It’s a movie about a historical crime, but it’s also a movie about another movie
Written by Alan Scherstuhl, November 8, 2017
In Intent to Destroy, documentarian Joe Berlinger attempts to assemble a sort of meditative history of the Armenian genocide and its century-long cover-up by the Turkish government out of a curious source: behind-the-scenes footage of the production of Terry George’s film The Promise, a sweeping historical saga with movie stars and first-rate production values, financed independently and released in the spring of 2017.
As a film, The Promise is interesting for its subject and the struggle to get it made, rather than its own drama or technique; Intent to Destroy uses The Promise as something of a guide, as our entree into the history, as if the filmmakers assume that we need to see Oscar Isaac to care about the extermination of millions. “There’s a scene in the movie where Christian Bale goes and attempts to take pictures of what’s happening to the Armenians,” one of the many interviewees tells us, his words illustrated with a clip from The Promise. He continues, “In the real world, it was forbidden to take pictures of anything.” That leads to an enlightening discussion of the practicalities of the Ottoman Empire’s mass murder of Armenians.