After gazing a hundred times at the Armenfilm screen with hope and faith, and almost as often leaving the cinema with a feeling of embarrassment — each successive failure seems your own personal failure — if we speak wittily about our cinema today, it means we still cherish hope, have not given up on our “prodigal brother”, and never will. Faithless cynicism has not yet hardened into a mask upon our faces, and never will. It will not, because cinema today, and still more tomorrow, in the grave national and class struggle over existence itself, is the most important sector of our cultural front. Defeat there would be tantamount to defeat along the whole front, and there we ought to concentrate our most talented organisers and artists. This is no exaggeration: cinema, and first and foremost cinema, can tell the world who we are, where we come from and where we are going.
But first we must know who we are, and only then say it. Do we know? Do most of our directors know their people’s history, poetry and language even half as well as Tarkovsky, Bondarchuk, Mikhalkov, or the most obscure Russian director? Can our director, proceeding from language alone, from knowledge of Armenian alone, trace the history of the people’s journey or draw the features of its moral character? Can he, if his camera should happen to be taken away, be an Armenian writer? Not merely a writer in general, which today would unfortunately also be desirable, but an Armenian, a national writer, an artist able to tell his own story? The answer is one and universally known. And from this same fortress of ignorance and inability begin both the equally significant “blind pilgrimage” and the equally blind “crusade” into Armenian literature and reality.
It seems, at least in the first case, that there is nothing wrong; that this is at least fidelity to the letter and word of the native literature, and thus to the people’s spirit. In reality, however, both disdain through ignorance and fidelity through ignorance are equally destructive to cinema itself.
Almost every more or less prominent Armenian in every important field, from sport to affairs of state and politics, and almost every reasonably successful literary work have passed across the screen. Here and there Armenians continue to distinguish themselves, our time adds such achievements as it can to those of our literary forebears, and Armenian cinema continues to follow our reality and literature. It continues to film already existing, completed, established, settled situations and figures, which certainly deserve respect and honour but do not allow the creative artist to say his own word: they impose their own, already long familiar. Yet every serious art, cinema included, and every self-respecting artist becomes such only by revealing and exploring new problems of reality, creating new values from its raw material, rather than reviving existing values and supposedly translating them into a new language. What would the directors themselves call us writers if we retold their films in the language of literature?
You are writers too, only you write with a miraculous camera. It is time, it is time, dear younger brothers — younger, but long since no longer small — to stand before the task of creating this people’s cultural life, and thus before this country’s future, with an equal brother’s rights and equal responsibility.