On Distance: Community and Landscape in the Films of Artavazd Peleshyan

Artavazd Peleshyan, Seasons of the Year (still), 1975.

This week, Film Notes publishes an essay by Daniel Schwartz and Armand Yervant Tufenkian on Artavazd Peleshyan’s “distance montage,” examining the tension between his ideal of organic unity and the separations and interruptions through which his films give form to collective life. On Tuesday, October 13, the authors will present Film at a Distance: On Artavazd Peleshyan, a lecture and discussion illustrated with film excerpts, at e-flux Screening Room (more information about the event).

For the Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Peleshyan, the poetics of community = the poetics of cinema = the poetics of the universe. What do we mean by this formula? For the Ancient Greeks, poiēsis denotes the process of making (Greek poiēin = to make, to produce). In the Symposium, Plato has Diotima describe poiēsis as the passage from non-being into being, a process she likens to giving birth.1 In the early Soviet Union, this idea was radicalized via the theories of Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Vladimir Solovyov, and Vyacheslav Ivanov into a theurgic principle: mythopoiesis, “the creation of myth with the power to revolutionize life.”2 

A product of the avant-garde, Soviet cinema is both an heir to this project and in tension with it. 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.3 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.  

For Peleshyan, the process of rupture gives rise to a greater whole. Taking two montage fragments, he seeks not to join them together but rather insert “a third, fifth, tenth fragment between them,” thus redistributing their “semantic load” across “a multitude of links”—or, given the etymological similarity between the Russian ‘link’ (zveno) and ‘call’ (zvon), a network of resonances. The connection between these links is instantaneous such that distance, at the level of the whole, is annihilated and montage itself is overcome.4 “By creating the film through montage,” Peleshyan states in an interview with Scott MacDonald, “I have destroyed montage. In the totality, in the wholeness of one of my films, there is no montage, no collision.”5 

In a sense, distance montage tracks a slow-moving perestroika that begins with Khrushchev’s Thaw and ends with the collapse of the USSR. The contradictions of distance montage, which can ultimately be reduced to the contradiction between universal and particular, reflect those that dissolved the Soviet Union. A mystical sounding epigraph opens and, in a slightly altered form, closes Peleshyan’s essay: “Birth without parents. Imagine a monster that devours that from which it is itself born. Or a process in which some, in dying, know not to whom they give birth, while others, being born, know not whom they kill.”6 For Peleshyan, who appears to have added this epigraph to the 1988 version of his article, this temporal-poetic structure—one that characterizes the revolutionary lifecycle of the USSR—finds expression in montage as metabolic processes.

Peleshyan’s films, he writes, resemble “living organisms, possessing a system of complex internal connections and mutual interactions.”7 These connections are modeled “not on the physical mixing of elements, but on their chemical synthesis.”8 In quasi-Deleuzian fashion, these montage elements are displaced from “their own territories” such that what takes place on screen “is not a direct mutual interaction between different spatial and temporal components, but indeed the interaction between opposite and unstable processes.”9 Soundtrack and image track “dissolve” one another and, in effect, change places.10 Likewise, the value of shots—close-up, medium, long—changes depending on the task assigned to them.11 

Artavazd Peleshyan, We (still), 1969.

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.12 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.13 

Here, landscape emerges as a—perhaps the—crucial figure linking Peleshyan’s theory to his films. In a section on the musicality of landscape, Eisenstein uses the term “juncture” to address the arrival of sound film, an event that fundamentally transformed “the very principles by which ‘linear’ montage is constructed.”14 In particular, sound film moved the “center of support”—“the juncture between pieces…the element lying outside of the depiction”—into the depiction itself.15 As Joan Neuberger points out, this move refers “not only to collisions between shots, or even between various formal senses (sound and image, color and movement, etc.), but between far-flung images across the whole of the film and between or among every detail in every frame.”16 Landscape thus becomes, in Eisenstein’s words, “a complex bearer of the possibilities of a plastic interpretation of emotions,” of “whole performance complexes” in which sight, sound, color, and movement permeate one another. In this regard, it “can serve as a concrete image of the embodiment of whole cosmic conceptions, whole philosophic systems.”17 

