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Life in the balance: Scott MacDonald on Artavazd Peleshian

ArtForum, Feb, 2010 by Scott MacDonald
THERE IS NO BETTER EXAMPLE of a remarkable cinematic accomplishment not finding an audience--at least in the United States--than the work of documentary filmmaker Artavazd Peleshian. Born in 1938 in Armenia, then a part of the Soviet Union, Peleshian began making films as a student at the Moscow Film Institute in 1964; by the time he completed The Beginning, in 1967, he had become what he remains: one of the greatest montage artists in modern cinema. When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, one assumed it was only a matter of time before Peleshian's work would be available on this side of the Atlantic--he had become reasonably well known to European film-festival goers, in part because of the support of Jean-Luc Godard--and by all accounts Peleshian himself was excited about the possibility of his films being seen in the United States. He visited here in 1991, and for a time the American filmmaker Godfrey Reggio, best known for Koyaanisqatsi (1982), championed Peleshian in hopes that his own Anima Mundi (1992) might be paired with one of Peleshian's films for an American run. Peleshian demurred, and during the past two decades his US presence has amounted to a few scattered screenings and, more recently, a third-rate bootleg DVD of his films. Fortunately, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, is a presenting a substantial selection of his work this month. To fully grasp Peleshian's contribution, one must go back to the 1920s, the golden age of Russian cinema, when Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and their colleagues transformed film editing. Even if their perfection of montage became the model for the barrage editing now typical of American television advertising, their accomplishments remain a pinnacle in the history of the medium. However, for many filmmakers during the waning years of the Soviet Union, Eisenstein and Vertov came to represent the arrival of Stalin, the gulag, and artistic repression; the result was a rebellion against montage that took two forms. Andrei Tarkovsky's slow, meditative films constructed from long takes were a crucial breakthrough, and many directors followed his lead, among them Alexander Sokurov, whose Russian Ark (2002), a feature-length film realized in one shot, is the apotheosis of this antimontage impulse. A less pervasive tendency, perhaps best exemplified by Peleshian, has involved a redirection of the forms of montage championed by Eisenstein and Vertov.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Peleshian has called his method "distance montage." Unlike Eisenstein's montage, which is "linear, like a chain," distance montage, Peleshian has explained,
creates a magnetic field around the film. It's like when a light is turned on and light is generated around the lamp. ... Sometimes I don't call my method "montage." I'm involved in a process of creating unity. In a sense I've eliminated montage: by creating the film through montage, I have destroyed montage. In the totality, in the wholeness of one of my films, there is no montage, no collision, so as a result montage has been destroyed. In Eisenstein every element means something. For me the individual fragments don't mean anything anymore. Only the whole film has the meaning. ... Sound and image cross each other, intersect each other, switch, change territories. The sound enters the territory of the picture and the image enters the territory of the sound. You start to see the sound and you hear the picture. ... I would want to say that whereas Eisenstein saw editing as a means to get from here to there, I see editing as a means for seeing where we are.*

In distance montage, successive shots may or may not be directly related, and even when they are, their relationships represent only part of their significance. Certain shots, even short sequences, as well as discrete passages of music and isolated sound effects, are repeated multiple times, each time in a different context. As the film develops, the viewer's sense of the topic Peleshian is exploring evolves, and these repetitions accumulate implication and emotional power. Each of the seven Peleshian films being shown in Washington is an operatic rumination on a particular theme. The Beginning uses mostly archival material to cast the October Revolution as a metaphor for liberation of all kinds. In We (1969), Peleshian focuses on his native Armenia as a means of exploring forms of ethnic unity and resistance to assimilation that are shared by cultures the world over. In The Inhabitants (1970), the subject is animal life's global battle against relentless human encroachment. For The Seasons (1975), Peleshian again turned to Armenia, evoking the human struggle to wring sustenance and community from the natural landscape. In Our Age (1982), his subject is the human quest to conquer mortality, as epitomized by the space program, where the "final countdown" instigates a desire to transcend earthly existence. In The End (1992), life is a train journey into the light. And in Life (1993), the miracle of birth is emblematic of the agony and ecstasy of creation.

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