Two Films From One Fountain

On the grave of his unfaithful wife, Usta (master) Mkrtich builds a fountain. On it he engraves: “Every woman is her husband’s fountain. No one else can drink from her water.” Whenever someone tries to approach the fountain to quench their thirst, the water stops flowing. The master alone can drink water from it. The news about the miracle of Heghnar Fountain spreads throughout the community.

At the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, almost parallel to each other, two Armenian directors, Arman Manaryan in Soviet Armenia and Arbi Ovanessian in Iran, were working on their own screen adaptations of the same literary work: Mkrtich Armen’s novel “Heghnar Fountain”.

Manaryan’s film is quite faithful to the original work in terms of content and ideology. The plot, the dialogues, and the internal monologues give away the director’s eagerness to convey the subtleties of the original literary work. Arbi Ovanessian is much more unhindered. He follows the main developments of Mkrtich Armen’s narrative, but also makes many changes.

These two films create a unique opportunity to study Soviet-Armenian and Diasporan-Armenian viewpoints and for the comparison of two divergent approaches when it comes to interpreting national literature. 

Mkrtich Armen’s “Heghnar Fountain” alludes to the oppressive nature of patriarchal society. The judgment of what is right and wrong is based on a tradition that has kept humans in chains for millennia. Is the new generation ready to throw aside ancient laws built on lies, expand their horizons, and change their perception of the world? It is this question that reveals the primary conceptual discrepancy between these two films. 

Everything is clear-cut in Manaryan’s film. The modern man of the time, incarnated in the master’s son, no longer believes in miracles and quickly discovers the secret to the Heghnar Fountain. Religion loses to science. The age of traditions and superstitions is in the past. The time of the Soviet Man has come. The children swimming in the Akhuryan River in the film’s closing scenes, will have a completely new value system.

In Arbi Ovanessian’s “Fountain,” the theme of changing times and progress is almost completely pushed out, conceding to the idea of the never-ending cycle, the eternal return. The main question remains unanswered: Is the miracle of the fountain real? The myth maintains its keystone significance for the persistence of the community and the nation. 

Dismissing the book’s ending, Ovanessian seemingly opts for a spiritual-religious interpretation, while skillfully playing with the audience’s perceptions and expectations. 

At the end of the film, we see the children swimming again. But unlike the characters in the Soviet “Heghnar Fountain,” these children have already mastered the behavior of the adults, imbued with old, stagnant ideas. The new generations will not change anything. Life will complete another cycle, take another turn, continue in spirals. The eternal flow of water is also a symbol of the cycle of life and events, renewal and perpetuation. The fountain instead of the grave is the symbol of life that succeeds death.

Master Mkrtich knew from the beginning that he was destined to make exactly 40 fountains, and he died after completing the 40th. At his wake, the crowd speaks of predestination. The builder, Avetik, says he was predestined to build 12 bridges. And now he is afraid to build after the 12th.

At the end of the Soviet film, the intention to start building the 12th bridge can be perceived as the resolve to overcome fear and superstition and accept the new times. While in Ovanessian’s case, it indicates coming to terms with one’s own death and surrendering to fate.

Unlike Manaryan’s film, which follows the exact geography of the book, in Ovanessian’s “Fountain,” the places, as well as the people, lack definition. Alexandropol-Gyumri-Leninakan is transformed into an abstract Eastern rural town: there are constant transitions to stifling streets permeated with a scolding, critical atmosphere under the eternally condemning gaze of the church dome.

The film’s rhythm is consistent with the slow pace of life in a traditional village where ritualistic actions are endlessly repeated. The beginning of the film is devoid of dialogues and action hinting at plot development. Still lifes of rural life — faceless objects and empty spaces — plunge the viewer into a world of unhurried life full of ceremonies and traditions. After some time, the images of those same objects return, and now they are in interaction with their surroundings. The paper plane, the well, the door — all amass significance and context. 

As soon as we comprehend the realm presented by the film, the scenes containing dialogues appear unnecessary, seeming to be artificially embedded in the body of the film. For example, in the wake scene, the primary emphasis is not on toasts and speeches as in Manaryan’s film, but the arrangement of people and objects, the solemn synchronicity of their movements. All of them are elements of a distinctive ritual, and the ritual becomes the foundation of existence.

