ARTAVAZD PELESHIAN
AFTER 15 YEARS WORK ON THE PROJECT, THE ARMENIAN DIRECTOR HAS FINALLY COMPLETED HIS NEW FILM, LA NATURE, A DAZZLING PAEAN TO MAN’S RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS ENVIRONMENT THAT PREMIERED AT PARIS’S FONDATION CARTIER.
Twenty-seven years after what was thought to be his final film, Artavazd Peleshian is back. In this new work, the radical director pushes his self-invented concept of “distance montage” yet further. A quarter of a century, from one millennium to the next, has brought his poetic effects of association and suggestion to new heights, as can be seen by comparing The Seasons (1975) and La Nature (2020), which are both being shown by the Fondation Cartier as a counterpoint to their Sarah Sze show.
In the beginning was The Beginning (1967). At 29, the boy from Soviet Armenia, then a student at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow (VGIK), had already made two very beautiful short films, Mountain Vigil (1964) and Earth of People (1966) – movies by a highly talented director, for sure, but not yet Peleshian. It was with The Beginning that the composition of a complex, rigorous, methodical and eruptive oeuvre really began. Between 1967 and 1993, Peleshian produced seven titles that, shown back to back, last two hours. Entirely filmed in black and white – with the exception of the 7-minute-long last one, Life –, they are totally devoid of dialogue or commentary. The shots (with or without sound) and music all existed before these films were made – what is known as “found footage,” a term that doesn’t really do justice to these extraordinary compositions of images and sound which, each time based around a theme, constitute a sort of moving marquetry, an organic system of sensory echoes through Peleshian’s extraordinary
manipulation of montage. Following in the footsteps of the great Soviet artist-thinkers on the subject (Eisenstein, Vertov, Kuleshov, Pudovkin), Peleshian developed his own approach, which he summarized in the text Counterpoint Montage or the Theory of Distance, published in the magazine Trafic (no. 2, spring 1992).
Tackling themes such as the human community ( We, 1969), the animal kingdom ( Inhabitants, 1970), nature ( The Seasons), technology and the attempt to tear oneself away from the planet ( Our Century, 1982), as well as death ( The End, 1992) and life ( Life, 1993), each of the seven films mobilizes a multitude of sensations and mental associations, in varied emotional registers, from dreamlike wonder to critical wordplay, from terror to serenity. Peleshian’s poetic method of montage puts him among the greats; looking for a language beyond the order of discourse – as he explained to Jean-luc Godard at a memorable meeting in which the Franco-swiss director told him, “To me your films seem to come only from cinema” ( Le Monde, 2 April 1992) – he developed a “cosmic” meditation which embraces all sublunar beings in the complexity of their relationships.
It is in this optic that we must consider La Nature. Commissioned by the Fondation Cartier and the Karlsruhe ZKM in 2005, Peleshian’s longest ever film (1’02) focuses on what modernists have called nature (as opposed to culture). A dazzling audiovisual poem, it deploys the sovereign beauty and devastating furies of volcanoes, tsunamis, typhoons and mega-fires in a sort of apocalyptic prophecy that takes on its full meaning in relation to his previous work. Which makes it all the more apposite to show it in conjuction with The Seasons, even if all his films would make sense here, especially the The Beginning, based as it is in the anthropocentric convulsions of history, wars and revolutions.