Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
English Language and Literature
Katarína Havranová
Reconstruction of the “Orient” in Selected American and Canadian Films
Master’s Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Ph.D.
2016
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
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Author’s signature
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank my supervisor doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Ph.D. for his valuable advice provided during the process of writing.
Table of Contents
Introduction ...... 5
1. Stereotypes and Reality ...... 8
1.1. Fact and Fiction ...... 10
1.2. Stereotypes and Their Fantasy World ...... 14
1.3. From the East-West Division to Neo-Orientalism ...... 18
1.4. Orientalism in Film ...... 22
2. Stephen Gagahan´s Syriana ...... 28
2.1. Islamic Fundamentalism and Enlightened Reformism ...... 32
2.2. The To-be-looked-at-ness of the Veiled Woman ...... 36
2.3. Reconstruction of Orientalist Geography: Gardens and Deserts ...... 39
2.4. The political message of Syriana ...... 44
3. Denis Villeneuve´s Incendies ...... 47
3.1. The Brutal Rapist and the Cold-Blooded Assassin ...... 51
3.2. Violence in the Desert and Universality of Geography ...... 54
3.3. Construction of Story, Reconstruction of Memory ...... 60
3.4. The Validity of the Denial of History ...... 64
4. Atom Egoyan´s Ararat ...... 66
4.1. Trauma and the Image of the Evil Turk ...... 68
4.2. Representation of History ...... 72
4.3. The Depiction of the Homeland ...... 81
4.4. Questions Left Unanswered ...... 87
Conclusion ...... 89
Sources ...... 92
Summary ...... 97
Resumé ...... 98
Introduction
Edward Said has shown that the Orient is a cultural realm against which the West has defined itself. Orientalism, both as an academic discourse and as a style of thought that justifies colonial interests in the East, has determined the Orient in political, sociological and ideological terms. Said does not claim that the Orient is essentially an idea, but he says that it has a corresponding reality; however, he does avoid the question of this correspondence between reality and the cultural construct.
According to Said, orientalist imagery is marked by its textual aspect: it relies on narratives rather than reality. This intertextuality fosters the reiteration of fixed patterns.
Given by their visual nature, fixed patterns are especially relevant in cinema since visual reproduction is a powerful means of their conventionalization and automatization.
Stereotypes are gaining momentum in contemporary cinema. As Schweinitz points out in
Film and Stereotype, stereotypes are present in all narratives, and they function on the characters’, the narrative and other levels of the film. Contemporary filmmakers are well aware of the fact that creating films devoid of stereotypes is unconceivable; for this reason, many postmodern directors employ stereotypes in a conscious and creative way.
This work attempts to connect the use of stereotypes with the fictionalization of historical events in films. Lubomír Doležel claims that postmodern historical fiction is fundamentally different from its traditional counterpart in its treatment of reality.
Doležel’s main idea in Possible Worlds of Fiction and History is that whereas traditional historical fiction adheres to historical authenticity, postmodern works recreate parallel possible worlds to the past. This work claims that the fictionalization of a real-life event may happen by the adoption of preexistent elements and structures of story-telling.
During this process, which Doležel calls “transworld morphing”, both cultural and
5 narrative stereotypes play crucial role in the films which are going to be examined in this work.
Orientalist filmmaking has developed its own conventionalized fantasy world with complex structures of interlinked stereotypes. This work investigates the relation of the historical and fictional elements in three contemporary feature films by American and
Canadian directors. Since fiction has the power of reshaping previous convictions about the past, it makes the presence of history in the narrative problematic because it can distort historical truth. Distortion of history can occur because fiction always relies on previous pre-established structures. This work aims at demonstrating that those films that do not judge critically the established stereotypes, which they inadvertently or intentionally make use of, jeopardize the validity of the film’s message. On the contrary, fiction can serve as an accurate version for the reconstruction of the past if it does make a critical judgement of pre-established patterns from previous narratives.
The three films examined here build on historical events set in regions which are traditionally perceived as oriental: the life story of an ex-CIA agent in Stephen Gaghan’s
Syriana (2005), the Lebanese civil war in Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies (2010), and the
Armenian Genocide in Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (2002). All of these films fictionalize the historical events, fictionalize historical characters and add fictitious characters to the narrative, and even fictionalize the geographical settings. The question this work would like to address is not to what extent these films are mimetic or not; but rather how they construe the fictional worlds of the historical events. Do these fictional worlds respond to the long-established orientalist tradition? The work will scrutinize those orientalist stereotypes that the process of fictionalization makes use of; how the films address cultural stereotypes when portraying oriental men and women; how they construe the geographical location of the oriental land; and what purpose the fictionalization of the
6 history serve. It will also be considered, what possible political aims and implications the process of fictionalization has in each of the films.
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1. Stereotypes and Reality
In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude that the orient was
essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality […] There
were – and there are – cultures and nations whose location is in the East,
and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously
greater than anything that could be said about them in the West. (Said 5)
Following this statement, Said puts forth that it is not within the scope of his study to investigate this fact “except to acknowledge it tacitly” (5). Said deliberately avoids the question of correspondence between reality and the orientalist discourse. Instead,
Orientalism deals only with orientalism’s ideas about the Orient. It is not concerned with real societies, peoples and cultures of the Orient: it deals exclusively with their representation.
One might raise the question why it should be important to look at such a relationship which is the ultimate aim of this work situating the issue within the context of cinema. Given its visual aspect, film is a powerful conveyor of the notion of realism.
Via the exposition of visual images, directors have the power of creating the illusion that what happens on the screen is actual reality in the viewer.
Said has shown that orientalist stereotyping, to which a current counterpart is the spreading of stereotypical images of Arabs in contemporary American media, has a
“textual attitude” (92). This means that the description of the East and the whole discourse on the Orient heavily relies on texts rather than empirical experience. Since films has the power of conveying a visual “reality”, they are also powerful means of creating stereotypes. They run the risk of automatizing conventionalized structures and perpetuating the image of the “Other.”
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The presence of cultural stereotypes in film raises several important questions.
Perpetuating stereotypical representations of the “Other” might be severely damaging at the ethnic group. However, if the image of the “Other” is extreme, should it be condemned if it is based on historical evidence? Is a negative image always also a stereotype? Is the avoidance of negative images and offering only positive picture a good way of getting rid of biased cultural convictions?
Shohat and Stam argue that “positive-image approach” has serious flaws since it disregards both the filmmaker’s and the audience’s perspectives and social status (205).
Such films are not infrequent in the history of Western cinema and they very often follow the pattern of a non-Western protagonist’s Bildungsroman. In these films, the ideological message is confounded with the Western character’s ideological point of view who becomes the conveyor of the “norms of the text” (205-206).
This chapter explores four important theoretical aspects for the analysis of films in which negative images of oriental elements do emerge. First, it looks at theoretical approaches on the relation between history and fiction in narratives, and it aims at formulating a hypothesis on the role of fictional elements in narratives which reconstruct the past; second, it examines stereotypes in film with special attention to cultural stereotypes, and their function within the narrative; third, it gives a succinct overview of the socio-cultural context of orientalist and neo-orientalist discourses in the Western world; and fourth, it expands on the orientalist cinematic tradition by foregrounding and analysing its most important tropes that may be useful for the analyses of films in the subsequent chapters.
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1.1. Fact and Fiction
Lubomír Doležel is considered the leading theorist in the literary field dedicated to the relationship between reality and fiction (Schweinitz 58). Doležel’s objective is to challenge postmodern thinkers’ generally accepted conviction, who claim that it is impossible to establish a stable boundary between fictional and historical writing (17-21).
This perspective, initiated by Roland Barthes’s narratology and upheld by Hayden
White’s historiographic metafiction, maintains that fiction and history are essentially the same. To address questions of reality and fiction, Doležel parts from the long-established philosophical concept of possible worlds which helps him to differentiate between
“fictional worlds” and “historical worlds”. They differ in: (1) function, the first being fictional alternatives to the actual world whereas the second are “cognitive models of the past” with an intention to reconstruct past events; (2) structure, where fictional worlds may cover impossible worlds unacceptable for historical worlds; (3) the cast of agents.
At this point, the author claims that both fictional and historical worlds are inhabited not by real people, but their “possible counterparts” (Doležel 36) whose features may be altered in a fictional world even significantly, but never in a historical world. Another fundamental difference between the two worlds is that fictional persons cannot inhabit a historical world. The last aspect of difference is (4) the question of incompleteness, being a characteristic of both, but where the fiction writer has a greater freedom to decide on their choices which are determined by aesthetic factors (Doležel 33-41).
As opposed to Yana Meerzon’s treatment of Incendies as a historical world, this division makes clear that the films analysed in the following chapters are set in fictional worlds. Although all of them cognitively aim at the reconstruction of past events, being it an ex-CIA agent’s experiences, a civil war and a genocide, each of the films enriches the plot with characters who do not have real-life counterparts (all of the characters in
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Incendies and the majority of them in Ararat are such), or deliberately distort real-life characters’ features and obfuscates historical events (as Syriana does). Therefore, all of the three films work with a significant amount of fiction. These fictional elements surround the representation of the real-life events which are the central motives of the films since they set the narrative in motion.
Within fictional worlds, Doležel devotes special attention to the immensely popular postmodern genre of “historical fiction”, that is, literary texts which he describes as “fictional representations of the past” (84). As opposed to historical worlds, historical fiction stands out for casting agents who have real-life counterparts in the past and agents who do not have. Doležel maintains that both types of agents are fictional characters, however, he calls the latter category fictionalized characters since these go through a so- called “transworld morphing”, a transformation when they enter the fictional world (85).
This transworld morphing and its quantity is what keeps postmodern historical fiction separate from traditional historical fiction. Whereas traditional historical fiction used to work with the highest degree of historical authenticity, writers of postmodern historical fiction are “systematically transgressing” the main tenet of traditional historical writing because of their intention to “create alternative possible pasts” (87-88). In other words, postmodern historical fiction cares less about historical authenticity and puts forward the importance of opening up a discourse on various possible interpretations on the past. This idea sides with Alemany-Galway’s concept on the fundamental difference between postmodern and non-postmodern texts:
In postmodern texts, it is not only the isolated poetic metaphor that is a
site of condensation, of multiple meanings, but the text as a whole. This is
true of any literary or artistic phenomena but, as in normal language use,
the multiplicity of meanings in nonpostmodern works are made univocal
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by a dominating discourse and by the resolution in a “truth” of the work,
rather than an opening up to the “truths” of postmodern forms. (73)
In her book, Alemany-Galway formulates a universal postmodern film theory taking contemporary Canadian cinema as the basis for postulating her argument. The reason of her choice is that she claims that Canadian cinema has developed a particular style which foregrounds the voice of the marginalized, and because of this unaccustomed perspective Canadian cinema departs from traditional realistic mode of narration.
According to Alemany-Galway, the most important distinctive feature of this film is that it juxtaposes different images which are intended to construct reality. Neither of these images is privileged as correct, nor are they contradictory versions of reality (3-5). The presence of the different versions of reality creates a tension which the narrative is not primarily aimed at resolving. Doležel’s and Alemany-Galway’s arguments coincide in the fact that they underline the ability of postmodern texts to recreate a possible version of past rather than mimetically copy reality. The thrust of their arguments is that such texts open up the possibility of comprehending and coping with reality and the past.
Nonetheless, Doležel takes issue with some of the assertions of Linda Hutcheon’s theory on “historiographic metafiction”. Hutcheon problematizes historical knowledge and its status in literature. In her A Poetics of Postmodernism she states that
Historiographic metafiction refutes the natural or common-sense methods
of distinguishing between historical fact and fiction. It refuses the view
that only history has a truth claim, both by questioning the ground of that
claim in historiography and by asserting that both history and fiction are
discourses, human constructs, signifying systems, and both derive their
major claim to truth from that identity. (93)
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Hutcheon does not deny history to the extent Barthes and White do since her argument does not question the validity of past itself. However, her tenet “does problematize the epistemological certainty of history by considering history (and fiction) as a set of constructed discourses” (Luebbe 1115-1116), that is, Hutcheon approximates history and fiction being both of them constructed discourses. Doležel maintains that in her perspective, history is reduced to the level of fiction, despite the fact that the historical element should be the central focus of postmodern historical fiction. Doležel claims that
Hutcheon assumes “an ideological position that tries to find its confirmation in fiction”
(90) in the question. In other words, the main difference between the two theorists is that
Doležel believes in the significance and central position of the historical element in postmodern texts which involve history, as opposed to Hutcheon who views the historical element equally important to the fictional.
This work investigates the relation of the historical and fictional elements in films.
It addresses the question whether fiction which overrides the historical element can serve as a righteous interpretation of the past. For this, only in-depth analyses of works may give an answer. It is irrefutable that fiction has the power of reshaping previous convictions about the past, thus it problematizes the epistemological certainty of history since there is a possibility that it distorts historical reality. This work claims that distortion of the past occurs because fiction always relies on previous pre-established structures.
The aim of this work is to demonstrate that those texts which do not judge critically and do not scrutinize the conventionalized patterns which they inadvertently or intentionally make use of run the risk of distorting the epistemological certainty of history. In this case, fiction should not serve as a parallel version to the past since it does not fulfil the task of opening up the possibility of comprehending history and reality. However, and somewhat countering Doležel’s strict adherence to historical truth, this work aims at demonstrating
13 that fiction may serve as a righteous version of the past if it does make a critical judgement on the pre-established patterns of previous narratives, which are going to be theorized in the next section.
1.2. Stereotypes and Their Fantasy World
As early as in the 1930s, intellectual thinkers were already occupied with the impact of technological advances which lead to the standardization and automatization of art. Walter Benjamin showed that the new technologies accelerated artistic production to an extent that had been unimaginable until then, and that this acceleration changed the status of art. Mechanically reproduced artistic items followed the same pattern, thus their meaning underwent a considerable degree of conventionalization and rationalization.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s scathing indictment on the function of “cultural industry” showed the danger of the standardization of mass production which was directed at the cultivation of a false psychological compulsion in the spectatorship, which could meet satisfaction only by the consumption of capitalism’s products. The main target of their criticism is not the technological development that makes mass production possible, but its underlying economic factor, whereas the structures of production are set to minimize sales risk and maximize profit, thus culture “impresses the same stamp on everything” and leads to the homogenization of the spectatorship’s taste (Adorno and Horkheimer
120). In their view, culture is reduced to endlessly repeated fixed schemata which do not leave ground for individual artistic production. As Schweinitz points out, this conception of art sides with Schklovski’s principle of the artistic function of defamiliarization which has been traditionally viewed as the main tenet of high art (104-108). The mourning over the loss of individual art is, however, no longer acceptable in the postmodern context.
Theorists insisting on the importance of intertextuality and pastiche in postmodern works
14 have shown that the production of artistic works cannot be detached from pre-established schemata. Stereotypes are found behind all artistic expressions. Given their visual aspect, they are especially significant in films, and many contemporary directors employ stereotypes in a conscious and creative way.
The term stereotype cannot be narrowed down to a single discipline, but it may refer to three main types of fixed schemata. Socio-psychological discourses understand stereotypes as fixed belief patterns or preconceptions which may exercise profound influence on human behaviour. They are always dependent on emotions, and the confirmation of the expectations modelled on stereotypes offer satisfaction and pleasure
(Schweinitz 5-8). This concept sides with the Frankfurt school’s insistence on the function of cultural structures which are based on a psychological need. In Linguistics, stereotype refers to fixed formulas such as collocation and verbal formulas, whereas within literature and other arts it refers to conventional repetitive schema within texts, often understood as pictorial representation of an idea (15-24).
What is important for Schweinitz here is that these definitions shaped by distinct disciplines share various common features. He calls these regularities and similarities
“facets”. Given their presence in every discipline, and because it would not be possible to make one stable concept, stereotype in film should be understood as an “interplay of its individual facets”. He defines the following four facets: “(1) schema, reductionism, and stability; (2) automatism and conventionalization; (3) distortion and loss; and (4) a ground for difference to emerge” (Schweinitz 27-28). In other words, stereotypes never consist of full texts but are simplified and reduced to patterns which work on the ground of comparison and abstraction. They operate on a cognitive level as well-defined memory structures which shape our thinking and enable repetition. The reduction of the
15 complexity of the original idea inevitably leads to the distortion of the original concept and a partial loss of its meaning, which may become problematic.
At this point, the author argues that there are two different aspects that are needed to be considered: first, the problem of distortion of the original meaning is connected to the fact that stereotypes are often perceived as received “from outside” and as “second- hand formulas” driven by social interests; second, distortion is, however, not always necessarily directed towards the reduction of social diversity and it can function as an evasive tool from reality (36-37). Schweinitz argues that the deliberate distortion of the complexity of reality which is aimed at the creation of fantasy worlds may be viewed parallel to what Claude Lévi-Strauss defined as the opposition between rational worldview and a mythical world (37). In this sense, the fantasy worlds of the stereotypes, commercialized by films and media entertainment, operate on the same principle as myths do.
