» INVOCATION / Պաղատանք - A cinematic memorial -

by Fred Kelemen
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“Something terrible has happened [...]. One should not think that this terrible thing [...] has disappeared without a trace. Perhaps it has, unnoticed, become part of our being, and we know nothing about it, because we are constantly committing it. The darkness of humanity before the flood was definitely less than that of people today”.
(Béla ­Hamvas, Henoch Apokalipszise)

The title of this film series, which commemorates the ­Armenian Genocide from 100 years ago, also refers to that which art always is; an invocation of spirits. In this case, it is concerned with both the ghosts of genocide that appear in all genocides at all times—from the first genocide in the 20th century, committed by the Germans in Namibia beginning in 1904, through the Armenian Genocide, and the Shoah of the Jewish people carried out by the Germans, up to the massacres of the recent past in Srebrenica and elsewhere—as well as the spirits of the victims and their descendants.
The experience of the genocide has been burned into the film history of Armenia from the very beginning. The traces of this pain continue to appear in these films up to the present day. While the creators of the first films felt the influence of the genocide through its contemporaneity, the later films are works from grandsons and granddaughters, in which the pain, the desire and the search for the reality of a long-lost, mythical homeland have continued to burn themselves in like wounds.
100 years since the Armenian Genocide are also almost 100 years of film history, are 100 years of invocation and hope through memory and life in the present.
Reminders of the genocide appear again and again in films from those of the early 20th century, like the shot-in-the-US, first film about the genocide Ravished Armenia from 1919, which has survived in fragments, through the Armenian films Nahapet and Nostalgia, to films from the recent past from Armenian directors and directors, as well as those from Turkish filmmakers and filmmakers. They also attempt to raise their voices against the process of forgetting.
Because, as a Jewish proverb says, to forget is to prolong exile, and memory is the gateway to salvation. The future needs remembrance and not indifference. Elie Wiesel wrote “I have always believed that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. The opposite of faith is not arrogance, but indifference. The opposite of hope is not despair, it is indifference. Indifference is not the beginning of a process, it is the end of a process.” In this way, the films are also an invocation against not only the indifference of the past, but also that of the present and the future.
Recounting events is the guardian of time. Pain experiences its freedom and healing through narration. In the art of film, the canvas becomes the membrane of the images of the soul. Brought into movement, it drowns out the silence with an evocative sound—which can be a whisper, a lamentation or a cry.
Beyond stirring our emotions, films challenge us to reflect and think ahead, to understand and recognize what endows the ghosts of genocide, all genocides, with vitality, and allows them to continue to resurrect themselves and do their misanthropic work.

“To read in the pictures […] only what confirms a general abhorrence of war is to stand back from an engagement with (it) [...]. It is to dismiss politics”. (Susan Sontag, ­“Regarding the Pain of Others”).

From March 7th, over Good Friday and Easter Sunday, up to April 25th, a cinematic invocation will be attempted through this most extensive film series worldwide on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.
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Programme: http://www.gorki.de/spielplan/2015-03/anrufung/1331/