Mediatized Witnessing, Spectacles of Pain, and Reenacting Suffering: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarian Cinema

Abstract

Focusing on the conception, production, distribution (and disappearance) of Ravished Armenia (1919) and Alice in Hungerland (1921), two silent films on the Armenian Genocide from a gendered perspective, this chapter combines media history (“technologies of witnessing”) with the history of global humanitarianism. These two oldest movies on the genocide were shot with the initiative of the Near East Relief in order to raise donations and international awareness through the reenactment of suffering, sensationalization of violence, and victimized Armenian bodies. Both films enjoyed a short-lived fame and revenue, followed by disappearance and subsequent oblivion. The early humanitarian cinematic representation of the Armenian genocide sheds light on the ferocious mediatization and marketing strategies of humanitarian agencies, specifically as to how they targeted the corporal bodies of their lead orphan actresses, Arshalouys Mardigian and Esther Razon, through extensive bodily interventions, enormous workload, and reenactment of suffering.

Introduction

As Leshu Torchin has recently noted, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, human rights advocacy has largely relied on testimony to make ethical claims on its audience.¹ With the emergence of new media forms in the early twentieth century, new “technologies of witnessing” increased the role of visual images in determining the representation and recognition of violence and humanitarian responses to it.² Greatly convinced of the force of visual evidence, as well of the power of a traumatized witness and a heart-breaking testimony, Western humanitarian discourse and practice both during and immediately after the Armenian Genocide relied greatly on visibility, survivors/witnesses, and testimony. The years following the Great War were decidedly significant for visual media and humanitarian cinema. Between 1919 and 1923, there was an intense production of silent movies, which focused on American relief campaign for German-occupied Belgium and France, Armenian genocide survivors, famine in Russia, Greek refugees (and the relief operations directed to them). The first two movies on the Armenian Genocide, Ravished Armenia/Auction of Souls (1919)³ and Alice in Hungerland (1921), are the earliest examples of the representation of genocide in this novel media form.

Both films were initiatives of and produced by the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief (ACASR), also later called the Near East Relief (NER). Relying also on their legacy of decades long missionary philanthropy through the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and experience with earlier Armenian massacres in the 1890s and 1909,⁴ NER translated its transnational evangelical legacy and long-established rhetoric of Christian martyrdom and biblical iconography into a new human rights visual culture of testimony through these two films. The NER films on the Armenian genocide were early examples of the mediation of survivor testimony—in their terminology an innocent Christian child “martyr,” who was paradoxically still alive—to create advocacy and politicize the public. American missionary activity, though familiar with practices of publicity and testimony in a humanitarian advocacy context, was refashioned as a result of the encounter with the film industry and the promises of a film set.

Humanitarian cinema as it was first produced in the early twentieth century established and standardized certain long-term templates and tropes for the depiction of human suffering.⁵ The visual representation of the Armenian Genocide turned the plight of Armenian orphans into an “icon of children’s suffering in Western humanitarian discourse and intervention.”⁶ Ravished Armenia and Alice in Hungerland are pioneering and original films to analyze the use of new media technologies in institutionalization and professionalization of humanitarian practices. First of all, both of them benefitted from the immediacy of the cinema technology, which greatly strengthened the affective experience of the viewers. The audience was compelled to witness the suffering of the victim through repetitive images of the body in pain.⁷ Suffering, spectacle, and compassion became closely interconnected with each other. The chapter, in that sense, addresses the new language of cinematic humanitarianism as a “spectacle of suffering.”⁸

New technologies and medias of witnessing also coincided with the growth of marketing as a new sector. Building upon newly developing marketing techniques, mass culture, and “sensationalism,” modern mass humanitarianism transformed fundraising into a marketing exercise and charity-giving a mass consumer activity.⁹ Humanitarian organizations relied on “business-like fundraising, purchasing, and accounting procedures”¹⁰ and employed publicists, public relations experts, campaigning managers, filmmakers, and photographers.¹¹ Although every humanitarian agency wanted to fundraise and promote their relief operations through visual media and humanitarian cinema, the massive commercial success of Ravished Armenia as a full-length Hollywood film, distinguishes it greatly from similar titles.

The Armenian genocide as represented in the early cinema relied not only on the marketing of the suffering body, but also on the reenactment of victim testimony. Both Ravished Armenia and Alice in Hungerland employed Ottoman subjects, and “survivors” as their lead child (orphan) actresses. Arshalouys Mardigian (1901–1994) and Esther Razon (1912–2015) were asked to relive, replay, and reenact their testimonies through their acting in the film set. The chapter specifically underscores the bodily violence inherent to the processes through which witness bodies’ and their testimonies are converted into humanitarian publicity material.¹² Furthermore, the humanitarian publicity campaigns and release of the NER films were always surrounded by other mediums and practices, especially screenings and public lectures.¹³ Arshalouys and Esther took part in these huge PR campaigns. On these occasions, the lead actresses of the film, a genocide survivor and a war orphan, were expected to embody both corporal evidence and affect. On the one hand, the presence of the survivor, victim, suffering body was used to lay a “truth claim” to the narrative told. On the other hand, the young girl’s presence in the movie theater, next to the screen and vis-à-vis the viewers, was crucial to speak to the feelings of the audience and strengthen the affect through witnessing a multiplied physical embodiment. The survivor/witness/victim, on the other hand, was forced into a spiral of re-suffering.

