Boston Globe, MA
Feb 9 2007
MOVIE REVIEW
A noble attempt to understand genocide
By Wesley Morris, Globe Staff | February 9, 2007
In 90 minutes, Carla Garapedian’s documentary "Screamers" tries to
get a lot done — too much, in fact. The movie’s principal goals are
to decry the Armenian genocide in 1915 at the hands of the Turks and
to wrestle with the enduring controversy over whether the slaughter
constitutes genocide. Garapedian also holes up with the intelligent
hard-rock outfit System of a Down , four affable and earnest
Armenian-American guys who, along with millions of other people, want
the 1915 massacre, in which a million and a half Armenians died,
ruled genocide once and for all.
But "Screamers" doesn’t stop there. Randomly inserted amid chunks of
time on the System of a Down tour bus and footage of the band onstage
are interviews with Armenian survivors. Garapedian talks to Hrant
Dink , the Armenian-Turkish journalist who was slain last month and
whose assassination, as awful as it was, might have begun a healing
process between Turkey and Armenians. There is footage from a
congressional hearing last year that produced a resolution to
recognize the events of 1915 as genocide. President Bush hasn’t
recognized the resolution, the prevailing hypothesis being that the
United States doesn’t want to anger Turkey. We need the air bases.
This film has provocations to spare; it just hasn’t been made
provocatively. It’s a mess, actually. Most of the content is
inarguable, but Garapedian’s handling of it leaves much to be
desired. Several subjects compete for our attention, and since the
filmmaker can’t seem to decide how best to arrange them, the parsing
is left to us. Garapedian, an Armenian-American from Los Angeles, has
an extensive international broadcast journalism background, but she
has a hard time clearly situating the Armenian genocide within the
larger political-moral problem of genocide itself.
Concert footage of System of a Down performing, say, its
half-melodic, half-infuriated, and dangerously good anti war song,
"B.Y.O.B.," aren’t easily wed with impassioned park-bench
explanations of genocide from journalist Samantha Power. Atom
Egoyan’s 2002 historical drama about the genocide, "Ararat," was a
similarly noble blur.
The way "Screamers" is staged, a lot of the film’s material feels
like padding, rather than a collection of scenes gathering toward a
climactic conclusion. The sheer importance and personal urgency of
the material seems to have gotten the better of the filmmaking. Or
maybe "Screamers" is intended to serve a purely tutorial end. That
might meet an obvious, urgent political need, but it doesn’t do the
film’s many fascinating strands any lasting favors.