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Wednesday, September 30, 2009

LINKS :: Lisandro ALONSO

@ 9/30/2009 12:29:00 PM By HarryTuttle
Lisandro ALONSO (born 2 Jun 1975; Buenos Aires, Argentina) = 34 yold in 2009
4 films / 4 screenplays (1st film: 2001/latest film: 2008)
INSPIRED BY : Fernando Birri (Tire dié, Los inundados), Héctor Babenco (Pixote), Jorge Preloran, Nicolas Sarquis (Palo y hueso), Lumière, Abbas Kiarostami, Werner Herzog (Aguirre)?
C.C.C. films (strict model in red) : Liverpool ; Fantasma ; Los Muertos ; La Libertad
INFLUENCE ON : Paz Encina ?
S/T sin titulo (2009) Short - BAFICI 2009
Liverpool (2008) IMDb link - Quinzaine des Réalisateurs Cannes 2008
Fantasma (2006) IMDb link - Cannes 2006

Los Muertos (2004) IMDb link - Cannes 2004

  • "Le deuxième souffle" By: Jean-Philippe Tessé (Cahiers du cinéma, n° 590; May 2004) [FRENCH]
  • "L'épopée stupéfiante d'un solitaire" By: Jacques Mandelbaum (Le Monde; 15 May 2004) [FRENCH]
  • "Des acteurs vierge de cinéma" By: Thomas Sotinel (Le Monde; 15 May 2004) [FRENCH]
  • "Lisandro Alonso : géométrie variable" By: Emmanuèle Frois (Le Figaro, 15 May 2004) [FRENCH]
  • "That's How a Man Lives" By: Andy Rector (FIPRESCI; 2004)
  • "L' oubli et l'oubli" By: Sylvain Coumoul (Cahiers du cinéma, n° 595, Nov 2004) [FRENCH]
  • "L'enfer vert" By: Vincent Ostria (Les Inrocks; 3 Nov 2004) [FRENCH]
  • "Bouffée d'anxiogène" By: Didier Péron (Libération; 3 Nov 2004) [FRENCH]
  • "Los Muertos" By: Jacques Morice (Télérama; 3 Nov 2004) [FRENCH]
  • "Lisandro Alonso filme son tropisme pour la vie sauvage" By: Thomas Sotinel (Le Monde; 6 Nov 2004) [FRENCH]
  • "Los Muertos end credits" By: Zach Campbell (a_film_by, 23 Feb 2005)
  • "Los Muertos, 2004" By: acquarello (Strictly Film School, 19 Feb 2005)
  • "Los Muertos, 2004" By: Mohit Sabharwal (The New Delhi Biscuit Company, 24 Apr 2005)
  • "Lisandro Alonso. Bevrijd in de jungle" By: Gabe Klinger (Filmkrant, #270, Oct 2005) [DUTCH]
  • "Films That Got Away" By: Andy Rector (KINO SLANG; 1 Jul 2006)
  • "Got Your Goat" By: Nathan Lee (The Village Voice; 27 March 2007)
  • "Los Muertos" By: Matt Zoller Seitz (NYT; 5 Apr 2007)
  • "Los Muertos", "Quiet City" By: Michael Atkinson (IFC; 28 Jan 2008)
  • "Los Muertos (Lisandro Alonso, 2004)" By: grunes (Dennis Grunes, 23 Jul 2008)
  • "Lisandro Alonso『Los Muertos』" By: maplecat-eve (maplecat-eve Diary; 5 Oct 2009) [JAPANESE]
  • (add link here)
La Libertad (2001) IMDb link - NYFF 2001

Dos en la vereda (1995) short

  • (add link here)


GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOK on Lisandro ALONSO
  • (add reference here)

GENERAL ONLINE ARTICLES

INTERVIEW

TEXT BY Lisandro ALONSO

WEBSITES

DOCUMENTARY ON Lisandro ALONSO
  • (add reference here)
Please complete, correct when needed. This is an ongoing resource page to be updated.
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Sunday, September 13, 2009

