Saturday, August 13, 2022
No Result
View All Result
Asbarez.com
NEWSLETTER
ՀԱՅ
  • Home
  • Top Stories
  • Community
  • Arts & Culture
    • Art
    • Books
    • Music
    • Theatre
    • Critics’ Forum
  • Op-Ed
    • Editorial
    • Opinon
    • Letters
  • Columns
    • By Any Means
    • My Turn
    • Three Apples
    • Community Links
    • Critics’ Forum
    • My Name is Armen
    • Living in Armenia
  • Videos
  • Sports
  • Home
  • Top Stories
  • Community
  • Arts & Culture
    • Art
    • Books
    • Music
    • Theatre
    • Critics’ Forum
  • Op-Ed
    • Editorial
    • Opinon
    • Letters
  • Columns
    • By Any Means
    • My Turn
    • Three Apples
    • Community Links
    • Critics’ Forum
    • My Name is Armen
    • Living in Armenia
  • Videos
  • Sports
No Result
View All Result
Asbarez.com
ՀԱՅ
No Result
View All Result

CRITICS’ FORUM: On Movies That Move Us: An Interview with Gariné Torossian

by Contributor
March 2, 2015
in Arts & Culture, Columns, Critics' Forum, Latest
0
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

Poster for 'Stone Time Touch'

BY KAREN JALLATYAN

Gariné Torossian is a Lebanese-born Canadian-Armenian filmmaker who for more than two decades has been making numerous audio-visual works of art of astonishing complexity. She has graciously agreed to answer a few questions regarding her practice and specifically her first feature-length film “Stone Time Touch” (2007). After the film premiered in the Forum section of the Berlin International Film Festival, it went on to be screened at over 50 festivals and aired on the Sundance Channel (USA) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It continues its run in April in Berlin as part of the “INVOCATION—A Cinematic Memorial” program curated by Fred Kelemen, and in autumn of 2015 at the Armenian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, curated by Adelina Von Frustenberg. Our conversation also touched upon Torossian’s early emblematic short film, “Girl From Moush” (1993), and her new feature-length film, “Noise of Time,” about a woman returning to Bourj Hammoud and inadvertently confronting her past.

KAREN JALLATUAN: What were some of the circumstances behind making “Stone Time Touch”?

GARINÉ TOROSSIAN: It was important for me to discover Armenia as a traveler and filmmaker, and to explore the relationship between the real Armenia and my imagined one. It was my first sojourn to Armenia and Georgia, where I stayed for a considerable time. The film is many things, including an exploration of my relationship with the country from different perspectives. One of the characters is a first-time visitor to Armenia. Another knows and depicts the country under a less-than-optimistic light. Yet another is the filmmaker documenting the different layers of reality and perspectives through a series of interviews, mostly with the women of Armenia. All of these perspectives are ones I’m interested in, and so I found a way of interweaving them into my film, which is, in a nutshell, a search for a country, and there are many different perspectives one can excavate, depending on your point of view—who you choose to interview or not, and where you look or not, as well as how you look at a place and its people. Reality and its discovery is a complicated, multi-layered process, so this film was my search for how to approach reality in an authentic way.

K.J.: In an important piece entitled “Diaspora Studies: Past, Present and Promise” (2012), Khachig Tölölyan distinguishes the subjective (individual) and objective (collective, social and material) realities in diasporas by relying on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory.” Postmemory is what is transmitted from often collective gripping traumatic events to the second generation. To what extent were you aware that your subjective perspective in making “Stone Time Touch” would address the broader objective realities pertaining to the Armenian diaspora and its “postmemory”? What did you learn in the course of making this film about the Armenian diasporic “postmemory” as it encountered the “actual” Armenia through you and through the lens of your camera?

G.T.: Well, for an Armenian, there is no way really to leave history. That’s probably true of all people and nationalities. Even if as a diasporic person it’s in fact really easy to leave your country, and I’ve done that many times now, what is more challenging is leaving its collective past. It preoccupies my thoughts and work as an artist, and that’s also true of the Lebanese civil war. That kind of past is different than your individual history, which we’re capable of shaping through our actions and will, but it’s different with collective history—the memories are sort of bequeathed or hoisted upon you independent of your will. For me, as an artist, these are two sources I draw from, and I go back and forth between the individual as well as transnational memories and the larger national memories we’ve inherited as Armenians, and I move between these categories in my films too. I don’t think one has a larger place in my work than the other. I don’t prioritize that way. They are all sources of inspiration, apprehension and exploration. As far as postmemory is concerned and how collective trauma has been transmitted to our generation, it’s not so much the exploration of that idea that is interwoven into “Stone Time Touch,” as much as the search of what constitutes reality. One of the things I learned is that my actual Armenia is not only different than, say, to someone who was born and grew up there, but that what constitutes Armenia in its totality may be very different and unique to a lot of different people based on their experience and biography.


