Ravished Armenia

In 1939 Hitler justified the pogroms perpetrated by his regime by sneering "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" Twenty years earlier Aurora Mardiganian contrived to preempt that boast when her eye-witness account was published in 1918, followed by a film that achieved a great impact but of which today only a small fragment remains.

In a fashion similar to 'Nuit et Brouillard' the bleached out images create the quality of a nightmare. Instead of cattle trucks we see camels against a barren desert, and it's strange to see the perpetrators wearing fezs rather than Nazi uniforms; while the final image of the corpses of naked young woman who have suffered a mass crucifixion resembles a grotesque parody of the road to Calvary.

Only 20 minutes of this feature-length movie chronicling the genocide of over a million Armenians during WWII survives today, but what remains suggests that this movie was unlike anything to have previously come out of Hollywood. The existing footage is hazy and difficult to follow, but it is still a powerful, and at times harrowing, indictment of the atrocities that members of the human race are capable of inflicting on one another.

True, amazing... a must watch with true historical facts

Aurora Mardiganian was an 11 year-old Armenian living in Ottoman Turkey when she witnessed her family butchered in 1915 while she personally was forced to march to Syria, resulting in one-million deaths of her fellow Armenians. She survived the grueling march, only to be sold into slavery. Mardiganian escaped, and through a series of stopovers, finally ended up in New York City, where a young scriptwriter, hearing her story, sat down with her to compose a movie script and accompanying memoirs of her and her people's tragedy.

First National Pictures bought the screenplay and produced the 90-minute recreation of the 1915 Turkish events, releasing "Ravished Armenia," also known as "Auction of Souls" in February 1919. The movie, with Mardiganian playing herself, is the earliest film depicting a genocidal mass murder. Only 20 minutes exist of the movie, but what has survived is the portion of the motion picture illustrating the grisly torture, rape and murders of the Armenians. Filming of the scenes recreating the march was in California and directed by Oscar Apfel, early mentor to a young Cecil B. DeMille. One particular sequenced filmed was especially tragic: towards the end of the movie shows 12 females crucified in the desert. The filming took several hours in the hot sands, resulting in one model contracting influenza and dying several days after the shoot.

"Ravished Armenia" was a perfect fundraiser for relief organizations who aided the Armenians in Turkey and Syria. Charities charged up to $10 per person for each showing before the movie was released to general theaters. The film generated a ton of controversies with its depiction of the flogging of women and their nude crucifixion, prompting several state censor boards, including Pennsylvania, to outright ban its viewing. First National sued the state on the grounds "Ravished Armenia" was an educational film showing the horrors of an ongoing genocidal program in Turkey. The judge ruled against the censor board and allowed its projection.

As for Mardiganian, whom the press called the Joan of Arc of Armenia, she married and lived in Los Angeles the remainder of her life, dying in 1994 at 93 years of age.