Mind the Gaps  Atom Egoyan's Ararat addresses a genocide that
predates the invention of the term: the slaughter of 1.5 million
Armenians by the Turkish Ottoman army during World War I. The
ethical dilemmas involved in depicting a historical atrocity are
summed up in Theodor Adorno's injunction against post-Auschwitz
verse. But the habitually self-conscious and self-critical
Egoyan (born to Armenian parents in Egypt, and raised in British
Columbia) doesn't just concede the impossibility of his task.
This conflicted epic, sprawling in scope yet painfully aware of
its limitations, widens the frame in order to give Egoyan's
reservations free rein.  Ararat concerns the production of a
movie about the genocide (also called Ararat) and ponders the
damages incurred both when history is negated and when history
becomes narrative. If Schindler's Listrepackaged the Holocaust
as prestige entertainment and was duly extolled in some quarters
as the last word on the matter, Egoyan's film is the Spielberg
monument's tormente