K.J.:
The narrative of encounter, cast at its face value as a “return to homeland,” that you stage in “Stone Time Touch” between a diasporic Armenian identity and the actuality of Armenia, is represented in a style that reminds me of your earlier short film “Girl From Moush” and suggests a certain “diaspora aesthetic.” I borrow the phrase “diaspora aesthetics” from Stuart Hall, who theorizes identity as the practice of positioning ourselves within processes of identification, while acknowledging that difference undercuts all claims to identity. How would you describe your “diaspora aesthetics”? Do such “diaspora aesthetics” also inform your understanding of Armenia as a country, nowadays especially after your visits to Armenia?

Still images from 'Stone Time Touch'

G.T.: I appreciate the distinction, but I don’t see my work as falling into one paradigm or the other. If there is such a thing as a diasporan aesthetics, I see it as very broad. My tastes are quite catholic, kind of wide, and I don’t mean this in the religious sense. I also think that the aesthetic choices between diaspora and homeland will inevitably become more blurred or borrow more from each other—much more so than in the past. Post-Soviet Armenian filmmakers will have more interaction with diasporan filmmakers and the same will be true the other way around. Since “Stone Time Touch,” I lived in Armenia for two consecutive years, and while there are clearly differences, say in architecture, between Soviet modern and the West’s International School, you have more of a cross-pollination of cultures and sensibilities between homeland and the outside, so these categories will become less relevant. Having said that, yes there are differences, real ones, there clearly are. Very likely the Russian sensibility or aesthetics has a much smaller place in my creative representation than it does for post-Soviet Armenian filmmakers. But I try to remain open to all influences and try to watch widely and critically. That’s inevitable because as a diasporan my aesthetic sensibility is very much informed by my movement, my actual movement across frontiers, cities and homes, from Beirut to Toronto, Berlin, Paris, Yerevan, and Montreal, not as a visitor but a resident.

K.J.: Hudson Moura from the University of Toronto has written extensively about your films. He sees your work as simultaneously positioned between cultures and media, one liminal positioning nourishing the other. To what extent did you feel yourself as an artist-in-exile when you started your artistic projects? In what ways did you experience, if ever, a transition from being in exile to living in the diaspora? And finally, was there a moment when you felt that you had decidedly overcome any sense of melancholic longing for a homeland, especially after the making of “Stone Time Touch”?

G.T.:
Yes, I have overcome that melancholic longing, and that happened after I lived in Yerevan for two consecutive years. My second son was born there, the first one in Paris. Those were personal choices we made as a family—professional choices, artistic choices; so the multiple migrations from city to city that we’ve made in recent years had little to do with that exilic condition. Exile presupposes some kind of forced expulsion from one’s homeland. So I’ve never felt that exilic experience in the larger existential sense. Melancholy and memory, yes, the search for a multifarious identity shaped by my residencies in different places, yes, but that’s quite different than exile. Even before my hyper movement across borders since 2007, when my feature came out, I was more focused on identity as a theme in my work, but perhaps that’s not so peculiar to my case. The search for identity has a particular place in Canada and among Canadians, so maybe their preoccupation with it only fed my curiosity with the issue.

K.J.: “Stone Time Touch,” in contrast to “Girl From Moush,” has pockets of stories and an overarching narrative. What are the ways in which you think about telling stories in your films as opposed to reframing iconic images to shift the way we see them? What are the forces of storytelling that you strive to harness in “Stone Time Touch” and in your current work?

G.T.: I’ve moved more toward narrative with my current feature, which I’m still editing. It’s not script-based in the traditional sense. I don’t think I’d ever want to do that, at least not in the commercial sense, but there are scripted parts to it, and there are several overarching stories and acting in it, so “Noise of Time” will be different than what I’ve done in the past. My earlier short films were a flood of poetic and iconic imagery, and there will always be that in my work, but I’ve become more interested in telling the stories of others than working my obsessions and inner world onto actual film stock. I also think that it’s a pity that industry pundits throw films into categories or buckets like experimental or narrative. It’s more important to make good films, ones that move us, with unique characters that stay with us. So to get back to your question, one of the forces behind my storytelling is to try and build the narrative around remarkable and strong characters. The story has to be character-driven.