The most commonly discussed phenomenon is character stereotypes, since characters are those who most directly influence the spectatorship’s conception about groups of people. Traditional narratology differentiates between individual characters and character types or round and flat characters. It is given by the character types’ simplified, schematic nature that they tend to appear as stereotypes considerably more often than individual characters (48).
Schweinitz differentiates between two types of stereotypical characters: the
“stereotyped ‘image of the Other’” and the “conventionalized intertextual types” (50).
The first category describes characters whose individual complexity is reduced to a certain number of character traits in a way that it corresponds with a conventionalized image of a social or ethnic group which is perceived as alien by the dominant society.
This category of stereotype sides with the socio-psychological perspective and
16 corresponds with Said’s notion of the “Other” as a subordinated being to the dominant culture. In this work these stereotypes will be designated as cultural stereotypes. Homi
Bbhabha stresses the importance of the concept of fixity in cultural stereotype. Bhabha’s concept denotes “a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition” (94). The construction of the “Other” must be always repeated to become something clearly recognizable. Once it becomes recognizable, it has to remain stable – and it does, even though historical circumstances change. Although this notion roughly corresponds with
Schweinitz’s second and third facets, which are automatism and distortion, as opposed to
Schweinitz’s almost neutral attitude and acknowledging that distortion might become problematic when it is directed towards social reductionism, Bhabha insists on the fact that cultural stereotypes always perpetuate highly damaging images of ethnic groups.
Stereotype may also manifest itself as a narrative mode when it is associated with one genre and its fantasy world. In this case, the character undergoes “derealization” in order to fit the fantasy world of the corresponding genre. Schweinitz says that this stereotype is an “open imaginary construct” which is motivated by intertextuality since the author’s thinking is shaped by the predecessors’ models within the genre. These two aspects, cultural stereotype and narrative mode, may coalesce or function independently from each other (48-49). If they coalesce, the stereotype is present both as a narrative mode of a well-defined genre and as an image of the “Other.”
Stereotypes on the characters’ level affect the narrative. Schweinitz illustrates this with one of the most highly conventionalized genres, the Western. This genre is a good example of how “interlinked stereotypes” function, that is, when the presence of one stereotype prompts the emergence of others: the damsel in distress figure motivates the revenge story which is accompanied by other stereotyped characters (the cowboys, the
17 prostitutes) and settings (the saloon) (56). More is the fantasy world conventionalized, the better interlinked stereotypes function. Structures of interlinked stereotypes create conventionalized “fantasy worlds” which
develop as discursive realities, which attain an internal plausibility,
legitimacy, or coherence not primarily by mimetically referring to the
recipients’ knowledge of the world of actual experience but largely by
drawing on stereotyped knowledge of reservoirs of the imaginary thus
narrative space becomes symbolic space, as constituted by the
conventionalization of the intertextual sphere. (57- 58)
This work argue that orientalist filmmaking has developed its own conventionalized fantasy world with an elaborate structure of interlinked stereotypes.
Cultural stereotypes and stereotypes as narrative mode as well as stereotyped settings are present and play an important role in the fantasy world of orientalist cinema. Having in mind Said’s and Bhabha’s insistence on the damage that the social reductionism of cultural stereotypes may cause, this work will pay special attention to those conventionalized images which may distort the validity of the film’s message.
1.3. From the East-West Division to Neo-Orientalism
Said differentiates between three different meanings of the term orientalism. First, he acknowledges it as an academic tradition of study covering anthropology, sociology, history and philology about the Orient; second, it is the idea that the West is opposed to the East, or as Said describes, it is a “style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the
Occident’”; and the third meaning refers to orientalism as an “institution for dealing with the Orient”, which is a means of the Western world to dominate and to assume authority
18 over the Orient (2-3). The thrust of Said’s argument is that the Orient is an imagined cultural realm against which the West has defined itself. The Western culture has imagined the Orient and created it in political, sociological and ideological terms.
Although, as it has been demonstrated, Said acknowledges the fact that the Orient is not an essential idea, since it has an undeniable corresponding reality, his theory lays emphasis on the constructed nature of the orientalist imagination.
The fact that the Orient is an imaginary construct can be illustrated well by the ambiguity of the geographical terminology that the West has applied to it. The idea of the
West’s superiority is backed by the myth of Europe’s origin in Ancient Greece connoting the belief in a divine origin (Shohat and Stam 55). Raymond Williams has shown that the concept of the West-East division originates in the Roman Empire, and the terms
“Eastern” and “Oriental” have been used from the sixteenth and seventeenth century
(333). First, the Orient referred to the eastern Mediterranean only geographically.
However, from the Arab conquests on, the Orient assumes the status of an alien culture.
Once it became synonymous with Islam, its geographical location expanded. In the twentieth century it covers the entire continent of Asia and also Eastern Africa (Lewis and Wigen 53-54).
The drawing of the borders of the Orient has not given a homogenous result and there is no consensus about its exact location today. The Orient and other divisions such as the Near, Middle and Far East have taken place from the dominant Western point of view, which however, fails to take into account specific regional, cultural and religious differences. However, as Culcasi shows, maps are social constructs which have the power to “create, codify and naturalize places” (Culcasi 587).
In Orientalism, Said works with a more restricted region than Lewis and Wigen defines the Orient, since he leaves out China, India, and those countries which are
19 generally viewed as the Far East. His attention is centred on the region which can be delimited as the Middle East. Culcasi points out that the geographical delimitation of the
Middle East is highly problematic, since the criteria used for its definition have been shifting and inconsistent throughout history and because it does not take into account cultural, political and religious variety within the region, but it builds on reductionist views and images. However, given the recurrent usage of the term in political, social and cultural discourses, it has undergone naturalization and the Middle East has been constituted in our knowledge as an actual and determinable region (583).
By summarizing the cartographical representations of the Middle East, which have taken place from the beginning of the twentieth century, Culcasi shows that in its most restricted sense, the Middle East refers to a geopolitical space determined by
Western oil interests and the Arab-Israeli conflicts. This concept of the Middle East always includes Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Afghanistan. The term has also a wider scope, and Western Sahara, Pakistan, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco are occasionally also considered to be countries of the Middle East. Eritrea, Djibouti,
Somalia, and Ethiopia rarely, but also appear as Middle East, as well as Central Asian states of Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Armenia and Uzbekistan. The term Greater Middle
East is also frequently used, but its usage is similarly ambiguous (587-589).
It is not the aim of this work to specify its interest on a clearly delimited geographical area, but to focus on a wider cultural phenomenon. It aims at analysing today’s transformations of the orientalist tradition and it will focus on films set in the
Orient, that is, in the Middle East in its wider sense.
Post-9/11 American culture is tied to a phenomenon called neo-Orientalism, where the prefix neo- is not referring to an ideological shift from classical orientalist discourses, but to a new mode or style of representing. Similarly to its classical version,
20 neo-Orientalism is based on binarisms between the triumphant Western values and an inferior culture, the Oriental Other. It is a monolithic and totalizing discourse (Behdad and Williams, Altwaiji 313).
However, as Behdad and Williams point out, at the same time as it is deeply ingrained in classical Orientalism, neo-Orientalism adjusts traditional orientalist tropes to its current political needs. The most important trope of the neo-Orientalist discourse is what Dag Tuastad calls the “new barbarism thesis” which assigns political violence in the
Middle East to local cultures thus it makes an essentialist claim of cultures as inherently violent. The term terrorism becomes generalized and applicable to entire groups of people. Although apparently denying hegemonic interests, neo-Orientalism serves the same function as classical Orientalism is to colonial powers, therefore the tropes of violence and terrorism should be considered as pretexts for hegemonic interests (Altwaji
314-319). Neo-Orientalism takes a stand with regime changes, aims to liberate societies from tyrannical rulers, and heavily relies on the claim to journalistic truth and an
“ahistorical form of historicism” (Behdad and Williams). This is also a point in which neo-Orientalism slightly differs from its classical counterpart, which was less concerned with ideological questions than cultural and formal issues. The need of historicizing social and cultural events of middle-eastern societies goes along with a tendency of reductionism of historical facts and making great generalizations about societies based on superficial information. This searching for the “truth”, which is no more than falsified history, is intertwined with politics.
The advocates of neo-Orientalism are academic thinkers writing bestsellers
(Altwaiji 316) as well as self-promoting immigrants publishing their memoirs and gaining great publicity not the least because of the fact that their fit in well with the dominant ideology (Behdad and Williams). Numerous researches have shown that in the neo-
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Orientalist context, there is a marked increase in prejudice and xenophobia towards the
Middle East and Middle Eastern immigrants (Douai, and Lauricella; Raiya, et al.).
1.4. Orientalism in Film
The heyday of colonialism concurs with the birth of cinema (Bernstein 1, Shohat
25). It is no coincidence therefore that colonialist discourses are heavily reflected in early cinematic productions. Throughout the history of American cinematography, those films which dealt with non-western civilizations made important ideological statements on how
Western societies viewed the “Other.” These films pronounced important statements on community values and defined group behaviour. Great number of orientalist film productions recreate the Orient on the screen much in the same way Edward Said describes orientalist discourse dominating literature. There is a considerable number of orientalist silent film productions as early as the 1920s. The most influential from these is The Sheik (1921), which launches much of the narrative and visual imagery of the romantic melodramas set in the Orient, whereas the Thief of Bagdad (1924) does the same for swashbuckler films (Bernstein 4). In the following decades, Hollywood conventionalizes the imagery initiated in the silent film era; several Hollywood classics build on or make use of these conventions, such as Cleopatra (1942) and Raiders of the
Lost Ark (1981), as well as films produced in former colonizer countries, which enjoy massive popularity in the US, such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962). In the second half of the twentieth century, the fantasy world of orientalist stereotypes has been solidified to an extent that neo-orientalist discourses spread to other cinematic genres such as animated cartoons (Nadel 184-205). Arab violence and terrorism, for example in The Naked Gun
(1988) leads up to productions dominated by the neo-orientalist discourse. The repetition
22 of this vast imagery since the earliest productions to nowadays poses a challenge for contemporary filmmakers.
Borrowing the concept from Said, Bernstein says that orientalism in film appears on the screen explicitly as a kind of “imaginative geography” (2). The power of cinema to visualize the setting in which the action takes place is especially powerful in colonialist discourses. The fact that the geographical landscape is explicitly shown exerts an impact that textual narratives cannot convey.
In her analysis of the most important tropes in orientalist filmmaking, Shohat merges post-colonial and feminist perspectives. The author argues that colonialist reading runs the risk of playing down the issue of gender, since it does not dissociate the role of male and female elements in spite of the fact that sexual difference does play a crucial role “in the construction of a number of superimposed oppositions” (20). The author argues that there is an immense presence of “gendered metaphors” in orientalist films, which are present not only on the characters’ level, but also on a metaphorical level, such as the visualization of landscapes. Gendered metaphors operate by placing some of the key elements of the colonial discourse in contradiction. Their presence in the film always seeks the need of a comprehensive analysis.
Geographical reductionism is a characteristic feature of showing oriental lands in traditional orientalist films, where the desert tends to be equivalent to the Orient. Whereas the image of the desert means primitivism, the Western setting stands for civilization.
Shohat claims that civilization “is clearly phallocentric”, whereas primitive landscapes are represented as “virginal lands” in orientalist films (20-21). This understanding clashes with traditional post-colonialist theories which maintain that the non-Western is seen as child-like who needs protection, not feminine. According to Shohat, the desert is the geographical embodiment of primitivism and femininity which connotes wilderness and
23 desolation as opposed to the garden, which is a very important metaphor of the Western civilization (19). Thanks to the diligent workforce in its interiors, the garden is a place of fecundity, cultivation and growth. On the other hand, the desert is barren land, a place of uncontrolled and boisterous elements. Therefore, the desert is seen as feminine and virginal driven by uncontrolled libidinal forces. It awaits fecundation, the taming of its savage elements, and its conversion to blossoming garden.
The garden-desert binarism is reflected clearly on the narrative level in orientalist films. Shohat views the intent to fecundate the desert embodied in the American Adam archetype. In this archetype, colonialist and patriarchal discourses are entwined, and it encourages the spectator to identify with the gaze of the male character who represents the gaze of the western civilization. As R. W. B. Lewis has shown, the American Adam has the power of creator and he is emancipated from history, therefore, he is innocent. In orientalist films, his perspective is represented by the figure of the Western discoverer.
Generally, he is an explorer or a scientist who arrives at the desert with the intention of exploring the land. His superiority, underpinned by his scientific knowledge, legitimizes colonialist interests in the barren lands and endows him with a heroic status (27).
The archetypical image of the American Adam is safeguarded with the privileges of science, knowledge and technology. He is opposed to the inhabitants of the desert, who are viewed either savage or exotic. Their uncivilized nature lends the moral supremacy to the explorer who legitimizes the demolition of the uncivilized culture since the native inhabitants are ignorant to uncover and make use of their natural treasures. Scientific tools, especially maps and globes, are important symbols of the status of the creator, since the American Adam character delimits new territories and gives them new names (28-
31).
24
A quintessential American Adam figure in the Middle East is T. E. Lawrence, a
British archaeologist and warrior in the Middle East during the First World War, and a prompter of the Arab revolt against the Turkish rule. As the biographer Michael Korda writes about his subject, "he didn't wander into the desert by accident, and emerge out of it as a hero. He wandered into the desert deliberately" (“Lawrence”). T. E. Lawrence, whose experiences in the Middle East were the subject of the 1962 blockbuster, Lawrence in Arabia, performs the role of an American Adam in the Middle East: his goal is to bring civilization to the desert, which is a dangerous place full of savage elements. Middle
Eastern settings in the film are of two types: either the scenes are set in the desert, or in the civilized spaces of the colonizers. Whereas the inhabitants of the desert do not transgress the boundary between the two spaces, the Western hero goes to the desert to bring civilization into it.
In stark contrast to Lawrence’s moral and scientific sophistication, the inhabitants of the desert are either child-like or violent. The tribes cannot live in peace, therefore they require the help of the Westerner. Those non-Western characters who are child-like are eager to take on the manners of the civilized Western man, whereas those who are violent, are shown to kill out of brutality or for pleasure. This entails the notion of an inherent violence and foregrounds the image of the brutal assassin. As Solheim shows, the notion of an inherent savagery remains to be an important trope of contemporary Western culture: the Arab men tend to be portrayed essentially violent; violence is treated not as an outcome of personal experiences but rather as an inherent characteristic of their personalities (61-63). It can be argued that the figure of the assassin, whose murderous pleasure is motivated by an inherent savagery, is a trope which develops into the figure of the terrorist central to the new barbarism thesis.
25
The concept of the land as the place of the uncivilized goes hand in hand with the concept of “the world of out-of-the-control id”, that is, the place of uncontrollable instincts (Shohat 32). The inherent sexuality is associated with the hot desert climate which connotes fiery passion. Therefore, orientalist films make use of a rich imagery of sexual symbols, such as the veil, the harem and the figure of the Arab rapist (Shohat and
Stam 156-170).
Colonial texts heavily rely on the figure of the Third World masculine sexual domination over women who serves as an indirect excuse for colonial domination (Shohat
39). In the orientalist context, the white man who lives in monogamous relationship is seen superior to the polygamous Arab figure. In accordance with that, the characters in early orientalist films operate within a well-defined hierarchy based on gendered and colonial presumptions. Since miscegenation is forbidden, the white masculine gaze is primarily oriented on white women, in whom, however, also the non-Western male antagonists take interest.
The non-Western man is primarily driven by sexual desire in orientalist films. An excellent example is The Sheik in which a young sheik passionately falls in love with an adventurous Englishwoman and makes her captive in the desert. After several attempts of escape the lady is made captive by another man, an Arab bandit. The sheik rescues the lady and the film resolves in the lady confessing love to the sheik after having been told that he is not an Arab, but of European origin, thus the danger of miscenegation is averted.
Girelli claims, that the figure of the sheik in the film is overtly sexualized and he appears both as “prey and predator, passive and active, perfect gentleman and kidnapping brute”
(9). The image of the rapist is softened in the figure of the sheik who grows up in the desert but is not an Arab by birth, however, brutality is stressed in the figure of the Arab bandit. By foregrounding these oversexualized masculine desires, the Western woman is
26 rendered to be sexually passive. Instead, it is the non-Western woman, appearing most frequently as minor character, therefore prone to stereotypization, who serves as the
Western woman’s “sexually hungry subaltern”:
While the white woman has to be lured, made captive and virtually raped
to awaken her repressed desire, the Arab/black/Latin women are driven by
a raging libido. Here one encounters some of the complementary
contradictions in colonial discourse whereby a Third World land and its
inhabitants are the object of desire for chastity articulated in the virgin
metaphors, while also manifesting Victorian repressions of sexuality,
particularly female sexuality, through unleashing its pornographic
impulse. (Shohat 41)
The Oriental woman, who often emerges in orientalist texts covering her face with a veil, reinforces the notion of the mysteriousness of the land, since she is an unreachable object for the gaze of the western explorer. Orientalist films tend to give oversexualized images of non-European women also by putting emphasis on their garment which exposes parts of their bodies or leave them partially denuded (32-35).