Focusing on the conception, production, distribution (and disappearance) of Ravished Armenia and Alice in Hungerland, the chapter sheds light on the early cinematic representation of the Armenian Genocide by focusing on the ferocious mediatization and marketing strategies of humanitarian bodies, specifically as to how they targeted the corporeal bodies of their lead orphan actresses, Arshalouys Mardigian and Esther Razon through extensive bodily interventions, enormous workload, and reenactment of suffering.

Testimony, Truth-Claims, and Technologies of Witnessing

Human rights activism in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide relied heavily on testimony. In fact, the Armenian sources of testimony as a discourse genre or narrative practice became a pervasive and powerful tool in the period. Survivors were also the witnesses of the genocide, and started to tell their stories from the moment they experienced the genocide and have not stopped telling them since. Narration had already started to serve as a form of oral transmission by 1915, as people were reunited in convoys or in camps; people from the same town or lost-and-found family members started to tell their own experiences to each other. When children in Muslim households found out that the other servant in the same house, or next door, or in the next village was also a converted Armenian, they immediately met and told each other their stories.¹⁴ In written form, numerous testimonies were already published as early as 1919. The first generation of educated survivors gave accounts of their experience in the form of memoirs, longer or shorter reports, or narratives written immediately after the event. They made a permanent impact regarding the necessity of testifying, conserving the memory of the events, and telling the story of their ordeal.

There was an uninterrupted stream of Armenian literature and testimony over the course of the century. Marc Nichanian emphasizes that this “memorial fervor” had a collective dimension in the years after the Armistice of Mudros, and it continued to be an uninterrupted effort in the following decades.¹⁵ During this same period, appeals were published in Armenian newspapers inviting readers to forward relevant documents, evidence, and eyewitness accounts that would prove to be crucial for the writing of the true account of the “catastrophe.” As Beledian notes, in this context, survivor testimonies were destined to become evidence.¹⁶

The survival testimony of Arshalouys Mardigian, Ravished Armenia: The Story of Aurora Mardiganian. The Christian Girl Who Lived Through The Great Massacres (1918), was published as part of this fervor. Arshalouys left her home town, Çemişgezek in 1915 with her family, and after two years of suffering, loss, persecution and torture, she landed on Ellis Island in November 4, 1917, at the age of sixteen. She was taken in by an Armenian-American couple, who helped her in her search for her brother via advertisements in newspapers. These advertisements were followed by newspaper interviews with the girl, and led to her “discovery” by the public. Shortly after, there were continuous proposals to mediatize her testimony. Henry L. Gates, a second-rate writer, and his wife Eleanor quickly realized that Arshalouys, as a witness of horrors, and her account of trauma would “sell well.” The couple volunteered to become her legal guardians in 1917 and placed her in the charge of Nora Waln, publicity secretary of the ACASR–NER. Their first interaction with Arshalouys was to make her tell the detailed story of her suffering and survival. Henry L. Gates immediately resolved to write a book based on her testimony and it was published within as little as six months.

The missionary network of information and humanitarian action developed along with new technologies of marketing and publicity that created new witnessing publics.¹⁷

Visual media technologies, specifically posters and “moving images,” became a significant part of NER’s mass publicity policy in the post-war period. James L. Barton’s detailed account of the history of NER also discusses their publicity strategies in the pursuit of “letting the public know.”¹⁸ In order to publicize its humanitarian operations and raise more funds, NER produced a large amount of visual material especially in the form of photographs, posters, and motion pictures.¹⁹ James L. Barton noted that immediately after the Armistice of Mudros, NER established “mutual arrangements” with moving picture companies. While they assisted with procuring permissions and accessing material, NER received in return the documentation on their relief agencies.²⁰

As Rozario notes, philanthropy was being redefined in the period as a marketing venture and the donors were treated as consumers. Their entertainment with techniques of sensationalistic mass media transformed humanitarianism into a mass phenomenon.²¹ Ravished Armenia (1919) set an example in creating a commercial sensation through humanitarian cinema. The newly developing practices of linking testimony with marketing and publicity, as well as connecting global humanitarian advocacy with entertainment media, crystallized in this cinematic representation. A young Armenian woman’s testimony of genocidal violence, namely a graphic account of the deportation march from her village to the Syrian desert; the recurring massacres committed along the way; the sporadic rapes of Armenian girls and women, was very quickly turned into a popular cinematic spectacle for the average American audience.

