Distance Viewing: Artavazd Peleshyan and the Cosmic Documentary

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics across Media I: Eco-Poetic-Cinema from Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Yugoslavia

Abstract

No less a figure than the film critic Serge Daney described the Armenian filmmaker Artavazd 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 that in 1971 he would call “distance montage.” He positioned this style both with and against Eisenstein and Vertov. While the films of the two legendary Soviet directors were based on “the relationships between consecutive shots,” Peleshyan’s films were “constructed upon shots placed far apart from each other.” His editing work focused not on “splicing frames together, but in un-splicing them, not in their ‘joining,’ but in their ‘disjoining.’” This splitting of the montage bond — akin to the splitting of the atom — fundamentally overturned the “familiar notions and laws of space and time” in accordance with a quasi-Buddhistic worldview where those “who give birth know not who they are killing, and those who die know not to whom they are giving birth.” In this presentation, I argue that Peleshyan’s notion of distance montage is based on a cybernetic and reflex-oriented conception of the cosmos as a dualistic whole. I claim that the roots of his film practice stretch back to the cosmic origin story of cinema itself, one that continues to influence filmmakers working in post-Soviet space today, in particular, Sergei Loznitsa.

Author

• Daniel Paul Schwartz, McGill U (Canada)