The ghosts of ravished Armenias: pastiches of genocide

Ravished Armenia – an eight-reel, eighty-five-minute, silent dramatized film based on actual events – first screened in New York City in 1919. It was primarily for the purposes of fundraising. Aurora Mardiganian was a survivor of the Genocide and played the lead role in this film. However, the entire full-length feature film was thought lost until recently, when a twenty- minute segment of the film was found in Armenia. Following the separate discovery in Yerevan in 1994, the twenty-minute segment was incorporated into two new films (although both used the same footage). Even though both films are distinct in their notions of filmic representation, memory and the sacred memorialization of the Genocide, it is no oversight that one rendering is titled Ravished Armenia in order to pay homage to the original film and the Genocide. The second rendering, titled Credo, aims to separate itself from the initial film.