Author: Maghakian Mike

ZNet, MA
March 10 2007

The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency

by Mahmood Mamdani
March 09, 2007

London Review of Books

The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate
of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is
roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely
linked to the official military, which is said to be their main
source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as
members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the
violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said
to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is
called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is
being named? What difference does it make?

The most powerful mobilisation in New York City is in relation to
Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect the reverse, for no other reason
than that most New Yorkers are American citizens and so should feel
directly responsible for the violence in occupied Iraq. But Iraq is a
messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy politics.
Americans worry about what their government should do in Iraq. Should
it withdraw? What would happen if it did? In contrast, there is
nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without history and without
politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as
`Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable as `Africans’.

A full-page advertisement has appeared several times a week in the
New York Times calling for intervention in Darfur now. It wants the
intervening forces to be placed under `a chain of command allowing
necessary and timely military action without approval from distant
political or civilian personnel’. That intervention in Darfur should
not be subject to `political or civilian’ considerations and that the
intervening forces should have the right to shoot – to kill – without
permission from distant places: these are said to be `humanitarian’
demands. In the same vein, a New Republic editorial on Darfur has
called for `force as a first-resort response’. What makes the
situation even more puzzling is that some of those who are calling
for an end to intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in
Darfur; as the slogan goes, `Out of Iraq and into Darfur.’

What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a
place with a history and politics – a messy politics of insurgency
and counter-insurgency? Why should an intervention in Darfur not turn
out to be a trigger that escalates rather than reduces the level of
violence as intervention in Iraq has done? Why might it not create
the actual possibility of genocide, not just rhetorically but in
reality? Morally, there is no doubt about the horrific nature of the
violence against civilians in Darfur. The ambiguity lies in the
politics of the violence, whose sources include both a
state-connected counter-insurgency and an organised insurgency, very
much like the violence in Iraq.

The insurgency and counter-insurgency in Darfur began in 2003. Both
were driven by an intermeshing of domestic tensions in the context of
a peace-averse international environment defined by the War on
Terror. On the one hand, there was a struggle for power within the
political class in Sudan, with more marginal interests in the west
(following those in the south and in the east) calling for reform at
the centre. On the other, there was a community-level split inside
Darfur, between nomads and settled farmers, who had earlier forged a
way of sharing the use of semi-arid land in the dry season. With the
drought that set in towards the late 1970s, co-operation turned into
an intense struggle over diminishing resources.

As the insurgency took root among the prospering peasant tribes of
Darfur, the government trained and armed the poorer nomads and formed
a militia – the Janjawiid – that became the vanguard of the unfolding
counter-insurgency. The worst violence came from the Janjawiid, but
the insurgent movements were also accused of gross violations. Anyone
wanting to end the spiralling violence would have to bring about
power-sharing at the state level and resource-sharing at the
community level, land being the key resource.

Since its onset, two official verdicts have been delivered on the
violence, the first from the US, the second from the UN. The American
verdict was unambiguous: Darfur was the site of an ongoing genocide.
The chain of events leading to Washington’s proclamation began with
`a genocide alert’ from the Management Committee of the Washington
Holocaust Memorial Museum; according to the Jerusalem Post, the alert
was `the first ever of its kind, issued by the US Holocaust Museum’.
The House of Representatives followed unanimously on 24 June 2004.
The last to join the chorus was Colin Powell.

The UN Commission on Darfur was created in the aftermath of the
American verdict and in response to American pressure. It was more
ambiguous. In September 2004, the Nigerian president Olusegun
Obasanjo, then the chair of the African Union, visited UN
headquarters in New York. Darfur had been the focal point of
discussion in the African Union. All concerned were alert to the
extreme political sensitivity of the issue. At a press conference at
the UN on 23 September Obasanjo was asked to pronounce on the
violence in Darfur: was it genocide or not? His response was very
clear:

Before you can say that this is genocide or ethnic cleansing, we will
have to have a definite decision and plan and programme of a
government to wipe out a particular group of people, then we will be
talking about genocide, ethnic cleansing. What we know is not that.
What we know is that there was an uprising, rebellion, and the
government armed another group of people to stop that rebellion.
That’s what we know. That does not amount to genocide from our own
reckoning. It amounts to of course conflict. It amounts to violence.

By October, the Security Council had established a five-person
commission of inquiry on Darfur and asked it to report within three
months on `violations of international humanitarian law and human
rights law in Darfur by all parties’, and specifically to determine
`whether or not acts of genocide have occurred’. Among the members of
the commission was the chief prosecutor of South Africa’s TRC, Dumisa
Ntsebeza. In its report, submitted on 25 January 2005, the commission
concluded that `the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy
of genocide . . . directly or through the militias under its
control.’ But the commission did find that the government’s violence
was `deliberately and indiscriminately directed against civilians’.
Indeed, `even where rebels may have been present in villages, the
impact of attacks on civilians shows that the use of military force
was manifestly disproportionate to any threat posed by the rebels.’
These acts, the commission concluded, `were conducted on a widespread
and systematic basis, and therefore may amount to crimes against
humanity’ (my emphasis). Yet, the commission insisted, they did not
amount to acts of genocide: `The crucial element of genocidal intent
appears to be missing . . . it would seem that those who planned and
organised attacks on villages pursued the intent to drive the victims
from their homes, primarily for purposes of counter-insurgency
warfare.’

At the same time, the commission assigned secondary responsibility to
rebel forces – namely, members of the Sudan Liberation Army and the
Justice and Equality Movement – which it held `responsible for
serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law
which may amount to war crimes’ (my emphasis). If the government
stood accused of `crimes against humanity’, rebel movements were
accused of `war crimes’. Finally, the commission identified
individual perpetrators and presented the UN secretary-general with a
sealed list that included `officials of the government of Sudan,
members of militia forces, members of rebel groups and certain
foreign army officers acting in their personal capacity’. The list
named 51 individuals.

The commission’s findings highlighted three violations of
international law: disproportionate response, conducted on a
widespread and systematic basis, targeting entire groups (as opposed
to identifiable individuals) but without the intention to eliminate
them as groups. It is for this last reason that the commission ruled
out the finding of genocide. Its less grave findings of `crimes
against humanity’ and `war crimes’ are not unique to Darfur, but fit
several other situations of extreme violence: in particular, the US
occupation of Iraq, the Hema-Lendu violence in eastern Congo and the
Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Among those in the counter-insurgency
accused of war crimes were the `foreign army officers acting in their
personal capacity’, i.e. mercenaries, presumably recruited from armed
forces outside Sudan. The involvement of mercenaries in perpetrating
gross violence also fits the occupation in Iraq, where some of them
go by the name of `contractors’.

The journalist in the US most closely identified with
consciousness-raising on Darfur is the New York Times op-ed columnist
Nicholas Kristof, often identified as a lone crusader on the issue.
To peruse Kristof’s Darfur columns over the past three years is to
see the reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale
unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never
trade places and so can always and easily be told apart. It is a
world where atrocities mount geometrically, the perpetrators so evil
and the victims so helpless that the only possibility of relief is a
rescue mission from the outside, preferably in the form of a military
intervention.

Kristof made six highly publicised trips to Darfur, the first in
March 2004 and the sixth two years later. He began by writing of it
as a case of `ethnic cleansing’: `Sudan’s Arab rulers’ had `forced
700,000 black African Sudanese to flee their villages’ (24 March
2004). Only three days later, he upped the ante: this was no longer
ethnic cleansing, but genocide. `Right now,’ he wrote on 27 March,
`the government of Sudan is engaged in genocide against three large
African tribes in its Darfur region.’ He continued: `The killings are
being orchestrated by the Arab-dominated Sudanese government’ and
`the victims are non-Arabs: blacks in the Zaghawa, Massalliet and Fur
tribes.’ He estimated the death toll at a thousand a week. Two months
later, on 29 May, he revised the estimates dramatically upwards,
citing predictions from the US Agency for International Development
to the effect that `at best, `only’ 100,000 people will die in Darfur
this year of malnutrition and disease’ but `if things go badly, half
a million will die.’

The UN commission’s report was released on 25 February 2005. It
confirmed `massive displacement’ of persons (`more than a million’
internally displaced and `more than 200,000′ refugees in Chad) and
the destruction of `several hundred’ villages and hamlets as
`irrefutable facts’; but it gave no confirmed numbers for those
killed. Instead, it noted rebel claims that government-allied forces
had `allegedly killed over 70,000 persons’. Following the publication
of the report, Kristof began to scale down his estimates. For the
first time, on 23 February 2005, he admitted that `the numbers are
fuzzy.’ Rather than the usual single total, he went on to give a
range of figures, from a low of 70,000, which he dismissed as `a UN
estimate’, to `independent estimates [that] exceed 220,000′. A
warning followed: `and the number is rising by about ten thousand a
month.’

The publication of the commission’s report had considerable effect.
Internationally, it raised doubts about whether what was going on in
Darfur could be termed genocide. Even US officials were unwilling to
go along with the high estimates propagated by the broad alliance of
organisations that subscribe to the Save Darfur campaign. The effect
on American diplomacy was discernible. Three months later, on 3 May,
Kristof noted with dismay that not only had `Deputy Secretary of
State Robert Zoellick pointedly refused to repeat the
administration’s past judgment that the killings amount to genocide’:
he had `also cited an absurdly low estimate of Darfur’s total death
toll: 60,000 to 160,000′. As an alternative, Kristof cited the latest
estimate of deaths from the Coalition for International Justice as
`nearly 400,000, and rising by 500 a day’. In three months, Kristof’s
estimates had gone up from 10,000 to 15,000 a month. Six months
later, on 27 November, Kristof warned that `if aid groups pull out .
. . the death toll could then rise to 100,000 a month.’ Anyone
keeping a tally of the death toll in Darfur as reported in the
Kristof columns would find the rise, fall and rise again very
bewildering. First he projected the number of dead at 320,000 for
2004 (16 June 2004) but then gave a scaled down estimate of between
70,000 and 220,000 (23 February 2005). The number began once more to
climb to `nearly 400,000′ (3 May 2005), only to come down yet again
to 300,000 (23 April 2006). Each time figures were given with equal
confidence but with no attempt to explain their basis. Did the
numbers reflect an actual decline in the scale of killing in Darfur
or was Kristof simply making an adjustment to the changing mood
internationally?

