Pelechian Project Program 1 (1964)
Directed by Artavazd Pelechian
79 minutes
Long a figure of cultish devotion but still too little known in the U.S., the Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian once said, while speaking to Jean-Luc Godard, that “film relies on three factors: space, time, and real movement.” Combining archival and original footage, and blurring the categories of documentary essay and the poetic avant-garde, Pelechian’s visionary works revolve around a grand recurring theme of humankind’s tumultuous relationship to the natural world. A spiritual and theoretical descendant of great Soviet filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, Pelechian evolved their pioneering editing techniques into a method he termed “distance montage,” which, instead of forging linear associations, sought to create “a magnetic field around the film.” The films in these two programs—restored under the supervision of Pelechian, now 88—span more than three decades and constitute a near-complete survey of his extraordinary body of work.