We can see this dynamic of embodiment play itself out across three of Peleshyan’s films—We, Seasons of the Year, and Our Century. We stages this dynamic explicitly by connecting its subject, the Armenian people, to the land. The film opens with a series of zoom-ins on the Armenian Highlands, accompanied by a breath-like sound effect, and closes with a series of zoom-outs. Embodying the principles of distance montage, the sound effect traverses as well as unifies the landscape through which it travels, giving it life. This landscape remains a central character throughout the film. Explosions, landslides, and volcanic eruptions stand in, not just for the principles of distance montage, but for the ruptures in Armenian history: the genocide, the successive waves of repatriation. 

Just as the film treats the landscape as human, it also presents the human as landscape. Hands bearing a coffin resemble the limbs of trees; a crowd sways like an ocean. In a nod to an old legend, a procession of mourners walking up to the recently inaugurated monument to the victims of the Armenian genocide is transformed, via a match cut, into a flock of birds. This reflects the symbiotic relationship between humans and the land—a fact brought home by repeated shots of men hewing tuff, a pink local stone from which much of Yerevan is constructed. 

Artavazd Peleshyan, Seasons of the Year (still), 1975.

Landscape also informs Peleshyan’s analysis of We, which serves as the basis for his theory of distance. Here, he mentions three load-bearing shots: a looped close-up of a girl staring into the camera (the opening shot of the film), a second looped close-up of the girl (appearing more than halfway into the film) accompanied by the same chord, and a long-shot of people standing on their balconies (the penultimate shot of the film). In the 1974 version of his essay, Peleshyan notes that, in the first shot, “the sound is, as it were, ‘dissolved’ by the image; in the middle, [sound and image] are in a state of equilibrium; at the end, the image is ‘dissolved’ by the sound.”18 Also dissolved is the scale of the shot. The long-shot of the balconies becomes a close-up of the girl and vice versa—her face may be viewed as a landscape. This exchange of qualities may be understood as a function of the treatment of the film as a plastic field of potentialities, shifting relationships, and diffuse processes. 

In We, the first close-up of the girl is separated from the rest of the film by black leader, thus enacting the paradoxical conditions of viewing a landscape—one stands both within and outside it. The problem is the same when it comes to surveying the past. In relating the close-up to the long-shot, the girl becomes “the face of the people gazing upon its history.”19 This line, cut from the 1988 version of Peleshyan’s essay, gives a deeper sense of the contradictions of universal and particular that underlie his theory. As Peleshyan points out, distance montage was, in part, a way to address the concerns of Soviet censors who thought the first (ostensibly lost) version of his film was too nationalistic.20 In response, Peleshyan replaced shots of specific figures with symbol-laden images such as the men hewing stone, an image that reflects the universal “creative will of the masses.”21 We thus tells the story of the genocide and of postwar repatriation without showing either in their specificity or context. This absence gives new sense to Peleshyan’s definition of distance montage as cinema with images that do not exist.22 Its power, Peleshyan tells Scott MacDonald, “is that even if something that’s part of the whole isn’t there at a particular moment, you feel its breath.”23 As if to underscore this point, the final shot, absent from most copies of the film but present in the new restoration, is a landscape of Mount Ararat.

Like We, Seasons uses the figure of landscape to explore the relationship between humans and the land, expanding the community to include animals and nature. Edited by Peleshyan’s wife Aïda Galstyan, the film is a pastoral symphony that tracks the rhythms and rituals of a mountain village. Shepherds guide their flocks across rivers, through tunnels, and down craggy slopes; men scythe grass and bundle hay; women cook, sew, and prepare a bride for a wedding. An earlier treatment structured the film around the relationship between a kolkhoz chairman and a young shepherd debating whether to leave for the city.24 Peleshyan dropped this frame and, with it, the human focus. “In essence,” he explained at a 1977 roundtable, “I didn’t make a film about people. My hero is nature. Nature is that hero which forces people to act as she wishes.”25 Accordingly, the “shepherds” in his “documentary” were in fact actors sourced from a local dance troupe, bodies cast less as dramatic personae than as natural elements akin to wind, water, and clouds.      

