• BIRTH IN ARMENIA

Artavazd Pelechian was born in 1938 in Leninakan, a city in Soviet Armenia that was partially destroyed in the 1988 earthquake, and renamed Gyumri following the country’s independence in 1991. He was raised in Kirovakan (now Vanadzor), where he received a technical education, employed first as a metal worker, and later as a draftsman. He met his future wife Aïda Galstyan in Kirovakan.

In 2020, Pelechian completed his memoirs. Exceptionally, for the Fondation Cartier’s exhibition, the filmmaker is sharing two pages from the not-yet-published manuscript, in which he recounts a vivid childhood memory.

Artavazd Pelechian, Memoirs (excerpt), handwritten Armenian text and English and French translations, 2020.

• DEPARTURE FOR MOSCOW

In 1963, Pelechian left his native Armenia and settled in Moscow. He decided to enter the VGIK, the prestigious film school counting other major figures of Soviet cinema including Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov, Alexander Sokurov, and Andrei Konchalovsky among its former students. He was a student there from 1963 to 1968, officially receiving his degree in 1971 with the presentation of his film We. Upon seeing this film and after extended deliberation, the jury made the unprecedented decision to grant him a triple degree, distinguishing documentary, fiction and television film.

This anecdote alone illustrates the unique position of Pelechian’s work, escaping the classical distinction in cinematographic genres.

• FIRST THREE FILMS

While still a student at the VGIK, he made his first three films: Mountain Patrol, Land of the People, and The Beginning. These films laid the groundwork for formal explorations that came to fruition in 1969 with the film We. Pelechian was commissioned to make The Beginning for the 50th anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution in 1967.

1964: Mountain Patrol
Լեռնային պարեկ (ARM) | Горный патруль (RU)

35mm, black & white, 10 min, Armenia/USSR

This film follows a group of workers who clear off the railroad tracks daily for train lines in the Armenian mountains. Pelechian extols the dignity and rigor of manual labor.

1966: Land of the People
Մարդկանց երկիրը | Земля людей

70mm, black & white, 10 min, USSR

An image of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker opens and closes Land of the People. Between these two sequences, the film visually evokes the accomplishments and activities through which women and men inhabit the Earth.

1967: The Beginning
Սկիզբը| Начало

35 mm, black & white, 10 min, USSR

Made on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution (1917), this film shows images of the Russian Revolution in parallel with sequences invoking the social strife of the 1960s around the world.

• THE FOUND LINK

At the heart of the 1960s, Pelechian continued the formal experimentations undertaken a few decades earlier in the cinematic realm by avant-garde artists in the USSR, which had been abruptly halted in the 1930s by the new aesthetic standards imposed by the Soviet regime. In a video interview, and in the text The Found Link below, the Romanian filmmaker Andrei Ujica, well versed in film history, explains this link connecting Pelechian to the great experimenters born of the Russian Revolution—Sergei Eisenstein, Esther Shub and Dziga Vertov. As former director of the ZKM Filminstitut Karlsruhe, Ujica participated in the production of Pelechian’s film Nature hand in hand with the Fondation Cartier.

The Found Link by Andrei Ujica

Those looking to understand the cinema of Artavazd Pelechian must seek out its origins in the period of the auteur’s university studies, which he began in 1963 at the renowned VGIK film school in Moscow. There, Pelechian discovered the classics of Soviet avant-garde film of the 1920s and 30s, and decided to carry on with these experimentations where his predecessors had been obliged to stop their artistic explorations under Stalinist censorship. The meaning of Serge Daney’s affirmation that Pelechian is a “missing link in the true history of cinema” thus becomes fully apparent.

“Film is an autonomous language.”

The young filmmaker’s intuition to return to the origins of cinematic modernism was firstly tied to the need to find answers to the fundamental questions of the era relating to the nature of the seventh art. These encompassed, for example, the relationship between image and music established by Eisenstein, culminating in the Battle on the Ice scene in the film Alexander Nevsky (1938); and the possibilities offered by archival materials for the development of a new film genre, montage film, as invented by Esther Shub and demonstrated in her masterpiece, Today (1929). But a real new starting point succesfully emerged with Dziga Vertov’s, Man with a Movie Camera (1929), confirming the Kino-Glaz manifesto’s thesis by which film is an autonomous language, rather than one derived from literature, as claimed by theorists of the Russian Formalist school. In all of these examples, montage plays a key role in the economy of the film.

On the occasion of a conversation published in Le Monde in 1992, Pelechian told Godard: “It is often said that film is a synthesis of the other arts, but I think this is false. For me, it goes back to the Tower of Babel, to before the division into different languages. For technical reasons, it emerged after the other arts, but by definition, it precedes them.” From Vertov’s Kino-Glaz manifesto, Pelechian borrows the idea of the superiority of nonfiction film over film tied to text and actors, but he does not concur with the former’s rejection of music or quest for a factual cinematic discourse devoid of any affect. Pelechian was seeking out something different. He furthermore said this to Godard in the same interview: “I am striving for a montage that can create an emotional magnetic field around it.”

“Like any great poet, Pelechian always deals with major themes.”

To this end, he developed his own method that he called “distance montage”. In doing so, he appropriated a poetic language that is literally universal, in that none of the elements composing it—neither image nor music—require translation. This type of language gives life to the dream of every poet: circumventing the mutilations of transposition into another language. This is why Pelechian’s work is essentially proto-poetic. And like any great poet, Pelechian always deals with major themes. He made three films on the history of his country. In We, he addresses the tragic fate of the Armenian people. End is a metaphor to illustrate Armenia’s path through the Soviet period, seen as a long tunnel with the light reached at its exit. Life celebrates Armenia’s rebirth following its return to independence in 1991. The Seasons is a pastoral ode to the age-old relationship between humans and nature, while Inhabitants focuses on the planet’s animal populations. Our Century is an instinctual depiction of dromology, Paul Virilio’s theory of speed and acceleration; and lastly, Nature highlights the imbalance between the dynamics of natural forces and humanity.

“The point of view is the cinematic eye itself.”

Just as great poetry always touches on philosophical ground, Pelechian’s films transcend emotion, ultimately reaching a theoretical level. They propose a fourth personal pronoun. “The point of view”—in the technical sense of the term—is not me, you or her, but the cinematic eye itself. Pelechian’s cine-poetics manage to fulfill Vertov’s dream as to the camera's pure gaze: Kino-Glaz/Cine-Eye. In this way, the Russian avant-garde ultimately fulfills its task and Pelechian, who bridged the gap, ceases to be the “missing link” and takes his position alongside the great classics to which he was drawn from his youth.

Andrei Ujica

Below, three clips from the films mentioned by Andrei Ujica (for Today, start from 21:24).)

On the occasion of the exhibition Artavazd Pelechian, Nature, the Fondation Cartier proposed to artists and thinkers to address a message to the filmmaker in the form of a short video or text. Recorded at the Fondation Cartier or from their homes, these messages are gestures of admiration and respect for this master of film, who remained at home in Yerevan, Armenia at the time of the exhibition’s opening. These tributes, like Ujica’s published here, punctuate the different chapters of Encounter with Artavazd Pelechian.

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