In the 23 April column, Kristof expanded the list of perpetrators to
include an external power: `China is now underwriting its second
genocide in three decades. The first was in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and
the second is in Darfur, Sudan. Chinese oil purchases have financed
Sudan’s pillage of Darfur, Chinese-made AK-47s have been the main
weapons used to slaughter several hundred thousand people in Darfur
so far and China has protected Sudan in the UN Security Council.’ In
the Kristof columns, there is one area of deafening silence, to do
with the fact that what is happening in Darfur is a civil war. Hardly
a word is said about the insurgency, about the civilian deaths
insurgents mete out, about acts that the commission characterised as
`war crimes’. Would the logic of his 23 April column not lead one to
think that those with connections to the insurgency, some of them
active in the international campaign to declare Darfur the site of
genocide, were also guilty of `underwriting’ war crimes in Darfur?

Newspaper writing on Darfur has sketched a pornography of violence.
It seems fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing
the worst of the atrocities in gruesome detail and chronicling the
rise in the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of
the perpetrators lies in biology (`race’) and, if not that, certainly
in `culture’. This voyeuristic approach accompanies a moralistic
discourse whose effect is both to obscure the politics of the
violence and position the reader as a virtuous, not just a concerned
observer.

Journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of
perpetrators face a group of victims, but where neither history nor
motivation is thinkable because both are outside history and context.
Even when newspapers highlight violence as a social phenomenon, they
fail to understand the forces that shape the agency of the
perpetrator. Instead, they look for a clear and uncomplicated moral
that describes the victim as untainted and the perpetrator as simply
evil. Where yesterday’s victims are today’s perpetrators, where
victims have turned perpetrators, this attempt to find an African
replay of the Holocaust not only does not work but also has perverse
consequences. Whatever its analytical weaknesses, the
depoliticisation of violence has given its proponents distinct
political advantages.

The conflict in Darfur is highly politicised, and so is the
international campaign. One of the campaign’s constant refrains has
been that the ongoing genocide is racial: `Arabs’ are trying to
eliminate `Africans’. But both `Arab’ and `African’ have several
meanings in Sudan. There have been at least three meanings of `Arab’.
Locally, `Arab’ was a pejorative reference to the lifestyle of the
nomad as uncouth; regionally, it referred to someone whose primary
language was Arabic. In this sense, a group could become `Arab’ over
time. This process, known as Arabisation, was not an anomaly in the
region: there was Amharisation in Ethiopia and Swahilisation on the
East African coast. The third meaning of `Arab’ was `privileged and
exclusive’; it was the claim of the riverine political aristocracy
who had ruled Sudan since independence, and who equated Arabisation
with the spread of civilisation and being Arab with descent.

`African’, in this context, was a subaltern identity that also had
the potential of being either exclusive or inclusive. The two
meanings were not only contradictory but came from the experience of
two different insurgencies. The inclusive meaning was more political
than racial or even cultural (linguistic), in the sense that an
`African’ was anyone determined to make a future within Africa. It
was pioneered by John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People’s
Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south, as a way of holding together the
New Sudan he hoped to see. In contrast, its exclusive meaning came in
two versions, one hard (racial) and the other soft (linguistic) –
`African’ as Bantu and `African’ as the identity of anyone who spoke
a language indigenous to Africa. The racial meaning came to take a
strong hold in both the counter-insurgency and the insurgency in
Darfur. The Save Darfur campaign’s characterisation of the violence
as `Arab’ against `African’ obscured both the fact that the violence
was not one-sided and the contest over the meaning of `Arab’ and
`African’: a contest that was critical precisely because it was
ultimately about who belonged and who did not in the political
community called Sudan. The depoliticisation, naturalisation and,
ultimately, demonisation of the notion `Arab’, as against `African’,
has been the deadliest effect, whether intended or not, of the Save
Darfur campaign.

The depoliticisation of the conflict gave campaigners three
advantages. First, they were able to occupy the moral high ground.
The campaign presented itself as apolitical but moral, its concern
limited only to saving lives. Second, only a single-issue campaign
could bring together in a unified chorus forces that are otherwise
ranged as adversaries on most important issues of the day: at one
end, the Christian right and the Zionist lobby; at the other, a
mainly school and university-based peace movement. Nat Hentoff of the
Village Voice wrote of the Save Darfur Coalition as `an alliance of
more than 515 faith-based, humanitarian and human rights
organisations’; among the organisers of their Rally to Stop the
Genocide in Washington last year were groups as diverse as the
American Jewish World Service, the American Society for Muslim
Advancement, the National Association of Evangelicals, the US
Conference of Catholic Bishops, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the
American Anti-Slavery Group, Amnesty International, Christian
Solidarity International, Physicians for Human Rights and the
National Black Church Initiative. Surely, such a wide coalition would
cease to hold together if the issue shifted to, say, Iraq.

To understand the third advantage, we have to return to the question
I asked earlier: how could it be that many of those calling for an
end to the American and British intervention in Iraq are demanding an
intervention in Darfur? It’s tempting to think that the advantage of
Darfur lies in its being a small, faraway place where those who drive
the War on Terror do not have a vested interest. That this is hardly
the case is evident if one compares the American response to Darfur
to its non-response to Congo, even though the dimensions of the
conflict in Congo seem to give it a mega-Darfur quality: the numbers
killed are estimated in the millions rather than the hundreds of
thousands; the bulk of the killing, particularly in Kivu, is done by
paramilitaries trained, organised and armed by neighbouring
governments; and the victims on both sides – Hema and Lendu – are
framed in collective rather than individual terms, to the point that
one influential version defines both as racial identities and the
conflict between the two as a replay of the Rwandan genocide. Given
all this, how does one explain the fact that the focus of the most
widespread and ambitious humanitarian movement in the US is on Darfur
and not on Kivu?

Nicholas Kristof was asked this very question by a university
audience: `When I spoke at Cornell University recently, a woman asked
why I always harp on Darfur. It’s a fair question. The number of
people killed in Darfur so far is modest in global terms: estimates
range from 200,000 to more than 500,000. In contrast, four million
people have died since 1998 as a result of the fighting in Congo, the
most lethal conflict since World War Two.’ But instead of answering
the question, Kristof – now writing his column rather than facing the
questioner at Cornell – moved on: `And malaria annually kills one
million to three million people – meaning that three years’ deaths in
Darfur are within the margin of error of the annual global toll from
malaria.’ And from there he went on to compare the deaths in Darfur
to the deaths from malaria, rather than from the conflict in Congo:
`We have a moral compass within us and its needle is moved not only
by human suffering but also by human evil. That’s what makes genocide
special – not just the number of deaths but the government policy
behind them. And that in turn is why stopping genocide should be an
even higher priority than saving lives from Aids or malaria.’ That
did not explain the relative silence on Congo. Could the reason be
that in the case of Congo, Hema and Lendu militias – many of them no
more than child soldiers – were trained by America’s allies in the
region, Rwanda and Uganda? Is that why the violence in Darfur – but
not the violence in Kivu – is named as a genocide?

It seems that genocide has become a label to be stuck on your worst
enemy, a perverse version of the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical
arsenal that helps you vilify your adversaries while ensuring
impunity for your allies. In Kristof’s words, the point is not so
much `human suffering’ as `human evil’. Unlike Kivu, Darfur can be
neatly integrated into the War on Terror, for Darfur gives the
Warriors on Terror a valuable asset with which to demonise an enemy:
a genocide perpetrated by Arabs. This was the third and most valuable
advantage that Save Darfur gained from depoliticising the conflict.
The more thoroughly Darfur was integrated into the War on Terror, the
more the depoliticised violence in Darfur acquired a racial
description, as a genocide of `Arabs’ killing `Africans’. Racial
difference purportedly constituted the motive force behind the mass
killings. The irony of Kristof’s columns is that they mirror the
ideology of Arab supremacism in Sudan by demonising entire
communities.[*]

Kristof chides Arab peoples and the Arab press for not having the
moral fibre to respond to this Muslim-on-Muslim violence, presumably
because it is a violence inflicted by Arab Muslims on African
Muslims. In one of his early columns in 2004, he was outraged by the
silence of Muslim leaders: `Do they care about dead Muslims only when
the killers are Israelis or Americans?’ Two years later he asked:
`And where is the Arab press? Isn’t the murder of 300,000 or more
Muslims almost as offensive as a Danish cartoon?’ Six months later,
Kristof pursued this line on NBC’s Today Show. Elaborating on the
`real blind spot’ in the Muslim world, he said: `You are beginning to
get some voices in the Muslim world . . . saying it’s appalling that
you have evangelical Christians and American Jews leading an effort
to protect Muslims in Sudan and in Chad.’

If many of the leading lights in the Darfur campaign are fired by
moral indignation, this derives from two events: the Nazi Holocaust
and the Rwandan genocide. After all, the seeds of the Save Darfur
campaign lie in the tenth-anniversary commemoration of what happened
in Rwanda. Darfur is today a metaphor for senseless violence in
politics, as indeed Rwanda was a decade before. Most writing on the
Rwandan genocide in the US was also done by journalists. In We wish
to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, the
most widely read book on the genocide, Philip Gourevitch envisaged
Rwanda as a replay of the Holocaust, with Hutu cast as perpetrators
and Tutsi as victims. Again, the encounter between the two seemed to
take place outside any context, as part of an eternal encounter
between evil and innocence. Many of the journalists who write about
Darfur have Rwanda very much in the back of their minds. In December
2004, Kristof recalled the lessons of Rwanda: `Early in his
presidency, Mr Bush read a report about Bill Clinton’s paralysis
during the Rwandan genocide and scrawled in the margin: `Not on my
watch.’ But in fact the same thing is happening on his watch, and I
find that heartbreaking and baffling.’