The famous producer William Selig held the rights to the film, but the promotions boasted the film as “Produced for the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief.”²² At the first private screening in New York on February 14, 1919, Mrs. Oliver Harriman, Chairperson of the National Motion Picture Committee, clearly underlined the direct link between the testimonial account of the victim and the humanitarian response, saying that Mardigian established a “direct contact between a stricken people and a generous human America.”²³ Further stressing the significance of this new technology of witnessing, Harriman continued:

The whole purpose of the picture is to acquaint America with ravished Armenia, to visualize conditions so that there will be no misunderstanding in the mind of any one about the terrible things which have transpired. It was deemed essential that the leaders, social and intellectual, should first learn the story, but later the general public shall be informed. It is proposed that before this campaign of information is complete, as many adults as possible shall know the story of Armenia, and the screen was selected as the medium because it reached the millions, where the printed word reaches the thousands.²⁴

As part of their fascination with new technologies of witnessing, NER produced more than a dozen publicity films in the early 1920s.²⁵ Alice in Hungerland (1921) was one of these early examples of humanitarian cinema and the second movie produced by NER on the Armenian genocide. The focus of the story was on the aftermath of the genocide, starring mainly Armenian orphans in NER orphanages. With an obvious, yet inelegant reference to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, in which Alice falls through a rabbit hole and embarks upon adventures, Alice in Hungerland was about the journey of a pretty American girl to the Near East. The script of the film was written by Emerson D. Owen, a newspaper editor and a publicity director at NER.²⁶ He was the co-producer of the movie along with William Selig, who also produced Ravished Armenia. In other words, both movies were shot at the initiative of the NER and with the same production companies.

Unlike Ravished Armenia, which was set in the Ottoman Empire during the years of genocide, Alice in Hungerland focused on the lives and predicament of Armenian orphans in the post-genocide context, without even alluding to the genocide. As Fehrenbach and Rodogno argues, humanitarian visual strategies that directed the audience’s attention to pure suffering tended to disregard the political and/or social background.²⁷ In the movie productions that followed Ravished Armenia, NER was more interested in children who were saved and the reason for their destitution was no longer a significant part of the storyline. The history of violence behind these child’s suffering was of only marginal interest. As DuBois stresses unlike human rights networks that sought justice, humanitarian organizations would not “confront perpetrators with the consequences of their actions.”²⁸ The message sent by the images of NER orphans was directed solely at the future.²⁹ Armenian orphans were presented as agents of progress and peace within NER publicity campaigns. Their gratitude for the generosity and the humanitarianism of the American public was also at the core of NER’s media campaign. Children posed smilingly into cameras or got into huge formations that declared “Thank You America.”

Just like Alice in Hungerland, many of the scenes in orphanage publicity films and photographs were shot in Armenia, at the City of Orphans in Alexandropol (Gyumri/Leninakan).³⁰ Professional photographers and filmmakers produced quite striking works in these cinematographic venues and transmitted their spectacles to distant audiences. Children there posed for photographers and filmmakers in small groups or in huge constellations, sometimes sorted by age and gender. They marched ceremoniously in honor of visitors from the US, Russian Commissars, and Armenian religious authorities. Children’s bodies were exposed to hard discipline and training for these performances, as they had to rehearse for weeks on the vast open spaces. Their personal hygiene, haircut, clothing (often white dresses and shirts) were all under scrutiny. In many of the publicity material, children were interestingly walking barefoot. Without doubt, the humanitarian bodies were not really concerned with how children were influenced from this constant duties of acting, entertaining visitors and reenacting their misery.

One of the first ceremonies in Alexandropol took place on August 1921, in honor of an American delegation headed by Charles V. Vickrey, secretary of the NER. Among them was the NER Women’s Organizations president Mrs. Florence Spencer Duryea from New York, along with numerous photographers and filmmakers.³¹ The more than thirty-member delegation made up of NER officials, as well as American politicians, diplomats, businessmen, and filmmakers, first went to Istanbul in the summer of 1921. In Istanbul, on the way to Alexandropol, and in the City of Orphans, the film crew was commissioned to shoot scenes for a humanitarian film documenting and publicizing NER’s relief activities. This was the production three-reel silent film Alice in Hungerland, filmed during this visit. Combining the genres of feature film with documentary, Alice in Hungerland was a fictionalized documentary that relied on a script about an American girl’s witnessing of actual orphans inside and outside of NER orphanages. From the perspective of the NER, the film, featuring hundreds of actual Armenian orphans in NER orphanages (needless to say free of charge) would blend “storytelling with journalism” and provide an account of the post-genocide humanitarian activities in a “child-friendly format.”³²

As a visual publicity output designed to collect donations from children and parents, the producers of Alice in Hungerland stressed the technological advantages of humanitarian cinema when it came to truth claims. The publicists argued that the terrible conditions of children in need could only through images be portrayed in a graphic and vivid way.

