Screamers
Director Carla Garapedian
MG2 Productions
“Screamers” is an apt name for this documentary
““ an impassioned, often incoherent, but always affecting look
at genocide throughout the past 90 years.
Director Carla Garapedian (“Beneath the Veil”)
alternates between concert footage of Armenian-American rock band
System of a Down, interviews with scholars and grainy newsreels of
massacres and killings.
The juxtapositions don’t quite work as a narrative;
Garapedian attempts to segue from System of a Down’s lyrics
about the Armenian Genocide of 1915 to the problem of genocide as a
whole, but sadly fails.
And every time the film starts flirting with worldwide issues,
it returns to the small story of the band. Alternatively, just when
the film seems destined to become an intimate portrait of four
musicians fighting for a cause, the focus abruptly expands, leaving
the audience with a jarring sense of whiplash.
There’s also little in the way of subtlety, what with the
atrocities of genocide being delineated with blunt precision. Yet
this doesn’t actually hurt “Screamers.” In fact,
it’s the whole point.
System of a Down’s loud instrumentals and searing voice
work, likewise unsubtle, combine with Garapedian’s forceful
editing to give the whole film an aura of burgeoning anger.
It becomes clear after a while that for Garapedian the
film’s title constitutes the only real response one can have
toward genocide. We must all scream in protest, and as loud as we
can.
This screaming, however, should not be directed solely at the
perpetrators of genocides, but also at the international community
that does little to stop genocide when it happens.
Governments, argues Garapedian, care more for neutrality and
economic foreign relationships than they do about human rights. As
a result, nothing is done when one culture attempts to eradicate
another; until it’s too late, that is.
It’s a powerful indictment and one that calls for numerous
examples from different conflicts. Unfortunately, though the
required examples are indeed provided, the film’s fixation on
the Armenian Genocide hides the broadness of the themes under the
shadow of specificity.
In another context this would not be a problem. The Armenian
Genocide is a fascinating subject for any artistic endeavor (see
Atom Egoyan’s “Ararat”). But in this case, it
feels like Garapedian set out to make a film exclusively about the
Armenian Genocide, and then last minute decided she wanted her
documentary to be a general overview of history. Consequently, she
succeeded at neither.