The Daily Star (Lebanon)
November 22, 2012 Thursday
A generation recalls, and forgets, itself
by Jim Quilty
Three World War II veterans, two men and a woman, stand in a salon and
raise their glasses in a toast. “What are we drinking?” one man asks.
“Victory!” the second replies.
DOHA: Three World War II veterans, two men and a woman, stand in a
salon and raise their glasses in a toast. “What are we drinking?” one
man asks. “Victory!” the second replies.
“No, no,” the first man says. “I mean what’s in the glass.”
“Cognac!”
Filmmakers are fond of turning their cameras on parents and
grandparents. There is a unique intimacy in this approach to
documentary that, depending on the filmmaker’s choices, can infuse a
work with the engaging warmth of conversation.
There are shortcomings to this approach too, of course. Family
relations are by their nature both parochial and sentimental. Unless
used sparingly, obscure dialects of sentimentality can baffle and
alienate an audience.
“Embers,” the feature-length documentary debut of Tamara Stepanyan is
unsparing. It turns the lens on the filmmaker’s deceased grandmother,
also named Tamara (or Toma), whose only visual trace is in a snippet
of black-and-white Super-8 film taken in then-Soviet Armenia.
Though Tamara Hakopyan’s absence leaves a pall of melancholy over the
film (it begins with a shot of her grave, accompanied by the
filmmaker’s off-frame sniffling) “Embers” is not simply a warm bath in
personal grief. The 77-minute film is a work of languorous lyricism,
one that is puzzlingly successful because at its skeleton is
old-fashioned interview-based exposition.
“Embers” had its world premiere last month at the Busan International
Film Festival, where it won the Mecenat Award for best documentary
film. The work just had its Middle East premiere at the Doha Tribeca
Film Festival, where it is screening in the Arab feature film
competition.
Stepanyan attempts to document the remaining traces of her subject
through interviews with her grandmother’s surviving circle of friends.
These utterly unsentimental encounters help transport the film beyond
autobiography and through history to a sort of poetry of the
ephemeral.
As her voiceover eventually explains, the filmmaker originally meant
to reconstitute her grandmother by assembling Toma’s surviving
friends, recreating their yearly tradition of gathering on May 9 to
mark their participation in the Soviet Union’s victorious war against
Nazi invasion.
It proved possible to include only three friends in the reunion. Some
members of Toma’s circle were ill or suffered dementia and so were
unable to attend. In lieu of this, Stepanyan interviews the survivors.
In the process, her search for her absent grandmother becomes a
profile of a generation as it remembers, and forgets, itself.
Toma’s friends don’t grieve her loss, but their recollections are nostalgic.
Some of Stepanyan’s informants are more comfortable speaking Russian
than Armenian, a mark of their representing the last traces of Soviet
Yerevan’s former cultural elite. For them communism didn’t denote an
oppressive police state but an ideologically driven social and
political project.
In discussing their group’s political activism, Toma’s friends betray
a not-unreasoning nostalgia for the past regime and an equal
skepticism of the present one.
One gentleman remarks that the Soviet regime was more just than the
one that rules Armenia today. His wife adds that it was only later on
that they realized how many people had suffered under Soviet rule.
“I don’t think it’s right to criticize [the Soviet] regime,” her
husband later insists. “Of course it had its weak points but it had
its strengths as well.”
Their nostalgia for the former state, in which they had more of a
stake than the present one, is natural. Theirs was a more cosmopolitan
era, in which Armenian heritage was secondary to being communist.
Given the tribalization of political discourse that tends to follow
the collapse of such cosmopolitan systems, it’s hard to not empathize.
Stepanyan’s film is no apologia for Soviet-era communism. Nostalgic
testimonials are juxtaposed with silent still-life shots of Soviet-era
landscapes – empty parks, silent tower blocks – and empty sitting
rooms inhabited by fading 20th-century portraits.
Some informants become less communicative as the interviews wear on.
The camera lingers over these silences and, at one point, all Toma’s
friends sit in their respective spaces, silent, apparently oblivious
to the camera.
Sometimes there is gentle humor in the absence. One lady, who is
unable to attend the reunion at film’s end because her memory fails
her, is a wellspring of amusing remarks. When the filmmaker seeks to
confirm the testimony of other informants that Toma and all her
friends were devout communists, the lady denies having been a
communist or ever having known one.
Later, when the director asks her about the May 9 meetings, she
replies, “I don’t really remember what happened. Ask me something
specific so I might remember.”
“The 9 May meetings,” Stepanyan prompts.
“Oh yes, those were happy days.”
“When?”
“Those days in May.”
“What days?”
“When did you say it was?”
“May 9.”
“Yes, 9 May.”
Stepanyan asks the lady if she was friends with Toma.
“Yes,” the lady replies, decisively. “I’m a very friendly person.”
The remark provokes chuckles form the audience but it also provides a
light-handed counterpoise to the pervasive weight of nostalgia in
works like “Embers.” In a film premised on the centrality of memory
and individual identity, it suggests that – for the inhabitants of
memories – recollection, and individuality, may be relative.
The Doha Tribeca Film Festival runs through Nov. 24.