Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity | Films, Armenian Feature

Any act of tyranny or terror involves a dehumanizing of the "other"—the individual or group upon which the act is perpetrated. Can a work of art that depicts an act of terror ever serve to counter this effect? If an act of genocide is only made possible by the abstraction of other human beings, can a film about genocide serve to rectify this violence? While it is certainly clear that there is a disparity between the horror of man's inhumanity to man and the uneasy alchemy that occurs when one combines elements of cinema and atrocity, it is also obvious that we live in a world where the currency of images is crucial to our understanding of any historic event. Who has the authority—be it moral, spiritual, or artistic—to tell a story of horror? And who decides if this story of horror can even be told?

The best-known novel to deal with the Armenian Genocide was written by an Austrian Jew, Franz Werfel, in 1933. The Forty...