Lecture and Screening
Admission
General $12
Student $10
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October 13, 2026, 7pm
Brooklyn NY 11205
USA
Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, October 13, at 7pm for Film at a Distance, a lecture and discussion with Daniel Schwartz and Armand Yervant Tufenkian on Artavazd Peleshyan’s theory of “distance montage,” illustrated with film excerpts.
The Armenian director Artavazd Peleshyan (b. 1938) is the quintessential filmmaker’s filmmaker. Mysterious, elusive, and recalcitrant, his renown is based on a small body of poetic documentaries made primarily between the 1960s and early 1990s. These films showcase Peleshyan’s unique lyrical style evocative of the montage aesthetics of the 1920s Soviet avant-garde. Indeed, Peleshyan’s films so closely resemble those of Vertov and Eisenstein that in 1971 he articulated a theory to distance himself from the two avant-garde filmmakers. This theory, aptly titled “distance montage,” asserts that while the “montage theories of the 1920s focus on the relationship between adjacent shots—what Eisenstein called the ‘montage juncture’ and Vertov—the ‘interval,’”Peleshyan’s own theory focuses “not on the splicing together of shots but on their un-splicing, not in their juncture but in their disjuncture.” Invoking mystic, cosmic, and metabolic imagery, Peleshyan compares this new method to the nuclear splitting of the atom, an event that unleashed new energetic possibilities.
Films
Excerpts from the following films will be presented during the lecture.
We (1969, 24 minutes)
With his diploma film We, Artavazd Peleshyan reveals what it means to make a film with “images that don’t exist.” A tour de force that glimpses the Armenian genocide through images that never show it, and reflects on the power that binds the collective to universal truth.
Seasons of the Year (1975, 29 minutes)
A pastoral symphony, Seasons of the Year raises the labor and rituals of Armenian shepherds to the level of a lyric poem. Rushing rivers and treacherous mountain passes, fluffy clouds and billowy flocks of sheep become the occasion for a philosophical meditation on time, movement, and the precarious balance between humans and nature.
Our Century (1983, 50 minutes)
A blast through cosmos and chaos reminiscent of Felix Sobolev’s Biosphere!, Our Century chronicles the sublime, violent, and at times comic history of space travel. One of the clearest examples of Peleshyan’s mystical theory of “distance montage,” where space itself becomes a field of remote interactions whose laws only cinema can truly grasp.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.
