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Screamers

Director Carla Garapedian

MG2 Productions

“Screamers” is an apt name for this documentary – an impassioned, often incoherent, but always affecting look at genocide throughout the past 90 years.

Director Carla Garapedian (“Beneath the Veil”) alternates between concert footage of Armenian-American rock band System of a Down, interviews with scholars and grainy newsreels of massacres and killings.

The juxtapositions don’t quite work as a narrative; Garapedian attempts to segue from System of a Down’s lyrics about the Armenian Genocide of 1915 to the problem of genocide as a whole, but sadly fails.

And every time the film starts flirting with worldwide issues, it returns to the small story of the band. Alternatively, just when the film seems destined to become an intimate portrait of four musicians fighting for a cause, the focus abruptly expands, leaving the audience with a jarring sense of whiplash.

There’s also little in the way of subtlety, what with the atrocities of genocide being delineated with blunt precision. Yet this doesn’t actually hurt “Screamers.” In fact, it’s the whole point.

System of a Down’s loud instrumentals and searing voice work, likewise unsubtle, combine with Garapedian’s forceful editing to give the whole film an aura of burgeoning anger.

It becomes clear after a while that for Garapedian the film’s title constitutes the only real response one can have toward genocide. We must all scream in protest, and as loud as we can.

This screaming, however, should not be directed solely at the perpetrators of genocides, but also at the international community that does little to stop genocide when it happens.

Governments, argues Garapedian, care more for neutrality and economic foreign relationships than they do about human rights. As a result, nothing is done when one culture attempts to eradicate another; until it’s too late, that is.

It’s a powerful indictment and one that calls for numerous examples from different conflicts. Unfortunately, though the required examples are indeed provided, the film’s fixation on the Armenian Genocide hides the broadness of the themes under the shadow of specificity.

In another context this would not be a problem. The Armenian Genocide is a fascinating subject for any artistic endeavor (see Atom Egoyan’s “Ararat”). But in this case, it feels like Garapedian set out to make a film exclusively about the Armenian Genocide, and then last minute decided she wanted her documentary to be a general overview of history. Consequently, she succeeded at neither.