Shohat argues that the emphasis on an overtly sexual Orient has to be seen in relation to the restrictive production code of Hollywood filmmaking that prohibited excessive sexuality on the screen. Therefore, under the pretence of its exoticism and underdevelopment, the theme of the Orient was exploited for showing eroticized pictures
(46-47). In this sense, the overt sexualisation of the Orient can be understood as the way how Hollywood cinema managed to project sexual fantasies on the screen in an era of strict censorship.
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2. Stephen Gagahan´s Syriana
“A lot of the movie is made up of composites […] Most of it has a basis in reality but things have been heavily obfuscated” gives Stephen Gaghan, the scriptwriter and director his account on how much of the film is based on reality (Gaghan in Jaafar).
George Clooney, who takes the role of Bob Barnes, the central character in Syriana, says that the screenplay made use of real-life events “to provide a structure for a fictionalized story” (Clooney in Fuller and Jaafar). Although he was initially meant to play former CIA officer Robert Baer, they encountered severe difficulties when creating an authentic character who would reflect the actual Robert Baer accurately partly because they lost the ability to fully incorporate Baer’s relationship with his son into the narrative and partly because they needed the story suit the other narrative lines of the film. Therefore, real- life Robert Baer’s story is considerably reshaped in Syriana: “Bob Baer is alive, and there are other differences all around […] We had to fictionalize it so we could tell a story as a film not as a civics lesson” (Clooney in Fuller and Jaafar).
The plot of Syriana is made up of four interweaving storylines. Each of them presents a very complex plot structure casting one male protagonist as the central character who is accompanied by a great number of minor characters. The narrative line makes frequent shifts between the storylines and distant geographical places, thus it juxtaposes different actions and settings. This special narrative technique using very short shots, frequent jumps among locations and multilinear narrative has been termed
“hyperlink cinema” by film critic Alissa Quart (Booker 20). In Quart’s perspective,
“hyperlink” refers to how the film is clicking between different storylines and different places and how it demands its spectatorship to make these jumps as if they were clicking among websites. The rapid cuts between shots, or what Quart called the “film's click-
28 here-we-want-your-eyeballs gimmicks” (48), may appear to leave the viewer deliberately confused at some points.
The circumstance that interconnects the storylines and launches the series of events takes place prior to the beginning of the film: prince Nasir, a Persian Gulf Emir´s eldest son, awards the right for drilling natural gas to a Chinese oil company, who is the highest bidder, instead of an American company called the Connex who had been granted the contract previously. With the intention to recuperate its dominant position in the territory, Connex decides to carry out a merger with a smaller Texas company, the Killen who has just been granted a contract in Kazakhstan. The storyline is further complicated with internal investigations in the companies who are accused of winning previous contracts unlawfully, while Nasir, who has made himself the enemy of American economic interests, faces the challenge of confronting his father and younger brother who succumb to American influence. Similarly to Bob Barnes, prince Nasir’s character is based on people Gaghan met when doing his research in the Middle East, who were “very enlightened princes from the countries in the Persian Gulf with tremendous educations, huge personal libraries and really, really sharp perspective” (“On Ruthless Pursuit of
Oil”).
Bob Barnes is a CIA agent, whose task is to put an end to illegal arm trafficking in the Middle East. As a rebuke for a lack of political discretion, he is given the secret mission of assassinating Prince Nasir. However, Barnes’s mission fails because he is made captive and tortured by an Iranian agent. Later, he is investigated as a rouge agent in the US, because his superiors are afraid of that he would speak about the planned assassination. As he discovers more details about the plan, he decides to warn the prince who is staging a coup against his younger brother. However, Nasir is killed with a guided bomb from an American drone when he travels in the desert to take power at the moment
29
Barnes reaches the convoy, so he also dies in the explosion. The major part of this storyline is based on Robert Baer’s memoir in which the former CIA agent describes his experiences in the Middle East.
Bryan Woodard is an American energy analyst with residence in Switzerland.
Motivated by his company’s business interests, he attends the Persian Gulf Emir’s party in Spain. During the party, Woodard’s son, the five years old Max, jumps into the swimming pool in which no one notices that the water is electrified and dies. Despite his loss, Bryan continues in the negotiations with Nasir who, surprisingly to Bryan’s expectations, shows to have a mind for the modernization of his country. Woodard becomes Nasir’s economic advisor, but he temporarily separates from his wife who blames him for opportunism. Woodard narrowly escapes Nasir’s assassination and returns to his family.
The fourth line gives the story of Wasim Khan, a Pakistani immigrant who has come to the country with his father with hopes of better life. However, they are laid off from the Connex refinery due to the ownership change. This means that they are deprived of their only means of survival, since the company have provided them with food and lodging. Having been laid off, Wasim finds himself at a severe disadvantage since he does not speak Arabic and cannot get a new job. Wasim and a friend of him meet an Islamic fundamentalist who recommends to join an Islamic school and ultimately persuades them of committing a suicide attack directed on a tank ship of the refinery.
Several authors describe Syriana as a film giving a very sophisticated and detailed picture of global power relations, which is an unaccustomed practice of Hollywood cinema (Cohen, Edwards; Katz; Tyrangiel). Syriana has an educative aim at the mainstream audiences, which is called a “specific pedagogy” by Cohen, which derives from the narrative technique of the film. Each of the four storylines stands for a distinct
30 narrative level: an economic (the fight within the oil industry), a political (the CIA’s interests in the Middle East), a personal (Bryan Woodard’s evolution) and a social
(Wasim’s loss of work which leads him to join Islamic fundamentalism).
This interweaving of economics and politics with the public and the private makes up the text as a whole and formulates its message. Cohen also claims that globalization is manifested by a hierarchy in the narrative, since the chains of events are subordinated to the economic level (24). It is the economic interests of the consumer society that presses political decisions (Nasir’s assassination), and indirectly also social (Wasim’s suicide attack) and personal choices (Bryan’s mental evolution from the American Adam’s role to utter disillusionment). According to Cohen, the film is not a mere indictment on imperialism, but its specific pedagogy lies in the fact that it offers an unaccustomed type of transparency between the economic and other relations.
Krems and Dunbar claim that hyperlink cinema is precisely intended at giving this picture. The juxtaposition of different realities creates a very elaborate interactive network which leaves the viewer with the impression that contemporary life takes place in accordance with the rules of a globalized world. This effect is underpinned by the narrative technique since it would not be possible to offer such a detailed picture were not for the modern technologies of travel and communication (414).
Barnes’s character is what Schweinitz calls a conventionalized intertextual type.
Since Baer’s character and other historical events have been disconnected from their actual reality and were deliberately fictionalized in order to tell a story with a universal message, it can be claimed that the plot of Syriana is an interplay between reality and fiction, much in the way Doležel defines the relationship between fiction and history in texts of postmodern historical fiction. The fictionalization and modification of the story of the real-life character is required to make the story reach an end by showing how
31 economic interests override personal aims. Barnes’s function is to fail in order to highlight the specific pedagogy of Syriana: the trenchant criticism on American imperialism in the
Middle East. This pedagogy is insisted on an emotional level since Barnes’s death is intended to provoke intense emotion in the viewer.
This chapter will demonstrate that the fictionalization of real-life elements in
Syriana makes an extensive use of stereotypical elements derived from orientalist cinematography. These stereotypes are present on various levels of the narrative, such as the characters’, the settings’, and a metaphorical level, and play an important role on the level of the text as a whole.
2.1. Islamic Fundamentalism and Enlightened Reformism
Syriana opens with an image of a crowd of ragged men in the desert at dawn.
There is a close-up of dirty clothes and pairs of shabby shoes before the camera shifts and makes an extended shot of the people’s faces. They are mostly Arab men whose faces are covered by the dirt and the dust of the desert. As it turns out later, they are the manual labour of the Connex refinery, and they are waiting for the bus to take them to work.
When the bus arrives, many of them run headlong to get on and scramble to outrun the rest of the group.
As several critics have pointed out, Syriana demonstrates “a level of sophistication in the references to the Middle East that mainstream audiences aren’t used to” (Fuller and
Jaafar). Gaghan says that it was a firm intention to defeat cultural stereotypes which are manifest in Hollywood cinema and his film consciously “goes some way towards humanizing suicide bombers” (in Fuller and Jaafar).
The attempt of delineating the underlying motives and social circumstances which lead to the ultimate act of suicide bombers is not an entirely new element in cinema. Even
32 though less frequently, there have been released American films, such as Rendition (2007) as well as Third World cinema productions, such as Paradise Now (2005), which tackle the issue of suicide attacks without surrendering to neo-orientalist discourses. It might be argued that “humanizing suicide bombers” is a re-emerging pattern that is currently undergoing conventionalization.
This work aims at demonstrating that Syriana attempts at articulating a conscious reaction to the new barbarism thesis by opposing mainstream media representations of
Arab men as inherently violent; however, there are also other, less consciously formulated stereotypes of Arab men conveyed by the film which are working on a more subtle level.
First, this section examines the function of Wasim’s character in the film whose violent act is portrayed as a result of his personal experiences; second, the work focuses on other non-Western characters who have a major or a minor role in the film. It will be demonstrated that insofar Wasim’s character, it is true that there is an appeal to the audience to reconsider preconceived stereotypical belief patterns; however, a closer investigation will show that – consciously or not – the narrative line leaves place for the presence of characters whose violent behaviour is shown as an essentialist trait. It will be demonstrated that in accordance with Schweinitz’s ideas about the stereotypization of characters in film, character types are more likely appear as embodiments of stereotypical patterns than of individual characters in Syriana, but also individual characters are influenced by orientalist patterns.
Wasim Khan’s character represents the lowest social level of the society in the film. He is at a double disadvantage since he has been laid off and he does not speak
Arabic. There are various shots which focus on his disadvantageous position. After the workers are informed of having been laid off, there is a shot of the group of sad men walking in the desert and leaving behind the refinery. Wasim and his father are
33 foregrounded within the group and the camera shows them to speak about their dream that has just been spoilt: to bring Wasim’s mother to the country. At another occasion, both of the men are standing in a queue looking for job. When Wasim’s father explains to an old man that they have to be quiet, he is confronted by a guard who does not understand what he has been saying. When Wasim tries to protect his father, the guards beat him. These scenes of social injustice and defencelessness are aimed at indicating the motives which lead to Wasim’s gradual conversion to Islamic fundamentalism.
Although he is the main character of the corresponding storyline, Wasim is rarely shown on the screen by himself. He is usually shown as a member of a group: a group of workers scrambling to get on the bus, a group of employees leaving behind the refinery, or a group of young men rambling in the desert. This insistence on his social belonging is required to give an explanation to the suicide attack. Wasim is a member of the social group exploited by the capitalist regime and within the limits of his group there is no much hope of better life. His violence is associated with group violence, a characteristic trait of shots taken of the masses of non-Western people in the film, which is the implication of the economic exploitation of the social group. One of the rare close-ups of
Wasim alone on the screen is when he turns his fishing boat towards the tank ship. The film takes an explicit emphasis on his personality only in this last shot which shows the suicide bomber ready to carry out the final act. In this sense, the suicide bombing is an outcome of the exploitation of a social group neglected by the society.
Prince Nasir and his younger brother Meshal stand on the opposite edge of the social hierarchy. Being the sons of the richest person of the country, they are surrounded with luxury. There is, however, sharp contrast between the two brothers in how each of them approach wealth which is illustrated with the visual compositions of the images.
Nasir is frequently portrayed in traditional robes and in the company of old Arab men;
34 other times he appears dressed in suit and seeking advice of Western professionals. He maintains close relationship with his native land and its nature and at the same time he reveals that he has been educated at the best European universities. His figure connects the wisdom of a mythical, pre-civilization era with modern world. Nasir is portrayed to have moral strength and strong determination to improve the economic and social position of his country. It is important to notice that his quality of the enlightened reformer is the product of the Western society in which he was intellectually formed. Viewing Western education as the only acceptable way of the development of the Middle East is a hidden applause to Western culture.
In stark contrast, Meshal is always portrayed to be surrounded with luxuries. He celebrates his birthday on a luxury liner, other times he plays billiard or entertains himself with luxurious electrical gadgets, such as the remote control which causes the electrical short in the pool light and kills Bryan’s son. Moreover, he is ambitious and wants to become the successor on his father’s throne even though he is the younger and this would be a rupture with tradition. Ambitious and impressionable, Meshal befriends the head of the American company who promises to help him to the throne in exchange for his restoring power in the region. When Nasir is told by his father that he has decided that
Meshal will succeed him as the Emir, he says furiously: “You cannot do this. He is barely qualified to run a brothel, much less a country.” At this point, the cinematic apparatus has been set to encourage the viewer to fully identify with Nasir’s statement and reject
Meshal’s ignorance and political opportunism.
The relationship of Nasir and Meshal resembles of the mythical opposition between the two brothers of whom one is the ultimate good and the other is the embodiment of evil driven by greed of which Claude Lévi-Strauss speaks in Myth and
Meaning. Meshal heartily accedes to the request thus his evil character makes him a traitor
35 of his country, whereas the murder of the elder brother elevates Nasir to a position of a martyr. It is a Manichean binary opposition which resembles a fairy-tale structure; however, when investigated more closely, it has serious implications. Whereas the viewer knows that Nasir is open-minded because he studied and developed intellectually in the value-system of the Western civilization, Meshal’s unexplained evilness implies the notion of an inherent, ethnically preconditioned backwardness. Since it does not seek to examine any underlying motives to the behaviour of the character, this statement is essentialist.
Similarly to Meshal’s character, the viewer is not allowed to have a closer insight into the figure of the Islamic fundamentalist who takes possession of Bob Barnes’s explosive in the beginning of the film and appears later to recruit Wasim and his friend for the suicide attack; neither is the viewer offered any explanation of Barnes’s violent
Arab torturer. As Bradshaw points out, in its treatment of characters, Syriana is not able to challenge one-sidedness at several points: “Gaghan is careful to endorse only free- market liberalism as the acceptable side of Arab nationalism in the Middle East. The only
Muslims are extremist and suicide bombers. Moderate Islam does not exist.”
2.2. The To-be-looked-at-ness of the Veiled Woman
The second scene of the film starts with a picture showing a murky landscape image of Tehran suggesting that it is daybreak. Then the focus shifts to a woman who is dressing up in a dimly lit room. The camera slowly tilts down showing her body as she is doing up the buttons on her pants and is taking on a jacket. There is a fairly long shot focusing on her breasts and another on her face. Finally, she puts a veil on her head and walks away in the dawn.
36
Although Syriana puts its main focus on the social and the global, and is apparently devoid of sentimental issues, sexual strategies play an important role in the film. Given its placement in the beginning of the film and the relative longevity of the above described scene, it may be claimed that this shot takes on special importance and sets the atmosphere of gendered power relations in the film.
In orientalist cinema, the veil stands as a symbol for the mystery of the feminized landscape and implies the secrecy of the non-Western woman (Shohat 32). It establishes her status as an unreachable object for the Western masculine sexual desires. This idea is analogous to Laura Mulvey’s theory of the masculine gaze in classical Hollywood cinema of which she wrote in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", the essay which laid the groundwork for feminist film theory. Mulvey’s theory draws on Freudian psychoanalysis and asserts that classical Hollywood is decidedly phallocentric since it makes use of the image of the woman who lacks phallus. The threat of castration poses a challenge for men, to which the cinematic apparatus responds in two patterns: with active scopophilia, which derives from identification, and with fetishism, which presupposes the separation of the ego with the object on the screen (Mulvey 808). Classical Hollywood cinema encourages the spectator to identify with the gaze of the masculine hero who projects his sexual phantasies on the woman. The woman is therefore a subordinated element whose only significance is to serve as the eroticized object, or as Mulvey says, her only function in the film is her “to-be-looked-at-ness” (809).
Close-ups of the woman body gain special significance in classical Hollywood style, since they “integrate into the narrative a different mode of eroticism. One part of the fragmented body destroys the Renaissance space, the illusion of depth demanded by the narrative, it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon rather than verisimilitude to the screen” (Mulvey 809). The function of the woman is not to advance the narrative
37 of the film, but to disrupt its development. She is not an active participant of the narrative line, instead, her role is to offer extradiegetic digressions as an eroticized image for voyeuristic masculine pleasure.
