Khazarian’s experimental approach doesn’t exactly elucidate the conflict; nor does it take an ideological position. But, as the ironic title suggests (Kalatchnikov is the name of a standard semi-automatic rifle), the film shows us how war can usurp, and even poignantly become, a culture unto itself.

Despite the political backdrop, I Love the Sound is less a documentary than it is a personal reverie on issues of identity, culture, and the sense of community that coalesces in the shadows of national struggle. It’s a landscape that Jean Renoir captured eloquently in his 1937 masterpiece Grand Illusion. Except for this thematic similarity, the two films couldn’t be more different. I Love the Sound enlists radical experimentalism to highly subjective ends: fetishistic replays of scenes, digital manipulation, different film and video stocks, and other alienating effects like close-ups on a subject’s eyes while he speaks rather than his mouth (sehr Brecht) are among the techniques Khazarian employs. Yet the film’s abstract approach and concerns ultimately call to mind literary rather than cinematic parallels. Khazarian’s sense of nostalgia and his use of archive photography evoke the autobiographical simulacra of W.G. Sebald, who peppers his novels with antique photographs that add verisimilitude to a history that may not, technically speaking, be his own. Khazarian’s interest in the immigrant’s experience also allies him with Milan Kundera, whose novels similarly address the complex relationships of immigrants to their abandoned homelands (the Czech Republic, in Kundera's case).

One way Khazarian tries to gain insight into his subject is via the irony of jarring juxtaposition; he contrasts footage of an elderly Armenian couple recounting their experience of the 1915 massacre with the staged violence of contemporary professional wrestling. Khazarian’s message is ambiguous, and provocatively so: have we become immune to the power of violence now that it’s a form of mass entertainment? Or is the point that violence is always performative?

Khazarian doesn’t explicitly explore queer issues in the film, yet the work is unmistakably that of gay man. Filming in the male barracks, Khazarian’s lingers over one soldier’s well-fitting cargo pants, and then replays the clip again and again, fetishistically. Later, Khazarian gives us a glimpse of a bare-armed, stringy-muscled soldier between the wind-swept rushes of a field. His hands are cropped out of the frame, and he is hard at work at something in his lap—perhaps cleaning his Kalatchnikov. Yet the mise-en-scene has a voyeuristic, almost pornographic quality, suggesting perhaps Freud was not entirely wrong about the sexual implications of little boys and their guns. That boredom can erupt into eros—or violence—at the slightest provocation is both the excitement and the danger of the military life. (In this sense, the film calls to mind Claire Denis’ sublime retelling of Billy Budd among French legionnaires, Beau Travail, though it’s one instance where I Love the Sound suffers in comparison.)

Elsewhere in the film, Khazarian includes (what I take to be) archival footage from the '70s of young Armenian youth frolicking on a school bus, mooning the camera. Finally, the camera fixes its gaze on a boy of about seventeen with Ashton Kutcher bone structure and soulful, open eyes. The cameraman is clearly in love, and so, one suspects, is our filmmaker. There is an eerie sense of doubling and distance here (the anonymous cameraman echoing and squaring the desires of Khazarian) that is the soul of the film. Most gay youths grow up isolated observers of a heterosexual community they can’t completely partake in or identify with. But for Khazarian, who was dislocated from his entire culture, the alienation is twofold. That distance gives Khazarian the outsider's perspective on a fascinating and little-explored terrain: the gay émigré's search for meaning through the lens of an elided past and the politics of the present.