Preisgekrönter Film "Ararat" in Sydney: Filmvorführung regt zum Denken und Diskutieren an

Description

A report about the screning of "Ararat" at Mechanics' Cinema. 

Event description:

Ararat (2002), dir. Atom Egoyan

The evening brings Atom Egoyan’s critically acclaimed film Ararat into dialogue with the work of the German-Jewish thinker Günther Anders. As a metafictional film about an attempt to make a film about the Armenian genocide, Ararat explores cinema’s capacity to confront the incomprehensible truths and traumas of history. This same question is raised in Anders’ “Washing the Corpses of History”, a 1941 exile diary, which documents its author’s strange job as a cleaner in a Hollywood costume factory.

Earlier this year, Atom Egoyan donated the historical costumes used in Ararat to the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, an occasion he marked by writing a play. In a coincidence that almost defies belief, the lead actor cast in this play about the power of historical movie costumes had formerly starred in Real is Not Real Enough, a dramatized audio version of Anders’ diary about cleaning the fake replicas of the past. This started the conversation between Anders’ ideas and Egoyan’s film, a conversation this screening will further contribute to.

The evening is hosted by Helen Wolfenden, Chris Muller and Ben Nickl (the team who produced Real is Not Real Enough). The screening is framed by short clips from Anders’s Hollywood diary and a small surprise from Berlin