… the showing of a moving picture film, Alice in Hungerland, graphically depicting the heartrending conditions in the stricken area for which American contributions are solicited. (…)

Alice in Hungerland (…) portrayed more vividly than words the need of aid.³³

Humanitarian film as a new form of witnessing had the advantages of immediacy and affective persuasion. During a screening, Mrs. Duryea explained that “with the exception of a few introductory scenes, all of the pictures shown were not staged, but were actual conditions as they found them.”³⁴ Cinema both imitated forensic evidence of visible, so real, suffering of children, and also documented how children were saved. The audience at the screenings would come to the theater with the anticipation of seeing both a spectacle of pain and a happy end (humanitarian response).³⁵

Suffering Bodies, Spectacles of Pain, and Marketing of Agony

Humanitarian cinema provided global humanitarianism a new medium of immediate contact with and a way to consume a distant suffering. In her analysis of humanitarian cinema, Valérie Gorin differentiates “atrocity images,” that relied on exhibition of death and inflicted violence, from “about-to-die images,” which implied that there was still something to be done. NER’s Ravished Armenia largely relied on the former, depicting a wide range of physical abuses and graphic details of the body in pain. The film allocated a significant portion of its narrative to mass atrocities, such as mass burnings, rapes, impalings, and crucifixions. The visual strategy of Alice in Hungerland, on the other hand, stressed “about-to-die images,” in which suffering and vulnerable children’s bodies stressed the urgency of humanitarian intervention to prevent impending death. The outcomes of aid were also visually emphasized through before-and-after (or inside-or-outside the orphanage) strategies.

Gendered Violence, Martyrdom, Slavery

Despite the novelty of the form of story-telling through visualization, the content of Ravished Armenia told an already familiar account about Christians suffering at the hands of infidels. Armenian suffering deserved the action, recognition and compassion of the viewers, since they were also Christians. Making use of extensive and well-established global American evangelical missionary discourse and organizational networks, the film highlighted the religious dimension to generate both support and outrage.³⁶ Often presented as one of the first advocacy films, vivid representation of atrocities are considered to contribute to the film’s great financial success (donations in the amount of $117 million). Furthermore, the humanitarian campaign succeeded in raising consciousness as millions of Americans learned about the plight of the “starving Armenians.”³⁷

Once the testimony of Arshalouys Mardigian, the witness, was recounted, and handed over to the Gates couple and ACASR, it was reconstructed in such a way that would make it visible, showable, and sellable. The brutal translation of her memory and testimony increased the distance between the lived experience of the genocide and the media representation of it as an exotic drama.³⁸ In that sense, her experience illustrates the impossibility of witnessing when it comes to telling, processing, and representing the genocide.³⁹ Henry Gates’s book, as well as the screenplay of the film attributed to Nora Waln, relied on established Orientalist imaginary and an iconic Christian tradition of representing suffering. An undefended Armenia, represented by a woman-martyr, was already part of a well-defined iconography in Western media (Fig. 1). The poster of Ravished Armenia, reminiscent of the abduction of Persephone by Hades, reproduced this tradition, as was clear from both the name and the content.

Fig. 1

The movie poster for Ravished Armenia. Source: Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ravished_Armenia.jpg

One of the stereotypical visual mediations of the Armenian genocide depicted a monstrous, cruel, sexually violent Turkish male, violating and degrading Armenian women. Orientalist gender stereotypes, depicting women as passive subjects (and victims), as objects of pleasure and lust, living in harems, defined the representation of Armenian women in the film.⁴⁰ The recurrent theme of harems, slave markets, slave auctions, and the abuse and trafficking of Christian women formed the film’s principal leitmotiv.⁴¹ The use of the name “auction of souls” and the persistence of “white slavery” narrative in the film attempted to connect with the visual (and sensational) language of anti-slavery movement and cultural production, especially in literature and film. Similar to nineteenth-century abolition writings, the film was saturated with graphic images of suffering, as well as horror, gore, and perversity.⁴² Slavery and atrocity images that surrounded it were exploited for their sensationalism.

The “pornography of pain,” which was utilized as “an integral aspect of the humanitarian sensibility” in Karen Halttunen’s words, had a literal resonance in the context of Ravished Armenia.⁴³ Pornographic sexual violence and its connotations were exaggeratedly exploited in the publicity campaign for the film. The press book for the film introduced headline stories that primarily underlined the sexual violence: “Ravished Armenia to Show Real Harems,” “Girls impaled on Soldiers’ Swords,” “With Other Naked Girls, Pretty Aurora Mardiganian Was Sold for Eighty-Five Cents.”⁴⁴ In the film, Arshalouys was often naked and suffering in graphic and disturbing rape, sexual torture and murder scenes. Violent scenes of uncensored cruelty followed one another and without end.

