Artavazd Pelechian is one of the greatest montage artists in modern cinema. He was born in 1938 in Armenia, then part of the Soviet Union, and studied at VGIK in Moscow from 1963-68. Over the next thirty years, Pelechian made the majority of his films whilst working at the heart of the Soviet film industry. His films uniquely combine documentary footage from official archives with images shot by the filmmaker himself and his collaborators. Assembled through what he conceptualised as “distance montage”, his films defy traditional distinctions between documentary, fiction and the essay film. Whilst they hold a relationship to the found footage cinema produced by avant-garde filmmakers in the West (including Ken Jacobs, also featured in this year’s festival programme) and to the essay film (although they remain largely wordless), they are unique in their poetic approach and the way that the viewer’s sense of the subject matter evolves through repetition and accumulation: “Eisenstein’s montage was linear, like a chain. Distance montage creates a magnetic field around the film. It’s like when a light is turned on and light is generated around the lamp. In distance montage, when the two ends are excited, the whole thing glows” (Pelechian).
Pelechian’s work was championed by French critic Serge Daney as “a missing link in the true history of the cinema.” A 1983 article for Libération cemented Pelechian’s reputation in France, where his films have shown the most outside the former Soviet Union and where his writings have been translated and published. Daney described Pelechian as “a filmmaker, a real one. Unclassifiable, except for the catch-all category of the documentary. What a poor category! In fact, what we have here is a work on montage, which I had come to think had not been practised in the USSR since Dziga Vertov. A work on, with and against montage.”
The programme Interstitial Cinema: the films of Artavazd Pelechian offers a rare opportunity to see this work in the United Kingdom. As Sight and Sound declared upon the release of his 2020 feature Nature: “[the] Armenian director has long been a well-kept secret for cinephiles, but his work has never seemed more relevant and deserves to be better known.”
With thanks to Lilit Sokhakyan, Sona Karapoghosyan, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
The Universal Cinema of Artavazd Pelechian
by Sona Karapoghosyan
Artavazd Pelechian was born in 1938 in Gyumri, Armenia. Early on, he recognised cinema as the most suitable form of self-expression and travelled to Moscow to study at the Institute of Cinematography. His cinematic oeuvre, totalling less than four hours, centres on his distinctive theory of distance montage. This theory stands in opposition to Sergei Eisenstein’s classical montage approach. Whereas Eisenstein constructed narrative meaning through the juxtaposition of consecutive shots, Pelechian “tears them apart,” placing them at a distance from one another. As a result, the narrative of his films emerges through the interaction of images across distance.
Pelechian’s body of work represents a synthesis of art and science, shaping not only the content and form of his films but also his filmmaking method. Taking the etymology of the word cinematography – from the Greek kinema(movement) and graphein (to write or record) – as a starting point, all of his films can be seen as recordings of movement. This concept is explored in its broadest sense: as the physical transfer of a body from one point to another, as social or political movements of groups, and as the continuous human drive for development. In most of his films, archival footage – meticulously compiled and edited by Pelechian – or material filmed by him or his cinematographers focuses on people in constant motion. Beginning (1967) depicts the October Revolution and its impact on human history, Our Century (1983) captures scientific and technological progress; and We (1969) presents an entire nation in motion, offering Pelechian’s interpretation of Armenian history.
Pelechian’s commitment to a pure and literal understanding of cinema also shapes his formal choices as a director. Although he is not theoretically opposed to the use of voiceover or dialogue, he avoids them whenever they do not contribute to the narrative. With the exception of rare dialogue in his first film, Mountain Virgil (1964), or minimal intertitles in a few others, Pelechian’s films contain no dialogue. Instead, he makes extensive use of music, serving as a kind of conductor who establishes the rhythm of his montage. The best examples of this approach can be seen in Seasons (1975) and Our Century, where the music does not impose or manipulate mood but instead responds to the images, creating a visual symphony.
The most distinctive and idiosyncratic formal feature of Pelechian’s cinema is distance montage. He began exploring this method as early as his second film, Earth of People (1966), which is bookended by the same image of Rodin’s Thinker. Pelechian refined the technique in his subsequent works, with We standing as one of its most accomplished examples. In this 27-minute film, certain images are repeated throughout, creating complex interactions across scenes. For instance, the image of a little girl reappears at the beginning and toward the end of the film, establishing relationships not only between these appearances but also with the surrounding sequences, thereby contributing to the overall narrative. A similar effect is achieved through the repeated images of shepherds rescuing their herd in an overflowing river or amid abrupt, snowy mountains. These recurring images, which Pelechian refers to as base or pivotal scenes, function as poetic refrains, making distance montage a literal integration of poetry into his cinema. Moreover, the technique extends beyond images to sound and music, as seen in the repetition of echoes in We and recurring musical passages that serve the same structural purpose.
The narrative of Pelechian’s cinema is thus constructed through distance montage. The interrelation between images placed next to one another or far apart serves to represent and analyse causal relationships between events unfolding on the screen. In Beginning, the film traces the gradual development of a historical process from causes to consequences: social discontent leads to uprising, which results in revolution and ultimately shapes world history through events such as the rise of fascism and the Second World War. In We, a similar relationship is presented in the opposite direction, moving from consequences to causes. The film portrays a contemporary Armenia that develops and flourishes, welcoming repatriates from the diaspora – those forced to leave their homeland due to the Armenian Genocide and wars. The image of the little girl becomes central to this structure: initially appearing as a neutral figure, she is later revealed as a survivor of genocide. Our Century follows the same logic, beginning with one of humanity’s most significant scientific and technological achievements – human space travel – and then moving backward into the depths of history, tracing the earliest human attempts to ride, drive, or fly. Through such juxtapositions, Pelechian intertwines the contemporary world with history: in one case, history becomes contemporary, while in another, the contemporary transforms into history. In this way, Pelechian uses distance montage to search for causes, consequences, and meaning within historical events and realities.
Pelechian chooses a different narrative direction in Seasons, where distance montage contributes to the poetic quality of the film, transforming it into a pastoral tale. Through small episodes drawn from the everyday routines of villagers, the director constructs a universal narrative that captures and celebrates life and nature in their purest forms. A similar approach is evident in Inhabitants (1970), where nature is placed in opposition to humans. Pelechian’s skill in using specific, localised examples to explore universal themes is perhaps his greatest strength, present throughout his entire oeuvre, including his later films Life (1993) and Nature (2019).
When attempting to summarise the filmography of Artavazd Pelechian and its central themes, his films can be grouped into several broad categories: humanity, work, life, history, nature, and the cosmos. Traces of socialist ideology can be identified in the way his films celebrate human labour and collective effort, while biblical imagery – shepherds, sheep, sacrifice, and even the suggestion of a flood – also appears throughout his work. Yet these elements do not function as isolated references. Rather, they exist as parts of a single, unified universe. Throughout his long career and relatively small body of work, Pelechian remained faithful to his cinematic vision, continuing an ongoing pursuit of pure cinema and establishing himself as a truly cosmic filmmaker.
Sona Karapoghosyan is a film critic and curator based in Yerevan, Armenia. Since 2017, she has been a program curator at the Golden Apricot International Film Festival.