The above mentioned scene of the unnamed woman dressing up in the dark makes a conscious use of stereotypes and stereotypical conventions borrowed from orientalist filmmaking and classical Hollywood cinema. In this scene, the veil continues to stand for the symbol of sexuality and for the mysteriousness of the oriental woman. The notion of secrecy is reinforced by the narrative technique since at the moment of her presence on the screen the viewer does not know how she is connected to the narrative line, whereas the scene makes an excessive use of stereotypical camera techniques which are intended to eroticize her by encouraging the viewer to identify with the dominant masculine gaze.
Phallocentrism is a general tendency in Syriana. The film is set in a masculine world, in which women’s role as active participants in the development of the narrative is more than limited. Although there are a few women characters occupying important positions as professionals, they are not dynamic elements who put the events in motion and are exclusively Western women. There are also two mother and wife characters.
Bryan’s and Nasir’s wives function as the private and emotional sides of their husbands as opposed to men’s public pursuits. Apart from these however, non-Western women’s function is rather limited: they are mere objects of men’s sexual desire.
Following the veiled woman’s departure and supposedly leaving behind the same place from where she has left, Bob Barnes joins a group of people who seem to have been partying all night. They are sitting on sofas in a luxuriously furnished room which is half- lit by the light of the dawn coming from behind windows covered with velvet curtains.
The focus of the group is Arash, an Arab man surrounded by women who are drinking and smoking. Arash occasionally caresses a woman or lights her cigarette. When Barnes
38 arrives, starts small-talk and asks Bob whether he has ever tried liquid MDMA, of which, as Arash assures him, “Tehran is the world capital”.
As it later turns out, Arash is a secondary character, an arm-dealer with no major role in the film than to be killed by an explosive prepared by Barnes. However, his character is important from the point of view of the fictionalization of the story. Since he is not an individual character, but a character type, and because this category is more inclined to resemble fixed patterns, Arash’s figure presents the conventionalized orientalist pattern of the polygamous Arab who dominates over women. The group to which he is the central figure consists of a number of lecherously behaving women, sitting in a luxuriously furnished room around the man. This shot makes reference to the metaphor of the harem, the place of pornographic imagination of orientalist films and makes explicit the oversexualized image of the non-Western women.
The overall atmosphere expresses the exoticism of the Middle Eastern setting. Not only the place is oversexualized, but it also creates a notion of nostalgia for a decadent colonial world, where the Western man can enjoy things which are prohibited in a well- defined society: illicit sex, alcohol and drugs. There is noticeable shift in gendered hierarchies, however. It is not the Western women any more, but the figure of the non-
Western woman shrouded in mystery in whom the Western man takes interest.
2.3. Reconstruction of Orientalist Geography: Gardens and Deserts
As it has been shown, orientalist films are inclined towards geographical reductionism. This is seemingly not true for Syriana which, being a hyperlink film, operates with a great number of settings. The action is shifting among distant geographical places such as Washington, Texas, Spain and Switzerland. However, whereas the locations in the Western world are geographically well-defined, except for
39 the first shot set in Tehran, Middle Eastern settings are not specified. The viewer knows only that the action takes place in the Persian Gulf, but the Emir’s country remains unnamed. Even though the pattern of politics resemble of American treatment of Saudi
Arabia; and there are also other indications of the country, such as a photo of an actual
Saudi king in the film (Saba), the country is not explicitly stated. The decision to place the action into an imaginary setting in the Middle East reinforces the need of using conventional stereotypes to make the setting discernible for the spectatorship.
The traditional orientalist binarism between the garden, being the symbol of civilization, fecundity and growth, and the desert, the place of savage elements and unexploited treasures, remains to be a significant force for the fictionalization of the settings in Syriana. Although the film works with a rich imagery of settings which includes streets of towns and cities, offices, interiors of cars and planes, the desert and the garden are conspicuous re-emerging elements in the course of the film. They are significant because they often serve as backgrounds for the characters who respectively belong to them or to the interaction between the native population and the other group.
They are mutually exclusive: there are no desert-like places in the Western world and no gardens in the Middle East.
It is not incidental that the opening scene of the film takes place in the desert, whereas, similarly, the first shot in the Western world is taken inside a garden. These initial shots create the respective atmospheres associated with the two cultures and establish the highly visceral visual imagery of the film.
The opening scene depicting the group of men of low social position places the group in a desert at dawn. The shot makes an explicit emphasis on their torn and dirty clothes and tired faces. It suggests that the men of the desert live in poor sanitary conditions and it focuses on the antisocial behaviour of the group when the bus arrives.
40
A few minutes later, the camera returns to the desert and shows the same men, now in uniforms. They are slowly walking in the sand leaving the refinery behind after they have been informed to be laid off. In the picture, an unnatural light contaminated with dust and dirt predominates. Both of the pictures suggests that the inhabitants of this landscape are poor and violent.
It can be claimed that the desert has gone through quite an important change. It is still a place of backwardness, brute force and poverty which is due to the lack of knowledge and education of its inhabitants, however it is not uncivilized any more. There is civilization, but it is rather a grotesque form of civilization which questions the legitimacy of the Western well-being. There is job in the desert, but not one that would give dignity to its employees. There is transport in the desert, but there are no roads for the bus to go on and no discipline in the people to use it. The extradiegetic music and the lightning are intended to create the atmosphere of drama on screen.
In stark contrast, everything is neat and tidy inside the gardens. The gardens in
Syriana are situated in the interiors of big cities. The first shot of a garden is in
Washington D.C., showing a man cutting out overblown roses. He is an elderly, but definitely well-situated and a very influential man, wearing protective gloves, a light, clean shirt and a white hat. A subordinate of him arrives and is being assigned the task of looking into some previous contracts of an oil company. As it turns out, the elderly man is the head of a law firm. The tasks of cutting out the dry plants and of scrutinizing some previous dirty jobs create a weird parallel: it makes the impression of the omnipotence of the gardener and his power of getting rid of anything that may occur unpleasant with a pair of protective gloves.
Images of gardens and parks within cities are very frequent in the film. They are often locations of sport activities and it is only this aspect they share with the desert.
41
However, whereas in the desert people play football and cricket, the traditional team games of lower social groups and colonized people, people in the parks are alone and jogging. Even the cemetery is a hospitable place in the Western world which is visited by well-groomed people and where blooming plants are cultivated. As opposed to the desert covered by dust, the gardens are lit by natural sunshine. They stand out as a praise of civilization, which is able to create a natural, harmonious and healthy environment inside cities.
The sharp contrast between the two settings is intended at creating the notion of an unbridgeable gap between the respective worlds they symbolize. Visually, they are entirely disconnected and their juxtaposition is made possible only by the movement of characters, which is, however, unidirectional: it is always the Western man who travels to the non-Western setting. Syriana is not able to disconnect this movement from the traditional orientalist pattern of the Western discoverer whose interest in the virginal land is legitimized by his scientific superiority; however, the innocence of the discoverer is commented upon critically, thus his innocence leads him to abject failure.
After the funeral of his son, Bryan accepts Prince Nasir’s invitation to his country and joins him to take a ride in the desert. There is a shot, when the camera shows two
Arab men situated in a landscape picture of the desert. Dressed in traditional white robes, they are standing opposite each other with a long distance between them, and are flying falcons. The man who is standing closer to the camera is Nasir. In this picture, the character of the Arab is associated with closeness of nature. He is a character who is able to maintain a fruitful relationship with the elements of nature, and it suggests Nasir’s moral excellence. There is a notion of harmonious relationship of the man with nature untouched by civilization.
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This notion of the presence of an ancient harmony and the tendency toward the mystification of the desert sides with Shohat’s argument, who says that the colonialist re- discovery of the barren lands suggests a kind of nostalgia for a land of purity. The static image of the landscape implies the notion long-preserved treasures that have been kept away from Western civilization. This state is prior to the penetration of the Western discoverer in the land.
The harmony of the landscape picture of the desert is disrupted when Bryan, a prototype of Western civilization dressed in suit and wearing sunglasses, walks into the focus of the camera. Nasir seems to be eager to discuss the economic prospects of his country with Bryan who he wants to have his economic advisor. Bryan, under deep emotional pressure and overwhelmed by fury for the loss of his son, of what he is blaming the Emir’s party, bursts out in a monologue:
Twenty years ago, you had the highest GNP in the world. Today, you’re
tied with Albania. So good work. Your second biggest export is second-
hand goods followed closely by dates for which you lose five cents a
pound. You wanna know what the business world thinks of you? We think,
a hundred years ago you were living out here in tents in the desert,
chopping each other’s heads off. And that’s exactly where you gonna be
in another hundred.
As Gaghan says, this monologue is aimed at representing “aggregate American view […] that kind of xenophobic, stereotypical thinking that I think we can all be prey”
(“On Ruthless Pursuit of Oil”). Bryan’s anger makes him feel free to speak and formulate his ideas clearly. He represents the belief in the need of economic progress and his monologue contains the derogatory view on the native people who possess huge reservoirs of natural resources, but are not able to harness the treasures of their land.
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The notion of the presence of the American Adam is further reinforced when
Bryan sets out to explain Nasir the most profitable way of harnessing and exporting natural gas to Europe and Asia: he draws a map in the sand. At this moment, Bryan takes on all the imagery related to the archetype of American Adam, that is, the insistence on geography, which is manifested by frequent presence of the indispensable tools of the science of geography. In Syriana, there are numerous occasions when maps appear which are frequently shown in non-oriental settings, such as inside the offices of the oil companies, whose intention is to exploit the natural resources of the land. Bryan’s map drawn in the sand is overtly symbolic: being drawn in the desert, it scrutinizes the exoticism of the land and affirms Bryan’s position as the Adam who wants to harness the treasures of the land.
2.4. The political message of Syriana
Krems and Dunbar have conducted a research on the capacity of human brain to handle the enormous amount of information which emerge in hyperlink films. Their study shows that hyperlink cinema tends to exceed the cognitive constraints of a typical human mind (425-427). The amount of settings, characters and actions connected together by the quickly manoeuvring of the camera among these different elements prove to be too demanding for the human mind.
Syriana overflows with information and it is essential to raise the question, what the goal of this narrative technique is. A psychoanalytic study shows that the amount of information and the fast cuts among the shots are intended to deliberately confuse the viewer:
Simply through the form in which the film is presented, we are made to
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feel that we are being given a glimpse of a world of greater sophistication
than our own, a world of hidden meanings, one that is obscure to us, but
understood and mastered by very few. We are made to feel like the
powerless child confronting a primal scene, sensing that it is exciting and
important, but unsure if we fully understand its import (“The Sins of the
Father”).
This child-like perspective of the viewer is similar to Cohen’s specific pedagogy of the film. Not only that the viewer is rendered to the position of a powerless child, but the cinematic apparatus is set to incite the viewer’s desire to understand the powerful adults’ world which is full of political intrigues and economic interests.
As it has been demonstrated in this chapter, the film works with conventionalized patterns both on the level of characters and in its visual aesthetics. Given this educative aim and because of rendering the viewer to this child-like position, the cinematic apparatus ensures a powerful means of manipulation. It is important to examine therefore, what the consequence of the immense presence of stereotypes is.
On the characters’ level, those pre-established schemata which are foregrounded by a protagonist-figure end in failure. The American Adam’s traditional message of bringing progress to the desert is critically commented upon on the narrative level. There are two characters who intend to do something good for the Middle East: although Barnes cannot be seen as a prototypical American Adam, in his final decision to save the life of the prince he shares also the archetype’s aim of bringing progress to the non-Western land; Bryan’s innocence however, shares the Adam’s emancipation from history. In the end, both of them fail to complete their mission: Barnes dies in the explosion and Bryan narrowly escapes it. His return to the family means a change of mind and giving up the ambitious project. Similarly, Nasir, the enlightened reformer is killed; Wasim, the tragic
45 hero whose failure is motivated by the devastating circumstances will never bring his mother to join the rest of the immigrant family.
All of the main storylines end in failure and the cinematic devices is set to inspire anxiety and resignation in the viewer. The fact that all of the major pre-established schemata end in failure suggests that their function is the reverting instead of the reinforcing of preconceived beliefs in the viewer. However, whereas the fil succeeds in to present these structures in this way, it fails to scrutinize other stereotypes which work on a more subtle level and a closer investigation reveals that the stereotyped image of the
“Other” proliferates in the film. Such is the case of the non-Western woman, who, reminding of the conventions of classic Hollywood filmmaking, serves as the object of sexual desire for the male gaze. All the non-Western women appear only as character types and the same is true for the majority of non-Western men: whereas Western men are delineated in a detailed manner, or they undergo a personal development, non-
Western men do not change and they are prone to take on stereotypical roles.
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3. Denis Villeneuve´s Incendies
The difficulties of civil war is a very complex part of history and it was
not possible to have any view about it. For me it was very important that
the audience was aware that I was making a fiction film. […] in order to
make it apolitical, I had to make it in a fiction land. (Villeneuve in Elias)
Denis Villeneuve claims in an interview that to talk about Arabic culture posed the biggest challenge of directing Incendies. Since the film is an adaptation of a theatrical play written by Wajdi Mouawad, an exilic playwright of Lebanese origin, Villeneuve knew he was an outsider to the culture in which the narrative was set, and he knew he was not able of giving a righteous image of a historical event set in a culture he did not know. The fact that Villeneuve sees a difficulty in placing the narrative in an unknown culture shows the director’s firm intention to keep distance from orientalist discourses and to avoid cultural stereotyping.
To bring a portrait of a country stricken by civil war presented another major difficulty. What Villeneuve speaks about when he says that “it was not possible to have any view” on the historical event is a mental barrier of the Lebanese society to open up discourses on the Civil War. This barrier has been experienced by several artists in the years following the end of the war. As Egoyan says, after the end of the Civil War in
Lebanon, there is “an extraordinary sense of trauma that people have very conveniently decided not to address because it's too painful and fresh” (Egoyan in Politi 232). This decision to avoid the trauma is linked with its dolorous complexity according to
Mouawad: “The history of Lebanon is forgotten, perhaps because the civil war was so difficult to understand that it stifled all memory” (Mouawad cited in Zahzah).
Given this double difficulty of avoiding orientalist stereotypization and of portraying a very complex historical situation of which the society itself refuses to speak,
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Villeneuve says he wanted to make a neutral and an apolitical film. He decided to approach Mouawad’s narrative from a more intimate point of view and to talk about
“something that I know, which is family and intimacy” (Villeneuve in Elias). By showing the intimate and private aspect of the war Villeneuve intended to give the story a universal dimension. He says he found it very meaningful to work with a powerful visual imagery, where the juxtaposition of landscape pictures with the private and intimate moments of the characters proved to be especially powerful: “My goal was to be able to show landscapes, staying close to the character” (Villeneuve in Elias).
Incendies is an adaptation of a play of the same name (also translated into English as “Scorched”). The Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad was born in the village of Deir El Qamar in south-central Lebanon from where his family left at the time of the outbreak of the Civil War when Mouawad was eight years old. The family stayed in France for five years before moving on to Quebec to seek a permanent settlement. The family’s experience of living in exile is mirrored in the main character and her children’s traumatic leaving of homeland in the play. Having seen a theatre performance of
Mouawad’s play in a small Quebecois theatre, Villeneuve immediately decided to make a film of it. The director asserts that when he was writing the screenplay for the film, his intention was to stay as close to the play as it was possible for making a film (Villeneuve in Kotek 29).
Incendies is a contemporary retelling of the Oedipus myth. As the majority of
Mouawad’s plays, the writer uses mythical structures to delineate the main character’s craving for uncovering family traumas. In the film, the emphasis on the main characters’ digging in the past is conveyed by the narrative structure of two interweaving narrative lines. One of the lines, set in the present of the film, introduces the time of the children who aim at revealing the truth of their origin; the second, set in the past, tells the origin
48 of the family trauma. The two storylines are alternating and are occasionally complemented with the characters’ flashbacks.
The film opens with twin brothers Jeanne and Simon who face an unexpected task after their mother passes away. In her last will, Nawal, the mother, instructs her children to hand over one letter to their father and one to their brother. Only then she allows to engrave her name on the tomb. As Simon and Jeanne thought their father dead and had no knowledge of a brother, they are astounded by their mother’s last will. Jeanne finally decides to set on a journey to the mother’s native country in the Middle East. She visits the city of Daresh and Nawal’s native village to find out that her mother spent fifteen years in the civil war’s most horrified prison, Kfar Ryat, imprisoned as war criminal.
Joined by her twin brother at this point, they find out the terrible truth: they were born in the prison as children of the brutal torturer, Abu Tarek, who raped women prisoners. The most shocking revelation, however, comes only later, when they identify Abu Tarek with
Nawal’s illegitimate child Nihad she had to give up under pressure of her family.
