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Man, people and the earth: Artavazd Peleshian’s Armenian cinema
Some authors and directors, even though basically unknown to the general public, can nevertheless leave a strong mark in the history of cinema, with few but considerable works: among them, we unquestionably find one of the major documentarists alive: the Armenian Artavazd Peleshian. He’s not just a film maker (“[…]one of the real ones”, as Serge Daney will say), he’s an Armenian film maker: a director whose origins are deeply rooted in this land, in its traditions and riches. But the strength of his works is not to be found only in that macrocosm, because it’s a part of that universality that only the greatest directors own: Peleshian’s Armenia becomes the entire world, with its contradictions, its balances, its dialectics, like the ones that keep man and nature together, in the eternal fight and relationship that connects them. Though it’s undeniable that his cinema is about his people and his country (Beginning, We), it’s above all an introspective and magically poetic cinema (Life, The seasons): it’s the cinema of the man and the cinema about the man.
With very few works (more or less ten), not only did he manage to find a space among the greatest icons of East cinema (in his country, he’s been side by side with another great Armenian director, now passed away, his good friend Sergej Paradzanov), but also he carved out a place for himself in the international cinema scene. At the beginning of the 80’s, when he had already produced 9 works (class 1938), he’s gained the respect of many French critics and directors, so much so that the great Serge Daney will say about him: “Three films – We (1970), The seasons(1975) and Our century(1982) – proved to me that he is unquestionably a film maker, a real one”; a few years later, he’s going to land in Italy as well, when he gets a retrospective at the renowned Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema di Pesaro (1986). Then, glancing appearances, screenings (this retrospective will present almost all of his films, taken from the International Armenian Archive in Erevan) and some episodes in “Fuori Orario”, an Italian TV programme about experimental films. Peleshian has been living in Mosca for a long time now (born in 1938 in Leninakan, Armenia, draftsman from 1958, in 1963 he decides to enrol at the director’s school of VIGK, and graduates in 1968), where he once more produced some unforgettable masterpieces.
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Artavazd Peleshian
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We, 1969, 27’
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The seasons, 1975, 30’
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Mountain Vigil, 1964, 10’ |
Man fighting against nature – landslides and their consequences |
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Earth of People, 1966, 10’ |
Man and his life in the world, freedom and constri(u)ction |
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Beginning, 1967, 10’ |
Found footage film about the October Revolution of 1917 |
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We, 1969, 27’ |
The most “armenian” film of Peleshian, a people and their land |
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Inhabitants, 1970, 10’ |
Migration, running animals…profiles of men |
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The seasons, 1975, 30’ |
Man and nature: sheperds in white waters, farmers taking hay down the mountains |
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Life, 1993, 6’ |
Joy and sorrow, a new life… |
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End, 1994, 8’ |
The microcosm of a train, all good things must come to an end |
Between ‘individual’ (Armenia, man) and ‘universal’ (the world, men), Peleshian’s cinema travels through opposites, its images seem to be alive, his editing (“distancionnyj montaz”, as he defines it), gives birth to films lacking a real plot (there’s no “pure” narration), but full of poetry and lyricism, freed from the waste of a cinema that too often only aims to immediacy and to the “easy to watch” purpose. Here we have then the struggle of shepherds, fighting against the white water of the river for the migration of the flock (The seasons, 1975), that becomes the struggle of men to get along with nature and find a balance point, just like the collective drama of the Armenian people (genocide, migration and repatriation) (We): all of this can be found in the disorientated and astonished look of a little kid at the beginning of the film.
Through his strong and revealing images, he hides the sensitivity of a look that seeks the “less obvious”, the “less immediate”: then, in Inhabitants (1970), we can never find the explicit image of man, but only those of animals on the run (just like today’s ‘masses’). Migration, membership, drama and poetry, life and death (two masterpieces of the 90s), traces and permanent marks of a director meant to be discovered, never to be forgotten.
Haunted House: Cronenberg, Welles, Bava, Beckett, Brakhage, Švankmajer, Polanski
With the second retrospective, everything changes: by choosing an iconography which has always fascinated both the audience and the critics, we tried to offer a 360° research on the topic of ‘the haunted house’ (haunted by ghosts or other supernatural presences).