With very few exceptions, the Save Darfur campaign has drawn a single
lesson from Rwanda: the problem was the US failure to intervene to
stop the genocide. Rwanda is the guilt that America must expiate, and
to do so it must be ready to intervene, for good and against evil,
even globally. That lesson is inscribed at the heart of Samantha
Power’s book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.
But it is the wrong lesson. The Rwandan genocide was born of a civil
war which intensified when the settlement to contain it broke down.
The settlement, reached at the Arusha Conference, broke down because
neither the Hutu Power tendency nor the Tutsi-dominated Rwanda
Patriotic Front (RPF) had any interest in observing the power-sharing
arrangement at the core of the settlement: the former because it was
excluded from the settlement and the latter because it was unwilling
to share power in any meaningful way.

What the humanitarian intervention lobby fails to see is that the US
did intervene in Rwanda, through a proxy. That proxy was the RPF,
backed up by entire units from the Uganda Army. The green light was
given to the RPF, whose commanding officer, Paul Kagame, had recently
returned from training in the US, just as it was lately given to the
Ethiopian army in Somalia. Instead of using its resources and
influence to bring about a political solution to the civil war, and
then strengthen it, the US signalled to one of the parties that it
could pursue victory with impunity. This unilateralism was part of
what led to the disaster, and that is the real lesson of Rwanda.
Applied to Darfur and Sudan, it is sobering. It means recognising
that Darfur is not yet another Rwanda. Nurturing hopes of an external
military intervention among those in the insurgency who aspire to
victory and reinforcing the fears of those in the counter-insurgency
who see it as a prelude to defeat are precisely the ways to ensure
that it becomes a Rwanda. Strengthening those on both sides who stand
for a political settlement to the civil war is the only realistic
approach. Solidarity, not intervention, is what will bring peace to
Darfur.

The dynamic of civil war in Sudan has fed on multiple sources: first,
the post-independence monopoly of power enjoyed by a tiny `Arabised’
elite from the riverine north of Khartoum, a monopoly that has bred
growing resistance among the majority, marginalised populations in
the south, east and west of the country; second, the rebel movements
which have in their turn bred ambitious leaders unwilling to enter
into power-sharing arrangements as a prelude to peace; and, finally,
external forces that continue to encourage those who are interested
in retaining or obtaining a monopoly of power.

The dynamic of peace, by contrast, has fed on a series of
power-sharing arrangements, first in the south and then in the east.
This process has been intermittent in Darfur. African Union-organised
negotiations have been successful in forging a power-sharing
arrangement, but only for that arrangement to fall apart time and
again. A large part of the explanation, as I suggested earlier, lies
in the international context of the War on Terror, which favours
parties who are averse to taking risks for peace. To reinforce the
peace process must be the first commitment of all those interested in
Darfur.

The camp of peace needs to come to a second realisation: that peace
cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language
of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every
major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a `civilising
mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion
with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details
of barbarity among the colonised – sati, the ban on widow marriage or
the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female
genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all
invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of
atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for
intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a
dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing
barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators
with the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning
on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style
intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to
other parts of Sudan, unravelling the peace process in the east and
south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror.

Footnotes

* Contrast this with the UN commission’s painstaking effort to make
sense of the identities `Arab’ and `African’. The commission’s report
concentrated on three related points. First, the claim that the
Darfur conflict pitted `Arab’ against `African’ was facile. `In fact,
the commission found that many Arabs in Darfur are opposed to the
Janjawiid, and some Arabs are fighting with the rebels, such as
certain Arab commanders and their men from the Misseriya and Rizeigat
tribes. At the same time, many non-Arabs are supporting the
government and serving in its army.’ Second, it has never been easy
to sort different tribes into the categories `Arab’ and `African’:
`The various tribes that have been the object of attacks and killings
(chiefly the Fur, Massalit and Zeghawa tribes) do not appear to make
up ethnic groups distinct from the ethnic groups to which persons or
militias that attack them belong. They speak the same language
(Arabic) and embrace the same religion (Muslim). In addition, also
due to the high measure of intermarriage, they can hardly be
distinguished in their outward physical appearance from the members
of tribes that allegedly attacked them. Apparently, the sedentary and
nomadic character of the groups constitutes one of the main
distinctions between them’ (emphasis mine). Finally, the commission
put forward the view that political developments are driving the
rapidly growing distinction between `Arab’ and `African’. On the one
hand, `Arab’ and `African’ seem to have become political identities:
`Those tribes in Darfur who support rebels have increasingly come to
be identified as `African’ and those supporting the government as the
`Arabs’. A good example to illustrate this is that of the Gimmer, a
pro-government African tribe that is seen by the African tribes
opposed to the government as having been `Arabised’.’ On the other
hand, this development was being promoted from the outside: `The
Arab-African divide has also been fanned by the growing insistence on
such divide in some circles and in the media.’

Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a
professor of anthropology at Columbia University. His most recent
book is Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots
of Terror.

fm?SectionID=15&ItemID=12299

ARF Dashnaktsutyun has made no decision yet

07-03-2007 17:14:51
KarabakhOpen

It is early to discuss the presidential election appointed this July,
said Jirair Shahinjanyan, the secretary of Artsakh Central Committee
of the ARF Dashnaktsutyun. `We will run in the election but we have
not decided how, whether we will name a candidate or will support
another candidate. The conference of the party will make a decision
later this month,’ Jirair Shahinjanyan said. `For us it is more
important to work out a development policy for the republic for the
upcoming five years. And we will support a candidate who will be
committed to this policy.’

Jirair Shahinjanyan said there are no absolutely free and fair
elections. ` But we must pursue this goal. The role of a political
party is to guarantee a free election. It is not true to say that
Karabakh is a country of dictatorship. On the other hand, we cannot
consider our country as democratic. If we pursue international
recognition, we must admit that we will be recognized only if we build
a country based on democratic principles,’ said the secretary of the
Central Committee of the ARF Dashnaktsutyun. He also emphasized that
the ARF Dashnaktsutyun has always made efforts to contribute to a free
election through its proxies and observers.

`As a rule, there are no irregularities during the voting day. The
principle of equal opportunities is broken during the election
campaign. We must acknowledge that free elections are a chance for us
to become established in the international community. We must take
this chance,’ said Jirair Shahinjanyan.

The New Anatolian, Turkey
March 10 2007

Perincek guilty over ‘genocide’ remarks

The New Anatolian with AP / Lausanne

A prominent Turkish politician was found guilty Friday of breaching
Swiss anti-racism laws by saying that the early 20th century deaths
of Armenians could not be described as genocide.

Dogu Perincek, leader of the Turkish Workers’ Party (IP), was ordered
by a Swiss court to pay a fine of 3,000 Swiss francs (US$2,450) and
was given a suspended penalty of 9,000 francs (US$7,360).

Perincek was charged with breaking Swiss law by denying during a
visit to Switzerland in 2005 that the World War I-era deaths of up to
1.5 million Armenians amounted to genocide. He has since repeated the
claim, including during his trial earlier this week.
Perincek accused the judge of "racial hatred" toward Turkey and said
he would appeal the verdict with Switzerland’s Supreme Court.

Perincek also said that he would take his case to the European Court
of Human Rights if necessary.

The IP leader, who submitted 90 kg of historical documents, argued
there had been no genocide against Armenians, but there had been
"reciprocal massacres."

"I defend my right to freedom of expression. There was no genocide,
therefore this law cannot apply to my remarks," he said in his
opening statement on Tuesday.

He told reporters he would appeal the sentence, which he denounced as
"unjust and impartial" and "imperialist."

In his closing statement, Judge Pierre-Henri Winzap described the
defendant as an intelligent and cultivated person, but added that to
deny the Armenian genocide was an arrogant provocation because it was
an accepted historical fact.

Switzerland’s anti-racism legislation has previously been applied to
Holocaust denial.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry, in a written statement on Friday,
expressed Ankara’s uneasiness with the Swiss court’s decision.

Noting that the decision would not be accepted by Turkey, the
statement said, "We hope that decision will be corrected by
independent Swiss judicial officials which we believed that there
were in Switzerland.

Turkey strongly opposes the claims that its predecessor state, the
Ottoman government, caused the Armenian deaths in a planned genocide.
The Turkish government has said the toll is wildly inflated and that
Armenians were killed or displaced in civil unrest during the
empire’s collapse and conditions of World War I. Ankara’s proposal to
Yerevan to set up a joint commission of historians to study the
disputed events is still awaiting a positive response from the
Armenian side.

After French lawmakers voted last October to make it a crime to deny
that the claims were genocide, Turkey said it would suspend military
relations with France.

PanARMENIAN.Net

Exact number of Armenian historical monuments in Turkey unknown
09.03.2007 17:32 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Akhtamar is a universal property. That is why the
Turkish government decided to reconstruct it, historian Samvel
Karapetian told a PanARMENIAN.Net reporter. In his words, the Akhtamar
Church has no analogs in the world’s architecture and
sculpture. `Akhtamar is unique and the Turkish government will receive
fantastic profits from the flow of tourists. The contents of the
inscription on the wall of the temple is a question of minor
importance for them. Greek, Armenian and Assyrian monuments are being
reconstructed throughout Turkey presently and Turks themselves decide
whether or not to mention their belonging,’ Karapetian said.

The Armenian historian also noted that the exact number of historical
and cultural monuments in Turkey in not known. `According to the data
furnished by the Constantinople patriarchy, about 2100 churches
functioned in Western Armenia in 1912-1913. 3000 out of 8000 villages
in Western Armenia were inhabited by Armenians only. Thus, each
village had a church, sometimes even two churches. I think we can
speak of thousands of Armenian monuments throughout Turkey. Akhtamar
was lucky to avoid the fate of churches in Mush and Kars which were
transformed into mosques,’ Karapetian said.

PanARMENIAN.Net

Turkish nationalists were going to kill Archbishop Mutafyan?
09.03.2007 12:52 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ A Turkish man accused of firing in the air outside
an Armenian church claimed Wednesday his real target had been
Patriarch Mesrob II, the spiritual leader of the tiny Armenian
community. "I had prepared it for (Mesrob) Mutafyan II," Volkan Karova
shouted to reporters here as he and fellow suspect Yilmaz Can Ozalp
were being escorted to the prosecutor’s office to give their
testimony, the agency reported. It was not clear whether he had
intended to physically attack the patriarch or scare him.