Similarly to Nawal, Abu Tarek, being responsible of war crimes, has started new life in
Canada under a new identity. When meeting in a swimming pool, Nawal recognizes him.
According to the tattoo on his feet, she identifies the man to be the child she was forced to give up, and according to the face, which lives in her memory vividly, she recognizes her torturer. The closing scene of Incendies shows Jeanne and Simon handing over the two letters to the man in Canada.
Beyond this mythical narrative, there are various elements based on historical events which were taken over from Mouawad’s play. Nawal’s story is situated in the
Lebanese Civil War, which lasted fifteen years, from 1975 to 1990. The country, however, remains to be unnamed both in the play and the film and all of the locations are
49 fictitious. Incendies shows various historical incidents of the Civil War which are recognizable as historical events.
The main character, Nawal’s figure is based on a real-life woman, named Soha
Bechara. She was Mouawad’s friend while he stayed in Lebanon as a child. Soha Bechara was eighteen at the time of the Sabra Shatila massacre. Having witnessed the massacre, she attempted to assassinate the chief of the Right Wing Christian Section militia, who she held responsible for the killing. Mouawad “was really impressed by her political engagement and resistance because when she did this murder attempt, she then spent ten years of her life in a jail” (Villeneuve in Douglas). Nawal’s resistance to torture and the way how she was able to keep her mental sanity are all based on Soha Bechara’s figure.
Similarly, the brutal military campaign in the fictitious city of Deressa, which convinces Nawal of the need of taking an active role in the war, is based on the real-life
Sabra and Shatila massacre (Zahzah). However, the most detailed picture of a war incident in the film is the picture based on the Ayn al-Rummaneh bus massacre, which took place in 1975 and is considered the incident that directly motivated the outbreak of the war. In the massacre, which was preceded by several smaller incidents between the
Phalangist militia and Palestinian guerrillas, the attackers opened fire on a bus of
Palestinians causing the death of almost thirty civilians.
The changing of names and the avoidance of naming the events is a way of making historical events fictional, and as Villeneve puts it, there is also “poetic transposition” of the real-life events both in the play and film which does not allow a historical interpretation of the narrative:
It’s not a portrait of Soha Bechara at all […] there is a big poetic
transposition and I decided to keep the same to do the film, because if you
put back all those elements in the right place in the history of Lebanon,
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then you have a big problem, because there is so much fiction in the story,
it became a bit morally weird to talk about history in such a twisted way.
(Villeneuve in Douglas)
This statement shows that the director insists on that his film avoids to address history. Instead, the film is aimed at giving a narrative of fiction. Given the mythical structure of the narrative, this statement seems to be tenable since the Oedipus story gives universal flavour to the narrative. As Villeneuve puts it, it is not a film on a specific war, but it’s a film “about peace” (Villeneuve in Elias). However, this work maintains that the presence of the historical element is not only undeniable, but it also shapes the wider context of the film.
3.1. The Brutal Rapist and the Cold-Blooded Assassin
Incendies is imbued with violence. The previous chapter has demonstrated that stereotypical representations of Arab men have played a major role in Syriana. The violence of stereotypical figures both (1) served to underpin the outcome of the Western imperialist exploitation and was tied to social problems; and (2) it was present on a more subtle way as an essentialist characteristics of native people. This subchapter will examine closely the representation of those Middle Eastern characters who perform violent acts in Incendies. For this end, the respective narrative lines of present and past will be separated since violence dominates only in the past and is tied to persons who appear in the past; whereas it emerges only as memory in the present and is investigated by characters who do not commit violent acts themselves.
The narrative line set in the past opens with the scene in which Nawal and his
Muslim lover Wahab try to escape from Nawal’s village. The young lovers are alarmed as they attempt to find a route where they can leave the place unnoticed in a mountainous
51 and rocky land, but they are soon stopped by Nawal’s brothers who are surveilling the paths. As Wahab and Nawal make a few steps backward with a terrified look on their faces, one of the brothers cruelly shoots Wahab down. They seem to have no mercy for their sister either. While the girl falls on her knees next to her dead lover, they argue over who will kill Nawal, but she is rescued by her grandmother in the end.
Nawal’s brothers are character types whose violence is the product of a long- established cultural belief, that is, to take revenge on those who have sullied the family honour. Their function is to punish the person who transgresses the rules of the community or as they say, who “brings shame to the family”. Their violence is more important on a symbolic level than as an independent personal characteristic. It is a violence that determines the future of the next generation. Although Nawal and Wahab’s son is a fruit of real love, Nihad is born to a cruel world which kills his father and forcedly removes him from his mother.
Born to violence, Nihad himself becomes the embodiment of violence. When the war erupts, Nihad becomes an active participant of it. There is a dramatic escalation in violence connected to Nihad’s character. As a kid he is shown to become a member of a guerrilla militia. As a teenager, he is already a murderer: he is depicted to shoot at innocent people on the street and to cold-bloodedly kill a child. Then he departs from the militia and starts killing people on his own behalf. According to Solheim, this state resembles of the figure of a terrorist whose violent acts are performed on his own accord
(62). At this point, Nihad’s violence is performed for the sake of violence. His brutality leads him to become a torturer of imprisoned women and his violence culminates in the raping of his own mother. As Telmissany points out, in contrast to his mythical counterpart who is a tragic hero oblivious of the crime he commits, what Nihad does are conscious acts of war crime (54).
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By offering this dramatic evolution to the utmost level of cruelty, Nihad’s violence functions as a symbol in the film. Although there are numerous violent characters in the film whose identity remains to be unspecified, this work makes the claim that Nihad’s character stands out to represent a universal brutality. The escalation in violence of a single character shows how cruelty functions in war and speaks for all of the violent acts committed by unnamed characters.
It is fundamental to ask whether there is any personal motivation that makes violence erupt in Nihad. Villeneuve’s film explains Nihad’s character differently than
Mouawad’s play. As Solheim demonstrates, the play makes a conscious critique on the
Western media’s impact on Nihad. It shows the moral responsibilities of the journalists who are exposing pictures of fighting Arab men and thus they create the notion of the photographed subjects’ inherent violence, which is reinforced not only in the Western, but also within the non-Western world (60-63). On the other hand, Villeneuve removes this social dimension from Nihad’s motivation. In accordance with the aim of staying completely apolitical, Nihad’s violence is not a product of the perpetuation of damaging images in the Western media. In Villeneuve’s film, Nihad is depicted as a boy of extraordinary skills. As a former militia fighter explains to Simon years later, Nihad had a profound craving for love as a kid. He wanted to find his mother who he has been searching for a long time and he wanted to commit a suicide attack so that his mother can see his photo in the news. In Villeneuve’s film however, differently from Mouawad’s character, and differently from Wasim in Syriana, Nihad’s cruelty is not a response to the
Western exploitation, but a psychopathic result of the extreme lack of maternal love.
If Nihad’s violence is incited by the lack of the mother, Nawal’s violence is a response to the loss of her son. Nawal’s commitment to the war is motivated by the tragic incidents she witnessed when she was searching for her son in the south of the country.
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The mourning over the child she believes to be dead and the experiences she goes through when she escapes the bus massacre and sees the ruins of the attack at Deressa harden her pain and turn her to cold-blooded violence which she commits against the man she believes to be responsible for the pain she feels. By becoming an assassin, however, she takes over a role which is traditionally assigned to men.
The discourse on phallocentrism is treated radically different in Incendies than it is in Syriana. The previous chapter has demonstrated that the cinematic mechanisms work similarly to classical Hollywood cinema in Syriana, that is, visual images maintain and solidify phallocentrism. Whereas women in Syriana are reduced to mere objects of fetishist sexual desire on the level of editing, the protagonist of Incendies is “reduced to the level of a beast” on the narrative level (Graham-Smith 58). In Incendies, there are many women who are university students so it is not their intellectual identity which is reduced, but the masculine attack is directed on Nawal’s womanhood. Graham-Smith argues that Nawal’s incapacity of speaking about the rape is a conscious decision to avoid language, which is, as Irigaray and Cixous have demonstrated, inherently masculine. It is a phallocentric discourse, therefore it is not able to convey the terrible insult on Nawal’s womanhood (59). The phallocentric attack on her identity cannot be spoken of, that is why only other people have to reveal the trauma. It is no coincidence that Nawal’s daughter, Jeanne is the more apt person to go for the disclosure of the attack committed on a woman than her brother. In this sense, it is the narrative itself that negotiates gender binarism in Incendies instead of visual imagery that would run the risk of reductionism.
3.2. Violence in the Desert and Universality of Geography
The opening scene of Incendies is a landscape picture depicting a mountainous region. The composition is dominated by a palm tree which is foregrounded in the picture.
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Its large and wide leaves are blown by strong wind. The wind and the scarce vegetation indicate a desert-like, dry land. Since there is nothing human-made in the picture, the shot suggests a state prior to human refinement.
The focus of the camera is gradually extended to place the landscape picture in frame. The picture is framed by a window, allowing the viewer to see that the shot has been taken from inside a building. The notion of the empty natural landscape is thus disrupted, and this disruption is also enhanced by the extradiegetic vocal music which is launched at this point. The soundtrack “You and Whose Army” from Radiohead creates a strange juxtaposition with the oriental land.
The angle of the camera gradually shifts to the interior of the building. It shows an empty room resembling of a prison cell. There are young boys in shabby clothes and a few adult man in military wear inside. The latter are guerrilla fighters as it is indicated by their scarves behind which they are hiding their faces. Some of the men are holding rifles and the others are shaving the heads of the kids. As it later turns out, the kids have been taken from an orphanage during a military campaign by the militia who is going to prepare them for the fight.
The camera focuses mainly on the heads and the faces of the children and it also makes a close-up of the feet of the people in the room, thus creating a sharp contrast between adults and children. Whereas the adult men are in large military boots, children are barefoot. They wear a few pieces of clothes which allow to see their underfed bodies.
The shot strongly suggests that they are children of whom no one has taken care for some time. The focus of the camera on shoes, the lack of shoes and the dirty faces, similarly to
Syriana, is a strategy which highlights the oppressed position of the social group.
Similarly to Syriana, the film opens with a shot of a mistreated and abused social group. Whereas in Syriana the group of workers were exploited by globalization, these
55 children are exploited by war. The notion of exploitation and mistreatment is more powerful here because of the fact that the oppressed group are children. Since the children are orphans, they are one of the most fragile and marginalized groups of which society most easily forget in case of an extreme situation. In war, orphan children are those of whom society cares the less.
The camera gradually comes to a stand and focuses on a boy whose head is being shaven. The dramatic power of the picture is achieved by the focus directed on the movement of the foregrounded bodies which are in contrast with the almost completely still background. A man holding a rifle and a few children sitting next to the window are situated in the background, which looks as if it was frozen and reminds of a grotesque still image; thus it directs the viewer’s attention to the smooth movement of the hands which are holding the boy’s head and the razor, and the involuntary movement of the boy’s body under the adult hands. As the camera focuses on the boy, he slowly shifts his eyes from the floor to the camera revealing a sinister face and a malevolent gaze.
The shaving of Nihad’s head suggests a change of identity. The innocence of the child is being lost when he enters the militia and the shaving of the head makes a gloomy prediction of his future. The innocence lost, cruelty and violence become Nihad’s dominant features. The abandoned child from the orphanage of whom no one has taken care becomes a murderer, a maverick, and ultimately, a rapist. The change of identity is also explicitly emphasized by the later change of his name from Nihad to Abu Tarek.
Since “Abu” in Arabic means “the father of”, this change is explicitly symbolic. By throwing away the name given by the mother and thus substituting maternal care with violence, he chooses to take on the violent identity of the incestuous father.
The closeness of the landscape picture and the brutal image of children preparing to become murderers is an explicit connection. It can be argued that landscape in
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Incendies consciously draws on the orientalist trope of the inhabitants’ primitivism in the desert. However, what is fundamentally different from the traditional stereotype of the primitive desert is that the land is not innocent here anymore. It is not a virgin land which awaits to be converted into a garden, as it is still to certain extent in Syriana, but it is a land that has lost its innocence. The primitivism of the land, which is explicitly stressed by the cinematic apparatus, is not an inherent state, but it is the outcome of the war.
The opening scene launches a series of violent scenes which make an explicit connection between landscape and savagery. As Nihad’s identity is growing to be more and more brutal, there is a similar escalation in violence connected to the landscape.
When Nawal and Wahab are persecuted by Nawal’s violent brother, their futile attempt to escape takes place in the same land of the opening scene. It is a rocky and dry land where only a few trees grow and a strong wind is blowing. This landscape, however, is not war-stricken yet. Although it conceals violence in itself, it is not destructed by its own violent forces yet.
In contrast to this location, the most emblematic scene of the film, the bus massacre, takes place in a completely empty desert where no plant is growing. After the militia has stopped the bus, the gunmen shoot at the passengers in the bus. Nawal, a
Muslim woman and her daughter survive just to realize in terror that the gunmen are pouring petrol on the top of the bus. Nawal manages to escape by showing her cross thus identifying herself as Christian, but her desperate attempt to save the surviving child as her own fails. Nawal is thrust down on her knees by the gunmen a few meters away from the bus which is set on fire behind her. There is an extended shot depicting Nawal sitting in the sand with a terrified look on her face with the image of the bus in flames behind her, inside which the survivors of the shooting are burning to death.
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Graham-Smith describes the impact of the image on the viewer as an “assault on the senses by the visual field” which “precipitates the viewer into the vertiginous gap between a relatively safe, distanced observation and a raw, seemingly unmediated encounter with violence” (Graham-Smith 57). Villeneuve himself claims that he wanted to “show violence in the very ugly way, a very unspectacular... anti-cinematic way”
(Villeneuve in Kotek 30). The viewer’s encounter with violence is made possible by the viewer’s identification with Nawal’s gaze. The viewer is strongly moved by violence since they witness it through Nawal’s presence. The violent visual imagery interplays with the landscape in order to achieve this emotional impact in the viewer. The empty desert which is the scene of the bus massacre suggests the viewer a profound sense of loss and distortion, and it creates the illusion that apart from Nawal, the viewer is the only witness to this incredible amount of violence. As opposed to the untouched landscape of the scene in which Nawal and Wahab are persecuted, the place of the bus massacre suggests a violent destruction of the landscape itself. Plants cannot grow at a place set on fire, similarly, people cannot live in a ruined town in Deressa.
In contrast to Syriana, which in spite of multiple geographical places works with a relatively limited number of settings, and where the Middle East is almost exclusively represented by the desert and luxurious interiors as opposed to the gardens and offices of the Western civilization, the settings are not mutually exclusive in Incendies and many of the settings can be found in both of the worlds. There are spaces and settings which appear in both Canada and the Middle East, and this work argue that there are three of them which carry special value: universities, hospitals and swimming pools.
Jeanne is a PhD student of mathematics, therefore, university is of central importance in her life. In Canada, she is shown to be teaching in a white classroom with artificial light. When Jeanne leaves Canada behind in search of her mother, the first thing
58 she does when she arrives at Daresh is to go to the university where Nawal studied many years ago. In stark contrast to the Canadian picture, this university is an overcrowded building full of colours. The fact that the film shows university bursting with people and history, where Nawal’s story has unfolded a few decades ago, is of significant importance.
The university is projected as the locus of intellectuals and it plays down the myth of uneducated barbarism of the Middle East. The hospital is of similar importance. Nawal is hospitalized in Canada, whereas the prison nurse is in hospital in Daresh. Both of them are visited by Jeanne and Simon in hospitals. Both of the women are shown to receive careful health care with full attention paid to the patients. Similarly to the university, showing a hospital in the Middle East has a deconstructive effect on the myth of barbarism.
The third setting in common is the swimming pool. Swimming pools are of special significance for Nawal and also for Jeanne and Simon. In Canada, it is a community swimming pool where Nawal identifies his son. She is swimming in the water when she notices the tattoo her grandmother made on a man’s foot who is standing outside the pool.
It is in the water that the truth is revealed to her. Similarly to this scene, after visiting the nurse in the hospital in Daresh, who tells Jeanne and Simon that Nawal gave birth to twins in the prison, the twins go to swim in a swimming pool when they struggle with accepting the fact that they are children of rape. Swimming is to help them to reconciliation and the acceptation of the truth. Water has, therefore, symbolic power in Incendies: it makes characters to reveal truth and helps them to the reconciliation with that truth. Water and swimming pools have a purifying effect on the characters who are stricken by the violence originating from to the landscape.
The settings in Incendies reflects and prompts the emotional value of the narrative.
The Middle Eastern landscape is a significant and frequent image in the film. The desert-
59 like landscape is the place of brutality and war crimes. However, this is the only aspect in which the film resembles of a traditional orientalist geography. The binarism of places of the Western civilization and the Orient opposed to each other is played down by locations which exist in both of the worlds.
