Interstitial Cinema: The films of Artavazd Pelechian (15*)

The Beginning (Skizbe)
1967, Armenia, dir. Artavazd Pelechian, 10mins

Made whilst still studying at Moscow’s VGIK, Pelechian dedicated this philosophical essay to the October revolution of 1917 and its influence on the destiny of the world in the 20th century. An early film that already contains all the elements of the work that will follow: a cinema without words, composed like music. 

“I am convinced that cinema can convey certain things that no language in the world can translate. One can speak of things, but there is a threshold beyond which words do not suffice to get to the heart of the matter. The fact that the word appeals to a thought, to an analysis or to psychology contradicts my conception of cinema as intuition or emotion, as grasping what you see.” (Pelechian)
 

Our Century (Mer dare)
1983, Armenia, dir. Artavazd Pelechian, 50mins 

Our Century is a masterful montage of archive footage of space travel, edited with images from the beginnings of manned flight. A meditation on the space race, the folly of the Soviets’ and the Americans’ Icarus dream, Our Century is the century of defying gravity, of vanity and destruction. In this philosophical film-poem, Pelechian works his images as if they were a musical score; a symphony about humanity, nature and the cosmos.

 “Our Century is a film about us, about me, about what I'm striving for, what we're all striving for every person, humanity. And this desire to ascend, to transcend, is literally embodied in the cosmonauts" (Pelechian).