Critics’ Forum
Film
Filmic Approaches to Catastrophe: Narrative and Trauma in Levon
Minasian’s Le Piano and Eric Nazarian’s Bolis
By Myrna Douzjian
This year’s Arpa International Film Festival featured two short films
with a storyline informed by an historic catastrophe: Levon Minasian’s
Le Piano depicts the musical aspirations and struggles of a child
virtuoso, Loussiné, who was orphaned after the earthquake in
Leninakan, Armenia in 1988; Eric Nazarian’s Bolis follows the journey
of an Armenian oud player, Armenak, who visits Istanbul to perform in
an oud festival and find the site of his grandfather’s pre-Genocide
oud shop. Both films deal with trauma, by conveying the humanizing and
therapeutic power of music or comedy in the face of death and
destruction. But the narrative technique of each film remains entirely
distinct: Le Piano subtly addresses the earthquake through brief
references and allusions, while Bolis explicitly spells out the
effects of the Genocide on Armenak’s family.
Le Piano treats the 1988 earthquake in Leninakan (present-day Gyumri)
as an unspeakable, un-representable catastrophe. The film opens with a
brief view of the destruction wrought by the earthquake and quickly
moves to tell the story of one family and their neighborhood in Gyumri
thirteen years later. The earthquake scene is juxtaposed with the
skeletal frame of one of the town’s ruined buildings. Through such
juxtapositions, the film points subtly to the difficulty of coping
with the aftermath of the earthquake – both physically and
psychologically.
The film combines tragedy with comedy to create emotionally powerful
effects. A grand piano is being delivered to the domik (a small
prefabricated home) of the famous musician, Hovhannes Lalayan. When
the piano arrives, the neighbors jump at the chance to help install
it. But as five men carry it to the house, they realize, to their
dismay, that it is wider than the doorway. They propose the humorously
absurd idea of disassembling it, but Hovhannes angrily refuses. As the
men discuss other possible solutions, the audience learns something
that will reappear in the plot – that the Ministry of Culture has lent
the piano to Hovhannes’s mute granddaughter Loussiné (Lousik) so
that she can use it to practice for an internationally televised
competition. One of the men then makes an even more preposterous
suggestion: why not lift the house up with a crane so that they can
install the piano? This suggestion is immediately followed by a brief
digression on the death of Lousik’s parents and the loss of her piano
during the earthquake. The cumulative effect of the scene is to hint
at tragedy, while desperately trying to undercut it. So while the
comic effect of the conversation is clear, the narrative also conveys
a deeper purpose – by referring to Lousik’s situation only indirectly,
through dialogue and allusion, the film addresses the
un-representability of the earthquake, while ironically suggesting its
sheer enormity.
Minasian effectively combines humor with despair elsewhere in the
film. The piano never makes it into Hovhannes’s house, and in a later,
suspenseful scene, he is sleeping outside in order to guard the
piano. Just then, two thieves try to steal the piano, while a
neighbor, Seroj, helps Hovhannes chase them away. Once the crisis has
been averted, the camera catches Seroj adjusting his
ridiculous-looking toupee – comic relief once again quickly tempers
the dramatic tension.
The film also develops contrasts among its various thematic
elements. For example, while celebrating Lousik’s ability to succeed
despite severe hardship, it pokes fun at hackneyed and idealized
notions of culture and nation. In one scene, Ms. Galoyan, the Minister
of Culture, visits Lousik in order to hear her play. Galoyan,
outrageously dressed and made up, suggests that Loussiné is one of
Armenia’s national treasures. The Minister’s lofty claim is countered
by her outrageous appearance, leading the audience to question not
only what she says but also the position she holds, both within and
beyond the film. The film soon brings the point home – as Galoyan and
a small group of locals listen to Loussiné play, an angry neighbor,
Nevart, insults Galoyan by sarcastically referring to her as a
“national treasure.” Nevart then proceeds to dump a pail of water on
Loussiné’s audience, because she is tired of hearing the romantic
piece by Schubert Loussiné is playing on the piano, the only song
she plays throughout the film. Here and elsewhere, through the use of
direct but gentle humor, Le Piano portrays an otherwise painful and
serious subject matter with humor and subtlety, a feat not often
accomplished even in the best Hollywood films.
When Loussiné finally heads to Yerevan for the competition, her
neighbor Seroj buys a big-screen television in order to watch the
performance. A minor parallel story develops, recapitulating the
episode of Hovhannes’s piano. With the help of his neighbors, Seroj
tries unsuccessfully to fit the TV through the door of his own
domik. The group eventually gives up and watches the competition
outside. Loussiné performs brilliantly and returns home. By the end
of the film, the piano that was lent to her has been taken away, and
she is seen “playing” the same song on a makeshift instrument –
essentially a full set of piano keys drawn on a long piece of
paper. The film concludes with a final tragicomic scene: Seroj brings
in a crane to lift his house so that he can install his TV. The
narrative takes us back one last time to the problem of rebuilding
life and home in the post-earthquake community of Gyumri, only to
leave it unresolved.
