Do I have the right to encourage or reproach my colleague in cinema? I do, and I can. In today’s fierce competition between social systems, states and nations, the people have yoked me, the writer, and him, the film director, to one and the same “cultural cannon,” hoping that we will haul it up to the height marked out by the nation’s destiny. They have yoked us together, but my partner often pulls poorly. Does the film director have the right to reproach me, his colleague in literature? He does, but he cannot: a joint collection of Armenian and Georgian short stories has recently appeared. The Armenian short story in it is nowhere near as far behind the Georgian short story as Armenian cinema is behind Georgian cinema.
I can already hear the opponent’s ready-made phrase: “Armenian cinema has its strengths, Georgian cinema has its own; these are not even strengths and weaknesses, but rather necessary differences.”
But Georgian cinema has presented the national character of the Georgian to its own, Soviet and worldwide audiences; Armenian, Soviet and worldwide audiences know little of the Armenian national character.
Here a people admires, is disappointed, remembers, hopes, grieves and rejoices on the spectator’s cultural map of cinema, while this country—this remnant of a great pilgrimage—is only dimly visible. And in my opinion, a fully realised artistic image of its people does not exist in the heart of the spectator, the highest judge.
Efforts seem to have been made; money has indeed been spent; the requisite amount of film has been exposed. Actresses have grown old waiting for artistic creation; music and painting have been added; Armenian literature, with an elder brother’s solicitude, has placed its finest works at cinema’s disposal… And all this, often, to no purpose.
An idea demands purity. A corrupted idea is vengeful: it takes revenge both on its corrupter and on itself—quite simply, it never comes into being. Culture is the idea of a people’s endurance, in other words, its spirit. Before cinema and before us, the people itself created its epic. The initiative for that creation has now been entrusted to us. Dostoevsky is a Russian writer: that is, he is the uncorrupted idea of the Russian people’s elevation. Tumanyan is the great Armenian national writer, the flight of this people’s spirit over centuries and countries. Art without a nation does not and cannot exist. Art means national art. Without a nation means outside art. What interests a Russian in me, an Armenian, is what is mine alone, what makes me Armenian. What the two of us have in common he already knows—only the small differences in our characters, out of which Pushkin arose there and Tumanyan rose here, interest him.
But to express that small, minute, insignificant difference beside all that is shared, one must know the people’s history, language, poetry and song in their full extent—in short, one must be that difference, embody it. Who, for instance, is Hamo Sahyan? Where, for instance, does the line “To the spring cloud in the bright sky I say farewell” come from? Why can an Armenian not shout “Gorko!” at a wedding?… Chance questions before which some of our directors would stand with the innocent ignorance of Tumanyan’s little girl from Tiflis: “Papa, where is this Sasun?” Yet it is hard to imagine a Russian director who considered himself a director without knowing, from root to crown, his people’s history, language, poetry, economic and geographical shifts, anxieties and hopes.
It is futile to suppose that one can add this or that shade of national, local colour to a substitute for world cinema and obtain a national cinema. Both the substitute and its costume must come from the country itself. Otherwise the idea is corrupted, and the corrupted idea devours both itself and its corrupter. The result is what looks like an investment of money and effort, and… all for nothing.
Be that as it may, the existence of Georgian cinema demonstrates the unique form in which cinema exists: national cinema. And H. Malyan’s success demonstrates that we, too, can create such a cinema.
This is no self-deception. We need—and it is time—to take a pencil, divide a sheet of paper into two columns, put all the successes of all our film directors in one column and their failures in the other. That reckoning itself will tell us what we ought to film and what we ought not to film.