Great Silent – ​​Weekend

His films and theoretical works are taught in film schools all over the world, books are written about him and films are made about him, Sergei Parajanov considered him one of the few true film geniuses, Alexander Sokurov and Godfrey Reggio called him his teacher, his theory of editing was inspired by Jean-Luc Godard. His films – almost all of them short – can be watched in one evening, they are easy to find on the Internet. But if you’re not a cinephile, you’ve most likely never heard of director Artavazd Peleshyan. Xenia Rozhdestvenskaya tells how Peleshyan’s cinema works and why his films are important today.

Absence

I want to live in his universe. A silent man, a loner, a director who created his own theory of montage and his own theory of the universe, Peleshyan began filming in 1963 and has since made only a dozen films, each – no matter how long it lasts, six minutes or 50 – is grandiose. All of them are outside of documentary cinema, outside of the usual forms. Most are black and white, many use historical chronicles, all without off-screen commentary, all have episodes that repeat over and over again, cyclicity and rhythm are important in all, each is a kind of symphony. Peleshyan is an inventor, theorist and practitioner of “remote editing”, a cinematographer who is sure that cinema originates “from the time when there was no division into different languages”. The man who reinvented the laws of cinema. An elementary particle of cinema, like Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein.

In one of his theoretical works, Peleshyan wrote that his favorite technique was montage with missing frames, that is, montage in which some images are implied, but “almost or completely eliminated.” The viewer himself completes these shots thanks to music or context.

He himself is such a missing frame. The French film critic Serge Daney, one of those thanks to whom the name of Peleshyan is known all over the world, called him “a link that is missing in the real history of cinema.”

Distance

Artavazd Peleshyan is 85. He was born in 1938 in Armenia, in Leninakan (now Gyumri), and came to enter VGIK in 1963. He studied with Leonid Christie, who was sure that neither before nor after Peleshyan did anything more significant happen in documentary films. He began to develop his own theory of montage from the very first of his works – both theoretical and practical – not exactly arguing with Vertov and Eisenstein, but doing it differently. Where Eisenstein has a “montage junction”, Peleshyan has a “decoupling”: he spreads significant shots, creates a distance between them. Getting into this force field, neighboring frames begin to work differently.

Both his VGIK short film The Land of People (1966) and the legendary Beginning (1967), made for the 50th anniversary of the Great October Revolution, destroyed time – in the first film he showed one day in the life of Soviet people, in the second – the beginning new Soviet era. But time in these films seemed to be melting, sinking, the revolutionary masses in Nachalo ran to meet themselves.

In the film Our Century (1982), dedicated to space, flights, including interrupted ones, there are chronicles: planes fly over the desert, and their shadows, making their way through the dunes, grow and shrink, then lag behind, then catch up. Peleshyan’s cinematography in relation to the usual cinema is the same shadows in the desert, physically explicable, understandable and calculated, but still incredible.

“Remote editing creates a magnetic field around the film,” he wrote. No wonder they seem to breathe, pulsate.

Therefore, individual frames from his films have almost no power. Like individual episodes. In Sibiriada, Andrei Konchalovsky decided to use pieces from The Beginning, but then asked Peleshyan to edit the original chronicle episodes. They get out of the “Siberiada”, cross out its artificiality – but, perhaps, it rests on them.

He generally stands out from the history of cinema, and it is not surprising that he has almost no followers – even Godfrey Reggio, who is considered his student and calls Peleshyan his idol, began to develop his own concept of editing even before getting acquainted with Peleshyan’s films. Jean-Luc Godard can be called his other admirer and follower – he set similar tasks for his later films: to get away from time, to get away from the word, to get away from the language. In 1992, their dialogue took place in Paris, and there Peleshyan says: “Only cinema is able to truly fight against time thanks to editing. With this microbe – time – cinema can do away with it.

Time

Critics, finding no other words, called him a film poet, but if we recall the classic confrontation of the 1960s – “something of physics is held in high esteem, something of lyrics is in the pen,” Peleshyan is certainly not a lyricist, but a physicist. Not surprisingly, he summed up his vision of cinema in My Universe and the Unified Field Theory, a book he has been writing for nearly 40 years that offers a comprehensive “history of everything.” He writes: “Both science and art operate on the same three basic concepts: space, time and motion” – and explains that the Universe is “immortal, finite, stable and eternal” – a conclusion to which he came “thanks to the language of cinema.