As recent scholarship has demonstrated, the genocide was an essentially gendered experience.⁴⁵ Examining the sexual violence against women, which took the shape of rape, abduction for slavery and concubinage, and assimilation into Muslim families by force, these works focused on gender-specific aspects of the genocide. In that respect, it was not unexpected for the filmmakers to stage different forms of sexual violence. However, what was problematic in this mediated/distorted form of witnessing was the omnipresence of a malevolent and threatening male gaze toward Arshalouys. An Armenian young woman survivor, whose trauma and suffering were at the core of NER’s humanitarian advocacy, was depicted simply as an object of desire. The audience behavior was, for that matter, voyeuristic. After all, the book and the film reproduced the perpetrators’ perspective with a sickening sense of excitement, passion, and desire for the ravishing to occur. As Nora Tataryan stresses, the exploitation of her body, gender, testimony, misery, and labor remains within the legacy of the genocide itself.⁴⁶

Encounters with “Non-Children” and NER’s Doors to Heaven

As Cabanes notes, post WW1 humanitarian cinema directed its lens largely to “the emaciated bodies and empty gazes of starving children.”⁴⁷ The child’s body was deployed as an irreplaceable image in humanitarian visual vocabulary.⁴⁸ Alice in Hungerland largely relied on these “other children” as its victim image, but it was much less controversial than Ravished Armenia since it focused primarily on humanitarianism and childcare in NER orphanages. The juxtaposition of “homeless, starving children on the streets, often sleeping next to dogs,” and “the neat, cheerful children in the Committee’s orphanages” was a typical visual strategy for missionary work in the Ottoman Empire.⁴⁹ The NER’s cinematic publicity also followed this line. The movie presented a spectacle of suffering children, who were often “piteously begging” and depicted as “sorrowful.” The children in the orphanages, on the other hand, were “healthy” and “happy,” always well-fed, dancing, and singing.⁵⁰

Alice in Hungerland opens with a scene featuring Alice, a healthy, well-loved American girl in a very nice white dress, reading Alice in Wonderland. In the spirit of seeking a similar adventure, Alice decides to go and see for herself what her father (a NER relief worker) actually does in the Near East and the tangled circumstances of the people whom he helps. She conceals herself in one of the rescue ships bound for Constantinople, miraculously leaves the vessel all in one piece, and manages to find her father in the Ottoman capital. Throughout the film, Alice and her father visit the NER orphanages opened for Armenian orphans. In fact, they do not spend much time on orphanages in Istanbul, instead they go over the Black Sea to Batum and then into the interior, to Tiflis, Alexandropol, Erivan.

The film exaggerated the idyllic life in NER orphanages, depicted like an oasis in a desert. Even though there was no effort at contextualization, the world outside the iron gates of the City of Orphans was described as some sort of hell and the children there as non-children beasts. During the journey Alice sees dirty, naked, sick, starving and dying children, and witnesses incongruous sights. When Alice alights from trains, she sees hundreds of children in groups, even younger than herself, but unaccompanied, “homeless, ragged, starving and ill.” They beg for scraps of bread or lie still in the street, dead for want of actual food. She also encounters children who found shelter in caves and protected themselves with dogs.⁵¹ Therefore, as NER publicity magazine warns its readers, she is quite different from Lewis Carroll’s Alice, as “these sights were underlaid with the tragedy of being real.”⁵²

Finally, the father and daughter arrive at the City of Orphans in Alexandropol, which was at the center of NER’s visual publicity campaign.⁵³ Alice is saddened by her encounter with desperate Armenian orphans waiting at the gates of orphanages for admission. They have been turned away for lack of resources. Alice distributes bread to these “non-children” at the gates while trying to understand why there is not a place for each child in the orphanage. Actually, at first, she cannot even be sure whether they are children or not. Were these “little people” with ragged clothes, naked feet, and dirty hair and faces children? When she approaches them to distribute bread, she first asks: “Are you a child?”⁵⁴ (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

Alice asks Armenian orphans if they are “children.” Source: Elisabeth Edland, “Shadows: A Children’s Play for the Near East Relief,” The New Near East, January 1922, 12

“Alice::

Are you children?

[Silence]

Alice::

Please talk to me. You do not look like children in my neighborhood.

An older child::

You do not look like a child either. Did they give you these nice clothes in the orphanage?

Alice::

Orphanage? Oh no, my mom sewed it.

A younger child::

Your mom?”

As she enters the City of Orphans, Alice sees a different world, she meets happy, healthy, smiling children eating at long tables. She sees contented children running to their classes and handicraft workshops. They even entertain her with Armenian folk songs and dancing.⁵⁵ When she visits the dorms, she realizes that two or three children are sharing a single crib, and then she understands why many children still wait outside the doors. She then sees trucks full of flour and is astonished to learn how much flour it takes to feed the children in just one orphanage. In her good will, Alice occasionally manages to beg for bread from the kitchen to distribute to “ravenous” children outside the doors.⁵⁶ But even at her age, she understands that her efforts are never adequate. Her father later explains the urgency of the situation as winter is approaching. The cold climate and snow will make the lives of these “forlorn waifs” much more difficult than in summer.

