In Place, Out of Time
by Hrayr Anmahouni Eulmessekian
Reprinted from ARARAT (Spring 2006)
A Story of People in War and Peace. Armenia, 2006. DVD: BBC version total run time 1 hour, 8 minutes. Director/Producer Vardan Hovhannisyan, Bars Media. Camera: For peacetime, Vahagn Ter-Hakobyan; wartime Vardan Hovhannisyan. Editor Tigran Baghinyan.
We are dealing with a film. We know how. By now most of us have been doing it all of our lives. A documentary. We have a template of it in our minds. We will hear its sound, be alarmed if we don't, tweak its volume to our comfort level. When facing it, the monitor will still be surrounded by the furniture we are familiar with, we will watch it as it dutifully displays the arrangement of a pixel file in the sequence it is programmed to do, just as it had done the night before when the violence of the commercial break interrupted the sitcom's laugh track, or, not too long ago, the pornography that beamed to us live from the tip of a cruise missile.
At first, there is a text. Consensual, correct, proper, spell checked, compressed. A historical contextualization. Solemn silent. Bold, easy to read. White on black. An abstract array of rhythmic noises fades in after the second paragraph is held long enough to be read. Hectic, a faint breath gives it away, running footsteps. Away or towards we don't know yet. The first cut is on a fast-disappearing blurred ground. Must be fall, the dried up leaves cover the ground. The breaths are distant enough to demote their priority. Not the time to catch them yet. A few moments later, sounds of automatic gunfire puts us in the middle of a firefight. The camera somewhat stabilizes on the ground. The lens is all fogged up, most probably from the cameraman's breath. A finger wipes it clean for all of us to see.
Breath and ground. Soldiers end up fighting for the first, the powers that be for the second.
The fog of war is a euphemism, not a metaphor. It belongs to the official cover-up's vocabulary. It also doesn't apply here, for the fog is real. It is thick and it is the one being fought against, shot at, as Felo, crouched in his foxhole, admits in-between surveying for silhouettes and recording a message for his kids on Vardan's camera. "Just in case," he adds.
We do not see who's in that fog, nor do we need to. We know who's in there, for they are right here with us, neatly packaged in our biases and prejudice. Being passed down as we speak.
Our us versus their them. As it most probably is for their them.
"A story of a people in" fades in first only to be dwarfed later by "war and peace." At the present, the truce is still tentative, there is no peace yet and this not the celebrated novel.
The first time we see Vardan Hovhannissyan, the filmmaker is in a church. The faint echoes of a Sunday service had been audible since the previous scene of three bodies lying dead. We can't tell which side they were fighting on, when alive, what was their nationality, their religion. Twelve years had passed since those days.
He too had wanted to forget and move on, we hear him say gently, almost intimately. His is not the voice of authority, nor of pretense. He is married now, with two children-"life is so wonderful." This time the voice carries over scenery. He sounds different though, more appreciative. Even the picture-perfect shot of Ararat loses its symbolism, and goes back to being solely the breathtaking view that it is.
Vardan had spent four years in the war in Karabagh. We also know by now that his son had seen his uniform hanging in a closet, and wondered if he had ever been a soldier.
"I was not a journalist anymore, I was part of this brotherhood."
His voice is heard over the scenes of Lernik's lifeless body being carried back by two of his friends. "Vay mer abern a" [Woe, he is our brother] we hear him say while filming, with it the all-toorevered objectivity of Western journalistic standards fades away. He is useless as an agency reporter anymore, but Vardan kept filming the war on his own for four more years.
Felo, Lernik-no doubt nicknames. The brotherhood's re-naming, perhaps. We will go on meeting more of them. Out of all the war footage he had collected, Vardan ended up using only five days worth, which covered only twenty meters of battlefield. We will meet Khachik, Anahit the peacetime math teacher, the young Chouht-called "chick" for his young age, and Avag. Some who did and some didn't make it.
Twelve years later, though, Vardan goes back to look for them, to find them again, and with them to find his film, the question that might de-fragment his narrative.
