Ravished Armenia

In 1939 Hitler justified the pogroms perpetrated by his regime by sneering "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" Twenty years earlier Aurora Mardiganian contrived to preempt that boast when her eye-witness account was published in 1918, followed by a film that achieved a great impact but of which today only a small fragment remains.

In a fashion similar to 'Nuit et Brouillard' the bleached out images create the quality of a nightmare. Instead of cattle trucks we see camels against a barren desert, and it's strange to see the perpetrators wearing fezs rather than Nazi uniforms; while the final image of the corpses of naked young woman who have suffered a mass crucifixion resembles a grotesque parody of the road to Calvary.