In the closing scene of the movie, a group of “filthy, miserable children” are seen stretching their hands toward Alice. Alice’s ironed, bright white dress is now tainted and damaged, as the skirts were cut and used for bandages. Her hair is now shorter. So, she appears as a hero who sacrifices her comfort and habits like other “benevolent” women who work for the NER⁵⁷ (Fig. 3). The gates and the hell behind the gates were also used graphically in future NER productions.⁵⁸

Fig. 3

The cover of the New Near East magazine promoting Alice in Hungerland. Source: The New Near East, January 1922

Reenactment as Resuffering

Ravished Armenia was not only based on the testimony of an eyewitness, but Arshalouys was also the one acting out her own experiences on the screen by playing a leading role in a Hollywood movie.⁵⁹ The star of Alice in Hungerland, Esther Razon, was also not a child movie star from Hollywood, but an actual 9-year-old orphan girl from Istanbul, “discovered” in the NER-supported Jewish orphanage (Orphelinat National Israélite) in Ortaköy.⁶⁰ So the lead (child) actresses of both films, a genocide survivor and a war orphan, were supposed to “live over again” their past sufferings through acting and reenacting. The casting of victims and witnesses in these movies was important for their “testimonial role,” as they were instrumental to strengthen the “truth claim” of the visual evidence. Furthermore, humanitarian publicity campaigns, especially release of films, was surrounded by other media and consumed as a larger performative process. It was not rare that silent movies were sounded with orchestral music in the theater. More importantly, witness accounts accompanied screenings. These were provided by field reports or travel diaries of humanitarian workers (the Western witnesses) and survival testimony of the victim (the native witness) who documented the horrors in the first person.⁶¹ Gorin notes that all these additional elements were intended to facilitate “more intimate contact with suffering.”⁶² The presence of Arshalouys and Esther in the screenings were expected to embody corporal evidence. The bodily presence of the survivor, victim, suffering body was used to lay a “truth claim” to the narrative told. Moreover, young girl’s presence in the movie theater, next to the screen and vis-à-vis the viewers, would also increase the affect, transforming film-viewing into a multi-sensorial experience. While the feelings of the audience were intensified through witnessing a multiplied physical embodiment, the survivor/witness/victim was pushed into a spiral of re-suffering.

An Embodied Representation of the Genocide

In a short publicity article for the Exhibitor’s Trade Review, Mrs. Oliver Harriman, Chairperson of the National Motion Picture Committee, stressed that Arshalouys did not act, but “lived over again” her traumatic testimony as a fully embodied reenactment that had a corporal resonance in her “flesh,” “bare shoulders,” “bleeding feet,” and “unsheltered head”:

With a courage past belief, Aurora threw herself into the part of motion picture heroine in her own life history. For the sake of the love she bears her people, this young girl lived over again all the horrors of those years of deportation and hunger and misery worse than death. She felt again the touch of fouling fingers upon her shuddering flesh, the whistling lash of the whip across her bare shoulders, the blistering sand under her bleeding feet, the glare of the blood-red sun upon her unsheltered head. With all a young girl’s capacity for suffering, she passed a second time through the gates of hell—in order that her people, the stricken people of the Near East, might be saved.

The heroine’s part was played with amazing power and with a skill beyond the reach of art—it was not acted, it was lived.⁶³

The film was shot in less than a month in the Selig Studios in Los Angeles. The exploitation of Hollywood actors, extras, and crews due to the casual nature of their work and abusive employment practices were common knowledge in the period.⁶⁴ For Arshalouys, fooled into take part in the film despite her very little knowledge of English and filmmaking, the whole period of filming translated into brutal exploitation (for $15 a week) and an enormous workload. The film also featured hundreds of extras, most specifically 200 Armenian genocide orphans appeared in the film. Their stories of survival and seeking refuge in the United States were very similar to Arshalouys. Numerous survivors, therefore, who lived through every phase of the genocide and had lost their families, were trapped in the same nightmare again. The production was a horrifying experience for the young woman, as she was heavily burdened with an embodied representation of the genocide. Arshalouys had to reenact her written survival testimony and re-live it on screen.⁶⁵ The first time she came out of the dressing room and walked into the set, she was shocked to see so many men with red fezzes. She immediately assumed that her “guardians” were ready to give her “back to the Turks” to end her life.⁶⁶ During filming, Arshalouys broke her ankle while jumping from one roof to another in a scene about escaping from a harem. The producers did not agree to postpone shooting, so she acted her scenes with bandages around her ankle, while being transferred from one scene to another. Mrs. Gates even told her to press hard on her leg, claiming this would heal the fracture! ⁶⁷ In some scenes, the bandages were visible, but the producers were confident that the audiences would see them in connection with genocidal violence. However, the workings of the film industry, humanitarian cinema, and marketing strategies literally perpetuated the logic of the genocide.⁶⁸