Later Wednesday, a court charged the two men with "threatening by
firing shots" and "carrying an unlicensed gun" and sent them to jail
pending trial, the agency said. The pair had been arrested late Sunday
just hours after two men fired a shot in the air outside a church in
the city’s Kumkapi district. At the time, a ceremony was being held
there for slain ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. The ceremony at
the church, on the European side of Istanbul, was to mark the 40th day
since Dink, the 52-year-old ethnic Armenian editor of the bilingual
Agos weekly, was shot dead outside his office. It was led by Patriarch
Mesrob II, who represents the 80,000 Armenians in Turkey. Anxiety has
engulfed the Armenian community and intellectuals since Dink’s murder
on Januray 19, and in recent interviews Mesrob II has said that his
office had been receiving threats. Dink had angered nationalist
circles and the courts for describing the World War I massacres of
Armenians under the Ottoman Empire as genocide, a label that Ankara
fiercely rejects. Nine people have so far been charged over his
murder, which prosecutors believe was the work of ultra-nationalists,
reports the AFP.

Russian FM to visit Armenia in April

ArmRadio.am
09.03.2007 14:23

In April Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will visit Armenia, RA
Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian declared at a press conference today.

In his words, the exact date of the visit is not known yet, but it is
expected that Lavrov will arrive in Armenia in the first week of April.

An Islamic Enlightenment
By Phyllis Chesler
( hors.asp?ID=3D1947)
_FrontPageMagazine.com_ () | March 9, 2007

Is Islam the problem, or can it be part of the solution? Can Islam be
reformed from within, or is Muslim violence and hatred due entirely to
the teachings and history of the Qur’an? These were some of the major
issues raised at the _Secular Islam Summit_
( Article.asp?ID=3D27090) in
St Petersburg, Florida, this week.

A landmark event, the summit brought together such brave and eloquent
defenders of freedom and conscience as the scholar Ibn Warraq (his nom
de guerre); Iranian exile and activist Banafasheh Zand-Bonazzi; Austin
Dacy of the Center for Inquiry; as well as many other Muslim and
ex-Muslim dissidents.
Most were incredible orators, some were entertainers, others were deep
and mournful thinkers. They included:
* Egyptian-born Dr. Tawfik Hamid, who was once a "colleague" of Osama
bin Laden’s second in command, Al-Zawahiri.
* The Gandhi-like Dr. Shahriar Kabir, Bangladesh’s leading human
rights activist.
* Tashbih Sayeed, Pakistan’s foremost opponent of radical Islam, a man
of few, but fiery words.
* Dr. Afshin Ellian, an Iranian professor in exile in Holland, a close
friend of Aayan Hirsi Ali, and a man of genial wit and wide-ranging
knowledge. * Egyptian-Palestinian-American author, _Nonie Darwish_
( s/authors.asp?ID=3D1176) , a
warm but absolutely uncompromising thinker and speaker.
* Syrian-American psychiatrist, _Wafa Sultan_
() , the woman who became
instantly famous for her _debate_
( =3D1050) on Al-Jazeera TV. A
small, trim woman, she is a towering speaker, theatrically thrilling
and passionate.

Indeed, there were so many excellent speakers that I cannot do them
all justice here. For now, let me focus on only two. The opening
speeches were delivered by Ibn Warraq, a consummate intellectual and
committed secularist, and Irshad Manji, the best-selling author and a
onetime master of the spunky sound bite who is now a bit more moderate
and modest in tone.

Ibn Warraq spoke of the dangers that Muslims in the Islamic world face
for speaking the truth about Islam, including prison, torture, exile
and death. Proving his point was the fact that a number of invitees
to the summit from Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia did not attend after
receiving one too many death threats or after being told that their
families would be targeted if they chose to attend. Most writers have
been stopped in their tracks by such Muslim-on-Muslim repression.

Warraq explained that he wants an Islamic "Enlightenment," a la John
Stuart Mill, rather than a "Reformation," which he considers mere
tinkering. He believes that Western values are universal, although he
felt that most human rights initiatives within the West, including the
Human Rights Commission in Geneva, are "hopeless" and will not push
sovereign Muslim tyrannies toward reform. He mourned the fact that the
West continues to "apologize for colonialism and racism" and that
Turkey still "refuses to acknowledge the Armenian genocide."

A running theme of Ibn Warraq’s remarks was the unjust treatment of
Muslims in Islamic countries. For instance, he insisted that
"protecting non-Muslims in Muslim societies" is crucial and can "lead
to pluralism and tolerance for Muslims as well." He called for a
"legal recourse" within the Islamic world for the widespread denial of
freedom of speech. He "demanded the re-writing of anti-American,
anti-Israel, and anti-Jewish text-books, especially in Saudi Arabia
and Egypt,’ adding that he considers such hatred "scandalous." Warraq
also implored "women’s groups in the West to defend Muslim women"
under siege.

In this connection, he assailed the "inconsistency and hypocrisy of
the "western multi-culturalists, including feminists" and stated that
the "lawof the western secular state must override religious law when
religious law denies basic human rights." Some European police — he
mentioned Sweden in particular — still return the victims of family
violence to the families that will kill them. In his view, the "rights
of women are central to Islamic reform.’

Warraq summed up his views on reform with the following credo: "No to
female genital mutilation; no to forced and polygamous marriage; no to
gender separatism."

Irshad Manji spoke next. She began with the wise observation that
"courage is not the absence of fear but the recognition that some
things are more important than fear." Manji, whose entourage included
a young woman in hijab, described herself as a "person of faith but
not a dogmatist." Manji found support for her moderation in a quote
from the Qur’an, which "tells us to oppose your family" when the truth
or true inner struggle is at stake. She pointed out that the "Qur’an
says nothing about the proper form of government," which suggests that
Islam should remain a private faith, not a political movement or a
government.

In Manji’s opinion, "this silence is deliberate and gives us room to
experiment with a different form of government." Calling for "Muslim
pluralism,’ Manji decried theocratic governments. In this regard,
Manji commented that someone "should tell President Bush that he
should not have empowered the theocrats in Iraq."

Manji proved an equal opportunity critic. She castigated "missionary
atheists" who are so "angry that they resemble religious
fundamentalists."At the same time, she criticized those Muslims who
are so "submissive to authority that they cannot stand up to (unjust
or tyrannical) authority." Agreeing with Ibn Warraq about the
universal nature of human rights, she condemned the popular view that
we are "not supposed to criticize another culture" if weare not part
of it.

Manji shared Warraq’s view that "more Muslims have been raped,
tortured and murdered by other Muslims than by westerners." Moreover,
she suggested that those in the Islamic world who make this argument
have not considered its full implications. How can we "criticize the
military culture in Guantanamo if we are ourselves are not military
personnel? And, how can Muslims criticize American foreign policy if
they are not American citizens?"

Finally, she made a point that I have made many times — and which has
gotten me demonized as a `racist’ — namely, that so-called western
"anti-racists" are really acting as "racists" when they hold Muslims
to lower standards out of some misguided notion of respect.

There was much more on offer at the summit. Other subjects of
discussion included the war between Sunni and Shiia Muslims; the
nature of jihad; andthe Islamic Caliphate. It is worth noting that the
tenor of the week was very different from what many have come to
expect from conferences on Islam. Nearly every single speaker spoke up
for Israel and for Jews, pointing out that both have been terribly
abused by the Islamic world, as has the West in general. The
conference also presented a declaration in English, Arabic, Bengali
and Persian. which may be viewed in English at
_http://www.secularislam.org_ ().

One might think that the western media would have flocked to the
summit in droves. It’s not every day, after all, that Muslim reformers
and dissidents gather for a forthright discussion about the troubles
of Islam and the Islamic world. Such was not the case. Both the
Associated Press and NPR promised to come but did not show.

To be sure, there were some notable exceptions to the media blackout
— CNN’s Glenn Beck devoted an entire hour to interviews with
conference speakers; Bret Stephens covered it for the Wall Street
Journal as did Jay Tolson for U.S. News and World Report and Christina
Hoff-Sommers for The Weekly Standard — but the various papers of
record in New York, Washington, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles were, to
the best of my knowledge, missing in action.

Curiously, both al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, not previously known for
their support of Islamic reform, covered the conference, which aired
live and in Arabic. It is an unhappy irony that these noble dissidents
should face ostracism and grave danger in Muslim lands and only to be
similarly ignored by the Western intelligentsia and media.

Nonetheless, the summit was a remarkable success. As a participant, I
was privileged to stand in solidarity with these dissidents. They are
our besthope in the fight to win hearts and minds.

YOUTH REPRESENTATIVE GATHERING HELD IN MOTHER SEE

Noyan Tapan
Armenians Today
Mar 07 2007

ETCHMIADZIN, MARCH 7, NOYAN TAPAN – ARMENIANS TODAY. A youth
representative gathering took place on March 6 at the Mother See of
Holy Etchmiadzin, with blessing of His Holiness Karekin II Catholicos
of All Armenians and presided by U.S. Western Diocese primate
Archbishop Hovnan Terterian. As Noyan Tapan was informed by the
Information Services of the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, the goal
of the gathering is to found the Armenian National Church-Loving Youth
Organization under the patronage of the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin.