With its ingenious plot and impressive cast of talented actors and
actresses, Le Piano is a brilliantly touching achievement. Though she
never speaks, Loussiné communicates with the audience through her
impressive stage presence and the power of her music. Like its
protagonist, the beauty of Le Piano lies in what the film doesn’t
verbalize. Instead of documenting the familiar reality that the
earthquake continues to have devastating effects, it grapples with the
difficulty of representing it, and by extension, of grasping its full
impact. The result is a film that acknowledges the complexity of its
task, rendering both its subject and its treatment of it all the more
painful – and poignant.
In comparison, Bolis takes a somewhat more predictable approach to
representing a traumatic story. Through the main character, Armenak’s,
search for his paternal grandfather’s (also named Armenak) oud shop,
the film’s plot addresses themes common to Diaspora literature and
film – it focuses on the concepts of home, ancestral roots, and
return. With its male protagonist and its concern for patrilineage,
Bolis also belongs to the mainstream of Armenian fiction. During his
journey, Armenak narrates the familiar “Genocide story” as it relates
to his family history. The one-dimensional monologue, what we might
call a monological narrative, unfortunately tends toward a didactic
aesthetic, often leaving little room for interpretation.
Nevertheless, the film introduces two thought-provoking elements into
an otherwise conventional project. The first involves the main
character’s feelings of ambivalence toward Istanbul and Turkey. Since
he naturally associates Istanbul with his family’s traumatic
experience during the Genocide, Armenak arrives in the city expecting
to hate the place. To his surprise, Armenak comes to feel that the
“city is like opium – addictive.” His initial readiness to reject
Istanbul quickly evolves into a complex set of nuanced emotions: an
appreciation of the people and the city’s cultural history and a sense
of nostalgia for its various spaces.
The second element of complexity, which complements Armenak’s openness
to the city’s culture, is the connection the film emphasizes between
Turks and Armenians. Nazarian suggests this link by drawing structural
parallels between Armenak and the Turkish woman who lives and runs a
store in the building that housed Armenak Sr.’s former oud shop: the
woman has set out to give up her home and store, while Armenak, as we
have seen, travels in the reverse direction, toward his ancestral
home; Armenak visits Oudi Hrant’s tombstone at the cemetery, and the
Turkish woman visits her late husband’s grave. Along the way, Armenak
and the Turkish woman develop a bond, as they share stories about the
past over coffee. Armenak’s search for his grandfather’s shop and the
family oud lost during the Genocide becomes a story about replacing
feelings of animosity with friendship. The film closes with Armenak
performing Sari sirun yar. He dedicates the song to his Turkish
friends, the Turkish woman, and her daughter, Aylin.
Nazarian highlights the two parallel journeys visually and
metaphorically as well. As Armenak continues to play, the scene cuts
to the broken face of his grandfather’s oud. The fragment of the
instrument lies in the pile of unwanted belongings that the Turkish
woman is throwing away in preparation for her move. Interestingly,
only the audience sees the oud; Armenak never finds it. In the
question-and-answer session that followed the screening, Nazarian
explained that Armenak’s inability to find the oud signifies that
there is a great deal we can never know about the past. We might add
also that, metaphorically, the story of reconciliation takes
precedence over the material recovery of the past in Bolis. Nazarian’s
strategy here resembles Atom Egoyan’s project in Ararat, a film that
treats genocide denial and tolerance within interwoven relationships
across various levels – familial bonds, love relations, and workplace
settings, even ethnic divides. Approaches like Egoyan’s and Nazarian’s
acknowledge the issue of denial, while tempering it with calls for
cross-cultural tolerance.
But are Armenian audiences ready to interpret Bolis in this way? In
the question-and-answer session that followed the film, Nazarian
explained that he chose the oud as an instrument that transcends
borders. He said that his goal was to create a “bridge between
Armenians and Turks through cinema.” But watching Bolis made me wonder
whether there could ever be a critical distance between Armenian
viewers and a text that deals with the Genocide. Judging from the
reaction to the film and the almost exclusive focus on the Genocide
story, I found it difficult to believe so. To my disappointment, all
but two of the questions posed by the audience revolved around the
politics of making a film that mentions the Genocide in Turkey: “How
was it possible?” “What were the difficulties the filmmaker
encountered?” The audience’s fixations on the politics rather than the
aesthetics of the film brought a larger question to mind: “Will
Armenians forever crave the retelling of the Genocide narrative?”
Juxtaposing the filmic approaches to catastrophe in Bolis and Le Piano
offers a site for broaching this issue. The comparison suggests that a
nuanced approach to representing the Genocide in fiction may lie
somewhere between the two films’ narrative strategies.
All Rights Reserved: Critics’ Forum, 2011.
Myrna Douzjian is a doctoral candidate in the Department of
Comparative Literature at UCLA, where she teaches literature and
composition courses.
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