genocide.html
Powerful documentary on genocide screened at Kennedy School
By Thomas Caywood
Special to the Harvard News Office
Those who loudly refused to let the world turn a blind eye or feign
helplessness as genocides ravaged millions of lives this century and last
are sometimes dubbed "screamers."
The Harvard community got an earful Monday evening (Feb. 5) from an
unlikely quartet of modern screamers – the chart-topping, earsplitting
heavy metal band System of a Down – during an advance screening of the new
documentary "Screamers" at the John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Starr
Auditorium.
The band members, like filmmaker Carla Garapedian, are the grandchildren of
survivors of the Ottoman Empire’s slaughter of more than a million
Armenians from 1915 to 1917.
Garapedian’s powerful film weaves together blaring concert footage of
System of a Down, screamers in both senses of the word, with horrifying
images of bloody or decomposing genocide victims sprawled grotesquely
across the ground in Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey, Germany, Bosnia, Rwanda, and
the Darfur region of Sudan. The extraordinary juxtaposition of a raucous,
sweaty, heavy-metal concert with talking-head segments of activists and
scholars, including Samantha Power, Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of
Global Leadership and Public Policy at the Kennedy School, went over well
with the overflow crowd at the screening.
One teenage System of a Down fan said the film helped him grasp the meaning
and emotion behind the songs he loves. Meanwhile, a woman who described
herself as a senior citizen said during the discussion after the film that
she found the dark, angry hard rock a perfect complement to the film’s
unflinching examination of genocide.
"It may not be the sort of music you normally hear in the Kennedy School of
Government," Garapedian quipped, adding that the audience’s hearing likely
would be restored about a half-hour after the film ended.
The three-year documentary project began in 2004 after Garapedian was asked
by the band along with other human rights activists and organizations to
set up information booths outside a Los Angeles concert.
"The fans came over and said they knew about the Armenian genocide. These
were 16- and 17-year-old kids from every ethnic group and every
socioeconomic group you can think of in Los Angeles. They weren’t
Armenians," Garapedian recalled. "They had been politicized by the band,
and that impressed me."
System of a Down’s success in bringing the largely forgotten story of the
Armenian slaughter to legions of pierced and black-clad young hard rock
fans around the globe came as Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book
"A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" continued to garner
critical acclaim. The two events coupled with Turkey’s ongoing efforts to
join the European Union while stridently denying the Armenian genocide
convinced an editor at BBC Television to back the film, Garapedian said.
In one scene, Power explains the origin of the term "screamer" as it
relates to genocide. "When you actually allow it all in. There’s no other
alternative but to go up to people and to scream, and to say, ‘The sky is
falling. The sky is falling. People are being systematically butchered, and
we can stop it.’ "
System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian, a wiry man with a mane of thick
black hair and a long chin beard, muses at one point during the film: "It’s
so crazy how men could be so cruel to men. It’s hard for the mind to
process."
During the discussion, Garapedian said that genocide continues, despite our
frequent pledges of "Never again," in part because people don’t feel a
connection to nameless victims on the other side of the world.
"Somehow our outrage is not there. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but
it’s not there. It’s missing," she said. "But the rage of the music allows
us to access it in some way. That was my hope with this film, that people
who see it in the movie theaters, especially young people, will feel they
can do something."
The audience erupted in an incredulous chuckle during the movie’s montage
of press conference footage in which U.S. government officials and
spokespeople sputter and stammer while carefully avoiding saying the word
"genocide" while discussing variously ongoing massacres in Bosnia, Rwanda,
and Darfur. Activist wags have dubbed the verbal gymnastics the "Genocide
Jig," Power said.
Among the members of the audience were Henry Morgenthau III, the grandson
of the U.S. Ambassador to Ottoman Turkey who tried unsuccessfully at the
time of the genocide to mobilize world opinion against it. The elderly
Morgenthau expressed hope after the screening that the film’s focus on a
multi-platinum-selling heavy metal band would help raise the profile of the
Armenian genocide for a new generation.
"The Armenian genocide has become forgotten as other genocides continue to
take place. We have to remember that we haven’t really given any meaning to
‘Never again,’" he said.
Omar Ishmael of the Darfur Peace and Development Organization later echoed
that sentiment.
"It’s about Armenia," Ishmael said, "but it tells the story of what is
happening today."
"Screamers" opens Feb. 9 at the Fresh Pond 10 cinema on Alewife Brook
Parkway and at the Showcase Cinema Worcester North 18 on Brooks St.
Copyright 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College