From: Armenian Weekly Editor <[email protected]>
Subject: The Armenian Weekly; Sept. 8, 2007; Arts and Literature
The Armenian Weekly On-Line
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The Armenian Weekly; Volume 73, No. 36; Sept. 8, 2007
Arts and Literature:
1. New Mamoulian Documentary Chronicles Life of ‘That Crazy Armenian’
By Andy Turpin
2. ‘The Fatal Night’ Tells How Men of Letters Saw 1915
By Andy Turpin
3. Two Poems by Tatul Sonentz
***
1. New Mamoulian Documentary Chronicles Life of ‘That Crazy Armenian’
By Andy Turpin
WATERTOWN, Mass. (A.W.)-A new documentary has come out this year analyzing
the life and works of legendary Armenian-American cinema and Broadway
director Rouben Mamoulian.
The film, "Rouben Mamoulian: The Golden Age of Broadway and Hollywood"
(Paris, 2007), is by veteran documentarian Patrick Cazals, who also
expressed his admiration for media history and romance in his 1993
documentary "Doisneau des Villes, Doisneau des Champs" on photographer
Robert Doineau.
Cazals has directed around 40 documentaries during his 31 years in the
profession. He is a former associate of Liberation and Cahiers du Cinema,
and a producer at France Culture radio. He created his own production
company, Les Films du Horla, in 1987. His research for the Mamoulian film
was partly conducted at the Mamoulian archives in the Library of Congress,
the archives of the Eastman Center in Rochester, N.Y., where Mamoulian began
his career in America. It is also based on interviews with Mamoulian himself
and experts on his oeuvre.
Beginning with his childhood in Tiflis, Georgia, at the turn of the last
century, Mamoulian, in a filmed interview in 1986, recalls, "My grandmother,
she was the greatest person in the world. Look children, you fill your heart
with love, there will be no room for fear or hate."
Kodak founder George Eastman discovered Mamoulian during a scouting trip to
Moscow and Europe. Mamoulian soon after began directing theater shows in the
New York area.
Feeling pigeonholed only doing European plays, Mamoulian told backers, "I
can do anything!" and was given Gerswin’s all-black cast opera "Porgy and
Bess," turning it from an untouchable show into his calling card masterpiece
of the stage.
Premier 1930’s playwright Eugene O’Neil soon contacted his agent and said,
"I want Mamoulian-and no one else-to direct my next play."
Cazals interviews his subjects-mostly the friends and film historians of
Mamoulian-with a sense of style and history that makes up for any lack of
editing or standardization (which many viewers may have become accustomed to
>From watching the History Channel).
Mamoulian’s directorial film debut came in 1929 with "Applause," a story and
study of burlesque show culture. One expert noted its standout realism: "You
see a whole world of seedy burlesque people. He created the exact opposite
of glamour, including girls with less-than-glamorous physiques."
In "City Streets" (1931), he brought the same gift to the genre of film noir
and invented the now-cliché and much spoofed plot device of the detective
voice-over narration style. Al Capone said at the time, "This is the best
show on gangsters because it doesn’t show the killings, just the results."
A running theme in Mamoulian’s films, which Cazals makes evident, was the
concept of duality within the human psyche and his love of stories that
played on this-from "Becky Sharpe" contrasting British hypocrisy and
morality, to the superhero alter ego dynamic in "The Mark of Zorro," to the
political polarization of capitalism and communism in his much-adored comedy
"Silk Stockings."
"People would seem like one thing but in their hearts were something else,"
Mamoulian noticed early in life.
At the outset of his career, Mamoulian wrote a children’s book- Abigayil:
The Story of the Cat at the Manger-about a cat that was present at the birth
of Christ. He included a cat in all of his films and, as if essentializing
the personality of his work, he said, "A cat to me is great elegance,
dignity, movement and above all mystery."
———————————– ————
2. ‘The Fatal Night’ Tells How Men of Letters Saw 1915
By Andy Turpin
WATERTOWN, Mass. (A.W.)-The Fatal Night, Mikayel Shamtanchian’s newly
translated account of the intellectual round up and ghettoization of
Istanbul’s Armenian intellectuals by the Turks in 1915, is like receiving a
broadcast account of the genocide from an Armenian Edward R. Murrow.
It is the second volume in the H. and K. Manjikian Publications "Genocide
Library" collection of survivor stories, and narrates a small niche of
genocide history from the perspective of a middle-aged Armenian
newspaperman, deported alongside other intellectuals from Istanbul and sent
to the provinces en route to Der El-Zor.
The account itself is astonishing for it seems rare that such an educated
and comparatively older man than many other survivors came out of that
period physically unharmed.
Shamtanchian seems to have slipped through a crack in the confusion to
survive., and therein lies the difference in his account versus the broader
and more gruesome accounts of hell other families endured during the
genocide.
All people cope with trauma in their own way. However, it is unfortunate for
professional and amateur historians that Shamtanchian’s account sheds more
emphasis on Shamtanchian, per se, than on the genocide. His longwinded
monologues are also rather uncharacteristic of a newsman, even a columnist,
during such an ordeal.
Yet, Fatal Night redeems itself with descriptions of how profiteering the
civilian and official Turks were in squeezing every drop of life and wealth
>From the Armenians along the deportation routes.
At one point, while waiting to be transported further, Armenian deportees
were allowed to spend the money they had stored upon their persons for
food-food that should have been rationed to them for free, if they were
truly considered a protected population.
Shamtanchian writes: "Thus a multi-colored throng of peasants surrounds the
barracks, armed with a multicultural smorgasbord of foodstuffs. Only a few
villagers are let inside the building, after being carefully screened by the
lieutenant. It goes without saying that we’re caught in a net of gross
exploitation. We hear later that, by allowing us to buy food, the lieutenant
has made a profit of between 20 and 30 gold pieces each day. All said, the
courtyard turns into an honest-to-goodness marketplace, into which flows the
abundance of the city."
To the uninformed reader, there are other more important books that must be
read before picking up Fatal Night. Yet, to the seasoned genocide scholar,
Shamtanchian’s memoir may ignite an interest with its account of the
persecution of intellectuals during the genocide.
—————————————- ————–
3. Two Poems by Tatul Sonentz
R I V E R S . . .
To my late comrade in arms,
Yervant Terzian
We were both weaned
>From the waters of the Nile
-Both the White and the Blue-
You much earlier at a tender age
Leaving behind the sights and
Scents of two caring mothers
Now joint forever earth and
Dust till the end of time.
I took my leave much later
The Middle East sun baked us both
Into early manhood full of dreams
Rising like Vahagn from the sun
That boiled the gore at Avarayr
On the banks of another river
Tghmut-murky with tears.
We picked our gear and sailed West
On the icy shores of the Charles
A river that first rang freedom’s bell
Our paths led us to the same place-
An outpost of enslaved Ararat-
Where you stood as sentinel
Faithful to your oath and
Constant as the Nile.
And you took your final leave
>From those we both loved so well.
With a well-earned smile
***
V I S I O N
Your dark eyes
Were majestic windows
That opened on the vastness
Of my uncharted universe
Through those magnificent orbs
My soul perceived the limits
Of love’s reach to infinity
And through misty eyes
My own stunted gaze
Mourned Its own
Mortality
And now
As a mere tenant
Of this warming planet
I take a peek outside
And can only see
A dead-end
Alley
———————————- ——-Tatul Sonentz
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