Artavazd Peleshyan, Seasons of the Year (still), 1975.

Peleshyan’s account of the structure of the film dovetails with Eisenstein’s conception of landscape. “Music in film is time for me; image is space,” he told the roundtable. Seasons “begins only with the spatial component: landscapes, the movement of clouds, the absence of action and music.” Music and time enter gradually; the two components alternate without merging until the finale, where “they intersect, totally pass into each other…the temporal component turns into the spatial one, while space, changing its look, transforms into time.”26 Landscape, here, is not just a setting but the field through which distantial possibilities—the transformation of image into sound, space into time—are actualized.  

Seasons’s iconic opening makes this mixing of elements visible. A closely-cropped shot of a shepherd attempting to rescue his sheep from a river opens and recurs throughout the film as a kind of pedal point akin to the close-up of the girl in We. The shot brings to mind Heraclitus’s dictum that one cannot step into the same river twice. Like memory, the landscape is always shifting. As if to emphasize this point, the sequence performs a series of cuts that capture shepherd and sheep at the same relative moment in their multiple passes through the stream. Again and again the two flow through the same area of current, crashing into the waves and into each other, until it becomes difficult to distinguish human from sheep from foamy rapid. 

Here, we find what amounts to Peleshyan’s formal signature: repetitive cuts and repeated motions that slow the image to a near standstill, delivering a contradiction between movement and stasis worthy of Zeno’s paradox. The spatiotemporal elements of Seasons—rain, clouds, snow, mud, rivers, humans, animals—are in constant flux. They not only echo one another visually, but merge with one another, thus undermining any ontologies that would keep them separate.  

If nature is the hero of Peleshyan’s film then landscape is its body. The film folds humans and animals into this body, pulling them in and spitting them out. This gesture of folding recurs throughout the film in episodes of shepherds fording rivers, sliding down mountain sides, disappearing into and emerging from a birth-canal-like tunnel, and running down hillsides pursued by bales of hay. Peleshyan’s script describes these descents in geological terms: the men “roll down simply and naturally, like a stone broken off from a cliff.”27 Elsewhere, a shepherd stands on a summit “like a petrified stone giant.”28 Human beings are, in this respect, features of the terrain. 

As Peleshyan’s contemporary Vadim Grunin put it, Peleshyan is not interested in what the shepherds have to say; he is interested in their physical state, one that is no more nor less worthy of filming “than the state of that field, that river, those sheaves. By colliding different physical states, he gets exactly what he wants: the poetry he carries within himself.”29 This implication of solipsism—of which Peleshyan is certainly guilty—also underscores the radical de-centering of the human that echoes through the landscapes of Seasons. The poetic collision of human and non-human elements speaks to a community that exceeds the human even if, at the same time, like so many poetic projects, it is centered on the poet’s own creative will. Hence, Peleshyan’s enigmatic definition of distance montage as “the cinematic system or cinematic method for measuring the system of the author’s worldview.”30 

Peleshyan’s films and theory resonate with a nonhumanist line of thought that runs from Baruch de Spinoza to Georgii Plekhanov and Evald Ilyenkov. On this line, according to Tracie Matysik, nature is something “that exceeds humans and their subjective work, even as humans transform nature.”31 As Keti Chukhrov points out, nonhumanist, in this sense, does not mean anti-human. Even Ilyenkov’s cosmic speculations about the death of the universe treat the human being as “a temporary but indispensable part of matter.”32 This idea receives profound treatment in Peleshyan’s 1982 film Our Century, a film that spurred the French film critic Serge Daney to declare that Peleshyan propels the “disoriented human body into orbit,” where it is “caught in the turbulence of matter, where there’s nothing human, nothing merely human, and where the elements (earth, water, fire, wind) make their return.”33

Our Century approaches the cosmos like the landscape in Seasons. Peleshyan is a pastoral filmmaker, and the film depicts, as it were, a cosmic pasture. The elements of this pasture are derived from archival footage of Soviet and American space programs, much of it used for an earlier children’s film Peleshyan edited titled The Starlit Minute (1973). Viewers of this film will recognize footage of Yuri Gagarin standing in a convertible being showered by flowers, shots of disasters from the history of aviation, views of the Earth rising over a lunar landscape, and images of cosmonauts exposing their bodies to centrifugal forces. 

