Cosmonauts in Distance Montage

Kraichtal. The Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Peleshian, who lives the life of recluse in Moscow, has until now only made a name for himself among cinephiles. Jean-Luc Godard and Serge Daney attempted early on to gain recognition for his small body of works, created since the sixties. Peleshian’s films, which are close in nature to both documentary film and poetic films d’auteur, have only been shown to Western audiences since 1988. Most recently, Paul Virilio gave Peleshian’s cinematic parable »Our Century« a key position in his Paris exhibition »Ce qui arrive«. Now, the Ursula Blickle Foundation and its curator Gerald Matt are testifying to this heightened esteem with a solo exhibition of the same name. They have succeeded in gaining Peleshian’s support for the project and in presenting three of his films. Accompanying the exhibition, which will later be shown in the Vienna Kunsthalle, is a catalogue providing abundant material and pictures, underlining the increased interest in Peleshian as an »artist«.
This change of context is, however, not without its problems. The DVD projection of the black-and-white films, originally made on 35-mm, in the darkened rooms of the exhibition entails some loss. This includes a reduction in the graininess and sharp contrasts of the film image. The films are also perceived differently in the »black box« of a museum than in a cinema – this is of advantage, as it allows any exaggerated monumentalization of the films to be avoided and lets the viewer take up a more objective position. Nonetheless, this appropriation of Peleshian’s films operates using traditional categories of the art system – it is about rediscovering a solitary body of work and its creator.
As could be expected, the exhibition has as its focus the film »Our Century«, cut down to 30 minutes in 1990 (the original version is from 1982). This is not only because Peleshian, in a breathtaking series of cuts, takes a critical look at the dreams of progress current in the last century and their Janus-faced character. What makes this film parable so fascinating is the archive footage that Peleshian has used, and above all the way he has combined this material. Despite having been shortened, »Our Century« is a perfect example of Peleshian’s theory of »distance montage«, which he developed through his engagement with Eisenstein and Vertov’s theories of editing. It is based on a re-definition of spatio-temporal structure and the relationship between image and sound in film: on the calculated interaction of individual leitmotivic shots or musical themes throughout the entire film. Peleshian is not interested in the provocative effect of adjacent shots or the interaction between image and sound, but in successive shifts within the entire structure of meaning. His theory of distances links up whole complexes of images and sequences of sounds. He uses the repetition of certain shots or sequences to achieve a high degree of complexity and rhythmicization that organizes the series of images still further. This results in a simultaneity of all image and sound impressions, which finally diffuse into one another. Peleshian is guided by the way memory functions, the vague interaction between potential and actual memories.
In »Our Century«, he has assembled archive footage about the highlights of aviation in the 20th century – starting with the pioneers of flying like the »Ocean Flyer« Lindbergh and the test pilots and fighter pilots of airborne warfare to the first spacemen. The mass euphoria about individual heroic deeds is juxtaposed with the big civil and war catastrophes – Peleshian contrasts heroes of aviation with the suppressed history of its victims. Again and again he interpolates pictures of the burning »Graf Zeppelin«, of crashing planes, of racing trains colliding or – unsurpassed in its symbolic power – of an atomic mushroom cloud. The Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who died in a plane crash in 1968, can therefore be seen as the tragic main character in the film. In leitmotivic fashion, Peleshian uses parallel editing to closely link two important events in the history of space travel: Gagarin’s first space trip in 1961, and the moon landing of the Americans in 1969. In particular, the tense faces of the astronauts and airmen, which threaten to fall apart under the forces acting upon them, grasp the viewer’s attention as emotive images. The faces of the waiting scientists, marked by nervous tension, anxious hope and, finally, joy also stick easily in the memory. At the same time, the apparatuses and instruments of progress play the role of »speaking« props: the control centres with ultra-modern telecommunications and monitor technology, the test laboratories in which would-be astronauts’ capacity for coping with stress is improved, the seconds elapsing on the countdown display, which are frequently shown in close-up. The fastening of a seatbelt or the doing-up of a helmet also form part of the arsenal of automatized scenarios regarding the interaction between man and machine.
»Our Century« is accompanied by »Inhabitants« (1970) and »The Seasons« (1972-75) – two films that vary the leitmotivic question of the place of humankind or of every creature in the present-day world. The ten-minute film »Inhabitants« is a very rapid, rhythmic montage of images of animals fleeing. Peleshian does not let us know what or who could be the danger that the flocks of birds and herds are trying to escape in their wild flight: it remains vague, even if shadowy human forms can be seen and the distorted sound of shots can be heard. But, precisely for this reason, the danger makes an impact on the viewer as well. At the same time, the frequently interpolated close-ups of individual animals’ faces do not fail to fulfil their function as emotive images. The system of distance montage also informs the 30-minute film »The Seasons«. Peleshian’s film follows the change of seasons in the rural highlands of Armenia. Scree slopes, clouds, water, snow, wood fires form a series of images with a symbolic power. In these surroundings, people and animals are, as creatures, equally at the mercy of hostile natural forces. Peleshian also films customs and everyday gestures such as bringing down the sheep from the mountains, the hay harvest or baking bread, to provide a portrait of his people. They live mostly from sheep breeding, and seldom encounter the trappings of modern civilization: only if cars have to give right of way to the shepherds and their flocks going through a tunnel, or a female doctor in a white coat comes into the village. In stark contrast to Eisenstein in his propagandistic film »The Old and the New«, Peleshian clearly sides with the »old«. The film gains its vitality from the annual recurrence of rites and festivals, which secure the cultural identity of a people. The change of seasons is meant as a metonym for the way of life and permanence of the Armenian people living in harmony with nature. Peleshian’s films are all fragments of the cultural memory and as such – this is made apparent by the exhibition - are meant to leave their mark on it.