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Crowe's Water Diviner Is Out Of His Depth

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  • Crowe's Water Diviner Is Out Of His Depth

    CROWE'S WATER DIVINER IS OUT OF HIS DEPTH

    January 13, 2015

    By Anthony McAdam

    Leaving aside aesthetic considerations, the fact is the film's lack
    of any historical context is breathtaking. There are many, but there
    is one really glaring omission.

    It so happens that the well-documented genocide of the Armenians at
    the hands of the Turks was initiated on the day immediately before
    the Gallipoli landing, an overlap that traditionally receives hardly
    a mention from Australian historians, and no reference whatsoever in
    this film.

    The Spectator - To much fanfare, Russell Crowe's first film as a
    director, The Water Diviner, was released on Boxing Day. It appears at
    a key moment - the focus of the film, Gallipoli, is about to become
    the centrepiece in an elaborate nation-wide commemoration to mark
    the centenary of the landing in 1915.

    If intentions are taken seriously, the film is a huge disappointment.

    Its release came packaged to suggest that it presents a more honest
    and more understanding appreciation of our then enemy, the Turks.

    Besides being the director, Crowe is the star and driving force in
    the film's conception, and hence fully responsible for the result. His
    intention: 'It is time to teach our children the other side [i.e. the
    Turkish side] of the Gallipoli story'.

    Many of the media reviews have been just as presumptuous and
    wrong-headed. The Age, for instance, tells us 'This is perhaps the
    first Australian war movie to deal honestly with the Turks and that
    is one of its achievements'.

    Well, not really. This highly sentimentalised and rather pointless
    attempt to depict the human dimension of the Gallipoli campaign, as
    experienced by an Aussie father (Crowe) searching for the bodies of
    his three sons, fails both as plausible drama and as an honest attempt
    to confront the actual behaviour of the enemy (the Ottoman empire),
    not to mention the moral justification for the terrible sacrifice of
    Allied lives.

    On that last point, distinguished British historian Jeremy Black
    recently wrote: 'The current fashion for commemorating the dead
    by honouring their struggle does not in fact honour them unless we
    explain why they were fighting and facing the personal, moral and
    religious challenges of risking and inflicting death. Why did men
    volunteer in 1914? Why did they advance across the 'killing ground'?

    To mark the struggle without recalling its point and value is both
    to lack a moral compass and, indeed, not really to seek one'.

    And for those who believe, as Crowe seems to, that Britain and
    Australia entered the war for ignoble reasons, or no reason at all,
    it is worth 'remembering' that Britain was responding to a clear act
    of German aggression against a neutral country, Belgium, with which
    it was honour bound by treaty to defend, a decision overwhelmingly
    supported at the time by the Australian government and the Australian
    people. Turkey threw in its lot with the Germans and made itself
    the enemy.

    Not only does the film fail to show the slightest inkling of interest
    as to why the allies fought and, for that matter, why the hero's sons
    died, but Crowe bathes the whole story in a painfully mawkish and
    barely credible tale of a heart-broken water diviner (Crowe himself)
    who miraculously emerges as a body diviner rambling around the rocky
    cliffs of Gallipoli 'bonding' with the very soldiers responsible
    for his sons' deaths, with of course the now obligatory Aussie sneer
    directed towards a British officer made out to be a right pompous git
    (shades of Weir's Gallipoli?).

    Leaving aside aesthetic considerations, the fact is the film's lack
    of any historical context is breathtaking. There are many, but there
    is one really glaring omission.

    It so happens that the well-documented genocide of the Armenians at
    the hands of the Turks was initiated on the day immediately before
    the Gallipoli landing, an overlap that traditionally receives hardly
    a mention from Australian historians, and no reference whatsoever in
    this film.

    What happened to the Armenians? Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, author of
    The First World War in the Middle East (2014) paints the basic picture:

    The Armenian genocide started in earnest on 24 April 1915 with the
    arrest and deportation of thousands of Armenian political leaders
    and intellectuals. This act triggered widespread massacres that
    subsequently killed an estimated 1 million Armenians. The combination
    of the outright killings and the forced marches through the Syrian
    Desert constituted one of the earliest examples of a 'crime against
    humanity'...

    The mass murder of this ancient Christian community made no exception
    for women and children and was conducted with a barbarity that
    shocked even officers of the Ottoman's German allies, some of whom
    witnessed the gruesome scenes first hand, as did missionaries and
    other outsiders.

    The legacy of what happened a hundred years ago in Turkey this April
    is now taking on all the characteristics of a diplomatic perfect
    storm. Obviously, the Australian centenary commemorations at Gallipoli
    will be more elaborate than anything previous, the worldwide protests
    by the Armenian Diaspora will be more vociferous than ever, and the
    Turkish government's fierce opposition to even the mention of the
    word genocide will be as aggressive as ever.

    This combination of factors is now coming to a head with Turkey
    virtually ruling itself out of any hope of having its stalled
    application to join the EU accepted, its position on the Armenian
    issue being a major factor. If all this were not enough, more evidence
    is emerging that highlights Turkey's current machiavellian position
    vis-a-vis the Islamic State's forces on its borders, a savage army
    currently trying to murder what's left of Iraq's and Syria's Christian
    communities, and other demonised faith communities.

    Where does Australia sit in this gathering storm with its myriad
    strategic and moral conundrums? Not well. While Opposition Leader
    Tony Abbott did not hesitate to condemn the Armenian genocide, last
    June Foreign Minister Julie Bishop issued a statement that called
    the Armenian killings 'a tragedy' but added, quite unnecessarily,
    'we do not recognise the events as genocide' for which, according to
    (former Speccie Diarist) Geoffrey Robertson QC, 'she was duly lauded
    in Turkey as a genocide denier'.

    The moral issue at stake is neatly captured in the subtitle of
    Robertson's recently published book on the genocide: 'Who now remembers
    the annihilation of the Armenians?' It was Hitler's comment to his
    generals on the eve of the invasion of Poland urging them to show no
    mercy as there would be no retribution. It's all part of 'the other
    side of the Gallipoli story' that Russell Crowe somehow didn't get
    around to even hinting at.

    http://www.horizonweekly.ca/news/details/59284

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