Do I have the right to encourage or scold my film partner? I have and I can. In today's heavy competition between public institutions and public institutions, states and states, nations and nations, the people have put me, the writer, and him, the film director, under the yoke of one and the same "cultural cannon", cherishing the hope that we will pull that cannon to the height specified by the nation's destiny. has put it, but here my partner often does not pull it well. Does the film director have the right to scold me, his colleague in literature? has and cannot. Recently, a mixed collection of Armenian-Georgian short stories was published. There, Armenian storytelling is not as weak from Georgian storytelling as Armenian cinema is from Georgian cinema.
I can already hear the prepared phrase of the opponent. "Armenian cinema has its advantages, Georgian cinema has its own, they are not even advantages and disadvantages, they are more necessary differences."
But Georgian cinema has presented its national image of Georgian to its, union and world audience - Armenian, union and world audience has less information about the Armenian national image.
Here, a people admires, disappoints, remembers, hopes, grieves, rejoices on the film cultural map of the audience, but this country, this remnant of a great pilgrimage, is dimly visible, and the full artistic image of that people, in my opinion, does not exist in the heart of the audience, the supreme judge.
Efforts, it seems, have been invested, funds, yes, have been spent, an appropriate amount of film tapes have been drafted, actresses have aged in anticipation of creation, music and painting have been added, Armenian literature has put its best examples under the care of the big brother... and all of this, often out of place.
The idea requires integrity. The desecrated idea is a vengeful thing, it takes revenge both on the desecrator and on itself, it simply does not exist. Culture is the idea of the people's survival, in other words, the spirit of the people. When the cinema and we did not exist, the people created their own epic. That initiative of creation has now been given to us. Dostoyevsky is a Russian writer, that is, he has the pure idea of glorifying the Russian people. Tumanyan is the great Armenian national writer, the influence of the spirit of this people on centuries and countries. There is no anti-national art, it cannot be. Art means national. Apazkyni means outside of art. In me, an Armenian, a Russian person is interested in what is purely mine, what makes me an Armenian. And what we both have in common, he already knows - only the small differences in our descriptions, from which Pushkin mixed there, Tumanya increased here.
But in order to be able to express that small, that insignificant, that insignificant difference compared to the general one, one should know the history, language, poem, song of the people in its entirety, in short, to present that difference from oneself. Who is, let's say, Hamo Sahyan, where does the line "Spring cloud shines in the field, I say you stay good" come from, why can't an Armenian scream at a wedding... random questions that some of our directors would have faced with the naive ignorance of a girl from Tumanyan, Tbilisi: "Daddy, where is this Sasun?" However, it is difficult to imagine a Russian director who considered himself a director and did not know the history, language, poetry, economic and geographical shifts, anxieties, and hopes of his people from root to leaf.
It is in vain to think that it is possible to add such and such shades from national and local colors to the world cinema and get a national cinema. Both the erzatz and the costume must be from the country. Otherwise, the idea is defiled, and the defiled idea consumes both itself and the defamer. As a result, funds and efforts seem to be invested and... in vain.
Whatever it is. The existence of Georgian cinema proves the existence of a unique way of cinema, the existence of national cinema, and H. Malyan's success proves the possibility of creating such cinema in us.
This is not self-deception. it is necessary and time to take the pencil, divide the paper into two columns, write all the successes of all our film directors in one column, the failures in the other, and that total will dictate what should be drawn and what should not be drawn.