When he begins and ends a film with the same—or similar—elements, the same film image or sound repetition, he turns the film not so much into a ball—as he himself believes—but into a Möbius strip, an endless film closed on itself. But at the end of the film, as the author himself says, “the image acquires a qualitatively different meaning than at the beginning,” and Rodin’s “The Thinker” at the beginning of “Land of the People” thinks about something completely different from what the “Thinker” is about in the finale. The silence of the world, as it was before man, and the silence of the world, as it will be after the dust of civilization has settled, are different silences.

Silence

Peleshyan does not trust ordinary, human language. He believes that the word was invented for communication, and therefore is not able to convey what the film can contain. In his films, words are reduced to off-screen noises, he is a man of a dumb, silent cinema. Lev Anninsky wrote that Peleshyan “builds his symphonies without a single word” for good reason, because “words explain the anxiety of the spirit too flatly,” and Italian director Pietro Marcello called a biopic about the director Peleshyan’s Silence (2011). Peleshyan, by the way, was upset: he thought that the name “Without words” would be more correct. And yes, he does not say a word there – he watches TV, walks down the street, puts flowers on the graves of his teachers: Sergei Gerasimov, Leonid Christie, – he is silent.

In this work, the master’s unreleased films – primarily “Homo Sapiens”, a film about art and a paradise on earth, disfigured by bloodshed (Peleshyan has been dreaming of this project since the 1970s, but can not find financing in any way) – are compared with spaceships: ” They’re waiting to be assembled like spaceships.” It is impossible to talk about Peleshyan and not say anything about the Universe.

Sound

Peleshyan always tried to make the viewer “hear” the video sequence and “see” the sound, and completely abandoned the synchronous and off-screen commentary. Therefore, the spectator himself willy-nilly becomes the off-screen commentator in his films, and every person on Earth sees his own Peleshyan film – terrible or amazing, graphomaniac or brilliant, a film that stands at the very origins of cinema – or a film that certainly outstrips the movement of cinematic thought.

In his program film “We” (1969), which tells about the people of Armenia and, more globally, about a person as part of the world, there are also no words, only three captions: “Tired …”, “Do you think it’s better in another place?” and “This is your land.” Peleshyan himself spoke about his film “We” – in fact, about all his films: “It is almost impossible to retell the content of such films in words. They are on the screen, and they need to be watched.

Do you think it’s better elsewhere?

These films must be watched. Today, news feeds are constructed as “attraction montage” or “frame clash”, that is, as an attempt to attract the viewer or as propaganda. But if you look at our century as if it were a Peleshyan film, perhaps something will become clearer. What is happening now will rhyme with what will happen after many meters of film, and then everything will make sense. Some episodes will remain in the dark, but the missing frames always carry more meaning than those that we are able to see.

Artavazd Peleshyan knows what everyone else dismisses, what others think is madness or nonsense. In his book My Universe and the Unified Field Theory, he explains that half is equal to the whole. That one is not equal to one (“both units have different ‘parents’, so 100 – 99 is not equal to 5 – 4”), that the world is permeated with particles consisting of “no”, particles that are in an invisible, “missing” state. And that the “absent” world ensures the existence of the material world. And that “cinema” means “recording movement.” And that Einstein was irreparably mistaken. And that the Universe consists of two parts, like two hemispheres of the human brain, and that it “does not expand and does not shrinks. It pulsates like a human heart.”

Cyclicity, circulation, the clash of people and nature, ideas, not images – this is the essence of his cinema, and this is the essence of history. The repeatedly repeated shots of a swan preparing to take off at the beginning of the film The Inhabitants (1970) begin to be perceived as movement in general, the very essence of effort, the moment of application of force, after which nothing will be the same – this exhausts the whole essence of human civilization.

In The End (1993), the camera zooms (no matter which way) past the mountains, past the sea, through the trees, and thanks to the laws of physics, the mountains appear to be motionless, and the trees flicker, merge into stripes and gray spots. We are these gray spots, we will rush by and not notice ourselves; the mountains will stand forever.

No, not forever: in Nature (2019) everything falls apart, turns into fragments, dust, elementary particles.

No, let’s not rush: the profile of the woman in labor from The Beginning (1992) is as monumental as the mountains looking into the sky.

This is the secret and power of Peleshyan’s films: he does not offer any symbols, he does not impose metaphors, he simply shows the structure of the world.

In “Nature” the world is destroyed, peace is destroyed, civilization is flooded – there is humanity here, but there is no man, there is only a collective body, its ebb and flow, its fading music.

This is us. Collective body, sick, evil, great or insignificant. According to blockbusters, we fight and suffer, perform feats and meanness. If Peleshian’s films are to be believed, the collective human body is simply staring into the sky. Without words. Sometimes it seems to be breathing.

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