This week, Film Notes publishes an essay by Daniel Schwartz and Armand Yervant Tufenkian that offers an introduction to Artavazd Peleshyan’s films and critically examines his theory of “distance montage.” Reading the films alongside different versions of Peleshyan’s theoretical writings, the authors reconsider his relationship to the montage traditions, examining the tension between his ideal of organic unity and the separations and interruptions through which Peleshyan’s films give form to collective life.
From the essay:
The idea that cinema has the power to forge communities was one that the USSR held consistently throughout its lifespan. These communities sought to transcend borders, overcome categories of race, nationality, and ethnicity, and dissolve distinctions between humans, animals, and machines. At the same time, in pursuing this goal they risked homogenization and the effacement of genuine difference, not to mention engendering national resentments that would ultimately rip apart the Soviet Union.
Between the 1960s and 1990s, Peleshyan—the enigmatic filmmaker whose films including Beginning (1967), We (1969), Seasons of the Year (1975), and Our Century (1982) have recently been restored to great fanfare—engaged this paradox through a series of poetic documentaries that recalled, despite his statements to the contrary, the avant-garde experiments of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein. Indeed, Peleshyan’s montage style is so reminiscent of Vertov’s (and to a lesser extent Eisenstein’s) that in 1971 he articulated a theory that distanced him from the two filmmakers. This theory, aptly titled “distance montage”, argued that Vertov and Eisenstein had largely stressed the combination or the collision of images—the montage bond (Vertov) and the montage juncture (Eisenstein). By contrast, Peleshyan’s theory focused on separating images, on splitting the montage bond as one splits the atom, thus unleashing forces that had the power to fundamentally alter our understanding of the laws of space and time.
...The metabolic, cybernetic, and nuclear imagery Peleshyan uses to illustrate these ideas—so-called “load-bearing shots” functioning like “charged centers,” rotating “in opposing centrifugal directions,” and so on—makes it sound as if distance montage is a grand departure from the linear theories of Vertov and Eisenstein. But this is not necessarily the case. Curiously, the very passage Peleshyan cites to distinguish himself from Eisenstein—one in which the avant-garde filmmaker discusses the “montage juncture”—comes by way of Eisenstein’s Nonindifferent Nature, a text where Eisenstein is at his most distantial.
...Peleshyan’s project is pulled in both directions. His theory aspires to organic totality, a closed system without fissures or breaks, yet his method is the separation and insertion of images. His practice is premised on images that do not exist. Nancy’s description of totality comes to mind: the totality of community, he writes, is “a whole of articulated singularities,” and “articulation does not mean organization.” This is perhaps the most precise description of what Peleshyan’s films (as opposed to his theory) do. The people in We, the shepherds in Seasons, and the cosmonauts in Our Century are not fused into a single body but articulated, disarticulated, and re-articulated across landscapes, valleys, mountains, pastures, the cosmos.