Its central office will be at the Mother See of Holy
Etchmiadzin. Archbishop Hovnan Terterian coordinates the organization
under the Patriarchal authority of the Catholicos of All Armenians. And
friar Nshan Petrosian, a monk of the Mother See was appointed the
assistant of His Holiness. Students of the Gevorgian and Vazgenian
Spiritual Academies, young monks of the Mother See, representatives
of the Constantinople Armenian Patriarchate, about 70 young people
from Armenia, Artsakh and almost all dioceses of all over the world
participate in the representative gathering. The meeting works started
with the Lord’s Prayer and singing of "Surb Astuats" (Holy God)
Armenian church psalm, then Archbishop Hovnan Terterian addressed to
youth with the opening speech of the gathering. "We must consider this
day as historic one in your life as the Armenian Church-Loving Youth
Organization is for the first time officially founded. Though there
are youth unions inside separate diocesan structures, but the goal of
today’s meeting is to create a national youth structure which must be
led by one common regulations and function in a coordinated way under
the patronage of the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin. Recalling the
activity of the Mother See Youth Office founded within the framework
of celebrations dedicated to the 1700th anniversary of adoption of
the Christianity as the state religion, His Holiness Hovnan considered
full participation of the youth in the life of the Armenian Apostolic
Surb (Saint) Church important and imperative. His Holiness persuaded
everybody to grow strong with each other and reinforce the title given
by the God inside their souls. "This gathering must become a reason
for transfiguration, transforming in our life for every refuge becomes
possibility of our service to rise towards the God," His Holiness
Hovnan mentioned. After discussions concerning the organization mission
and spheres of its activity, the gathering participants elected the
Central Council, which, using decisions of the representative meeting
will prepare the 2008 first deputy meeting of the Armenian National
Church-Loving Youth Organization. The organization’s draft regulations
fostered by the representative gathering will also be presented at
the deputy meeting. Before the deputy meeting, Armenian Church-Loving
Youth Organization offices will be established in the Armenian Church
dioceses, meetings of regional sub-commissions will be convened on
different continents. Karekin II Catholicos of All Armenians received
the meeting gathering at the Patriarchate and passed his blessing to
them. "This initiative, formation of the Church-Loving Youth structure
of the Armenian Church is very essential and important for us. It must
be useful and beneficial in the affair of implementation of our church
mission. … The church must be able to be present in all spheres of
our life. It can not be implemented only owing to work of clergymen,
but with assistance of all Armenian sons of the elder and younger
generation. … The voice of youth must be heard inside of our church
structures, and your rows must be more widened and added by new members
during the time," His Holiness said, considering the taken first step
as promising and hopeful one. His Holiness Patriarch also expressed
his appreciation to His Holiness Hovnan for the love towards youth and
consistent and hard work. Archimandrite Aren Shahinian, the Armenian
spiritual pastor of Italy was present at the representative meeting.

Senses of Cinema
Great Directors
Issue No. 42, January-March, 2007
ors/07/mamoulian.html

ROUBEN MAMOULIAN
b. 8 October 1897, Tbilisi, Georgia
d. 4 December 1987, Los Angeles, USA

Adrian Danks is Senior Lecturer and Head of Cinema Studies in the School of
Applied Communication, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (University).
He is co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque, and editor of Cteq:
Annotations on Film, published in Senses of Cinema.

"Nostalgia for places one has never seen" (1)

In his canonical, often provocative, still influential if sometimes
damaging – at least in terms of its effect on the reputation of specific
filmmakers – account of Classical Hollywood cinema, Andrew Sarris relegates
Rouben Mamoulian to the category of directors whose artistic contribution to
American cinema offers "less than meets the eye". (2) The section of his
book devoted to this category is dominated by what he perceives as
inadequate or showy stylists, directors whose work ultimately betrays an
insufficient consistency and command of theme and a superficial deployment
of film form. Within this category Sarris dismisses the "technical
acrobatics" of Mamoulian’s films and relegates him to the historical status
of an "innovator who runs out of innovations". (3)

Although pre-empted by the earlier criticism of Mamoulian’s work by such
writers as Dwight MacDonald and Theodore Huff, (4) Sarris’ damningly brief
overview has bored down into the bedrock of auteurist film criticism. His
pithy dismissal has routinely furnished ammunition for the critics who have
followed Sarris’ lead, (5) and provided a point of departure for those
attempting to rehabilitate or champion the director’s refreshingly varied
and stylish work. For example, both of the book-length studies of
Mamoulian’s career so far published in English – Tom Milne’s groundbreaking
but overly laudatory critical study Mamoulian, (6) published in 1969, and
Mark Spergel’s immensely valuable, if snobbishly opinionated attempt to
discuss the nexus between Mamoulian’s personal life, theatre and film
career, Reinventing Reality, (7) published in 1993 – reiterate the critical
importance and centrality of Sarris’ brief and wearied dismissal. In fact,
Spergel’s substantial book vacillates between celebrating the very real
contribution Mamoulian made to the theatre and cinema and supporting Sarris’
uncharitable view. This is ultimately not surprising, as although Mamoulian
is undoubtedly a greater and more substantial director than Sarris allows
there is still a niggling sense that several of his criticisms ring at least
partly true. Nevertheless, on a film-by-film basis Mamoulian is definitively
one of the most intriguing filmmakers who worked in Hollywood in the 1930s
and ’40s.

In hindsight, it must be conceded that Mamoulian is a director who both
attracts auteurist approaches and frustrates them. His films betray a
consistency of approach, some common visual and thematic motifs, and a
definite sense of the artistic sensibility behind their creation, but they
are also maddeningly inconsistent in quality, varied in their approach to
genre, and don’t neatly align themselves with "classical" auteurist
criticism’s common preoccupation with hyper-masculinity or "closet"
femininity. Despite pretensions to the status of high art – signified by,
amongst other things, some of the sources of his adaptations and the
appropriation of particular painters’ visual styles – Mamoulian’s work is
often decidedly middlebrow and seemingly ideologically conventional. if not
conservative. This does not mean that his films are without subtextual
interest for contemporary viewers. For example, several critics have
provided unsurprisingly queer readings of The Mark of Zorro (1940), (8) or
have been attracted to issues of gender and performance in Applause (1929),
(9) while others have seen connections to the politics of early 1930s
America in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932), (10) or been intrigued by the
unheralded ideological complexities of Silk Stockings (1957). (11)
Nevertheless, these evocative dimensions are mainly subsumed to the
conventions of the Hollywood cinema of the time and the "universal humanism"
that Mamoulian commonly explored through individual characters rather than
broader social and political formations. Mamoulian has also been criticised
for de-emphasising the importance and centrality of the often highly charged
social, political and sexual contexts in which his plays and films are set.
(12) Nevertheless, in the early 1930s Mamoulian stridently produced films
that flirted with the boundaries of sexual decorum and morality. This is
evidenced by the fact that after the full-scale application of the Hays Code
in 1934 his films struggled to be re-released without significant cuts and
changes. His initial high reputation, particularly up to 1932, also suffered
as a result of the lack of circulation of many of his films. Even today,
Mamoulian is seldom the subject of retrospectives or critical surveys. His
best films mostly circulate in isolation from one another and are more often
categorised in terms of genre and star than director. Mamoulian is hardly as
forgotten, neglected or under-celebrated as some other early 1930s Hollywood
directors, but the discussion of his career does not match the achievement
and volume of his work in the cinema and theatre, and his significance to
both. His place in cinema history is thus complex. It is also somewhat more
contested than it ought to be.

Mamoulian can be regarded as both an aesthetic and stylistic magpie who
seldom, with the exception of the musical, made two films in the one genre.
He is also a director perhaps overly fixated on the technical or
technological possibilities of cinema. For example, Mamoulian’s often
repeated and wearisome accounts of his singular contributions to film
history focus almost exclusively on the various technical innovations he
reputedly brought to the cinema: two-track sound recording and the mobile
camera to "early" sound film (Applause); disembodied voiceover (City
Streets, 1931); the zoom lens and asynchronous sound (Love Me Tonight,
1932); three-strip Technicolor (Becky Sharp, 1935) and its expressive and
fully artistic use (Blood and Sand, 1941); and numerous others. (13) Partly
due to the longevity of his life – he was born in Tiflis/Tbilisi, Georgia in
1897 and died in Hollywood in 1987 – Mamoulian was the willing subject of
numerous career interviews. In these barely distinguishable discussions, he
routinely told the same anecdotes and pontificated upon his rightful place
in the history of Classical Hollywood. This distanced and calculated
perspective was also reinforced by the relative brevity of his career: his
last Broadway play, Arms and the Girl, was staged in 1950 and his final
completed film, Silk Stockings, was released in 1957. These "rote" interview
performances constructed a version of his career that emphasised his genius
and singular artistic contribution to the films he made, as well as the
conflicts he endured with less creative producers and technicians. His
actual contribution is, of course, much more complex, collaborative,
circumscribed and convoluted than he commonly let on.

Contrary to the common view, Mamoulian produced his best work when he was
attached for a sustained period to a particular studio. Such a system of
indenture and enforced collaboration ran counter to the legend that
Mamoulian himself promoted. His early and in many ways best work was made
predominantly for Paramount, while his brief tenure at 20th Century-Fox,
under the stewardship of Daryl F. Zanuck, in the early 1940s, resulted in
two of his most striking and pictorially beautiful works; The Mark of Zorro
and Blood and Sand.

But Mamoulian’s productive studio attachments have also provided easy points
of negative comparison for critics seeking to undervalue his contribution to
film history. Mamoulian made two films at Paramount – Love Me Tonight and
Song of Songs (1933) – that are often compared to the contemporaneous work
done at the studio by Ernst Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg (two of only 14
directors included in Sarris’ ultimate pantheon). In both films, Mamoulian
worked expressly within and with the forms most associated with these
directors. He inherited specific thematic and narrative preoccupations, and
was asked to direct stars – Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier in Love
Me Tonight, Marlene Dietrich in Song of Songs – whose careers were
intimately entwined with either director. Both projects were also initially
associated with Sternberg and Lubitsch. Sternberg himself recommended that
Mamoulian direct Dietrich for her first Hollywood film without her great
mentor.

