About

It is at once inspiring, complex, and fragile to encapsulate Armenian Cinema in just a few short paragraphs. Its origins and many appearances are and have been shaped by geographical and political coordinates near and away from the Armenian homeland, which at one time covered what is now the Republic of Armenia (formerly Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia) and reached as far west as the eastern provinces of present-day Turkey. Subsequently, Armenian Cinema could not be molded into one entity, covering one genre or one territory. Rather, it became a variegated amalgam of assorted themes, influences, and genres.

The Armenian people today span from the independent Republic of Armenia all the way to the hills of Hollywood in California, passing through Tehran, Beirut, and Jerusalem, Moscow, Venice, and Paris, and even Calcutta, Sydney, and Buenos Aires. A small but significant portion of these Armenians also resides in the Netherlands. Armenian Cinema, however, like all Cinema, begins not in a specific country, but with the birth of cinema itself in the late 1880s. Yet, it would take a few more years for Armenian Cinema in Armenia to be called into existence officially, by government decree, on April 18, 1926, thereby giving way to the first Armenian silent feature, Namus, by Hamo Bek-Nazarov in October 1926. After Namus, Bek-Nazarov, strongly influenced by early Soviet cinema, would go on to produce prolifically with films like Pepo, Zare, and Khaspush, all films that were either based on existing literary stories or on life in Armenia in those early decades of the twentieth century.

In the meantime, in 1922, a young Rouben Mamoulian left his birthplace in Tbilisi, Georgia, headed for Paris and later to London to direct plays. By 1927, he had moved further west and was directing musicals on Broadway. With the coming of sound in Hollywood in 1927, Mamoulian saw his chance to be among the first directors to make a Hollywood “talking picture” (synchronized sound) with the musical Applause in 1929. This film was considered a landmark in American cinema as Mamoulian employed sound innovations to give depth and texture to film dialogue and music. Throughout his career, Mamoulian would continue to innovate cinematic techniques while directing musicals and melodramas that appealed to the masses. Although Mamoulian never overtly portrayed or discussed Armenians in his films, he did at times slip his brief Soviet socialist experience into his films, such as the candidly socialist turnaround in Love Me Tonight and the dead-on parody of Soviets in Silk Stockings, arguably all in reference to his own Armenian background and his knowledge that Armenia was at that time one of the many republics trapped in the Soviet Union. With Mamoulian, then, Armenian Cinema saw another birth, this time in the diaspora.

Armenian Cinema as we know it today was thus born with Bek-Nazarov in the homeland and with Mamoulian in the diaspora, but the range of films that followed in their footsteps is as diverse as the homeland and diaspora could be. Some directors, like Mamoulian and Henri Verneuil, chose to focus on themes beyond their ethnic bounds. Others, like Atom Egoyan, Robert Guédiguian, and Don Askarian continue to juggle telling stories about their host-countries and exploring their experience as minorities in exile. Still others, like Harutyun Khachatryan, Henrik Malyan, Frunze Dovlatyan, and Ozcan Alper concentrate on the land, the people, the past, the present, and what the future might bring to their homeland. Then there are those directors who use film as merely another medium to express their unique‹poetic and artistic‹experience of the world they inhabit. These directors include Sergei Parajanov, Artavazd Peleshyan, Robert Sahakyants, and Yervant Gianikian. At the same time another wave of filmmakers, mostly from the diaspora, has been introducing more hybrid forms of storytelling and personal documentaries, such as Eric Nazarian, Nora Martirosyan, Serge Avedikian, Tina Bastajian, Christine Khalafian, and Garine Torossian. Finally, there is an entire generation of Armenian directors, from both the homeland and the diaspora, that has been working on creating documentaries, TV-produced and art-house, that chronicle the ripples and waves of social and political changes in the homeland and beyond. Among these directors belong Suzanne Khardalian, Vardan Hovhannisyan, Tigran Xmalian, and Nigol Bezjian.

The variety of streams among Armenian directors, as discussed above, brings us to the diversity of Armenian Cinema as a whole. Like all Cinema, Armenian Cinema, too, comprises all sorts of genres, from tragedies to comedies, documentaries to animations, absurdity to experiment. Moreover, Armenian Cinema does not belong to one country or territory, nor to one theme or ideology. Neither is it linear or moving in one direction. Rather, Armenian Cinema is a mixed bag of disparate genres, themes, forms, and influences. To speak of one Armenian Cinema, therefore, is fictitious at best, absurd at worst. Within this context, it is thus more constructive to speak of a collection of different Armenian Cinemas. To better understand this notion, consider the rich tableaux of Sergei Parajanov’s mise-en-scènes and his signature style that crossed both geographical and cinematic frontiers. Juxtaposed to Parajanov, consider Egyptian-born Canadian Armenian director Atom Egoyan’s Calendar (1993), with its stunning, picturesque photographs of Armenian churches serving as a backdrop to the merging of diaspora and homeland in a love triangle that echoes the multiplicity of Armenian voices.

The future of Armenian Cinemas is difficult to predict, but as opportunities for contact between the homeland and the diaspora continue to grow, and digital filmmaking evolves, it is hard to conceive that Armenian Cinemas will not reflect this convergence and expand the borders of what, how, and where Armenian Cinemas are today.