Scottish Premiere with a live new score mixed and played on stage by composer Juliet Merchant
Wheelchair accessible, English subtitles, £10 (concession)/£15 (full price)
A new restoration of a neglected silent classic by Hamo Beknazarian, the founding father of Armenian cinema. This historical melodrama recounts the brutal suppression of an oil workers’ strike in pre-revolutionary Baku. Beknazarian’s mastery of the silent screen is on full display here, from the striking use of close-ups and densely-plotted narrative intrigue to the show-stopping devastation of the finale. Presented with a new score mixed live by Juliet Merchant and an introduction by Armenian film scholar and curator Vigen Galstyan.
Content notes: severe injury, violence, death, animal death.
Access notes: visual storytelling and intertitles throughout, black-and-white cinematography, flashing images.
Curated by Klassiki
Reviews
‘Machinery itself has star quality – of the most monumental and anti-heroic sort – in this fascinating 1928 silent movie from the Armenian film-maker Amo Bek-Nazaryan. It’s such a vivid, dynamic, engaged piece of work, whose energies blaze forth afresh in this restoration, having apart from anything else wonderful archival value.
[…]
One of the treats of this film is the outstanding new score from Juliet Merchant, which brings out the film’s operatic intensity, and its plaintive beauty.’
Peter Bradshaw, 4/5 stars, The Guardian
dIRECTOR’S BIOGRAPHY
Hamo Beknazarian was born on 19 May 1891 in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, Russian Empire. His career in cinema started in 1914, when a casual acquaintance offered him a part in a film. Since that part, he decided to pursue a career in cinema. Between 1914 and 1918, he played about 70 parts, becoming a popular actor in pre-Revolutionary Russian film. In 1920, instead of going to Armenia as he had decided, he went to Tbilisi where he developed a film department for the Georgian Commissioner's office of Public Education. In 1933, he shot the first Armenian sound film Pepo.