Mamoulian’s work is ultimately marked by a pretension and tastefulness that
is comparative to but, in fact, miles away from the more baroque excesses of
Sternberg’s appropriation of "high" art. Mamoulian often displays a tendency
to isolate and "present" his influences, remarking upon his cleverness
afterwards. Sternberg mixes these elements up, rendering them in a more
innately cinematic, and explicitly critical, fashion (see, for example, the
use of classical music and religious art in The Scarlet Empress, 1934). Song
of Songs has rarely been discussed in much detail, and in spite of its
interesting analysis of Dietrich’s image, it really is significantly
inferior to the bulk of the Sternberg-Dietrich collaborations. But Love Me
Tonight is a considerably different proposition, and is the film most often
cited as evidence of either Mamoulian’s cinematic genius or the inflated,
superficial qualities of his work. Not surprisingly, critics such as Sarris
regard it as similar but inferior to such Lubitsch’s works as The Love
Parade (1929) and The Merry Widow (1934). But others see it as a joyous,
cinematically visionary work that is "Gay, charming, witty. everything that
the Lubitsch musicals should have been but never were". (14) I don’t think
that such a comparative approach is ultimately very useful. As James Harvey
has pointed out, Mamoulian and Lubitsch are actually very different
filmmakers, a fact that is actually highlighted by their varied adaptation
of similar material:

The Lubitsch films preceding it, even The Love Parade, are chamber films,
essentially small-scale and intimate. Love Me Tonight is a kind of bravura
effusion. That bravura element ran through all of Mamoulian’s films.
Mamoulian is a spectacularist; Lubitsch, the erstwhile "Griffith of Europe",
is not. (15)

The "spectacular" quality of Mamoulian’s films is evidenced by such elements
as: their constant shift of point of view; reliance upon the contrast of
medium close-ups and long shots; use of a wide variety of filmic devices;
ability to move between genres and tones; concern with characters’/actors’
identities and performances; and their more generally "presentational"
aesthetic.

Thus, Mamoulian is often characterised as the "third" director at Paramount
behind Sternberg and Lubitsch in the first half of the 1930s (is this such a
terrible place to be?). Mamoulian’s work is much more uneven and varied than
the work of these two other great auteurs. But his significant contribution
to American cinema also extends well beyond his initial tenure at the
studio. He is thus, in some ways, a paradigm for the jobbing Hollywood
director with some pretensions to art and personalised authorship, but who
was also pragmatic enough to take on projects for varied – sometimes mostly
technical or technological – reasons.

One of the richest and most fascinating of these assignments was Mamoulian’s
first film for MGM, Queen Christina (1933). This film is often singled out
for its languid bedroom scene between Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. Its most
remarkable moment features Garbo wandering nostalgically around the room,
memorialising it for some future moment of recollection. This almost
wordless pantomime underlines many of they key qualities of Mamoulian’s
cinema. It relies upon the mechanics and technical resources of the studio
system, as well as the mystique of stardom and celebrity. It is also almost
impossible to not recognise a melancholy that moves between the actors and
the characters they play, emanating from the roles they inhabit both within
and outside of the film. Christina’s immediate memorialisation of their
brief but sweet affair, points towards the film’s own nostalgia for the
real-life relationship of Garbo and Gilbert, as well as the actor’s
once-vibrant career. It is a sequence that moves between silent and sound
cinema, creating the kind of hybridised, isolated, abstracted world that is
the mark of Mamoulian’s work. But this sequence is also a product of the
studio, its focus on elements of décor, gesture and the glamorous posturing
of its impossibly attractive stars part-and-parcel of an overriding MGM
style. Its seeming miniaturist detail is rendered "spectacular" by the
glistening and veiled shimmer of its presentation.

Thus, although Mamoulian’s work was often striking it was seldom as
innovative, groundbreaking or iconoclastic as he led his interviewers to
believe. Thus, Sarris’ predominantly negative account of Mamoulian’s cinema
is also something of a welcome corrective to the director’s self-promotion.
The difficulties and fallowness of his later career are also perhaps the
ultimate outcome of his often-hostile relationship with his collaborators.
For example, Mamoulian was the director of the original Broadway productions
of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s groundbreaking Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel
(1945). Both of these productions allowed Mamoulian to further his attempts
to create and synthesise a truly organic and integrative theatrical
presentation, and were extraordinary critical and box office successes. But
Mamoulian’s endless self-aggrandisement and disagreement with the writers
over authorial accreditation resulted in him never working with the team
again or being offered to direct the large-scale film versions of either
musical in the mid-1950s. Mamoulian’s piecemeal film career – he completed
only 16 features over 30 years – across a variety of genres and studios, as
well as his famously aborted directorial contributions to Laura (Otto
Preminger, 1944), Porgy and Bess (Otto Preminger, 1959), and Cleopatra
(Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963), also give evidence to both the uncompromising
strength of his artistic vision and how he chaffed against the necessarily
collaborative and commercial fields he worked within. Nevertheless, despite
his much cited affinity for the more solitary art of painting – and how, for
example, this influenced and directed the choice of colour and composition
in the Goya-Velasquez-El Greco-inflected Blood and Sand, or the many
Americana drenched frames of Summer Holiday (1948) that directly cited Grant
Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and John Curry – Mamoulian was also a showman,
perfectly suited to the popularisation and adaptation of "high art" forms
and sources. Despite his claims to the contrary, these forms and elements
were the outcome of the collaborative potential he found at such studios as
Paramount, MGM and 20th Century Fox. Thus, his value to Hollywood and
Broadway as a synthesiser and channeller of forms and multifarious creative
contributions should not be underestimated.

For a director who was brought to Hollywood – or initially to the East Coast
studios of Paramount as a dialogue coach and then to direct Applause – to
deal with the aesthetic crisis of the introduction of sound, Mamoulian
proved himself to be a peculiarly "cinematic" director, exploiting many of
his scenarios for the pure visual and sound ideas/situations they suggested.
Nevertheless, as I will illustrate, the distinctions between theatre and
cinema in Mamoulian’s work are not as clear as they might at first appear or
as definitive as he often let on: "It’s curious really. Here I had been
recruited as a stage expert on dialogue, and all I could think of was the
marvellous things one could do with the camera and the exciting new
potentials of sound recording. The camera fascinated me." (16) The seeds of
this attentiveness to the aesthetic possibilities of the cinema can actually
be traced to several of Mamoulian’s formative experiences in the theatre,
his attempts at expressive stylisation in the original stage adaptation of
DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s Porgy, in particular. Thus, for example, the
initial, rhythmic "symphony of street sounds" that opened this 1927 play was
appropriated and expanded for the percussively dynamic opening of Love Me
Tonight. Mamoulian combines this coup de thétre with a sense, construction
and transformation of space that is intrinsically cinematic. The single
perspective of the stage transformed into a dizzying montage of sounds and
points of view.

Mamoulian also furthered his theatrical experiments with fluid staging,
scene changes and general transitions in the cinema. This quality is
discussed by Milne in terms of how the distinction between dance and
non-dance, musical number and bridging dialogue sequence are often blurred
in Mamoulian’s films: "one is almost tempted to say that every Mamoulian
film is a musical. It isn’t true, of course, but with every action and line
of dialogue conceived in terms of stylised rhythm, choreographed rather than
directed – it feels as though it were." (17) Milne argues that this gestalt
sense of "stylised rhythm", as well as a feeling for true movement, are
Mamoulian’s great contributions to the cinema. At times his description and
analysis of the director’s work aligns it more closely with the European
avant garde of the 1920s. Thus, for example, the still somewhat "grounded"
staging of musical performances in the theatre is transformed, in the
mercurial Love Me Tonight, into a series of montage-driven musical numbers
that move across vast, opened out and interiorised spaces. The greatest
instance of this is the opening performance of "Isn’t it Romantic". The song
is casually introduced by Maurice Chevalier’s tailor and then taken up by a
range of quickly moving characters until it arrives at the chateau of
Princess Jeanette (Jeanette MacDonald), drifting dreamily from a gypsy
encampment. This sequence highlights the patent anti-realism of Mamoulian’s
approach – the use of rhyming dialogue, almost theatrical musical
performance, extra-diegetic sound – but also comes close to achieving the
director’s aim of "conveying truth through stylization and poetic rhythm".
(18)

Despite his truly significant triumphs in the American theatre, where his
status as one of directorial greats is more assured, it is only in the
cinema that Mamoulian was able to fully explore his quest for a truly
synthetic art form seamlessly combining music, performance, painterly design
and dynamic movement. It is common to celebrate much of Mamoulian’s early
work in the cinema, but to also insist upon the ultimate decline of his
films after the last, "proper" innovations of the first three-strip
Technicolor feature, Becky Sharp. This is not terribly surprising when one
straightforwardly compares such early, cinematically dynamic and somewhat
risqué works as Applause and Love Me Tonight with the seemingly more staid,
conventional and often nostalgic films of the second half of his career:
High, Wide and Handsome (1937), Summer Holiday and Silk Stockings. But Milne
proffers a different approach to Mamoulian’s oeuvre. Whereas Spergel takes a
conventional tack in relation to pinpointing the brief flowering of
Mamoulian’s genius and the long decline that followed, Milne provides a more
holistic account, highlighting the ongoing refinement of his work. The
patent artificiality of Mamoulian’s final films – Blood and Sand, Rings on
Her Fingers (1942), Summer Holiday and Silk Stockings – and their true
abandonment to the rhythms of movement, colour, composition and the body,
allows full expression to the overarching abstraction and anti-realism that
generally marks his work. It is thus hardly surprising that Mamoulian was
considerably less productive in the grittier, more cutthroat post-war era.
His only cinematic haven in this period was within the production unit of
Arthur Freed at MGM. But even there Mamoulian’s famously fastidious, slow
and unworldly working methods created considerable animosity. The ten-year
gap between his two final films is a clear pointer towards these problems.

Mamoulian’s approach to genre examines each – the western, musical,
swashbuckler, romance, horror, historical drama – for their capacity to
allow particular and appropriate technical innovations, flourishes and
preoccupations. Important examples include, the subjective point of view
shots that mark the horror film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the crane shots
in the outdoor musical western High, Wide and Handsome. Nevertheless, if any
genre seems closest to Mamoulian’s heart it is the musical – perhaps, the
most cinematic and theatrical of classical American genres. Like Mamoulian,
it was also the genre ushered into American cinema with the coming of sound.
Music and dance are integral to the rhythm and meaning of Mamoulian’s work
and provide an emphasis on movement that marks his great contribution to the
cinema. For instance, even a film like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde contains
several "musical" moments, which have pertinent things to say about both
class and the role of music as an index of culture and as a container of raw
emotion. This is probably the reason why Milne promotes Mamoulian’s final
film, Silk Stockings, as the crowning achievement of his career. The film
opens with a series of shots showing the walking-dancing feet of Fred
Astaire. Such a metonymic focus is characteristic of Mamoulian’s cinema.
This focus on feet appears numerous times in his work and the isolation of
body parts and their relation to the objects around them also marks the most
resonant scenes of many of his films (think of the final track into a
close-up of Garbo’s tabula-rasa like face in Queen Christina).

