Mishelle Masri
1915, 1917, 1922, 1933, 1949, 1961, 1975, 1994. Dates. Numbers. The act of naming: a date and nothing more. This dates sum up a number of 993,000,000 million people murdered, slaughtered, and killed, thrashed, beaten, slayed, executed. -For what? - We may ask – Why? – we all inquire with both, disgrace and sorrow. An all we overhear when we ask, when we think of it, when we try to swallow all of this, when we even consider asking, is silence, stillness, muteness. These dates, these marks of history, are inviting, welcoming us to speak. These inscriptions, in which lives, stories, deaths, lies, moments, times, instants, people, are hidden and where we storage every inch of history in dates, so that we may allow ourselves to dismiss them from our memories; something marks a date, and that 'something' is that which we attempt so hard to let go, but will haunt us every time we mark a mark again, it will take us back to it, with all the disgrace and humiliation that encompasses, every moment in the history of men. Because, every script comes or happens for the first and last time, every time. Those dates are something that we do not yet really know how to identify, regulate, recognize, distinguish… we have not yet found a way to name them, and we circumspect them with a number, around a number, along a cipher, a code, an encryption. Nevertheless, that dates tell us that they should endure from here on unforgettable: an ineffaceable event in the shared archive of a universal calendar, a worldwide experience of time, a schedule for humanity's memoirs. But they also cry to us, telling and recalling us that we are unable to reconcile with history, that we cannot make amends with time, we are incapable of mooring those deaths, they tell us that they haunted by its own time, a time that is much less its own than impossibly inherited in the unsituatable experience of their moment. Shall we try to write what happened in those dates in past tense? Or is present tense more suitable to announce us what enclosures those marks? Is the past already gone, removed, erased, or is the past happening every time we consign ourselves to oblivion? Is present tense, is the word "now", a word that opens, unlocks, and answers; a tense as faltering as it is urgent, a tense that inaugurates the event of writing and marking, as once an unfulfillable anticipation of what is to come, what is ahead of or in the work, and an all too precipitate (therefore "improper") decision about the past as, to choose from now on, the "proper" tense?This is what makes the film 1915 a way to resurrect old ghosts, merging past experiences with present ones. 1915 is a way to let a date happen, once and for all, as the way it should have happened long ago: it is way to allow 1915, as a date, as a calendar script, to escape its own fate. A way to let it happen. A way to assume a date. A way to assume the deaths. Assume that we allow those dates to happen. And it lets us know that when we forget, we kill the deaths again, we take the knives of our guilt and with remorse we stab them to their graves once and twice, repeatedly. Although I believe that knowing what happened and how it happened, isn't an emergency exit from guilt, at least it make us conscious that we are facing, and we will eternally face our impossibility to mourn, to grief them. And that even if we'd like to held one minute of silence for every victim of these crimes, we wouldn't have enough time, because we would have to be silent for 189 years. We have not enough time to mourn, we have not enough time to narrate each of the stories of the ones that were killed, we cannot even tell each name, write each name, know each name. 1915, as a movie, as a date, as an event, as a moment, as a genocide, externalizes us that there are gaps that we are unable, and we are powerless to fill; the gap—which makes as much as it breaks—is therefore where 1915, 1917, 1922, 1933, 1949, 1961, 1975, 1994 starts, and re-starts time and does it once more.