3.3. Construction of Story, Reconstruction of Memory
The fact that Lebanon is not mentioned in Incendies has symbolic power. The space for the name of the war stands for the space between the two generations and the lack of communication between them (Solheim 61). As it has been explained by
Mouawad, the older generation of the Lebanese exilic diaspora refused to speak about the war: “It [the civil war in Lebanon] was a very shameful war, where fathers killed sons, where sons killed their brothers, where sons raped their mothers… They didn’t want to explain to my generation what had happened... Strangers had to tell me my own story”
(Mouawad cited in Graham-Smith 58).
This refusal to communicate is explicit in Nawal’s refusal to speak about her life to her children. As Graham-Smith claims, Nawal renounces to speak because human language is not able to convey the degree of cruelty she has been victim of. Her muteness is therefore a double attack on her own identity since it reinforces the pain she cannot speak of; but it is also a means of protection of her children (58-59). However, Nawal does not only refuse to let their children know any detail about her life prior to coming to
Canada, but she also refuses to pass down her culture on their children as if she was blaming her culture for the violence. Her children have no knowledge about her taking part in the Civil War, they don’t suspect the reason for which she had to leave her homeland, and they do not speak her native tongue either.
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Violence takes place in the past, but it does not mean that the present is liberated from it. The violent events cast their shadow on the present of the narrative and the Middle
Eastern landscape visited by Jeanne and Simon is still overburdened with the violent traumas of the past. These traumas require the reconstruction of the traumatic event. The present landscape is a memento of the past for Jeanne and Simon. Their quest to uncover the enigmas and recover from the traumas is emphasized by the repetitive structure of the narrative.
Jeanne needs to go all over the same route her mother did a long time ago. This repetition is very powerfully emphasized by the visual composition of the images and the juxtaposition of similar events taking place in the past and present. The most striking similarity is the physical appearance of Nawal and Jeanne who have the same angle of face. Very often, pictures depicting Jeanne’s journey from Daresh to the south of the country in search of the memories of the mother resemble of the composition of images showing Nawal’s search for her son. A re-emerging image of the travel they undertake is the picture of the buses in which Nawal and Jeanne travel in their respective narrative lines. The buses are shown to pass through the same curvy road in the mountainous region. Both images depict a woman leaving behind the known for the unknown: for
Jeanne, it is the Western world and the city for the non-Western and the rural; for Nawal, it is the safety of the north for the war in the south. Both of the journeys presuppose the notion of entering danger. Whereas Nawal enters war, Jeanne enters the violent memory of the mother. With the same intention, the narrative lines often intersect to juxtapose the two persons at the same place. The scene in which Jeanne arrives at Daresh and visits the university is juxtaposed to Nawal’s story of her leaving the university; when Jeanne is in the prison gathering information about her mother, the next cut shows Nawal being
61 tortured at the prison. These intersections of past and present create a universalized atmospheres of present and past.
This way of the construction of the narrative is intended to avoid the illusion of a realistic narrative. This work argues that the director makes a particular emphasis on the constructedness of the film. He does it with a double objective: to avoid a realistic display of the Middle East because he wants to illustrate the second generation exilic children’s distance from their country who have lost direct connection to their mother’s exilic homeland; and also because the director himself acknowledges his Western point of view.
As Villeneuve says: “I knew I would be an imposter, doing a movie about something I don't know, which is war in Middle East. The only way I can relate it to this story was by intimacy and family, but the context will be something that I don't know” (Villeneuve in
Kotek 30).
Therefore, Villeneuve applies a set of strategies that are intended to depart the story from any illusion of realism. One of the most powerful narrative strategies is to highlight Jeanne and Simon’s cultural gap between the society in which they have grown up and which has isolated them completely from their mother’s culture.
Jeanne is an outsider to her mother’s society. She cannot feel to be part of the community and she is several times severely reminded of her stranger-identity. When she arrives at Daresh at her mother’s university, she enquires whether anyone can identify her mother from Nawal’s portrait. Since she cannot read the Arabic letters in the background of the photo, a university teacher explain Jeanne that her mother was photographed in the famous prison in the south, Kfar Ryat. When it turns out that she has never heard about the prison, the professor comments that “You are definitely not from here”. Her lack of
Arabic impedes her communication in her mother’s village. The infamous encounter with the ladies of the village ends up in her excommunication from the village, condemning
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Jeanne as an intruder precisely because of her lack of knowledge about her origin. One of the ladies says: “She is looking for her father but does not know who her mother is.”
Her status as a tourist-intruder is underpinned in the scene when Jeanne visits Kfar Ryat.
As she is walking in the prison accompanied by a guard, the guard offers her to go into a cell so that he can take a photo of her if she wishes.
Apart from the narrative element which emphasise the second generation’s cultural gap and lack of any knowledge of their ancestor’s identity, the film also makes use of several cinematographic strategies that suggests a distance from realistic representation. The most striking is that Villeneuve applies Western, non-oriental music to the Middle Eastern landscape. The Radiohead soundtracks severely clash with the landscape and
the goal of this counterpoint is to show the audience that what they will
see is a Westerner’s point of view on the Middle East […] When I was
editing and I put Arabic music, it looks really authentic and you got the
impression of being there for real, and I didn’t want to create this
impression because I said to myself, “I must be honest with the audience.
I must say to them right away that it’s going to be something artificial.
(Villeneuve in Douglas)
A similar strategy aimed at highlighting the artificiality of the narrative is the use of subtitles. Unlike Syriana, which indicates the exact geographical location of the corresponding scene in a realistic manner, Incendies uses subtitles to indicate the beginning of the story of a person or an important place of usually more than one character’s life and where narrative lines intersect. Such a place and a corresponding subtitle is Daresh, initiating a sequence where the story frequently jumps between present and past and the corresponding storylines of Jeanne and Nawal. These subtitles appear in
63 the centre of the screen written in large red letters, thus requiring the full attention of the viewer and distracting them from the action on the screen.
These strategies which aim at distancing the story from the notion of reality are in sharp contrast to Syriana, where real-life events are reconstructed lineally with no disruption between present and past, in order to offer the viewer a realistic narrative mode.
Incendies, however, approaches history as a metalanguage. It does not seek to reconstruct history but rather to reconstruct memory, since through the twins’ journey it highlights the process of reconstruction rather than history itself. Its main aim is not the mere description of the past, but also its understanding. Reconstructing memory in Incendies aims at the understanding and acceptance of past events, which is the first step in the process of healing of the scars caused by past traumas.
3.4. The Validity of the Denial of History
This chapter has shown various methods Villeneuve applies to separate the film from reality and its historical value. However, as Villeneuve himself says in an interview, in spite of all of his efforts, when the Lebanese watch Incendies, they comprehend it as a historical movie:
They say, “It’s so close to our historical war, it’s exactly how it happened.”
I say, “No, it has no historical value at all. Please don’t say that, because
on purpose, the accent is not right, the landscapes are not right.” [...] The
play was politically neutral and I want the film to be politically neutral
also, because it’s a movie about peace, about ending the cycle of violence,
so I don’t want to be part of this conflict. (Villeneuve in Douglas)
The fact that Lebanese people understand the film as a movie which depicts their own history shows that Incendies is not able to conceal historical events to an extent that
64 it could reject their historical value. The fact that the Lebanese project their history into the film shows their need to open up discourses on the painful memory of the civil war within the Lebanese society. This raises the question, what moral responsibility the director has when he deliberately disconnects the film of any post-production historical discourse. If the Lebanese view the film to mirror their own history, it strongly implies that the film has fulfilled Doležel’s tenet of postmodern historical fiction and it does perform the role of an alternative past reflecting history. In this context, Villeneuve does not distort past in Incendies; the changes he applies make the story universal but the film does not disconnect from the historical events; through the intimacy of the characters it becomes a quest for peace as the director says, thus it serves as a powerful statement also within the Lebanese context.
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4. Atom Egoyan´s Ararat
The events that took place are irrefutable. My film does not seek to add
anything to the historical record of what happened, since the real issues
for me have been why ‘what happened’ has been so systematically
ignored, and what the effects of that ignorance have been on successive
generations. Ararat is not so much about the past as it is about the present.
It is about the responsibilities of people living now. (Egoyan 892-893)
Atom Egoyan was born in Egypt to a family of Armenian origin. “I had always wanted to make a film about the Armenian Genocide of 1915” writes Egoyan, although he turned his back on his Armenian heritage as an adolescent (887). Both of his parents were exilic children born in Egypt and shortly after the birth of Atom the family moved to British Columbia, Canada, where, as Egoyan says, he was raised “without the three pillars of Armenian identity” (887). Since there was no Armenian community and no
Armenian church in their new home, and because he refused to speak the mother tongue his parents brought to Canada, his complete cultural assimilation seemed to be confirmed.
However, Egoyan became interested in his Armenian roots when he began his academic studies in Toronto and met an association of Armenian students whose members came from exilic families. At that time, he became acutely aware of the tremendous impact of the genocide. Egoyan dedicated his studies to the Armenian and international politics in the aftermath of the genocide. At that time he became attracted to cinema’s power of making people “believe that what they were seeing was absolutely real” (Egoyan 888). It was the release of the film Midnight Express, which made this strong impression on him. The film depicted a young man arrested in Turkey for smuggling drugs and detained under inhuman circumstances of the Turkish prisons. The film made Egoyan first ponder issues of history and fiction: “There is no doubt [it]
66 perpetuated negative and highly damaging images of Turks. On the other hand, the film was supposedly based on facts” (888-889). The film raised the question for him, whether showing these highly negative stereotypes was acceptable if it was based on facts and if it served the needs of the story. Egoyan acknowledged that if he adopted a similar approach in a film on the Armenian Genocide, it would immediately generate international polemics: “I could anticipate that any film that presented the Armenian
Genocide would be accused, from a Turkish point of view, of perpetuating stereotypes.
Yet from an Armenian perspective – in terms of stories we had been told over and over again from the time we were children – the barbaric and vicious images were very real”
(891).
Egoyan says his aim was not only to depict the Armenian Genocide as it lived in the Armenian diaspora’s cultural imagination, but he found it necessary to tackle other issues which have been crucially important in the eighty-five years long aftermath of the genocide, which is marked by the Turkish denial. First, the film was intended to present cultural convictions in which his generation has been raised; second, to observe the emotional roots of these convictions and how they has endured; third, it was aimed at examining and questioning these convictions (891).
Given this manifold responsibility, the narrative line of the film is likewise multi- layered. The major event around which the narrative lines evolve is the fictitious
Armenian director, Edward Saroyan’s production of a film on the Armenian Genocide.
This film-within-the-film is called the same as Egoyan’s film, Ararat, and it is based on an American physician, Clarence Ussher’s memoirs. Saroyan hires Ani, an art historian professor whose area of interest is Arshile Gorky, the exilic Armenian painter. Saroyan and his scriptwriter Rouben decide to incorporate Gorky into their film. The film also stars half-Turkish Canadian actor Ali, who plays the Turkish officer Jevdet Bey, who was
67 responsible for the slaughter at Lake Van in 1915. Gorky himself appears in a separate narrative line working on his masterpiece which is based on a childhood photograph taken of him and his mother. On another narrative line, Ani’s son Raffi tries to come to terms with the memory of his Armenian father, who was killed when trying to assassinate a
Turkish diplomat. Raffi travels to Eastern Turkey and makes a video recording of Mount
Ararat. When he returns to Canada, he is stopped at the airport by the customs official who suspects him of smuggling heroin in film canisters. The narrative lines are interweaving and do not follow a chronological order. Images of Saroyan’s historical feature are frequently inserted, but the notion of reality of these images is occasionally disrupted by showing the production crew behind the scene.
4.1. Trauma and the Image of the Evil Turk
Carr says that in Egoyan’s Ararat, “the historical narrative does not reproduce the events it describes; it tells us in what direction to think about the events and charges our thought about the events with different emotional valences” (cited in Parker 1046).
This view on the function of history in fictional texts that are based on historical events sides with Doležel’s argument, namely, that the author’s aim of the postmodern historical fiction is to create parallel possible pasts rather than recreate a mimetic version of the past; and also with Alemany-Galway’s more general claim on the postmodern text which seeks to open up a range of possible truths rather than one definitive version of reality. However, what is new in Carr’s concept is that it lays an explicit emphasis on the profound effect that historical events have on future generations; and that he sees an intricate relation between the passing down the legacy of historical events and an inherent affective value linked to the historical event.
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This work claims that Ararat is a historical fiction that foregrounds the power of the affective value linked to the historical events. It investigates both the underlying forces of this affective dimension and its effect on future generations. This primary emotional focus is substantiated by the fact that has marked all of the discourses on
Armenian Genocide, namely, that the genocide has been denied by the Turkish government, and, as Egoyan shows, this denial was to a considerable extent abetted by the West (891). The denial of the genocide, which is the official state of the facts today, has fuelled cultural convictions on both sides. It is these cultural convictions and the emotional attachment to them that Ararat deals with.
The denial of the Genocide poses the threat of oblivion. The trauma is therefore double and it affects all generations of the exilic Armenians. Not only the children of the survivors, but also the subsequent generations suffer the trauma and has to shoulder its immense emotional burden. The trauma prompts the characters to make a statement out of the memory so that it can be saved from oblivion. In the film, the characters of
Armenian origin are pursuing a creative process spurred by the trauma: Gorky is painting the picture of his mother who died in the genocide “to place her on a pedestal of life” as
Ani says about the painting; Ani herself is writing a book on Gorky to make the life of the artist and the prominent figure of the Armenian exilic diaspora to be remembered;
Saroyan is making a film on the genocide because he promised his mother, a genocide survivor, to do it; and Rouben is writing the script to this film which is based on Clarence
Ussher’s memoirs, an eyewitness’s accounts of the Genocide. As Egoyan says, “all of these post-genocide stories are driven by a common anxiety: the anxiety of not being heard” (896).
The trauma affects also the youngest generation who has to approach it in their own way. Raffi’s character is somewhat resembling Egoyan’s adolescence: he is reluctant
69 to listen to the over-repeated stories of the genocide and attempts to dismiss the cultural beliefs fuelled by its memory. However, he is gradually assuming a much more concerned view towards his relation to the past. Parker suggest that Raffi’s journey corresponds with the narrative line of a classical romance, where the hero first “exists in a kind of abeyance, unsure about his direction, and uncertain about who he is” (1048). Motivated by his step- sister and lover, Celia, who insists on the need of finding out more about their fathers,
Raffi steps on the path of quest for historical understanding. During his journey, Raffi is exposed to every kind of view. He sees his mother’s strict adherence to objective truth as well as Saroyan’s Hollywood-style version of the genocide, but his quest ends up in a need of exploring his own version of the history. Similarly to the other characters, he is able to articulate his version in a creative process, which is recording a video diary in the
Armenian homeland. Raffi’s evolution is essential to the plot and it demonstrates that not even the youngest generation can avoid the trauma. In other words, Ararat deals with an intergenerational trauma.
The trauma inevitably fuels negative images of the oppressor and these become visible in some of the products of these creative processes pursued by the characters. This work claims that negative stereotypes are present on two levels in the film. First,
Saroyan’s film-within-the-film depicts a number of violent characters. All of them are
Turkish soldiers who commit brutal attacks on the Armenians. Second, there is also one negative figure delineated in the present tense of the narrative.
One of the most important artistic device in Saroyan’s film is to show the cruelties of the genocide in shockingly realistic images. One of the most violent scenes depicts naked women burnt alive by Turkish soldiers. There is also an image of an Armenian woman being raped while her child is hidden below her. The brutality in Saroyan’s film
70 bears similarity to Incendies, where Abu Tarek commits the same war crimes what the
Turkish soldiers do.
Egoyan claims that “it’s important to show this material” and that his film consciously does it since “these are the images that every Armenian has been waiting to see, and to have the world see” (896). However, since these images appear in the film- within-the-film, the viewer is aware of the fact that Egoyan is critically commenting upon on a style of historical fiction film rather than perpetuates negative images, which would be highly damaging otherwise. Egoyan therefore makes a step further and also investigates what has happened since the genocide. He claims that “these scenes – in and of themselves – cannot make up for over eighty-five years of denial” (896).
The denial is embodied by the character of Ali whose private life and the role performed in Saroyan’s film fuse. Ali, an actor of Turkish origin born in Canada and a homosexual, plays Jevdet Bey, a highly stereotypical character of the brutally aggressive
Turk who believes in his racial hierarchy. His brutality is opposed to the innocence of the young Arshile Gorky in the film, who, together with another boy are taken captive by the
Turks when trying to send an appeal for help to America. Gorky is interrogated by the
Bey, while the other boy is tortured and killed. The killing of a child, the most innocent victim of the war, is perceived as one of the most brutal crimes in the Western world, which resembles of the figure of Nihad shooting at children.