But this abstraction and isolation of body parts also provides a pointer
towards the key innovations of the film. Milne champions Silk Stockings
primarily for the way in which it prioritises the body and movement as
vehicles for developing the film’s story and expressing its emotional
content. This characteristic only becomes fully observable in the scenes
featuring the ever graceful Astaire and Cyd Charisse. Thus, although the
film is truly "innovative" in the ways in which it communicates many of its
narrative developments through bodily movement and expression, it is also
marred by an excessive and often frontal presentation of its performances,
as well as an uncomfortable use of the Cinemascope frame (parodied and
utilised in the number "Stereophonic Sound"). But the explicit and
prioritised dance movements of Silk Stockings can also be likened to many
other of the most remarkable moments in Mamoulian’s cinema: the brutal,
enclosed, but physically spirited fencing sequence in The Mark of Zorro; the
wonderful springing rhythm of the opening of Love Me Tonight; the gradually
unfolding ball on the eve of the battle of Waterloo in Becky Sharp; the
timeless metronomic motions and gestures of Garbo around the room that
represents her brief idyll in Queen Christina. All of these sequences have a
dance-like quality. But it can be argued that the frustratingly piecemeal
qualities of Silk Stockings are also characteristic of much of Mamoulian’s
work. Mamoulian himself, by discussing his never fully-realised aim of
creating a truly organic, moving cinema while isolating particular
innovations and artistic choices, reinforces this view.

In retrospect, the two most completely satisfying films of Mamoulian’s
career – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Love Me Tonight – were made back to
back at Paramount. Both showily exploit the dynamic possibilities of sound,
camera movement, various editing devices (particularly wipes and dissolves),
and montage. Looking back on all of his films of the early 1930s, it is
still possible to be surprised by the sheer audacity of specific techniques,
individual images, the pace of many sequences, and the often idiosyncratic
uses to which Mamoulian puts such common devices as dissolves, wipes
(particularly of the diagonal variety) and subjective point of view shots.
Nevertheless, Mamoulian’s well-documented experiments in early sound
(Applause and City Streets), location filming (High, Wide and Handsome) and
colour (Becky Sharp) still tend to obscure a more holistic approach to
technical innovations and their possible meanings which does characterise
his cinema. Thus, the playful sound experiments of films like Love Me
Tonight and Silk Stockings are totally in keeping with the key ideas and
sense of life explored in the films.

Mamoulian’s films also constantly provide interesting variations on and
insights into specific themes and familiar genres. For example, it is
integral to the impact and meaning of Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde in
Mamoulian’s adaptation that the effect is mostly achieved without the aid of
cuts or dissolves. This startling effect is not just an exhibition of
technical virtuosity. One literally has to emerge from within the other.
Also, the high number of subjective point of view shots in this film is
justified by the film’s exploration of themes of shifting identity (a common
Mamoulian preoccupation), subjectivity and the relation of the individual to
society. The movement from optical points of view to much more distanced
perspectives and compositions is also a constant of Mamoulian’s cinema. I
think it is possible to link this restlessly shifting perspective to
Mamoulian’s mixed career in theatre and cinema. Thus, the alternation and
movement between close-ups and extreme long shots is only possible in the
cinema – either through cutting or mobile framing – but the sense of
distance in many of Mamoulian’s compositions seems a legacy of his
theatrical background and the tyranny of the proscenium. Nevertheless, this
movement between expressly intimate and coolly detached perspectives
contributes significantly to how Mamoulian renders subjectivity and the
bifurcated identities of many of his protagonists. This hybrid technique has
the effect of pulling us into the cinematic space while placing us at a
distance, combining the oneiric qualities of the cinematic experience with
the clearly detached perspective of the theatrical spectator.

As should now be clear, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is both a technically and
conceptually ambitious film. It attempts to find techniques to help
communicate specific ideas and complicate easy moral positions. The use of
subjective point of view shots is perhaps the most effective of these
devices, but others compete for prominence elsewhere in the film. The use of
long dissolves is often remarkable, linking such techniques in Mamoulian’s
film to similar ones explored by Josef von Sternberg in The Scarlet Empress,
another Paramount film of the era which investigates the disturbing power of
abundant and unchecked sexuality (though Sternberg’s film is much more
ambivalent, ambiguous and playful than Mamoulian’s).

Time and the vacillation between various states of physical and
psychological being are also themes that run through the film. Both are
given numerous pictorial "illustrations". For example, the figure of the
pendulum or the hands of a clock are foregrounded in the shot where Ivy’s
bare leg moves backwards and forwards as it is superimposed on the image of
Jekyll departing from her apartment. This motif, or motion, returns several
times in the film, most clumsily as a wipe that moves in a vacillating
clockwise and anti-clockwise motion across the frame (producing some very
interesting split-screen images in the process). Despite the laboured
quality of this device it still manages to communicate a core idea of the
relativity of various states, characters, spaces, situations and class
positions. In particular, the sexual frustration experienced by Jekyll in
relation to his fiancée, Muriel (Rose Hobart), and its connection to the
freer sexuality of working-class Ivy, is visually communicated through this
technique. This focus on sexuality and class is a key, often troubling and
unresolved theme of many of Mamoulian’s films.

Spergel has suggested that much of Mamoulian’s work returns to the theme of
the divided public and private self. (19) This thematic motif is most
clearly schematised in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde but is playfully and
seriously surveyed in many of his films. Sometimes, as in Song of Songs and
Queen Christina, this theme plays along the fault lines of the divisions
between actor, character, the public and the private self. In both these
films the central female characters, inhabited by Dietrich and Garbo
respectively, are required to make a division or distinction between their
public and private personas. Thus it doesn’t take too much of a leap to read
Garbo’s Queen Christina as a treatise on the attractions and hardships of
modern celebrity, as well as more specifically about the star herself. Such
a reading is supported by the initial publicity for the film, which actively
sought to blur this distinction between character and actor, to link the
royalty of the past with the celebrity of the present. In attempting to
relaunch Garbo’s film career – she had been absent from the screen for over
a year and legend abounded about her activities – and highlight the coolly
European salaciousness of her star persona, the film’s original trailer made
the following appeals to: "A Queen whose love affairs were as modern as
tomorrow’s tabloids"; "A 17th Century maiden who lived with 20th Century
madness".

Such a blurring of character and star persona, the past and the present, is
hardly unusual in the films of Dietrich and Garbo. But Mamoulian’s films
also constantly and more prosaically narrativise this complex division
between the public and private self. It is thus hardly surprising that many
of his films feature characters who are either not quite what they seem or
who are required to take on contrastive identities; mistaken identity is
also important to the plots of Love Me Tonight, Queen Christina, Songs of
Songs, amongst others. The obliteration of one of these selves, or the
closer alignment of the two, is often the key drama of the narrative. This
takes on its most obvious form in a film like The Mark of Zorro, where the
hero deliberately takes on two opposing personalities in order to hide his
true identity. It is also explored through the complex androgyny of Garbo in
Queen Christina, where she is, somewhat implausibly, mistaken for a young
man (highlighting, perhaps, the performative nature of all sexuality). The
journeys of the central female characters of Applause, High, Wide and
Handsome, Silk Stockings, and even Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, take this form
as well.

Mamoulian’s cinema can also be considered as primarily presentational in its
form and style. Thus despite seeming to be explicitly cinematic –
particularly in the use of various devices that are impossible and often
have no correlative in the theatre such as wipes, expressive montage, varied
film speeds, etc. – there is still something that is explicitly theatrical
in the nature of his films. His films share an overriding interiority and
stage-like quality. Even such a seemingly action orientated film as Blood
and Sand is more accurately described as a mood piece lacking significant
exterior scenes and containing only glimpses of its strikingly staged
bullfights. We are thus mainly positioned away from the action, witnessing
other characters’ responses to the balletic but bloody scenes. Mamoulian’s
films are full of moments where characters seem less than involved in the
here-and-now of a particular time, place and situation, and more concerned
with how they are presented to the audience. In fact, such a shift in
emphasis often marks his adaptations of more socially grounded source
material by Tolstoy, Thackeray and O’Neill. Such relative "romps" as The Gay
Desperado (1936) and High, Wide and Handsome initially proceed at a
breakneck speed, introducing us to characters within the framework of a
performance. In High, Wide and Handsome this is relatively straightforward,
as the central character is introduced singing the title song at a medicine
show. Nevertheless, Irene Dunne’s excessive performance of the song
foregrounds the very act of annunciation. As a result, her performance seems
almost outside of the film’s world, on a pedestal, less keyed to the
spectators who appear in the frame than those who exist beyond it.

The opening of The Gay Desperado is even more revealing. This film
illustrates how self-aware Mamoulian could be of the forms he was working
within and of his own career narrative. The opening shots of the film,
coming after the iconic, cartoonish image of a sombrero under the credits,
are initially disorientating as they show what appears to be a rather brutal
and stylish gangster film caught in media res. The shots are, of course,
reminiscent of Mamoulian’s earlier City Streets. Our initial impressions are
subsequently undercut by the realisation that we are watching a
film-within-the-film. We then see and hear a group of Mexican bandits
responding to what is on the screen, discussing the ways they might
appropriate the modern methods of American gangsters. In short succession,
the film incorporates a fight within the cinema, several comic moments, and
a musical performance by a tenor who quietens the unruly mob. As in many of
Mamoulian’s films this impure and hybridised opening tells us much about the
film that is to follow. In its foregrounding of appropriation, adaptation
and its ambivalence towards modernity it also tells us much about
Mamoulian’s sensibility. For a director who was often extraordinarily lucid
and knowledgeable about new cinematic technologies in the first years of his
film career, Mamoulian quickly developed a taste for nostalgic Americana and
a suspicion of the benefits of the modern world. In fact, even such
contemporaneously set films as City Streets, Silk Stockings, Golden Boy
(1939) and Applause do not really have a genuine feeling for the present
day. For example, the vaudeville stages of Applause seem to belong to at
least the previous decade, while Silk Stockings’ portraits of Soviet and
Parisian life appear to evoke a quaint version of the 1930s rather than the
1950s.

