Artavazd Peleshyan: Seasons / Our Century

Please join us on Tuesday, July 16th for a screening and discussion of two short films by the enigmatic Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Peleshyan. No less a figure than the film critic Serge Daney described Peleshyan as “a missing link in the true history of cinema,” a “Vertov in the era of Michael Snow, a Dovzhenko added to Godard, Wiseman or van der Keuken.” Born in 1938 in Leninakan (present-day Gyumri), Peleshyan entered VGIK in 1963, where he pioneered a style of filmmaking he would later call “distance montage.” Peleshyan positioned this style both with and against Eisenstein and Vertov, writing that “the main essence and focus of editing work for me is not in splicing frames together, but in un-splicing them, not in their ‘joining,’ but in their ‘disjoining.’” To showcase this style, we will screen two of Peleshyan’s most famous films: Seasons (Vremena Goda, 1975, 30 minutes), a poetic film about Armenian shepherds, and Our Century (Nash Vek, 1982, 50 minutes), an experimental archive film about the space race. Both films, as well as Peleshyan’s theoretical writings, offer scholars tools for thinking about montage, time, and space (notably distance) in multiple contexts.