K.J.: The moving images in “Stone Time Touch” throb with the intricate rhythms of Zulal a cappella trio’s renditions of Armenian folk tunes. Why did you decide to use the music of this diaspora Armenian group? Is this just a rhythmic frame, or did you also want to draw attention to the cultural production of the diaspora, in an attempt to reflect upon it?

G.T.: I loved their music. It resonated with me, and it fit perfectly with the images. I wasn’t thinking of the diaspora when I decided to use their music in the film, just how beautiful their voices are. The closing scene is actually very moving and features a young girl from Armenia singing. It’s in there because it’s beautiful, not because she was born in historic Armenia.

K.J.:
“Stone Time Touch” is rare among films representing Armenia and the Armenian diaspora because it is from women’s perspectives and draws attention to the reality of women in so many ways. Despite the oblique presence of powerful patriarchal institutions in the film, “Stone Time Touch” creates a space in which women represent and are represented. The three protagonists are women: Kamee Abrahamian, Arsinée Khanjian, and yourself, Gariné Torossian. The voices of the Zulal trio are all female. The poor and the artists represented are, by and large, women. Of course, there are men in the film, but they do not monopolize the space of representation. Did you pay careful attention to the role of women in conceiving of “Stone Time Touch”?

G.T.: Yes, very much so. Women, except in a few countries, generally do not occupy positions of authority in the world. In more patriarchal countries like Armenia, this reality is even more appalling. I thought it was important to give voice to the women of Armenia, as theirs is very much an under-represented one. Yet, in so many households, they’re the ones who are the mothers, the breadwinners, the cooks, and full-time workers. I’ve never seen such strong-willed and confident women. Armenia needs its own version of Germany’s Angela Merkel. It would be a great premise for a movie too.

Karen Jallatyan is a Ph.D. student of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine and plans to write an interdisciplinary dissertation on the contemporary visual and digital culture of Armenia and the Armenian diaspora. He or any of the other contributors to Critics’ Forum may be reached at comments@criticsforum.org. This and all other articles published in this series are available online at criticsforum.org. To sign up for electronic versions of new articles, go to criticsforum.org/join. Critics’ Forum is a group created to discuss issues relating to Armenian art and culture in the Diaspora.

Contributor

Contributor

Next Post

Hamazkayin to Stage ‘Music From Armenia’ for Cello and Piano

Comments 0

  1. Stefan K says:
    7 years ago

    Lovely and lucid. Bravo Critics Forum.

    Reply
  2. Lorie says:
    7 years ago

    Girl from Moush has this haunting quality that has stayed with me all these years, and Torossian’s Stone Time Touch, somehow does the same. I saw the latter not at the Berlinale, but in an old factory space in LA, and have been carrying it with me ever since. Very thoughtful interview about her approach, which revealingly seems informed by her lived, visceral, experience, and geographic movement. I love the power and honesty of her films, things I rarely get from directors who come to a plot from the outside and try to make sense of it on screen. This often results in a wooden and cold cinematic experience. Torossian’s films, by contrast, are the opposite: warm, curious, uncomfortable, urgent, irreverent, understood from within, and sincere, and somehow, one of a kind. They stay with you.

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Lorie Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recommended

Baku’s Goal is to Pressure Yerevan to ‘Capitulate’ During Negotiations, Says Crisis Group

Baku’s Goal is to Pressure Yerevan to ‘Capitulate’ During Negotiations, Says Crisis Group

13 hours ago
Canada’s Foreign Minister Visits Toronto Armenian Center

Canada’s Foreign Minister Visits Toronto Armenian Center

14 hours ago

Connect with us

  • About
  • Advertising
  • Subscribe
  • Contact

© 2021 Asbarez | All Rights Reserved | Powered By MSDN Solutions Inc.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Top Stories
  • Community
  • Arts & Culture
    • Art
    • Books
    • Music
    • Theatre
    • Critics’ Forum
  • Op-Ed
    • Editorial
    • Opinon
    • Letters
  • Columns
    • By Any Means
    • My Turn
    • Three Apples
    • Community Links
    • Critics’ Forum
    • My Name is Armen
    • Living in Armenia
  • Videos
  • Sports

© 2021 Asbarez | All Rights Reserved | Powered By MSDN Solutions Inc.

