Political Violence Through a Different Lens

Aram Ghoogasian

The 20th century, violent as it was, saw the rise of nonviolence as a prominent strategy. Consequently, it also changed the public perception of violent uprisings.

Erebuni, a district in the Armenian capital, is currently the site of such an uprising, one that comes on the heels of the Armenian government’s overreaction to a hostage standoff at a Yerevan police station.

The motives of the hostage takers and the protesters who are responding to the detention of civilians without charge have been commented on extensively enough in the press. But many professional and amateur commentators alike have attempted to moralize the use of violence, often prefacing their columns with the disclaimer that they in no way condone violence committed by either the state or the populace.

Cannes 2015: Don't Tell Me the Boy Was Mad review – Armenia's tragedy becomes meaty drama

Andrew Pulver

 

The indefatigable Robert Guédiguian returns to the highminded thriller style that proved successful with his 2009 picture The Army of Crime, which unveiled local complicity in the betrayal of a wartime resistance cell in German occupied Marseilles. This new film, for which the original French title is a slightly more snappy Une Histoire de Fou (A Story of Madness), jumps forwards three decades, to Marseilles in the 1970s, and takes as its subject the wave of bombings and assassinations perpetrated by Armenian radicals against Turkish interests, in response to the genocidal killings of Armenians during and after the first world war.