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The Quest for Aurora: On ‘Ravished Armenia’ and its Surviving Fragment
Special for The Armenian Weekly April Magazine
A personal memoir
Four score and 15 years ago, “Ravished Armenia” (or “Auction of Souls”), the silent movie where Aurora Mardiganian (1901-94) played her own story of survival of the Medz Yeghern (Great Crime), came onto the silver screen as the earliest example of a genocidal crime embedded into a Hollywood production. The outcome was not very enlightening, as film historian Anthony Slide, one of its most knowledgeable students, has a
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How about getting Hollywood to produce a “Sophie’s Choice” type of movie, with a big name actress like Meryl Streep, playing Arashalous Mardigian in a professional production, from the book, of Ravished Armenia.
A fascinating account, thanks for setting the records straight!
Vartan; thank you for the extensive research in this exceptional, in-depth writing. Those of us who are silent movie buffs will want to print this off and study it with care. It deserves more than a one-time read. You are right that the passing of time has made us realize the value of silent film; and on more than one level. Published information like yours helps to ensure that anything that turns up in the future will be preserved. We are even beginning to recognize the value of old slides as an art form, and no longer discard them.
I’m glad you clarified the identity of Franz Werfel! You had me spinning for a couple of sentences!
With the large number of Armenians working in the film industry in Hollywood and NYC not to mention other notable cities — London, Paris, Berlin, Yerevan, Toronto (where is Atom Egoyan when we need him?] — it seems highly possible and probably that one of them will pick up the “ball” and start rolling it until this becomes a widely known film. Maybe wishful thinking, but still….
Thank you for this excellent account of a film that I only recently learned about. Clearly, this article is the result of an enormous amount of research on the author’s part, and it is an important contribution to our cultural history. I will be printing it out also.
can you see : http://www.armenews.com/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=109764#p109764