After the completion of filming, screenings was another phase of torture for the young woman. NER publicity department followed a very busy media campaign. The victim/witness was constantly expected to talk to the press and participate in social events (such as lunches, dinners, teas) embedded into screenings. At the first screening of the movie in Los Angeles on January 15, 1919, Arshalouys was introduced to the American public.⁶⁹ At the New York premiere on February 16, 1919, NER officials stressed the “testimonial role” of the girl on these occasions.⁷⁰ As the movie was released all around the US, Arshalouys had to be dragged into too many screenings for one witness to handle. She found these public appearances difficult, due to her social responsibilities of conversing with strangers, networking, and giving interviews.⁷¹ She fulfilled her role one last time in Buffalo, New York in May 1920. Immediately after the screening, she was banished to a convent school by Mrs. Gates and seven look-alikes were hired to replace her in upcoming presentations of the film!

Representing her very self in front of the camera and her physical presence in theaters during the film’s promotional tour was first and foremost an authentication strategy. The fact that seven doubles were hired to stand in for her and be present at screenings in her place also points to the affect dimension. Humanitarian publicity and mediatization strategy relied on sensational and multiplied technologies of witnessing. By accompanying her cinematic image on the screen with her own flesh and blood in the theater, Arshalouys became a sort of augmented reality and an “infinitely reproducible accessory.”⁷² Her personification through seven other women literally multiplied Arshalouys as if she was a commercial product. She was offering the audience “a copy of herself,”⁷³ an additional prop to fully consume the suffering and trauma.

Being Saved to Serve

Esther Razon was “discovered” in the summer of 1921 on an official NER visit to the Jewish Orphanage, where she had been staying for the past two years. Her “saver” was Mrs. Florence Spencer Duryea, a philanthropist from New York City, one of the initial supporters of NER, and the National Director of Women’s Organizations. Due to Mrs. Duryea’s liking of the girl, the filmmakers chose her for the main role in Alice in Hungerland. The casting of Esther to play a typical American girl is highly interesting. The American stereotype for the Jewish physiognomy most probably suggested that a Jewess can generate the illusion of being “authentic” (or non-Oriental), activating both the “truth claim” and the “feeling.” For the filming of Alice in Hungerland, Esther was then taken out of the orphanage and she traveled with the entire NER publicity team to Armenia. When the filming and the publicity tour was over, instead of handing her over again to her orphanage, Mrs. Duryea decided to adopt Esther—now called Alice not only in fiction, but in real life—and take her to New York City in the Fall of 1921.⁷⁴

In the film, Alice appears as an American girl who encounters starving and begging Armenian orphans, and relates to them through pity and philanthropy. Behind the scenes, however, Esther, an orphan who had also lost her entire family, was witnessing the suffering of Armenian orphans. Her witnessing was not quite the same as American school children being moved by the film in the comfort of their homes and families. Esther had to remember, if not relive, her own hunger, sickness, raggedness, and destitution in the preceding years while she herself was also “outside the orphanage gates.” The making of Alice in Hungerland must have been a strong emotional experience for her, not only because she had witnessed actual scenes of misery among genocide orphans—that is beyond the polished presentation in NER publicity—but also because she was acutely aware that she had so narrowly escaped a similar fate.⁷⁵

Similar to Arshalouys, throughout 1922 Esther traveled across the country—to Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, Nebraska, Arizona, New Hampshire, Illinois—to promote Alice in Hungerland. Staying in Mrs. Duryea’s home in New York, she was supposed to learn the “English language and the customs.”⁷⁶ The film was first presented in the November 1921 issue of the NER magazine, New Near East. In July 1922, she was featured in the New Near East magazine when she and another New York City orphans pledged to donate a part of their pocket money to NER.⁷⁷ Throughout the year, she gave interviews to newspapers on the film. As apparent from NER publicity material from 1922, both the movie and the little girl were central to the fund-raising campaign for Armenian orphans (Fig. 4). In a NER advertisement entitled “The Death of a Race” in the fundamentalist evangelical magazine, Sign of the Times, Alice featured in the same photograph with Henry Morgenthau (Fig. 5). The caption read:

Henry Morgenthau, one-time ambassador to Turkey. He and Mrs. Morgenthau have been very active in Near East Relief work. On his right is little Alice Duryea, a waif and refugee brought to America from the Near East, and who plays the part of the heroine in the Near East Relief’s moving picture, Alice in Hungerland.⁷⁸

Fig. 4

Alice distributing bread to “ravenous groups.” Source: The New Near East, November 1921

