Memories for Forgetfulness Elsewhere | V. Today
Black Bach Artsakh
Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri
2021
150 Minutes
Date
February 2–16, 2022
Black Bach Artsakh is the name of a world. It lives in and as a film. Those who view it not only inhabit it, but also care for it, keep it alive by keeping watch over it. In this way, it is not a film that so much resists the makers of war and those who deny and continue to justify genocide: It is a film that outlives them.
If film is a document, then it bears witness to a place and a time. For example: This film remembers events from a place called Artsakh in the year 2007—a middle point—exactly thirteen years after the 1994 cessation of hostilities in the struggle for liberation and self-determination by Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenian inhabitants, and thriteen years before the 2020 invasion by the authoritarian government of Azerbaijan, which enlisted Turkey’s military and several thousand mercenaries from Syria to conquer those same lands as its country’s sovereign domain.
Then film as a testament, which this film claims affinity with, is what unsettles the domain or reign of any sovereign or sovereignty. It inhabits a time that is neither the linear one of history nor the make-believe one of fiction, but what some refer to as that of the eternal. For this, and rightly so, Johann Sebastian Bach has been assigned as its honorary composer.
The film is part of an itinerant and intermittent Conference in Shards. (http://centreparrhesia.org/shards/)
Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri’s Black Bach Artsakh is presented within Today, the last of five chapters in Memories for Forgetfulness Elsewhere, an online film program curated by Irmgard Emmelhainz for e-flux Video & Film. The program streams in five thematic group screenings each two weeks long, and will be accompanied by two live discussions on February 2 and 15.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.