This soporific visual poem claims some vague connection to the slaughter of two million Armenians by the Turks in 1915, and the subsequent anguish of an obscure Armenian composer in a French mental hospital, but any historical or biographical detail is entirely accidental. The film demands extraordinary patience, but would still make no sense without an extensive introduction (not provided beyond the press kit at the screening I attended). Under separate episodes entitled 'Childhood', 'Journey', 'Lamentation, Mourning and Woe', and so forth, the camera suggests the gradual disintegration of the eponymous composer's mind, memory and culture by lingering on a series of artfully arranged symbolic tableaux, describing elaborate (and very, very slow) tracking shots over every introspective detail. The effect is, as the 1989 San Francisco International Film Festival program itself admitted, "like watching paint dry"; paint applied by an artist, perhaps, but (in a textbook example of intellectual rigor mortis) no less numbing to sit through.
