Documentary Images 1911-1918

History. The Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire was annihilated between 1895 and 1923 in a series of mass killings, deportations, death marches, and deliberate starvation. In the last phase, beginning in 1915, genocide of the Armenians became state policy of the Young Turk government, who had seized power in 1913. Planned and implemented by Mehmed Tal’at Pascià, then minister of the Interior, the massacres make for grim reading: an estimated 800,000 to 1,500,000 Armenians perished.
In the course of the 19th century the Ottoman Empire lost all its North African territories to greedy European colonial powers; Russia seized the Crimea and the lands of the Caucasus including Georgia and Eastern Armenia; and in the Balkan wars of 1912-1913, rich European provinces gained their independence (with the support of Russia, Austria and France), resulting in hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees streaming into Asia Minor. A new nationalist policy conceived of Anatolia as a turkified homeland inhabited by a purely Turkish population. In consequence, Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians who had lived in Asia Minor since ancient times suffered deportation and extermination.
Travelogues. The cinématographistes of the Lumière brothers went to Mexico (Gabriel Veyre), Tunisia (Alexandre Promio), Japan (Constant Girel) and Moscow (Charles Moisson), but not to Erivan. And the service de voyage of Pathé frères, busily shooting travelogues and scène d’industrie in China, Astrakhan and Dakar, clearly preferred tourist spots and French colonies. Film coverage of the Caucasian region, then under Russian rule, was poor: the Pathé catalogue lists only a view of Gagra (1914), one of Sotchi (1913) and three travelogues showing unnamed scenic mountains of the region (À travers la Russie, 1908; Le Caucase pittoresque, 1913; Torrents et montagnes au Caucase, 1914). None of these five films seem to exist at present (and maybe none of them showed Armenia).
The exception to the rule was Giovanni Vitrotti (1882-1966), the leading director of photography of the Società Anonima Ambrosio, who in the years 1910-1912 sojourned in Moscow several times and worked there on behalf of Ambrosio for the production company Thiemann & Reinhardt. On one occasion he travelled to the Caucasus to film, resulting in seventeen actuality films in the 1911 Ambrosio catalogue, depicting the landscapes of mount Kazbek and Ararat, the towns of Batumi, Erivan, Wladikawkas, Mleti, Tiflis (Tbilisi), Etchmiadzin, plus customs of the Caucasian Persians and Cossacks. Vitrotti’s travelogues had the usual length of 100 to 250 metres (e.g. a duration of 5 to 15 minutes). So far only one of the series could be traced: a print of Ani la città delle mille chiese has been preserved in the Joye collection (now in the BFI).
Newsreel. Two glimpses, two canopies, one for Kevork V (George V) who became katholikòs of all Armenians in 1911, and one for a torah scroll in Kutaisi before war sets in. Film images from war times are difficult to find and difficult to identify. Le Front Turc shows Russian soldiers and Turkish prisoners: this would be before the battle of Sarikamish. In a series of shots titled “From the Soviet Archive”, we recognize US Consul Oscar S. Heizer, who witnessed deportations and expropriations in Trabzon in 1915, reporting the atrocities to US consul Henry Morgenthau. There are no extant films documenting them directly. The core of witness images are the photographs taken by German soldier, medic and poet Armin T. Wegner, near Deir ez-Zor in the Syrian Desert, a major destination point for the death marches.
Cinematographic images need research to gain their meaning, their narrative. Whom do they show? Where? An Armenian refugee camp in Port Said? Filmed by a French army cinematographer in 1918? For 53 days, 4,200 inhabitants of six Armenian villages famously resisted the Turkish assaults on Musa Dagh, near Antioch, and were rescued on 12 September 1915 by Allied war ships. They were conducted to Port Said, where they lived in a camp until the end of the war.

Mariann Lewinsky