While Sergei Parajanov may be Armenian cinema’s most iconic and idiosyncratic filmmaker, the pioneering Hamo Bek-Nazaryan deserves to be much better known as one of Parajanov’s true forebears, having made a series of artistically original, culturally defiant fiction films and documentaries within the constraints of Soviet Socialist Realism in the 1920s and 1930s and—perhaps surprisingly given today’s regional violence in Nagorno-Karabagh—having helped to establish Azerbaijan’s own film industry in the process. Observing and preserving Armenian folkloric traditions that were still threatened with erasure in the aftermath of the genocide of 1915 and the Bolshevik revolution of 1919, Bek-Nazaryan also forged his own modernist aesthetic through experiments with film language. A celebrated actor in pre-revolutionary Russian cinema, Bek-Nazaryan began directing his own films in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and even Siberia and Iran. He also made the first truly indigenous Armenian feature, the romantic folk drama Namus (1925), and the first Armenian sound feature, Pepo (1935), with a score by the Armenian composer Aram Khatchaturyan. Both films are remarkable for their feminist depictions of Armenian and Kurdish women facing violence, and both are said to have inspired the Armenian Hollywood filmmaker Rouben Mamoulian.
Dom na vulkane (The House on the Volcano). 1929. USSR. Directed by Hamo Bek-Nazaryan. Screenplay by Bek-Nazaryan, P. Folyan. With Hrachia Nersisyan, Tigran, Ayvazyan, Tatyana Makhmuryan. North American premiere. Silent, with recorded score by Juliet Merchant, commissioned by Kino Klassika Foundation. 64 min.
“Today it’s impossible to imagine that there was a time when film studios of Yerevan [Armenia] and Baku [Azerbaijan] could cooperate.… In 1928, after 10 years of the Armenian massacres in Baku, A Home on a Volcano, a co-production of Yerevan “Armenkino” and Baku “Azgoskino” studios, was realized. The protagonist of the film is drill master Petros, who tells the story of the oil workers’ strike in pre-Soviet Baku to his adopted son, depicting the relationship between a big oil corporation and working-class people, representatives of various nationalities. The cast also comprised different nationalities; particularly, the future star of Armenian cinema, Tatyana Makhmuryan, [who] made her debut in this film. This was Beknazaryan’s last silent film in Armenia and first collaboration with Baku” (Artsvi Bakhchinyan).
4K digital restoration by One Man Studio, Yerevan, commissioned by the National Cinema Center of Armenia (NCCA) with the support of the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport of the Republic of Armenia; courtesy NCCA.
Yerkir Nairi (Land of Nairi). 1930. USSR. Directed by Hamo Bek-Nazaryan. US premiere. Silent, with recorded score by Vahagn Hayrapetyan. 56 min.
Charting Armenia’s uneasy passage from Russian colony to Soviet republic, Bek-Nazaryan uses various documentary conceits—archival footage, staged scenes, surrealist imagery, the panoramic, the particular, and the poetic—to exalt collectivization over capitalism on the occasion of Soviet Armenia’s 10th anniversary. Land of Nairi was widely shown among the Armenian diaspora of the 1930s before fading from view. This new restoration reminds us that Bek-Nazaryan was a tireless experimenter with film form; as scholar Vigen Galstyan observes, “Through his use of archival footage and his attempts at ‘visual musicality,’ Bek-Nazarian stands as a pioneer, paving a path that culminated with Armenian documentary filmmakers such as Artavazd Pelechian.”
4K digital restoration by One Man Studio, Yerevan, commissioned by the National Cinema Center of Armenia (NCCA) with the support of the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport of the Republic of Armenia; courtesy NCCA.