performers
by Douglas Messerli
Don Askarian (screenwriter and director) Musicians / 2000
Although the director has called his
2000 documentary, Musicians, I would suggest that, although many
of the figures in this film are indeed musicians, Askarian displays as much
interest in “performance”—particularly dance and high-wire movements (which
often mimic dance)—as he is with musical sound. And, at times, even when he
does focus on musicians, the interest of their performance has less to do with
musical sound than with other things in which they engage.
In one long scene a small musical group, with unbelievably beat-up horns and a long worn-out drum, arrive at their destination against a rotting wall in the city, occasionally blaring a note or two before they sit down across the overturned drum to dine on tomatoes, bread, a stew, cured meats and, most importantly, slightly diluted vodka, before they are willing to take up their instruments again. Their brief performance sounds as if it might have been played by just such a group in Sicily as in the mountainous country north of Turkey and Iran. But soon the players have put down their instruments again to drink more vodka, and it is clear that despite the director’s urging for them to continue in their concert, they are perhaps too drunk to continue with the music. Yet their whole performance, such as it is, is one of the most joyous, even comical moments, of Askarian’s film.
Another “musical” performance involves a funeral ritual at a cemetery. A
young boy burns something over the grave before anointing the spot with oil and
serving drinks to the two men who then play a brief piece upon their reed,
flute-like instruments. But the ceremony is far more important, and impressive,
than the music with which they close the event.
One of the longest scenes involves a brilliant tight-rope walker
performing before the ancient monastery of Khor-Virap. With only a balancing
pole, the walker not only gracefully crisscrosses the metal rope which is
nearly invisible against the landscape, but walks blindly, his entire body
covered in a black robe, across the same space, climbs small ladders balanced
upon
When musicians are the subject of Askarian’s documentary—a drummer, two
accordion players, and musicians performing on string instruments that seem
related to the lute—they are generally placed in covered pathways, alleys, the
halls of Yerevan dwellings, and other odd locations were the camera focuses not
only on their performances, but on the comings and goings of passersby or on
the street activities of everyday persons, young boys, girls, old men, and
women who live their lives, apparently, as much on the street as inside their
houses. Throughout the strange and soaring music these musicians’ performances
is played out against a world of decay—walls, buildings, gates, and other
objects peeling away and in near collapse. Even the men who perform these
pieces are nearly destroyed, one accordionist—who plays what appears to be
improvised pieces—is missing a leg; another displays a large portrait of
himself in his youth, in almost painful testimony to the old, toothless man he
has become.
That is, obviously, Askarian’s major point. As he writes of this film:
What happens after the empire?
All know and expect it in the advance,
only one thing they don’t know:
Despite the destruction, the disintegration,
the betrayal…despite the
annihilation of all bases of the life, the music
sounds, and how it sounds!
Higher and higher, over the human sorrow
and over the pain! It is also
one, daily practiced mental attitude, stand
and exercise, that awakens a
hope in the abandoned and in those, who
already have lost the last hope.
We enter an institution of art in this film only once, where we see a
man wearing a costume of another being just like him, ritualistically battling
it out with the other, wrestling with and tossing over and over the other and
his own body. Askarian views the scene from the top, a spiral staircase
spinning out below the camera. Is this his statement about the spiraling down,
the inevitable need to wrestle with oneself to express a vision, in short, a
failure, of formal art? As a noted filmmaker, Askarian clearly has known that
struggle throughout his life. The folk
artists whom he primarily observes have no such dilemmas; their performances
are simply part and parcel of the greater community, as natural as breathing in
and breathing out.
Los Angeles, October 21, 2011
Reprinted from International
Cinema Review (October 2011)
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