YEREVAN — On January 14, in Yerevan, Svetlana Gulyan, film scholar and researcher at the Institute of Arts of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia, passed away at the age of 86. She was a notable expert in world and Armenian cinema and television, and the author of a monograph on eminent American-Armenian stage and film director Ruben Mamoulian (The Sign of Mamoulian, 2015, in Russian).
Gulyan joined her beloved husband, historian and rare specialist in Arabic countries and the Armenian Genocide, Nikolay Hovhannisyan, who passed away on April 24 of last year.
I am sharing excerpts from my interview with my esteemed colleague and friend, conducted in 2018.
Dear Svetlana, there is an opinion that art historians are those who were unsuccessful in the art field themselves. Is this true in your case?
To some extent. I really wanted to become a director! But I understood that it is very difficult for women in this profession. I also wasn’t particularly healthy. I gave up the idea of becoming a film director, but I couldn’t give up cinema. And five years after graduating from the Russian philology faculty of Yerevan State University, I sat back down on the student bench, but this time at the film studies faculty of the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow.
You were the first among Armenian women film scholars and one of the first professional Armenian film scholars with a VGIK diploma. What did your education at VGIK give you?