Although Ali “is clearly troubled by the stereotype he’s unleashed” (Egoyan 893), his relation to the Armenian director and Raffi reminds the viewer of the present-day conflict between the Armenians and the Turkish. Most importantly, Ali is ignorant on the matter of the genocide. This is made obvious in the scene in which Saroyan briefly thanks
Ali for his performance in the film. Ali seems to be eager to discuss history with the
Armenian director, for this reason he follows Saroyan trying to explain him what he has
71 read about history. Saroyan, however, coldly refuses him but asks Raffi to buy Ali a champagne when he drives the actor home. In the following scene, it is Raffi who opens up a conversation with the actor and seems to be eager to discuss history in which Ali only reluctantly takes part. When Raffi, having been raised in the atmosphere of the negative cultural beliefs and therefore sceptical about them, thanks Ali for his performance which provoked him to “feel all of those things again”, Ali wants to put an end to their conversation which is inevitably taking the direction towards the role Ali played in Saroyan’s film. In the end, Raffi presses Ali to admit the Turkish denial. Parker argues that at this point “Ali adopts the manner of the war criminal he plays in Saroyan’s film” and “completes his own historical journey, in which he, a Canadian-born half-Turk, goes from complete ignorance about the genocide, to defensiveness, to an aggressive denial” (1045).
Is it fundamental to ask, with what end Egoyan casts this final failure of acknowledging historical truth to the only character of Turkish origin in the film. Ali’s character is obviously a symbol of Turkish denial of the genocide. However, this work claims, that Ali’s character also addresses questions of performativity and effects of perpetuating highly damaging stereotypes. Completing his historical journey, he also assumes the stereotype he has just performed in the film. In this sense, his character stands not only for the Turkish denial, but also for the immense power negative stereotypes might have on our cultural conscious.
4.2. Representation of History
Ararat opens with a detailed shot of some of the objects inside Arshile Gorky’s studio. The first of them is a large brownish button hanging on a thread which is fastened on a nail. The focus of the camera slowly moves up the thread and allows to view an old
72 photograph fixed to the wall with the same nail. The photo depicts an adolescent boy standing behind his mother. The focus fluently moves to a drawing hanging next to the picture. It is a pencil sketch of the persons from the photo. Next, the perspective shifts to a bunch of flowers, to a set of brushes, and then it shows tubes of paint. It comes to a standstill when it focuses on a painting. It shows a woman’s and a boy’s face which are not yet ready. Finally, the camera moves on from the painting to the painter who is standing at the window turning his back to the camera. He is looking out of the window as if he was collecting memories.
The opening scene introduces all of the key elements of the film. Not only the photo and the painting will be re-emerging motives in the film. The brushes suggest the process of painting, whereas the flowers make reference to the small bunch Gorky holds in his hand on the photo to hide the place of the missing button on his coat. The button is the opening and the closing motive of the film and emerges several times in the course of the film. It seems to convey special feelings for the painter-Gorky: he is several times shown to feel the button with his fingers as if the touch of the old button helped him to collect memories. The closing scene of the film is a shot from Saroyan’s film. It depicts the young fictional Gorky and his mother shortly after the photograph has been taken. In this final scene, Gorky’s mother, who has earlier noticed that Gorky was missing the studio from his coat, sews the missing button on the coat. Strangely, the button is the same in real-life painter-Gorky’s studio as it is in the fictional film.
History is present on three major narrative lines in Ararat. Two of them represents a present character’s conscious attempt to reconstruct the past and is set in the present time of the narrative. Their protagonists are Edward Saroyan and Ani who aim at the reconstruction of the past in a film and in writing a book and giving lectures respectively.
The third narrative line takes place in the past and introduces the exilic painter Arshile
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Gorky in his New York studio, however, the actual status of this narrative line is ambiguous.
The fictitious character of Edward Saroyan is a famous Armenian director. He works on the film which he believes will be his last masterpiece with missionary zeal.
Working on the decisive moment of his nation, he is committed to tell the world their history as well as he is completing his genocide-survivor mother’s promise. Since he is an aged man, he has been preparing for the film long before undertaking its direction.
Now, he is making the film of his life. He really believes in the profound impact that the completing of the film has on the Armenians who have been waiting long to see these pictures of the genocide.
Egoyan says Saroyan’s film is “something more than a movie” (896). The production of a film on the Armenian Genocide is a powerful statement on its own. It is not only a crucial marker of identity of the Armenians and the Armenian diaspora for whom it would ensure that the tragedy of their parents and grandparents will be remembered, but it is an important political message. Therefore, the way how the film treats history is becomes crucially important.
Saroyan is making a classical grand-style historical movie. The historical event depicted in the film is the defence of Van of 1915, when the Armenians put up heroic resistance against the Turkish forces before ending in a bloody massacre and the deportation of the Armenian population. The film is set to produce high emotional response in the viewer which is achieved by foregrounding various bloody scenes of the massacre. The film puts the victimized position of the Armenians in stark contrast with the Turks, who the film does not hesitate to portray as evil.
Several reviewers stated that Saroyan’s film-within-the-film is a “Hollywood- style” production. Heckner points out that Hollywood “has tackled the issue of historical
74 genocide in its own way, most successfully with Spielberg’s Schindler’s List” (134).
These movies are not only “quite resistant to going beyond courting its audience and to critically interrogating its own modes of producing and screening the Holocaust and genocide” (134), but they are set to exert strong emotional effect on the audience by offering the satisfaction of suture. In other words, they create the illusion that the viewer is part of the actions taking place on the screen. Egoyan himself has likened Saroyan’s approach to Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, by saying that the film resembles a “cinematic artefact from another time” rather than commenting on the actual state of affairs (895).
Suture functions as an important cinematic device in Saroyan’s film, but it is disrupted in Egoyan’s. On several occasions, the camera shifts from an image from
Saroyan’s film to the background of the scene showing the production members thus reminding the viewer that the scenes are not real-life pictures but they are being shot at present. This technique takes explicit emphasis on the disruption of cinematic suture and the illusion of reality.
The illusion of reality is also seriously questioned by the fact that Saroyan’s movie distorts historical facts. When Ani visits the stage setting, she raises a severe objection to what she sees: Mount Ararat is used as background to the battle at Van, even though it is geographically not possible. Nor the inclusion of the young Gorky in the role of the boy who is given the task by Clarence Ussher to deliver a plea for help to the American embassy is historically accurate. Saroyan defends the inclusion of Gorky and Mount
Ararat in the film by telling Ani that they are “true in spirit”. Saroyan’s screenwriter
Rouben has similar justification: it is “poetic licence” that allows them to bend historical truth in order to create the desired artistic effect of the cinematic production.
A few minutes earlier a similar incident takes place in the same studio but it is performed by different actors. Rouben shows Clarence Ussher’s diary to the American
75 actor Harcourt, who is going to perform the role of the American physician, and tells him:
“every scene in this film is based on this document.” Rouben is taken aback by Harcourt’s pitying expression and his answer, namely, that he has read not only Ussher’s memoir but
“every available piece of archival material” about the Armenian Genocide. The fact that
Rouben bases the entire screenplay on one single document can hardly be seen as a reliable method of a conscientious historian. His approach repeatedly puts the issue of historical accuracy and value of the film in question.
Both Saroyan’s and Rouben’s approach to the past are confronted by other characters, Ani and Harcourt respectively. Nonetheless, the use of poetic license is justified with the idea that “what ties events to each other (or their event-effects) is not based upon an empirical or measurable set of correspondences or similarities […] but rather upon an incorporeal and affective resonance” (Río 21). From Saroyan’s perspective, the events, even though they are not necessarily accurate, can be tied together if they share the same affective value. By putting together all these elements, namely, the picture of the demonized oppressor, the images of the worst atrocities of the massacre, one prominent public figure and the national symbol of the sacred mountain, the film blends together all the important markers of identity of the genocide-sufferers. It can be claimed that the overriding motive of Saroyan’s film is the desire for remembrance: the desire to be heard is so powerful that it overrides the need of historical accuracy.
Ani’s area of expertise is the work of Arshile Gorky, the Armenian-born painter.
Gorky escaped the genocide in 1915 and arrived at America when he was sixteen years old where he became a renowned expressionist painter. Ani believes that Gorky’s childhood experience during the Armenian Genocide profoundly shaped his later artwork.
Her lectures on Gorky focus on the production of the painting The Artist and His Mother.
This painting is based on a childhood photograph portraying Gorky standing and his
76 mother sitting, the only photograph he preserved about his mother. The photo was taken prior to the massacre of Lake Van and was intended to be sent to Gorky’s father, who at that time has already emigrated to America. Ani, comparing the photo and the painting during one of her lectures says: “Gorky’s homage to his mother was bound to take on a sacred quality. His experience as a survivor of the Armenian Genocide is at the root of its spiritual power. With this painting, Gorky has saved his mother from oblivion, snatching her out of a pile of corpses to place her on a pedestal of life.”
Ani’s reverence to Gorky’s work is almost fetishist. Her sentences make obvious that she regards the painting not only as Gorky’s private remembrance of his mother, but an object that has a “sacred quality” therefore is a powerful marker of identity of the exilic
Armenian community. Gorky’s mother is not one of the faceless victims of the genocide because the painting eternalizes her; and not only her but also all the other sufferers of the genocide. Gorky’s mother in the painting signifies all the deaths and sufferings of the
Armenian Genocide. As Río says: “One cannot bring dead bodies back to life, but one can always prevent the death of the event by reincarnating its incorporeal life into new bodies, new performances, and new effective encounters” (Río 25).
In Ani’s view, the painting is a powerful symbol of “one of the most courageous moments of Armenian history” to which Gorky was witness as a child. Whereas the painting is the symbol of Armenian history, she believes Gorky is a preeminent figure of the national identity of the Armenian diaspora. Being herself of Armenian origin, this means an affective attachment both to the figure of Gorky and to the painting. Moreover, the painting also carries traits of her personal life, since it symbolizes her own motherhood and mother-child relation. Her profound emotional attachment becomes evident when
Celia attacks the painting with the intention of destroying it. Ani becomes furious and has an argument over the status of the painting with Rouben, who seemingly does not
77 understand the significance of the attack, so she explains him: “Rouben, you are sickened because that painting is a repository of our history. It’s a sacred code. It explains who we are and how and why we got here.”
Although she is portrayed as a conscientious historian who adamantly opposes
Saroyan’s and Rouben’s poetic license, her emotional attachment to the painting might cast doubt on her objectivity. One may raise the question whether her historical version is not affected by her personal life, as her step-daughter, Celia suggests. It is going to be demonstrated in this section that Ani’s historical accuracy is also questioned by the third historical storyline.
The third narrative line dealing with history investigated here depicts Arshile
Gorky in his New York studio working on the painting The Artist and His Mother. The images showing Gorky completing his masterpiece interweave the whole film. The powerful opening images which depict the photo and the painting suggest that this narrative line is the dominant motive of the film.
Gorky’s character in the film shows the quest to give the Armenian Genocide a public figure who would speak up for all of the sufferings of the genocide. As Egoyan points out, the Armenian Genocide has always lacked a figure of emblematic position, similar to what Anne Frank signifies for the Jewish Holocaust. In comparison, Arshile
Gorky is not a commonly known figure. As Egoyan says: “For many people, the glimpses of this great painter’s life shown in my film have served as an introduction to this important artist” (894).
What is the most striking about this storyline is that the nature of the narrative line is not made obvious. It may leave the viewer in doubt whether Egoyan’s intention is to depict what he believes historical reality is, or he intends to create a fictionalized reality, similarly to what Saroyan does in his film. The painter adult Gorky in his New York City
78 studio neither is the part of the film-within-the-film, nor is he a contemporary to the other characters; nonetheless, his story strangely correlates with both the present-time narrative and he maintains a curious relation with the present from the point of view how he responds to the characters’ attempt to reconstruct the past.
Sometimes the interweaving of the narrative lines created by the frequent cuts between them creates the notion that Gorky is thinking about his childhood. For instance, one of the scenes from Saroyan’s film is an extended landscape shot of the Armenians being deported from their homeland. It shows exhausted mothers and children leaving their homes in a long line surveilled by violent Turkish guards. With a quick cut, the camera moves to the painter’s studio, showing Gorky burying his face in his hand.
Whereas the images change, the sounds of the crying Armenians persist for some time creating the impression that they are being heard in Gorky’s head. In this respect, the shots in Saroyan’s film function both as the film being shot and as Gorky’s memories.
Given the fact the viewer knows that Saroyan’s film is historically not reliable, this is a strange correspondence deliberately aimed to be ambiguous.
At other times, Gorky contradicts the reconstruction of the past and refuses present-tense character’s explanation of historical events. There is an art historian mystery which is attempted to be explained by several persons in the film. The question is, whether the mother’s hands on Gorky’s painting are deliberately left unfinished or whether Gorky painted the hands and later erased them. Ani claims in her book that the hands are left unfinished on purpose to signify the violent interruption of Armenian history: “Gorky leaves his mother’s hands unfinished, as if the history of its composition, like that of his people, had been violently interrupted.“
This statement is attacked by Celia, Ani’s dead lover’s daughter. Celia is shown to feel deep resentment for Ani who she accuses of her father’s death, an alleged suicide.
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Celia notoriously attacks Ani’s statements during her lectures trying to demonstrate that
Ani is projecting her personal life into Gorky’s art. At one of her attacks against Ani she implies that Gorky deliberately erased his mother’s hands. Curiously, the Gorky narrative line proves Celia to be right.
The scene which shows Gorky to erase the hands of his mother is one of the emotionally most intense moments of the film. An earlier scene has shown the painter to stare at his completed painting without satisfaction. There is Armenian folk music played from a gramophone in the studio. While Gorky is looking at the painting, he suddenly starts dancing before it. It is a moment of ritual: he pays reverence to his mother, as if the act of painting would serve as an act of mourning. In the scene where he decides to erase the hands he is shown to be emotionally overwhelmed. He steadily walks to the picture, falls on his knees before the painting and determinedly puts white paint on his hands.
However, when Gorky’s hands moves towards the painting, he hesitantly stops.
When Gorky makes that moment of contact with the painting, the only
resistance comes from an inherent property that he projects into that
object, so that both the violation and the resistance are orchestrated by the
same individual. Even if an object has an iconographic power, which is
able to resist touch, that again is also only within the mind of the violator.
It’s not something that an object is able to transmit on its own terms. There
has to be some projection into what it contains. (Egoyan in interview 254-
255).
As Naficy points out, the tactile dimension is an important feature of exilic cinema. Naficy claims that objects that bear resemblance to the homeland act as reminders of exile since they enhance certain structures of feelings that are perceivable by the senses.
Sensory reports stir private memories which activate the feeling of displacement (26-29).
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Tactile sensibilities are of special importance in Arshile Gorky’s remembrance of the homeland. It is the touch of the button and the painting which activates the memory of the homeland in Gorky. By projecting his memories on the painting, Gorky imagines her mother to be alive on the canvas. It is the same projection with which Saroyan works, when he consciously creates the effect of suture in film, and Ani, who unconsciously projects her own life into the book on Gorky. There is a need to project the past in a creative process in order to be able to come to terms with the trauma.
4.3. The Depiction of the Homeland
The homeland has special condition in Ararat since it is approached on various levels of the film. The territory in question is the region of the Lake Van which is part of
Eastern Turkey today. Historically, it was the centre of the Armenian kingdom of Ararat, therefore it is of special significance for the Armenian national identity. Being part of
Turkey and given the historical background, however, its status is controversial. There is considerable distance Egoyan maintains between spaces of Canada and the Armenian homeland and also between the past and present representation of the homeland.
The past of the land is depicted in Saroyan’s film. The most notable scenes that put an overt emphasis on the importance of the land are the scenes where the Armenians are being deported. Saroyan constructs poignant pictures of an extensive mountainous desert-like landscape, where thousands of Armenian women and children are leaving behind their homeland. The emotional content of the picture is created by its monumentality: the landscape picture is extensive, and the row of people seems to be endless. There is also a strong contrast between the still image of the landscape and the movement of the people which intensifies the notion of the violent displacement.
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However, as Egoyan disrupts the historical reliability of the film-within-the-film, he similarly questions its geographical consistence. Naturally, Saroyan’s film has no chance to be entirely authentic in this respect since its shooting at the actual Lake Van would have never been allowed by Turkish authorities. However, Egoyan places the issue at the other extreme by putting the entire production of the film into a studio; and by foregrounding a highly disturbing fact, which is, placing Mount Ararat to the background of Lake Van. This disrupts any intention of Saroyan’s film of being geographically trustworthy.