Still Life

@ 9/13/2009 01:57:00 PM By Just Another Film Buff
Sohrab Shahid Saless’ Still Life (Tabiat-e Bijan, 1974) is, barring Kiarostami’s Homework (1989), the greatest Iranian film that I’ve seen. To see that even during the pre-revolution era, when the escapist cinema of Hollywood and its imitations were much more popular, such uncompromising and quality films were being made is both surprising and hope-instilling. Typically European in its form but uniquely Iranian in its content, Still Life is the kind of movie that contemporary contemplative cinema takes off from. Produced by a newly formed group called Kanun-e Sinemagaran-e Pishro (Centre for Avant-Garde Filmmakers), that also produced some of Mehrjui’s early features, the film was one of the many films that were discontented with the existing way of governance. Although never overtly political, Still Life not only manages to critique deeply the disparity that existed between villages and cities of the country during the Shah’s regime, but also remains one of the best works from the country till date. Let’s wait and see what the present-day Iran brings in reply to this masterwork.

Still Life documents a period in the life of Mohammad Sardari (Bonyadi), a veteran employee of the railway services living in a rural part of the country and whose sole job is to close and open a railway crossing few times a day. He is waiting for a festival bonus from the department that is long pending. He is married and his wife (Zahra Yazdini) supplements his income by weaving carpets and carrying out minor tailoring jobs. We are only given such utterly quotidian details from his everyday life – he operates the railway gates in the morning, he rests at his accommodation near the crossing, he returns home for lunch, he goes back to operate the crossing for the evening train, he returns home for dinner and he sleeps - but that is all there is to Sardari. We are also given a few glimpses of his son who returns home for a day from the military service and a bunch of customers who exploit Sardari by underpaying him for the carpets his wife has woven. One day he receives a letter from the railway department that intimates him of his retirement from service. Sardari is unable to comprehend the meaning of the letter and starts to believe that he has been unreasonably given the sack. Heartbroken, he decides to go to the department headquarters located in the city and find out the reason.

Saless’ style is remarkable here. Almost throughout the entire film, he presents us long, uninterrupted extreme long shots of Sardari going about doing his routine at the railway crossing. Even when the old man is home, Saless and cinematographer Hushang Baharlu give us mostly medium and long shots that are filmed with the camera placed at the ground level, sometimes reminiscent of Ozu. In either case, Saless’ eye is that of an ethnological documentarian - interested in what his protagonist is doing, but never wanting more than that. The mise en scène is spare, stripped down to bare essentials, with a chunk of space between the characters and the camera. Even gestures, dialogues and movements are reduced to an absolute minimum. Watching the indoor scenes in Still Life is like gazing at an aquarium in which the fishes indifferently perform the same mundane activities over and over again. Halfway into the film one is acquainted with the routines of the old man and his wife. He comes home, rolls his cigarette, and starts smoking and she continues to stitch clothes and weave carpets. Even when their son returns home after a long time, conversations are perfunctory and the character functions are unhampered.

But what is singular about Still Life is the way it handles cinematic time. Saless, while letting us witness individual scenes unfold in real time – be it entire dinner sessions or railway transitions – without hindrance, shuffles the order of these scenes in a way that disregards chronology. In one scene in the film we see the couple’s son return home and in the next one, he is missing. And then he’s back in the subsequent one. Soon one notices that most of the scenes could have taken place in any arbitrary order in real time and each of those orders is essentially irrelevant, given the idea of the film. What’s the use of chronology when time repeats itself by going in cycles? In Jeanne Dielman (1976), Chantal Akerman used each day of the protagonist life’s to illustrate its microscopic deviation from the previous. She seemed to be essentially constructing a spiral out of Jeanne’s life – a structure that made her life seem to go in circles but which, in actuality, ends only in annihilation. Saless, on the other hand, treats time as some form of stray deadlock that could only be resolved by an alien intervention. Within this loop, all time is one and each day is virtually indistinguishable from the other.