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Return to Glennascaul, Hilton Edwards, 1951, 23’ |
(with Orson Welles) |
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The lie chair, David Cronenberg, 1975, 30’ |
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The Wurdalak, Mario Bava, 1963, 40’ |
(with Boris Karloff) |
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Goccia d’acqua, Mario Bava, 1963, 30’ |
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Wedlock house: an intercourse, Stan Brakhage, 1959, 11’ |
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The fall of the House of Usher, J. Švankmajer, 1981, 16’ |
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Film, Schneider & Beckett, 1964, 20’ |
(with Buster Keaton) |
The haunted house is a cinema’s classic (cinema was actually born inside this ‘double display’: bodies and ghosts of bodies – isn’t the ghost itself the negative of a body? – presence vs. absence, lights vs. shadows. The seven shorts films of this retrospective face the question of the “spectral” in a double perspective: a) on one side, we have the genre’s iconography (horror), characterized by a classical type of narration full of clichés (mystical appearances, ghosts, opposite lights, rarefied atmospheres, etc.: Return to Glennascaul, The lie chair, Goccia d’acqua and The Wurdalak), and b) on the other side, we find a more introspective dimension that puts spectrality into everyday life (Wedlock house: an intercourse), in Edgar Allan Poe’s dreamy-literary world (The fall of the house of Usher) and in the self.
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The lie chair, David Cronenberg, 1975, 30’
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Return to Glennascaul, Hilton Edwards, 1951, 23’
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Wedlock house: an intercourse, Stan Brakhage, 1959, 11’
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a) The short film of Hilton Edwards Return to Glennascaul (actor Orson Welles) shows us a typical situation of spectrality: a house haunted by ‘other’ presences, lives and times intertwining, through the sharing of spaces and ‘histories’ (a man meeting two women, he takes them home, but when he goes back there to give them back their lighter he realises that the house is empty and those women had never really existed…). Cronenberg’s short film, The lie chair, shows us an haunted house and a broken time: a boy and a girl looking for help (their car is broken), find themselves in the house of two old women, who start treating them as they were relatives. Fiction and reality merge in an episode of a TV series (Cronenberg’s shot it for a Canadian TV channel), where we can find every cliché: an isolated house in the middle of the storm, bleakness, lightning, mystery, lights and shadows. The three short films, taken from the TV series I tre volti della paura (Mario Bava, 1963), respectively La goccia d’acqua (a nurse is stalked by a medium’s ghost) and I Wurdalak (with the interpretation of Boris Karloff, a house haunted by weird ‘vampires’), are the embodiment of the 70’s horror cinema.
b) The three short films of the second group explore the spectral dimension in a very different way, totally detached from the genre’s conventions: in Stan Brakhage (A Wedlock house: an intercourse) we find the vision of a director who films himself and his wife in their apartment and who, between games of light and shadows, ‘disguise’ himself and other people as ghosts. In the film, discussing Samuel Beckett’s subject, we find a man (the last film interpreted by an old Buster Keaton) who, chased by a ‘look’, takes refuge into a house, he closes all doors and windows, until the worst dreaded ghost shows up: death. Finally, La caduta della casa Usher, based on the story of E.A. Poe, is built on the discrepancy between a voice talking about ghosts and a house physically falling to pieces (all of it through the surrealistic animation of Svankmajer): the house pulsates, just like a living body; it lives and dies and then rises again as a ghost. Last but not least, the retrospective presents, in collaboration with Lab80Film, the masterpiece of Roman Polanski, Rosemary’s baby (on Tuesday) and a surprise film, about haunted house as well (on Friday night).
Michel Gondry’s video clip art
Michel Gondry, applauded director of Se mi lasci ti cancello (2004) and L’arte del Sogno, is unquestionably a visionary director, and this heterogeneous imaginary of his takes shape in one of the ‘fastest’ and most engaging forms of visual language: video clip.
Björk, The White Stripes, The Rolling Stone, The Chemical Brothers, Kylie Minogue, Radiohead, Beck, are only some of the groups and musical artists he collaborates with (cooperation with Björk has been going on for many years now, result of experimentations and games). Universes multiply, figures halve, animated worlds join the ‘real’ ones, all of that in a visual editing which is placed between applied technology and choreographic simplicity. Gondry’s universe is like a Rubik’s cube: you need to change and turn you look to discover new colours and fantasies.
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Michel Gondry
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Declare indipendence, 2008, 4'
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The hardest botton to botton, 2003, 4’
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The melting of music and images, not only unquestioned protagonist of today’s TV channels, but also maker of a real visual art that takes the audience through the binomial “known notes into known visual spaces”, is a union that can have unexpected results: looking at the collaboration Gondry/Bjork, you can’t help being fascinated by their cleverness and their ‘recreational’ skills. And that’s the result of their collaboration, so the mastery of Gondry lies in his understanding of the unique qualities of the person he’s talking to, still never losing its artistic trademark: his infinite and overlapping worlds, the rhythm of his editing (Gondry used to be the drummer of the band “Oui Oui”), etc., distinctive of his work, are put to use in the hands of the ‘purchaser’, giving birth to something hybrid, which is typically Gondryan only because it leaves space to something ‘other’ than himself and his art.
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