The Project

In his lens-based installation, Egoyan re-presents the traumatic account of Aurora Mardiganian, a young woman who survived the Armenian genocide and whose story was published and then filmed in the United States under the titles Ravished Armenia and Auction of Souls (1919), in which she played herself.

The Brief

In 2007, I was fortunate enough to contribute to Canadian filmmaker, artist, and Academy Award Nominee Atom Egoyan’s Auroras exhibition for Toronto’s inaugural Luminato Festival. For this project I was asked to act as camera operator and contributed to the post production.

The Process

Egoyan’s installation plays on the fact that Mardiganian, after collapsing during the film’s promotional tour, was replaced by seven “look-alikes.” Encountered as a series of projections or monitors, Auroras shows seven women retelling Aurora’s harrowing story, which began as 15,000 Armenian women and children were ordered from their village. Their narrative culminates when Ottoman soldiers attack, raping a girl and killing her mother. Egoyan’s staging of Mardiganian’s testimony offers a startling reformulation of filmic witnessing.

By multiplying the subjects who retell her traumatic story, and multiplying the screens on which they appear, Egoyan brings into question the filmic conventions by which victims are framed as sacred subjects and held at a safe remove from the viewer’s world.

The project was shot in a multi-cam format, on Canon’s GL1 cameras on Mini DV. Post production was done in Final Cut Pro 7.

The Results

The project was the marquee piece for the inaugural Luminato Festival in Toronto and has since toured the world, being both screen-based and projected from country to country up until 2018.

Credits

CLIENT: LUMINATO FESTIVAL

DIRECTOR: ATOM EGOYAN

PRODUCER: MARCY GERSTEIN

CINEMATOGRAPHY/CAMERA OPERATOR: ANDRE ELIJAH