Mamoulian’s films create somewhat solipsistic and explicitly imagined or
performed worlds. Thus, even the beautiful Ansel Adams-like night landscapes
of The Gay Desperado – one of Mamoulian’s most underrated films – are
striking because of their similarity to a series of other compositions. This
is probably a key reason why Mamoulian was actually so well-suited to the
studio system of the 1930s and early ’40s, as despite his often striking use
of locations, including actual New York stations and subways in Applause, it
is the artificiality of his expressly audio-visual compositions that most
defines his work. It is therefore not surprising that several commentators
have emphasised a patently abstract quality in Mamoulian’s films, a tilt
towards an experimental cinema that Sarris also expressed an ambivalent
attitude towards: "[Mamoulian is] one of the most eloquent spokesmen the
more experimental mainstream film has ever had". (20)

Nevertheless, Mamoulian’s legacy is still substantial and should not be
relegated to predominantly technical considerations. He was the main
catalyst in at least five outstanding Hollywood films, and his initial run
of six features is as strong, and important, as any other director of the
era. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Mamoulian was at his best
when working within the system, exploiting the extraordinary conflation of
artists, actors, writers, technicians and craftspeople that made the
Classical Hollywood cinema possible. For a few short years, Mamoulian was
one of a small number of directors who used Hollywood as a true studio
environment.

© Adrian Danks, September 2006

Endnotes:
1.. Part of a line spoken by Greta Garbo in Queen Christina.
2.. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions
1929-1968, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1968, p. 155.
3.. Sarris, p. 160.
4.. Dwight MacDonald, "Notes on Hollywood Directors", Introduction to the
Art of the Movies, ed. Lewis Jacobs, The Noonday Press, New York, pp. 182-84
(originally published in 1933). See also, Huff’s response to MacDonald’s
essay: Jacobs, p. 207.
5.. See, for example, Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made it:
Conversations with Legendary Film Directors, Ballantine Books, New York,
1997, pp. 33, 618; Gilbert Adair, Flickers: An Illustrated Celebration of
100 Years of Cinema, Faber and Faber, London and Boston, pp. 82-3.
6.. Tom Milne, Mamoulian, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969.
7.. Mark Spergel, Reinventing Reality: The Art and Life of Rouben
Mamoulian, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, N.J. and London, 1993.
8.. Catherine Williamson, "’Draped Crusaders’: Disrobing Gender in The
Mark of Zorro", Cinema Journal vol. 36, no. 2, Winter 1997, p. 16.
9.. Jeffrey P. Smith, "’It Does Something to a Girl. I Don’t Know What’:
The Problem of Female Sexuality in Applause", Cinema Journal vol. 30, no. 2,
Winter 1991, pp. 47-60.
10.. Annalee Newitz, "A Lower-Class, Sexy Monster: American Liberalism in
Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", Bright Lights Film Journal no. 15,
1995, pp.12-8, 50.
11.. Robin Wood, "Art and Ideology: Notes on Silk Stockings", Film Comment
vol. 11, no. 3, May-June 1975, pp. 28-31.
12.. This practice is consistently criticised by Spergel, particularly in
relation to such plays as Porgy and Bess and Lost in the Stars, and the bulk
of Mamoulian’s work in Hollywood.
13.. See almost any of the multiple interviews that Mamoulian gave in the
1960s, ’70s and early ’80s, or the articles he wrote to discuss and promote
the contribution his films made to the "technical" art of the cinema. The
best and most informative of the Mamoulian interviews are: David Robinson,
"Painting the Leaves Black: Rouben Mamoulian", Sight and Sound vol. 30, no.
3, Summer 1961, pp. 123-27; James R. Silke and Michael Shamamian (eds.),
Rouben Mamoulian: "Style is the Man", American Film Institute, 1971.
14.. John Baxter, Hollywood in the Thirties, Tantivy Press, London, 1968,
p. 45.
15.. James Harvey, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges,
Da Capo Press, New York, 1998, p. 33.
16.. Interview with Mamoulian in Andrew Sarris (ed.), Hollywood Voices,
Secker and Warburg, London, 1971, p. 63. Mamoulian also claimed that, "I
didn’t bring any ideas from the theater because I don’t think that theater
can give any ideas to the films. They are different mediums. There is
nothing really in the theater than can contribute to films." See Harry A.
Hargrave, "Interview with Rouben Mamoulian", Literature/Film Quarterly vol.
10, no. 4, October 1982, p. 264.
17.. Milne, pp. 13-4.
18.. Sarris, Hollywood Voices, p. 63.
19.. See Spergel, pp. 1, 149-50.
20.. Ken Hanke, "Rouben Mamoulian", Films in Review vol. 39, no. 8-9,
August-September 1988, p. 403.
Filmography:

Applause (1929)
City Streets (1931)
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932)
Love Me Tonight (1932)
Song of Songs (1933)
Queen Christina (1933)
We Live Again (1934)
Becky Sharp (1935)
The Gay Desperado (1936)
High, Wide and Handsome (1937)
Golden Boy (1939)
The Mark of Zorro (1940)
Blood and Sand (1941)
Rings on Her Fingers (1942)
Summer Holiday (1948)
Silk Stockings (1957)
Select Bibliography:

Thomas R. Atkins, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: An Interview with Rouben
Mamoulian", Film Journal vol. 2, no. 2, January-March 1973, pp. 36-43.

John Baxter, Hollywood in the Thirties, Tantivy Press, London, 1968, pp.
43-9.

Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Pierre Sauvage, American Directors Vol. 1,
McGraw-Hill, New York, 1983, pp. 234-7.

Lucy Fischer, "Applause: The Visual and Acoustic Landscape", Film Sound:
Theory and Practice, ed. Elizabeth Weis and John Belton, Columbia University
Press, New York, 1985, pp. 232-46.

John A. Gallagher and Marino A. Amoruco, "An Interview with Rouben
Mamoulian", The Velvet Light Trap no. 19, 1982, pp. 16-22.

Ken Hanke, "Rouben Mamoulian", Films in Review vol. 39, no. 8-9,
August-September 1988, pp. 403-13.

Harry A. Hargrave, "Interview with Rouben Mamoulian", Literature/Film
Quarterly vol. 10, no. 4, October 1982, p. 255-65.

James Harvey, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges, Da
Capo Press, New York, 1998, pp. 31-4.

Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, "Rouben Mamoulian", The Celluloid Muse:
Hollywood Directors Speak, Henry Regnery, Chicago, 1971, pp. 128-43.

Richard Koszarski, "The Greatest Film Paramount Ever Made", Film History
vol. 15, 2003, pp. 436-43.

Peter Lehman, "Looking at Ivy Looking as Us Looking at Her: The Camera and
The Garter", Wide Angle vol. 5, no. 3, 1983, pp. 59-63.

Dwight MacDonald, "Notes on Hollywood Directors", Introduction to the Art of
the Movies, ed. Lewis Jacobs, The Noonday Press, New York, 1960 [article
originally published in 1933], pp. 182-84.

Rouben Mamoulian, "Colour and Light in Films", Film Culture no. 21, Summer
1960, pp. 68-79.

Rouben Mamoulian, "Some Problems in the Direction of Color Pictures",
Hollywood Directors 1914-1940 Vol. 1, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1976
[article originally published in 1935], pp. 288-93.

Rouben Mamoulian, "Controlling Color for Dramatic Effect", Hollywood
Directors 1914-1940 Vol. 2, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977 [article
originally published in 1941], pp. 15-24.

Rouben Mamoulian, "Dialogue on Film", American Film vol. 8, no. 4,
January-February 1983, pp. 26-7, 67-9.

Tom Milne, Mamoulian, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969.

Annalee Newitz, "A Lower-Class, Sexy Monster: American Liberalism in
Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", Bright Lights Film Journal no. 15,
1995, pp.12-8, 50.

David Robinson, "Painting the Leaves Black: Rouben Mamoulian", Sight and
Sound vol. 30, no. 3, Summer 1961, pp. 123-27.

Andrew Sarris (ed.), "Rouben Mamoulian Talking to Andrew Sarris, 1966",
Hollywood Voices, Secker and Warburg, London, 1971, pp. 60-8.

Andrew Sarris, "Rouben Mamoulian", The American Cinema: Directors and
Directions 1929-1968, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1968, pp. 160-1.

Michael Sevastakis, Songs of Love and Death: The Classical American Horror
Film of the 1930s, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut and London, 1993,
pp. 131-48.

James R. Silke and Michael Shamamian (eds.), Rouben Mamoulian: "Style is the
Man", American Film Institute, 1971.

Jeffrey P. Smith, "’It Does Something to a Girl. I Don’t Know What’: The
Problem of Female Sexuality in Applause", Cinema Journal vol. 30, no. 2,
Winter 1991, pp. 47-60.

Mark Spergel, Reinventing Reality: The Art and Life of Rouben Mamoulian,
Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, N.J. and London, 1993.

David Thomson, "Rouben Mamoulian", The New Biographical Dictionary of Film,
Little, Brown, Great Britain, 2002, p. 556.

George Turner, "Two-Faced Treachery", American Cinematographer vol. 80, no.
3, March 1999, pp. 188-96.

John Wakeman (ed.), "Rouben Mamoulian", World Film Directors vol. 1,
1890-1945, The H. W. Wilson Co., New York, 1987, pp. 710-14.

Wayne Warga, "Rouben Mamoulian", Action no. 9, vol. 5, September-October
1974, pp. 24-7.

Catherine Williamson, "’Draped Crusaders’: Disrobing Gender in The Mark of
Zorro", Cinema Journal vol. 36, no. 2, Winter 1997, pp. 3-16.

Robin Wood, "Art and Ideology: Notes on Silk Stockings", Film Comment vol.
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ARMENIAN DATA TO BE INCLUDED IN THE REPORT ON THE STATE OF THE DISABLED

armradio.am
06.03.2007 17:43

For the first time data form Armenia will be placed next EU member
states in the report on the state of the disabled people. President
of the "Unison" NGO Armen Alaverdyan said at a press conference today
that separate studies carried out in the sphere and official data
will be presented in the report.

Similar reports have been issued by the International Union for the
Rights of the Disabled in the US, Africa and Asia.