With this, Egoyan indicates how questionable the depicting of geographies of non-
Western regions in classical historical movies is. In the light of this sharp critique on the mode of production of Hollywood-style historical feature films, it is understandable that
Egoyan choses to create considerable distance from direct representation of the land at present. The previous chapter has demonstrated that Villeneuve alienates the viewer from the landscape by adding extradiegetic Western music to the scenes which is not compatible with the region in order to highlight the fact that the film is directed by the
Western point of view; this part is going to show that Egoyan uses visual effects for the same end.
The inclusion of video images recorded by characters of the film is one of the characteristic features of Egoyan’s films. The obsession with recorded images and their exploitation is a central motive of several of Egoyan’s works: in Family Viewing, the protagonist’s egocentric father is re-using old family video tapes to record his sexual experiences with his lover; in Calendar, a photographer with his wife go to Armenia to shoot pictures for a glossy calendar. In the latter, the camera is set up at twelve places to record still landscape pictures and at the same it documents the wife’s gradual alienation from his husband and her increasing emotional attachment to their Armenian driver.
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Calendar, shot in 1993, presents the same structures that are going to be elaborated on almost ten years later in Ararat.
In Calendar, the photographer is of Armenian origin, however, he does not speak
Armenian. As opposed to his wife who grows emotionally attached to the land, he feels alienated in the homeland of his ancestors. These distance and alienation are conveyed through the video recordings, since there is no direct picture of Armenia in the film, but all of the images taken in the country are mediated through the photographer’s camera.
Naficy claims that in Calendar, the camera serves “not only a narrative agent but also as an exilic epistolary agent” (136). The photographer’s camera is a device for connecting locations and thus bringing about the development of the narrative line as it helps the protagonist to recount the memory which is connected to each of the places. At times, the video images are slowed down, other times they are speeded up, or frozen, the same way the photographer is examining his own memories and feelings connected to the separation from his wife. At the end, the images fail to bring about the reconnection of husband and wife, but they help the photographer to reconcile with the thought of separation.
The content of these video recordings and the photos is a landscape picture where an ancient church or its ruins are foregrounded. The dominating motive of the recordings is the abandoned rural landscape in which the only participants, who occasionally step into or out of the focus of the camera, are the photographer’s wife and the Armenian driver. According to Naficy, all of these are characteristic motives of accented filmmaking. The ancient churches and the rural landscape are signifiers of the national identity and also imply a sense of loss felt over exilic community’s forced removal from the homeland. The rural landscape suggests the exilic craving for a “utopian prelapsarian chronotope of the homeland that is uncontaminated by contemporary facts” (152),
83 whereas the image of the Mount Ararat, which appears in one of the pictures, is a
“fetishistic marker of lost paradise” (164).
In Ararat, the video of the homeland is recorded by Raffi, the youngest of the
Armenian diaspora. It has been shown earlier, that Raffi goes through a gradual personal evolution in terms of his relation to his Armenian origin: first, he is sceptical about the negative cultural images in which he was raised as a child; later, although he recognizes the historical selectivity of Saroyan’s film, he is impressed by its deep emotional impact; and he attempts to balance the affective value of the film with caution. The burden of the trauma is intensified by its personal aspect: he needs to accept his father’s memory. When he drives home Ali, Raffi thanks the actor for the performance and says: “My Dad was killed trying to assassinate a Turkish diplomat. I could never understand how he could do that, what it would take him to kill someone. But today, you gave me a sense of what was going on in his head.” Egoyan raises essential questions at this point: “Is Raffi moved by
Ali’s performance because of what the actor incarnated, or because of the process of incarnation? Can this incarnation become a form of testimony?” (893). Although the director leaves these questions unanswered in his essay, it might be argued that although
Ali’s performance of Jevdet Bey leaves deep emotional impact on Raffi, it fails to make him grasp his father’s attempt to kill someone. In this sense, the process of incarnation, which without doubt leaves profound emotional impact on him, will never be a form of testimony for Raffi, as it is indicated in one of his video diaries, when he asks: “What’s the legacy he’s supposed to given me?” This question shows that Raffi has not been able to come to terms with his father’s memory yet. Therefore, the emotional impression of the performance is not an acceptable and righteous explanation to his doubts.
His quest for meaning leads him to the homeland to experience the testimony and the legacy he seeks. He instinctively feels that his only chance to understand lies in
84 visiting the homeland of his predecessors. The video diary he records at Lake Van and at
Mount Ararat reminds of Saroyan’s film-within-the-film; similarly, Raffi’s camera is a camera-within-the-camera. It focuses on all of the symbols and motives previously scrutinized in Calendar by Egoyan.
The exilic desire for a utopic homeland is revealed by Raffi’s first sentences of his video diary taken at the Lake Van: “I’m here Mom. Ani. In a dream world where the three of us would be together. Dad, you and me.” While the camera focuses on a church in ruins in a desert-like landscape and it moves to a more distant ruin of a church, Raffi imagines a visionary family idyll that could have become reality if the genocide had never taken place. Naficy has pointed out that ruins serve as reminders of an exilic gap in accented cinema; however, this work would argue, that ruins mediated by Raffi’s camera have a more direct, political goal. These ruins cannot be shown in Saroyan’s film since he would never been allowed to make a film on the place of the genocide. Raffi is only able to shoot the image with his personal, handheld camera. These ruins contain the memory of the genocide that cannot be spoken about at the place where it happened. The ruins are mementos of the tragedy and what is even worse, of its denial, which implicates that the tragedy will fade into oblivion. As Raffi recognizes, not even the ancient ruins can tell the story: “When I see these places, I realize how much we’ve lost. Not just the land and the lives, it’s the loss of any way to remember. There is nothing here to prove that anything ever happened.”
The technique of the camera-within-the-camera makes possible to draw interesting parallels between what appears on the swivelling screen of Raffi’s handheld camera and the cinematic screen. Raffi’s recordings focus on two important objects, both of them are of special importance for Raffi and make important contributions to other elements of the narrative line. One of them is an ancient relief depicting Madonna and
85 child on one of the islands situated in Lake Van, the island of Akhtamar; the second is
Mount Ararat. The previous Raffi connects with Gorky’s painting, since he believes that the ancient relief served as source of inspiration for Gorky’s painting. Together with the painting, the relief is one of the most powerful symbols of the film. For Raffi, it stands not only for mother-child relations, but it is also a symbol of the utopic family idyll and it helps him to accept the life of his father.
An interesting visual effect is created by the visual juxtaposition of the screens.
At customs, the custom’s officer makes Raffi to call Ani who should justify his son’s words. Raffi, who has been lying about his mission to shoot special footage for the film, although he believes to be innocent, needs to inadvertently warn his mother. Raffi is sitting by the desk and the handheld camera is next to him put on the desk. The camera is still playing Raffi’s recording which has previously been examined by the custom’s officer. The small screen is showing the recording of a landscape Raffi made from a moving car. During the telephone conversation of mother and son, the camera cuts to
Ani’s location. It is an interior of the car in which Saroyan, Harcourt, Rouben and Ani are riding to the premiere of the film. In this manner, the two journeys and arrivals are juxtaposed. Both movements come to a halt at the same time: when the car stops at the red carpet, Raffis’s recording has arrived at Mount Ararat. At that moment, the custom’s officer is being told by Rouben on the phone that Ani is at the premiere who assumes that the film’s production is over and Raffi has been lying.
When no one believes Raffi, the cinematic device supports him by foregrounding the picture of the sacred mountain. When Raffi says: “Everything I told you is exactly what happened”, the camera’s screen next to him shows a blurred picture of Mount
Ararat. Naficy claims that Mount Ararat, as all of the sacred mountains of great civilizations, is “historically linked to spirituality” and is “mediating between the
86 terrestrial and the celestial” (160). It is the power of the sacred mountain, the symbol of spirituality, which supports Raffi’s claim, who is finally released by the custom’s officer.
4.4. Questions Left Unanswered
During the premiere of Saroyan’s film, Arshile Gorky makes an unexpected appearance. He is shown to be looking at the poster of the film which is displayed in the centre of the hall. The poster depicts the deportation of the Armenians in an extensive, mountainous region. When Gorky turns around, he appears to be the same middle-aged man as he looks like in the storyline set in 1935. He looks at Ani and Ani immediately recognizes him. She is the only one to see Gorky at the premiere. However, when Ani starts to run towards Gorky, he suddenly disappears, the same way as he made his mysterious appearance.
Is the mysterious appearance Gorky’s ghost? Or is it Ani’s illusion experienced under strong emotional pressure? The film leaves the question unanswered, as it does when addressing various other issues. Ani is not able to capture Gorky in his historical accuracy because of her profound emotional attachment to the painting and due to her own personal traumas she has not overcome yet. She is not able to catch the essence of the exilic painter the same way as she loses sight of Gorky at the premiere. However, in spite of her failure to capture the most intense moment of Gorky’s life and making the erroneous statement about the unfinished hands, she is the only one who is offered the possibility of recognizing the painter.
Historical reality presented by the painter-Gorky storyline corresponds with Ani and proposes a brief encounter with her even though she has made a mistake when reconstructing the past; the same way it corresponds with Saroyan’s film, which has distorted reality at several points. In this sense, Egoyan’s film overrides Lubomír
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Doležel’s strict separation between worlds of history and worlds of fiction. By blurring the frontier between reality and fiction and creating the strange correspondence between the respective storylines, Ararat shows that a world of fiction may serve the purpose of a world of history very well.
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Conclusion
The reconstruction of history set in a land that is traditionally perceived as oriental is the central theme of the analysed films. All of the films approach the “Orient” and the
“truth” in a different way. This conclusion summarizes one common stereotypical character’s function in the films, and the cinematic worlds in which this character is placed in each of the films.
The figure of the assassin has emerged in orientalist films as an important trope of the colonialist discourse. The assassin, to whom an inherent violence is attributed, appears as a menace to civilization. His figure is an anti-hero, he is an inhabitant of the savage desert and he puts the Western culture in danger. This negative cultural stereotype has not disappeared in mainstream cinema; it has been transformed into the figure of the terrorist, the embodiment of the neo-orientalist thesis of new barbarism. This work has analysed three films; all of them consciously attack this one-sided cultural stereotype. It has been examined, in what way each of the films portray the figure of the assassin and how they tackle the problem of perpetuating negative stereotypes of an ethnic group. It has been shown that each of the films approaches the issue on a different scale.
Syriana aims at giving a humanized image of the assassin. It attacks the new barbarism thesis at its very core: it denies that assassins are barbarous evils by portraying a suicide bomber as a deeply emotional person. It gives the portrayal of a tragic hero who is victim of the circumstances and it lays the blame of his violence on the Western society by depicting the ultimate act of the suicide bomber as an inevitable outcome of the unjust power relations. The viewer does not know much about the character traits of the hero, whose ultimate act is socially and politically motivated in Syriana.
The world in which the film situates this figure shares a lot with traditional orientalist tropes. The setting of the assassin is the desert, one of the most important tropes
89 of orientalist films. The savagery and the lack of civilization within the desert are attributed to global power relations; however, the film also leaves space to less consciously operating stereotypes, which remind of traditional orientalist filmmaking and encourage the viewer to an easy identification with the fantasy world of the orientalist cinema. The quick identification is necessary since the viewer is rendered to a childlike position by the film’s illusion of the interrelating highly complex worlds.
In Incendies, the viewer is offered not only with the motive, but also with the result of the final act of the assassin, and this ensures a more critical approach. The narrative line evolves as a negative bildungsroman, since the viewer follows the assassin’s personal evolution and gets an accurate image of her character traits: it is the assumption of her son being dead and the destruction caused by the military siege that makes Nawal to arrive at the decision of taking an active part in the war. To kill is a cold- blooded act of which the assassin does not repent. The act of killing does not close, but it puts the narrative line in motion. It is the main driving force of the film: did the heroine not assassinate the military leader, she would have never been imprisoned, raped, and she would have not given birth to her children. It is a shocking revelation that their mother was an assassin for the second generation, and they has to face the enormous burden of this legacy.
The world, in which Incendies situates the assassin shares the notion of savagery with the traditional orientalist trope. Furthermore, the notion of violence is consciously intensified by the director, who makes a painful assault on the senses of the viewer by the visual imagery. The land is stricken by the savagery of the war, on the other hand, it is not an intellectually reduced space as in Syriana, but it is more diversified and savagery is not the only force operating within this world. There is also a conscious need of the director to put a distance between his Western-like perspective and this created world.
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The decision of not naming the country, which is, however, recognizable from the historical events depicted in the film, shows the director’s dismay of identifying with the orientalist discourse. This imposed silence on geography may be taken as a symbol of the geographical ambiguity of the terminology the West has applied to the Orient.
Ararat goes a step even further. Here, everything is past: the assassin’s life and the attempt of assassination are mere memories. The memory, however, is a trauma which haunts the living. The second generation have a need to come to terms with the fact that the father was an assassin. For this reason, the young generation has to visit the homeland.
Ararat takes for granted the assumptions elaborated in Syriana and Incendies, namely, that the act of assassination is always the outcome of the interplay of social and political circumstances and that it has powerful effect on the future; and it elaborates on the final phase: the process of healing from the trauma.
Ararat does not place the assassin into any world: it disconnects it from every kind of reality. It is only the memory of the world the assassin lived in that his son can investigate. Thus the director avoids to make any picture prone to cultural stereotypization. The only world in which the director situates his characters directly is the exilic identity. Through this exilic identity he refuses to project any non-Western element directly, since any direct projection would run the risk of misstatement. On the other hand, he accepts attempts of historical representation as righteous methods for healing from trauma and coping with history, even though they do not qualify as Doležel’s historical world.
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Summary
This work analyzes the relation of stereotypes and reality in films. From Said’s
Orientalism on, there has been an immense amount of critical works written on how the
West has imagined the Orient. Given its visual nature, film is a powerful medium for the visualization of cultural stereotypes. Since its birth cinema has accumulated a great range of fixed schemata for perpetuating stereotypes of the Orient. After giving a succinct overview of the most important orientalist tropes in cinema, and how these tropes evolved into contemporary neo-orientalist discourse, this work attempts to answer the question of what purpose these reemerging structures of stereotypes have in contemporary films; how the narrative line makes use of cultural stereotypes or alternatively, how it works to deconstruct them.
The films investigated here build on historical events set in regions traditionally perceived as Oriental: the life story of an ex-CIA agent in Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, the
Lebanese civil war in Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies, and the Armenian Genocide in Atom
Egoyan’s Ararat. All of these three films fictionalize the historical events, fictionalize historical characters and add fictional characters to the narrative line, and even fictionalize the geographical settings. This work investigates how these films construe the fictional worlds of historical events and how these fictional worlds respond to the long-established orientalist tradition.
This work claims that distortion of the past occurs because fiction always relies on previous pre-established structures. Those film narratives which do not judge critically and do not scrutinize the conventionalized patterns which they inadvertently or intentionally make use of, run the risk of distorting the historical validity and the message of the film.
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Resumé
Tato práce analyzuje vtah stereotypu a reality ve filmu. Od Saidova Orientalismu bylo napsáno mnoho kritických studií o tom, jak Západ vnímá Orient. Je to dané jeho vizuální stránkou, film se stal mocným prostředkem zobrazení kulturních stereotypů.
Film vytvořil širokou škálu ustálených schémat schopných stálého opakování stereotypů v Orientu. Tato práce podává krátký přehled nejdůležitějších orientálních stereotypů ve filmu a o tom, jak se tyto stereotypy vyvinuly v neo-orientalistickém kontextu, dále se zaobírá otázkou, jakou funkci mají tyto znovu a znovu se objevující struktury v současných filmech, jak používá dějová linie kulturní stereotypy, nebo naopak, jak se je pokouší vyvrátit.
Tyto analyzované filmy vycházejí z historické události, která se odehrála v zemi, tradičně považované jako Orient: životní příběh bývalého agenta CIA ve snímku Syriana od Stephana Gaghana, libanonská občanská válka v Incendies od Denise Villeneuva a arménská genocida ve filmu Ararat Atoma Egoyana. Všechny tři filmy zpracovávají událost tak, že vzniká fiktivní děj: přepracovávají historické osoby do fiktivních, přidávají vymyšlené postavy do dějů a přepracovávají geografická prostředí do fiktivních. Tato práce zkoumá, jak tyto filmy budují fiktivní světy historických událostí a jak tyto fiktivní světy reagují na dávno přítomnou orientalistickou tradici.
Tato práce ukazuje, že ke zkreslení minulosti může dojít, protože fikce je vždy závislá na existujících strukturách. Ty filmové dějové linie, které nezkoumají a nehodnotí kriticky předcházející stereotypy, které můžou být přítomné ve filmu úmyslně nebo bez
úmyslu, mohou ohrozit historickou platnost a odkaz filmu.
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