Ovanessian, a distinguished theater director and a great master of stage art, is rediscovering the cinematic space. In the love scene, the mise-en-scène resembles a painting or a theatrical performance that takes on a cinematographic dimension thanks to the ingenious editing that compiles abrupt yet smooth transitions into a seemingly uninterrupted scene. The screen space no longer has any correlation with the stage.

The framing of the shots forces you to study every detail, as one would in a photograph, posing the imperative to review the scenes repeatedly in search of specific patterns.

This “Fountain” can be contemplative, introspective, as well as emotional and full of mysteries. Through numerous ellipses and omissions, Ovanessian makes Mkrtich Armen’s quite complex, temporally shifting narrative even more ambiguous.

This is possibly another way to underscore that the plot is secondary in this film (or cinematography in general). All twists and passions abate. What takes center stage is the unique pace, the depictions of objects, the geometry of the frame, and the movement of bodies.

Fascinated by the mysterious beauty of an unknown woman, the gardener Yeranos (his character in the film is nameless, so are the others) follows her through the streets of the city into a church. Thanks to his sense of space, Ovanessian is able to convey the mystical nature of the place with just two shots. There is no such scene in Manaryan’s film (in the novel, Yeranos turns back without entering the church). The interior of Armenian churches is rarely seen in Soviet cinema. Even when depicted, they are deprived of piety’s laurels. In Arman Manaryan’s debut film, the 1961 “Tzhvzhik”, the church is presented as a place for market gossip and street slander. Propriety is false, the icons blurred, the hero praying at the altar seems to be behind bars.

In 1967, five years before “Fountain” was made, Arbi Ovanessian made the documentary “Ghara Kilisa” or “Lebbaeus, Whose Surname Was Thaddaeus,” which was dedicated to the Saint Thaddeus Monastery in the north of Iran. Instead of a postcard church image and visual clichés, it depicts a crowd of pilgrims gathered near the monastery who had come there from far away. The pilgrims pitch tents, drink coffee, and prepare food. Armenian speech can also be heard through segments of conversations. The film claims an air of reality. An Armenian island, a strange settlement emerges around the church. The film offers a unique experience for the Armenian audience transporting the viewer to the monastery, positioning them as one of the pilgrims.

In the 1960s, Iranian cinema was undergoing a reformation. Entirely new locations were appearing on its cinematic map. Ovanessian’s “Fountain,” with its archetypical rural town, is in cadence with two main works of Iranian new wave cinema, which depict life as far away from the big city as possible. Forugh Farrokhzad’s poetic-documentary film “The House Is Black” represented patients living in a leper colony, while in his film “The Cow”, Dariush Mehrjui depicted an Iranian village and the tragedy of an ordinary person living within the shades of a neorealist absurdity.

Later on, this rural and small-town cinematic typography became the basis for the second wave of Iranian cinema. Kiarostami’s, Makhmalbaf’s, and Panahi’s films present the prism of city dwellers who find themselves in a village and gradually adapt (or, as in the case of Kiarostami’s film “The Wind Will Carry Us,” do not adapt at all) to the unhurried and uneventful rural lifestyle.

There is no such hero in Ovanessian’s “Fountain”. All the characters remain alien and ambivalent. “Fountain” is not about human psychology and passions, but about the mysterious nature of time and space. It is the film’s camera that is endowed with the perspective of a foreigner who perceives its surroundings in a new way, like a casual passerby. It records the details imperceptible to a local.

While in Arman Manaryan’s film, the attempt to question the linearity of the narrative is met with the prohibition of Soviet rationalism, in Ovanessian’s instance, the author’s alienation emphasizes the narrative’s uncertainty and unreliability. Both films, each in their own way, mark the dusk of modernist cinema. The USSR entered a deep stagnation with the long Brezhnev years in the 1970s, during which Soviet-Armenian cinema experienced an ideological regression towards nationalist conservatism. In Arbi Ovanessian’s film, the alienation typical of late modernism merely becomes a device on the road to uncovering the mythical and the essential.

At the same time, through his visual and audio portrayal of national culture in the “Fountain”, Ovanessian creates a brilliant paragon for diasporan Armenian cinema.   

The juxtaposition of these two cinematic adaptations of the same literary work reveals polar perceptions of history, tradition, national culture and lifestyle. And by doing so, it indicates that the boundaries of “Armenian cinema” are much wider than they seem.

See also

Part 1

Part 2

Et cetera