Our Century takes these images and repurposes them in a way that undercuts Starlit Minute’s triumphalist sense of progress. Similar to Seasons, the cosmonaut is not the hero of Peleshyan’s film, but rather the cosmos. Cosmonaut bodies are jostled about much like shepherds in the rapids. They are repeatedly folded into the forcefield of space, the cosmic landscape. Their faces are distorted by gravitational waves. Nearly immobilized in their spacesuits and cockpits, they at times resemble prenatal infants. Their movements are simultaneously light and ponderous, awkward in a way that intimates, to quote Annette Michelson’s take on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, “the link between the development of sensory-motor knowledge and that of intelligence itself.”34  

Artavazd Peleshyan, Our Century (still), 1982.

In Our Century, that sensory-motor intelligence is not merely human; it is universal. Reclaiming the cosmonauts’ bodies, the landscape of the cosmos begins to vibrate with knowledge. The universe receives a psychedelic makeover reminiscent of the representation of the planet in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) or the biosphere in Feliks Sobolev’s Biosphere! Time for Consciousness (1974). Solar flares leap into space, water cascades down a fall, and the disk of the sun begins to pulse. The cosmos, in this regard, is a living, breathing organism. Distance montage is both its circulatory and nervous system. 

That Peleshyan considers this to be the case is evidenced by his 2017 treatise My Universe and Unified Field Theory, in which he attempts to apply the rules of distance montage to quantum mechanics. The principles of distance montage, he argues, “are universal, equally relevant in the realms of cinema and science. They fully align with the principles of editing in filmmaking, as well as the interactions between elementary particles and large bodies.”35 The ideas running through this treatise echo Ilyenkov’s cosmological phantasmagoria, which pictures the universe as an “eternal, closed in itself, big circle” that “comprises, in a ring-like form, all the possible ‘finite’ cycles of development.”36 Ilyenkov’s Spinoza-inspired treatment of thought as an attribute of matter that “constantly engenders thinking creatures, constantly reproduces, now here now there, an organ of thinking—the thinking brain” leads him to the idea that the cosmic task of thinking matter is to provoke a “conscious catastrophe,” a “fiery rebirth of dying worlds.”37 Ilyenkov’s emblem for this poetic cycle is “a snake biting its tail,” Hegel’s image for “true (as opposed to ‘bad’) infinity.”38

As a response to what Boris Groys calls cosmic anxiety, both Ilyenkov’s and Peleshyan’s treatment of the universe as a finite, thinking, material, and organic whole aligns them with the poetic-communitarian aspirations of Russian cosmic thinkers such as Nikolai Fedorov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Vladimir Vernadsky, and Alexander Bogdanov.39 Yet there is much in Peleshyan’s films that escapes the drive to either embrace chaos or control it.

Here, it is worth invoking the ideas of one last philosopher of community, Jean-Luc Nancy, as a way of thinking through the tension at the heart of Peleshyan’s project. In The Inoperative Community, Nancy argues that modern politics has imagined community as work, as a poetic project of regeneration, to return us to Diotima, in which people participate. The logic of this “immanentism,” Nancy contends, ends not in community but in its destruction, while genuine community “necessarily takes place in what Blanchot has called ‘unworking,’’’ in “interruption, fragmentation, suspension.”40 

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.”41 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. Their patterns and constellations in concert with animals and elements (planets, clouds, stones, sheep) recall the idea that “there is no common place,” only “the sharing of places, their spacing.”42   

The authors would like to thank Raisa Sidenova for pointing them in the direction of Peleshyan’s first published essay on distance montage, as well as the 1977 transcript of the roundtable on documentary cinema he attended.