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The Man, the People and the Land: the Armenian cinema by Artavazd Peleshian
There are authors and directors that, hidden to common audience, leave their mark on the cinema with few but crucial works: between them, undoubtedly, there is one of the most important living documentary film directors, the Armenian Artavazd Peleshian. He isn’t just a moviemaker (“[…] one of the real ones”, Serge Daney said), but he is an Armeniam moviemaker, a director deeply rooted in that country, in its traditions and in its treasures. Nevertheless the strength of his cinema can’t be referable to that single microcosmos, because it embraces the universality that only great authors possess: Peleshian’s Armenia is the whole world, with its contradictions, with its balances and plays with strength, just like the ones which keep Man and Nature joined, in the everlasting fight and relation that ties them up. Peleshian’s is the cinema of madness, of the masses and of the people (The beginning, Us), but also, and above all, an intimist and deeply poetical cinema (Life, The seasons), in short, a cinema of the Man and about the Man.
In very few works (about ten) he managed not only to carve out for himself a deserved place between “the greats” of the Western Europe cinema (in its native country he is compared to the other great Armenian figure, a friend of him, the late lamented director Sergej Paradzanov), but also to draw the attention of the world cinema on himself. In the beginning of the ‘80s, when he had already realized nine works (born in 1938), he fascinated French critics and directors, insomuch as the great Serge Daney said: “Three films, - Us (1970), The seasons (1975) and Our Century (1982) – convince me that he undoubtedly is a moviemaker, a real one”; few years later he also came to Italy, when the Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema di Pesaro (1986) dedicated a solo show to him. Then fleeting appearances, video projections, (this exhibition will screen almost all of his films, directly from the National Armenian Archives in Erevan) and instalments in Fuori Orario. Peleshian has lived in Moscow for many years (he was born in 1938 in Leninakan -Armenia-, drawer and designer since 1958, in 1963 he decided to matriculate to VIGK Faculty of Direction, graduating in 1968), where he realised and concluded intense and unforgettable masterpieces.
Films projected during the exhibition:
Between the particular (Armenia, the man) and the universal (the world, the people), Peleshian’s cinema moves in the opposites, his images breathe, his editing (at a distance, as Peleshian himself says) gives life to works in which there isn’t any plot (there isn’t pure narration), but poetry and lyricism purified from the drosses of a cinema that very often winks to the immediateness and to the spontaneity of the view. So, the effort of the shepherds fighting against the rapids of the river for the sheep’s transhumance (The seasons, 1975), becomes the fight of the Man to “support” and to find a point of balance with the Nature, like the collective tragedy of Armenian people (the genocide, their “transhumance” and repatriation) (Us) reflects itself with a metaphor in the stupefied and lost look of a little girl, symbol of the film itself. Peleshian hides in its strong and testimonial images the sensitivity of a look which is watchful to the “less evident” and to the less immediate: in The inhabitants (1970) (apology of humans?) we will never find the explicit image of the man, but only the one of escaping animals and biological agglomerates (like the big masses of the modern times). The transhumance, the belonging, the tragedy and the poetry, the life and the death (the two masterpieces of the ‘90s), tracks and indelible marks of a director who must be rediscovered and never forgotten. |