It is Felo he finds first, on the shores of a calm, quiet, deep blue lake. He's on a Sunday fishing trip. Felo, who had recorded the message for his kids while inspecting the fog, is now divorced. Introspective, quiet. Later we learn he is still in the army stationed in the mountains, on lookout. Now almost fifty, he is guarding the snowy peaks. He tries to justify that it was easier for him to be in a firefight than on sentry duty. He has no plans for the future.
Chouht, the young commander, the battlefield hero, is in jail. Doing time for possession. Marijuana. The age-old irony of a state, any state, that will decorate its citizens for killing human beings, only to turn around and jail them, on moral grounds no doubt, for trying to live with their own pasts or, a futile attempt to relive the rush of battle.
Khachik, we find out from his neighbors, is in a "hospital." A mental institution, we see the filled-up forms, we hear his symptoms and the noise the flipping of the pages makes. It is official. Later, alone with Vardan, he whispers his own evaluation. We find out that he is also a veteran of the Soviet era Afghan wars. He is trembling. We see the doctors and the nurses take care of him, surround him, while they are watching the war footage that Vardan had of him. We see him smelling the flowers lined up on the windowsill. We can read the brand names of the tin cans now doubling as flowerpots.
Gevorg the mailman is back on his civilian job. Avag too, they point out the pictures of who didn't make it. The math teacher didn't. He's the one who took off his wool cap at the site of Lernik's body. We meet his wife. His postcard-size framed picture is sitting on a desk along with a medal. She is about to leave for Moscow for the birth of their first grandchild.
Anahit, the medic, who had informed us about the ten other "girls" who had lost their lives since she'd been in the frontlines. She had trouble putting into words why she had chosen this path. She did not adjust to the civilian life. She's an officer in the army. We see her with young recruits. Still in uniform, she wonders out of place in a big city's fashionable shopping district.
Khachik is released. They say he is better now. His buddies take him on a picnic to celebrate his release. After the barbeque, we see them all under the shade of a tree. Staring.
The shots are kept long enough, silent enough, as only film can do. Only one of the Ararats is framed in the background.
Stares that not only won't let anything penetrate from the outside, but more importantly will not let anything escape from the inside. They are not blank, just oblivious to their surroundings. They distill time and soul into an impenetrable amalgam. Our next blink is on the cut.
The film ends on Chouht, still struggling to adjust to civilian life, but this time we are there in a clean sterile operating room, for the birth of his second son. He can hardly contain himself. Vardan too, he leaves his position behind the camera. The final scene freezes on an uncontrolled hug.
In the end, after all the fighting exhausts and itself is exhausted, there's that narrow opening for the participants to tell their own story, realign their narrative, reclaim their experience as their own, before the powers that be decorate them with wholesale glory and send them into oblivion. Vardan took that opportunity.
In this BBC version, we hear no theme music, no background track, no anthem, We see no insignia, no flags, no marching orders, no bands, no speeches, no glory. Nothing larger than life. We see the confusion, the fear and the respect for it, the frailty. The cinematography is exquisite, the editing and construct masterful. Not one extra frame and no frame to spare, no background track, no enhancement, no shock value, no sensationalism, and above all, honesty.
For the Armenian psyche, especially of the diasporan, the Karabagh issue is beyond any other post-Soviet conflict. It is deeply rooted in the Aghed (Catastrophe).* Seeing themselves able to inflict pain unto Turks, Armenians swell up in pride, with a taste of revenge. Recapturing land has given a feeling of euphoria. In that sense the film does not attempt to revaluate historical context, and it does not pretend to transcend the collective trauma, but, with each participant's story, the individual experience becomes part of humanity's. Each time, a brick is removed from the wall of the echo chamber of manipulated victimhood/heroism, a scratch etched on the closed loop of highly polished nationalism.
At the end, an unspoken danger might caution us that in the wrong hands, or for twisted hearts and mind, works like these can be used to add a few more wrinkles of humanity, of inherent goodness, on our self-portrait, while enhancing the shades of evil on theirs, the others, whose humanity we rarely are allowed to acknowledge.
*The proper name systematically used by Hagop Oshagan for the Armenian Genocide since 1931 (see Marc Nichanian, "The Style of Violence," Armenian Review, spring 1985).
[ARARAT]