Accessibility

Accessibility modes

Epilepsy Safe Mode
Dampens color and removes blinks
This mode enables people with epilepsy to use the website safely by eliminating the risk of seizures that result from flashing or blinking animations and risky color combinations.
Visually Impaired Mode
Improves website's visuals
This mode adjusts the website for the convenience of users with visual impairments such as Degrading Eyesight, Tunnel Vision, Cataract, Glaucoma, and others.
Cognitive Disability Mode
Helps to focus on specific content
This mode provides different assistive options to help users with cognitive impairments such as Dyslexia, Autism, CVA, and others, to focus on the essential elements of the website more easily.
ADHD Friendly Mode
Reduces distractions and improve focus
This mode helps users with ADHD and Neurodevelopmental disorders to read, browse, and focus on the main website elements more easily while significantly reducing distractions.
Blindness Mode
Allows using the site with your screen-reader
This mode configures the website to be compatible with screen-readers such as JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, and TalkBack. A screen-reader is software for blind users that is installed on a computer and smartphone, and websites must be compatible with it.

Online Dictionary

    Readable Experience

    Content Scaling
    Default
    Text Magnifier
    Readable Font
    Dyslexia Friendly
    Highlight Titles
    Highlight Links
    Font Sizing
    Default
    Line Height
    Default
    Letter Spacing
    Default
    Left Aligned
    Center Aligned
    Right Aligned

    Visually Pleasing Experience

    Dark Contrast
    Light Contrast
    Monochrome
    High Contrast
    High Saturation
    Low Saturation
    Adjust Text Colors
    Adjust Title Colors
    Adjust Background Colors

    Easy Orientation

    Mute Sounds
    Hide Images
    Virtual Keyboard
    Reading Guide
    Stop Animations
    Reading Mask
    Highlight Hover
    Highlight Focus
    Big Dark Cursor
    Big Light Cursor
    Navigation Keys

    Asbarez.com Accessibility Statement

    Accessibility Statement

    • asbarez.com
    • August 13, 2022

    Compliance status

    We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.

    To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.

    This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.

    Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.

    If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email

    Screen-reader and keyboard navigation

    Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:

    1. Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all of the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.

      These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.

    2. Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside of it.

      Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.

    Disability profiles supported in our website

    • Epilepsy Safe Mode: this profile enables people with epilepsy to use the website safely by eliminating the risk of seizures that result from flashing or blinking animations and risky color combinations.
    • Visually Impaired Mode: this mode adjusts the website for the convenience of users with visual impairments such as Degrading Eyesight, Tunnel Vision, Cataract, Glaucoma, and others.
    • Cognitive Disability Mode: this mode provides different assistive options to help users with cognitive impairments such as Dyslexia, Autism, CVA, and others, to focus on the essential elements of the website more easily.
    • ADHD Friendly Mode: this mode helps users with ADHD and Neurodevelopmental disorders to read, browse, and focus on the main website elements more easily while significantly reducing distractions.
    • Blindness Mode: this mode configures the website to be compatible with screen-readers such as JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, and TalkBack. A screen-reader is software for blind users that is installed on a computer and smartphone, and websites must be compatible with it.
    • Keyboard Navigation Profile (Motor-Impaired): this profile enables motor-impaired persons to operate the website using the keyboard Tab, Shift+Tab, and the Enter keys. Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.

    Additional UI, design, and readability adjustments

    1. Font adjustments – users, can increase and decrease its size, change its family (type), adjust the spacing, alignment, line height, and more.
    2. Color adjustments – users can select various color contrast profiles such as light, dark, inverted, and monochrome. Additionally, users can swap color schemes of titles, texts, and backgrounds, with over 7 different coloring options.
    3. Animations – epileptic users can stop all running animations with the click of a button. Animations controlled by the interface include videos, GIFs, and CSS flashing transitions.
    4. Content highlighting – users can choose to emphasize important elements such as links and titles. They can also choose to highlight focused or hovered elements only.
    5. Audio muting – users with hearing devices may experience headaches or other issues due to automatic audio playing. This option lets users mute the entire website instantly.
    6. Cognitive disorders – we utilize a search engine that is linked to Wikipedia and Wiktionary, allowing people with cognitive disorders to decipher meanings of phrases, initials, slang, and others.
    7. Additional functions – we provide users the option to change cursor color and size, use a printing mode, enable a virtual keyboard, and many other functions.

    Browser and assistive technology compatibility

    We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and for MAC users.

    Notes, comments, and feedback

    Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs, there may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to