By Douglas Messerli
Don Askarian (scriptwriter and director) Musicians / 2000
In one long scene, a small musical group, with unbelievably beat-up horns and a long worn-out drum, arrive at their destination against a rotting wall in the city, occasionally blaring a note or two before they sit down across the overturned drum to dine on tomatoes, bread, a stew, cured meats and, most importantly, slightly diluted vodka, before they are willing to take up their instruments again. Their brief performance sounds as if it might have been played by just such a group in Sicily as in the mountainous country north of Turkey and Iran. But soon the players have put down their instruments again to drink more vodka, and it is clear that despite the director’s urging for them to continue in their concert, they are perhaps too drunk to continue with the music. Yet their whole performance, such as it is, is one of the most joyous, even comical moments, of Askarian’s film.
Another “musical” performance involves a funeral ritual at a cemetery. A young boy burns something over the grave, before anointing the spot with oil, and serving drinks to the two men who then play a brief piece upon their reed, flute-like instruments. But the ceremony is far more important, and impressive, than the music with which they close the event.
One of the longest scenes involves a brilliant tight-rope walker performing before the ancient monastery of Khor-Virap. With only a balancing pole, the walker not only gracefully crisscrosses the metal rope which is nearly invisible against the landscape, but walks blindly, his entire body covered in a black robe, across the same space, climbs small ladders balanced upon the wire, and dances in leaps and bounds across the same space as if he were flying in mid-air. True, this performance is also accompanied by music, but it is the wire ballet that is truly awe-inspiring.

That is, obviously, Askarian’s major point. As he writes of this film:
What happens after the empire? All know and expect it in the advance,
only one thing they don’t know: Despite the destruction, the disintegration,
the betrayal…despite the annihilation of all bases of the life, the music
sounds, and how it sounds! Higher and higher, over the human sorrow
and over the pain! It is also one, daily practiced mental attitude, stand
and exercise, that awakens a hope in the abandoned and in those, who
already have lost the last hope.
We enter an institution of art in this film only once, where we see a man wearing a costume of another being just like him, ritualistically battling it out with the other, wrestling with and tossing over and over the other and his own body. Askarian views the scene from the top, a spiral staircase spinning out below the camera. Is this his statement about the spiraling down, the inevitable need to wrestle with oneself to express a vision, in short, a failure, of formal art? As a noted filmmaker, Askarian clearly has known that struggle throughout his life. The folk artists whom he primarily observes have no such dilemmas; their performances are simply part and parcel of the greater community, as natural as breathing in and breathing out.
Los Angeles, October 21, 2011
The next screening MUSICIANS will take place on 01/02/2016 in Mumbai bei MIFF 2016.
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