France Celebrates Armenian Culture

Alexis Lacroix, advisor to the CNL president and the moderator of several of panel discussions in the festival, said in an interview with René Dzagoyan in the same French-Armenian periodical, Nouvelles d’Arménie, that Colosimo initially came up with the idea of a traveling festival and then immediately thought of the Armenians. Presenting their culture would not only examine the diasporan experience but also have something to say to the French.

Lacroix felt that as a diasporan experience, the Armenian one was emblematic of the condition of all peoples faced with advanced globalization. Identity is no longer an immediate “natural” given but an open question, to which art can help reformulate answers. The films shown in the festival are evidence of this. Lacroix said, “the camera of the great filmmakers of Armenian origin is, together with the novel, the other ‘medium’ by which a dispersed people tries to recognize that which creates, despite its dispersion, its mysterious unity.” Certainly, then, the films of Paradjanov are marked by Soviet filmography, just as all the films of Egoyan depend on the canons of North American cinematography, while Guédiguian incontestably fits in the French tradition of social film. However, a part of their works, also visible and immediately perceptible, contains the persistent enigma of “Armenianness.”

In the introduction to the official program brochure Colosimo said that Arménie, Arménies was intended to raise questions concerning the nature of Armenian culture and identity, both in the diaspora and in the Republic of Armenia, and how different commemorative reconstructions have taken place after 1915. The intent of the CNL series was to show that “the book remains the best key for understanding a world in transformation.”

The Armenian participants are creators and transmitters of Armenian culture not only in Armenian, but in many other languages such as French, Spanish and English. Some, like Peter Balakian, do this though they do not speak Armenian. The invitees — actually 22 in number, but 20 is more symbolism due to the anniversary — were from eight different countries: the Republic of Armenia (Karen Antashyan, Henrik Edoyan, Violet Grigoryan, Vahram Martirosyan and Shushanik Tamrazyan), the US (Peter Balakian, Viken Berberian and Marc Nichanian), Argentina (Ana Arzoumanian), Lithuania (Vahagn Grigorian), Estonia (Gohar Markosyan), Romania (Varujan Vosganian) and Switzerland (Vahé Godel), along with France, of course, (Daniel Arsand, Nathalie Baravian, Krikor Beledian, Denis Donikian, Raymond Kévorkian, Michel Marian, Gaïdz Minassian, Claire Mouradian and Ara Toranian).

The French Orient-Express, a very fancy old-fashioned train apparently, took the Armenians along the same path that the post-Genocide Armenian immigrants to France traversed. The train only traveled during the day, and the Armenians stayed in hotels in the various cities in which they stopped. One of the writers invited from Armenia, Martirosyan, jokingly wrote afterwards that the first thought that came to mind when hearing of the French plan was of Agatha Christie’s detective novel, Murder on the Orient Express, which made him wonder whether a few Armenians might disappear during the trip.

The collective trip was useful not only for audiences, but also for the participants, as Martirosyan declared. Balakian said to the Mirror-Spectator that “one of the important dimensions of the festival was that it brought together for a full week a group of Armenian writers from various places in the world. We had a chance to get a sense of what other writers are doing. It gave me a deeper sense of the complexity of whatever it might mean to write from an Armenian cultural zone. A typical conference is a day or two and you can’t get to know your colleagues, but here we had time to hang out and talk; it created a unique kind of potential for literary community. I’m in touch now with writers I didn’t know a few months ago.”