By introducing Esther as a “waif and refugee … from the Near East,” the advertisement clearly implied that she was one of the 100.000 Armenian orphans in one of the 179 NER orphanages. If we were to believe in the advertisement, Esther was also one of the “children of Christian martyrs.” In the presentation in Hartford, the strategy was again focused on hiding Esther’s identity and the circumstances behind her adoption. She was presented as “Alice Duryea,” the foster-daughter of Mrs. Florence Spencer Duryea, who found and saved her “from one of the crowded Near East orphanages” during a trip to the “devastated country.”⁷⁹ The newspaper article calculatedly employed vague descriptions. Esther’s original name or age, where she was from, the orphanage that she was taken from was left unelaborated. It was as if the expression, “relief of destitute orphans and refugees in the Near East” was self-explanatory and it required no further temporal, historical, or geographical specification.

Knowing very well that she might again be forced to beg for bread, it was probably a blessing for Esther to be adopted and become the “daughter” of a rich American woman. Yet, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of New York, opposed legal adoption of the girl and brought a case to the court.⁸⁰ The Rabbi stated that the girl known as Alice Duryea was in fact Esther Razon

Fig. 5

Esther Razon with Henry Morgenthau. Source: Sign of the Times, vol. 49, no. 22, 30 May 1922

, and that she was not Armenian, but Jewish. Wise stressed that when Mrs. Duryea had adopted the girl, she had promised to rear her as a Jew. He had a statement to that effect from the authorities of the Jewish Orphanage in Ortaköy, the institution that granted Esther’s custody to Duryea (telegram, 14 February 1922). Upon hearing that Esther was now being raised as a Christian, Rabbi Wise argued that Esther, who had been born to Jewish parents, should be placed with a Jewish family and raised according to her religious heritage. The New York newspapers covered the issue for several weeks.⁸¹ Photos of Esther in the courtroom or scenes with her from Alice in Hungerland accompanied the news items. It was as if the controversy was also part of NER’s publicity of the film, since there was always a reference to the film and she was called “Alice of Hungerland.”⁸² Thanks to NER’s unconditional endorsement of Mrs. Duryea’s character, her financial standing, and strong lawyers, she won the case without difficulty.

With the encouragement, if not enforcement of her foster mom, Esther remained active in the activities of NER. Mrs. Duryea hosted “eastern bazaars” in support of Near East Industries, where the handicrafts of refugees were sold. In 1931, the sale of embroideries brought a revenue of $100,000.⁸³ Esther served “Turkish tea” and “Turkish coffee” and assumed the role of the “oriental beauty,” wearing “traditional costumes” at these events. As if first imitating an American girl than impersonating an Armenian “waif” was not enough, she should yet refashion her bodily attire as the “Turkish girl.”

Conclusion

This chapter explores the centrality of visual media and new technologies of witnessing in the development of international humanitarian advocacy. I provide a close analysis of the production, content, and consumption of two pioneering and original films, Ravished Armenia and Alice in Hungerland, which set the tone for the visual representation of the Armenian Genocide and re-invented Armenian children and young women as the ultimate “icons” of bodily suffering. The campaigns organized around Ravished Armenia and Alice in Hungerland rested on the intersection of overlapping humanitarian, commercial, and Christian networks in Europe and the United States. As the films moved through and across these various networks, the Armenian Genocide became an object of international humanitarianism.⁸⁴

Both films starred real orphans, Arshalouys Mardigian and Esther Razon, who were forced to reenact their pain and trauma once again for the screen. Not only were their personal traumatic experiences abused, distorted, and disregarded, they were also forced to take part in huge publicity campaigns across the US, wearing traditional attire and praising the NER. Stressing these merciless mediatization and publicity campaigns of humanitarian agencies, specifically how they inflicted further pain and caused truama for Arshalouys and Esther through extensive bodily interventions, massive workload, and embodied reenactment, the chapter focused on instrumentalization of testimony and suffering and perpetual victimization of survivors.

For a brief period of time, the humanitarian media around the genocide managed to expand the witnessing publics, who recognized the severity of the situation. However, the fate of both these films, shot on the initiative of the NER to collect donations, was short-lived fame and great revenue followed by disappearance and subsequent oblivion. New geopolitical expediencies, especially in the form of American isolationism and the definitive victories of the Turkish nationalist forces in Anatolia, eclipsed these iconic visual representations of the Armenian Genocide and its aftermath.⁸⁵ Already from the 1920s onward, the Armenian Genocide was rapidly removed from the international spotlight—justice claims for victims as well as the humanitarian demands for the survivors faded out. The period also curiously coincided with the mysterious disappearance of the films and the beginning of the official Turkish policy of denial.⁸⁶ Both movies were entirely forgotten until the last two decades; there are no known copies of them. Just like the denial of the genocide, the first films about the genocide, together with their leading orphan actresses, Arshalouys Mardigian and Esther Razon, were lost and forgotten for the past hundred years.