In one scene that comes towards the end of the film, Sardari visits the railway headquarters to seek an explanation for the retirement notice. In the building, he notices a pair of officers scanning through old photographs reminiscing about the past and talking about plans for the weekend, And just there, Saless provides the most overt and powerful contrast between the life in rural and urban Iran. The officers with a lush past and a busy future stand directly in opposition to Sardari, whose past is almost non-extant and whose future promises nothing different. Still Life would definitely form an interesting companion piece to Antonioni’s Blowup (1966), which seems to resonate more and more with the years. Both Thomas (played by David Jennings) and Sardari are perfectly alienated creatures who pass through life without an iota of an idea about their place in the world. Only that their geographical locations are poles apart. Thomas is one of cinema’s many alienated urbanites trying to impart a meaning to their lives. On the other hand, Sardari is the rare villager who believes that life will go on as it is and who is nudged to action only when that belief is shattered. But in essence, both of them are individuals wallowing in their own world unable to snap out of it.

Even with all its serious themes, Still Life isn’t entirely humourless. There is a constant undercurrent of dark comedy throughout the film (In a masterstroke of black humour, Saless has Sardari regularly tune the alarm clock!), but, like all the other elements of the film, it remains extremely subtle and never thrusts itself upon us. Instead, Saless builds one stretch of time upon another, elevating the film from the territory of mere narrative cinema to the realm of the philosophical, the experiential and the contemplative. In the shattering last scene of the film, we see Sardari, who is now forced to accept the reality that he can no longer work at the railway crossing, vacating his quarters. After he loads the cart with his possessions, he decides to check the house one last time for any object he may have forgotten. As he stands in the middle of the now-empty house, gazing at the room of whose inanimate furniture he had become a part of through the years, Sardari notices the final remnant of his life at this place – a piece of mirror hanging on the wall. He reaches out to collect it and, in the process, looks at himself for the first time in the film. Mohammad Sardari has indeed become old.


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Tuesday, September 01, 2009

The Wind Will Carry Us

@ 9/01/2009 07:24:00 PM By Just Another Film Buff
What would cinema be without Abbas Kiarostami? Watching his films is a process of unlearning cinematic conventions and relearning the humanity within. He has time and again proved that the audience can be emotionally stimulated and for the right reason, without ever engaging them in the film. The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) is a testament why he never sacrifices Kiarostami the humanist for Kiarostami the filmmaker. The moral questions – of choices, of priorities and of conscience – which the film presents seem pertinent now, in these tough times, more than ever. I can guarantee that one ready to confront them would have understood him(her)self better at the end of it all. All it takes is a little patience and a willingness to introspect after the film has ended.

More than the apparent issue of communication and the lack of it, The Wind Will Carry Us seeks to question the definition of communication. Sure, the protagonist Behzad (played to perfection by Behzad Dorani) does have a cellular phone and the speedy vehicle to move around, but what was the use of it all? He is shortsighted in more ways than one and seems to forget details that he had voluntarily gathered moments ago (Ironically, the villages consider him to be a telecommunications engineer!). The villagers, on the other hand, are scientifically handicapped but that seems to be utterly insignificant. They commute very easily, they have multiple paths to the same destination for easy and quick access and they seem to be able to even move vertically though the village using ladders and the serpentine alleys. They seem to know who lives where and at what distance a resource is to be found. This partly is reflected in their priorities in life and their attitudes towards it – gratefulness for the present and a reverence for the future.

The Wind Will Carry Us can very well serve as a commentary on how the developed nations and the Third World look at each other, but that would only be of minor significance compared to the seething humanity within and around the film. More than anything, The Wind Will Carry Us is a meditative self-portrait, or rather an attempt to look at oneself objectively. Kiarostami observes his own intrusion in the lives of unsuspecting locals and in general, the exploitative and manipulative relationship that exists between the filmmaker and his subjects. He drops enough hints suggesting this in the film. At one point in the film, Behzad is seen shaving facing the camera as the latter assumes the role of a mirror, which is not much different from what Kiarostami uses it as. Unlike in other Kiarostami “car trips”, the filmmaker protagonist is often filmed head on while driving the car, thereby obtaining a literal and figurative reflection of the camera on his spectacles – an indication that the person in front of the camera is not very unlike the one behind it.

Behzad, his alter ego, is the symbol of encroachment. He arrives ominously in his giant vehicle, tearing through the serene landscape of the secluded village, with a motive that is no more selfish than ours. His work involves the demise of an elderly woman of the village who is presently on her deathbed. Behzad spends time hoping against nature for the process to happen fast but things are not to be so. His attempt to strike up conversations with the village folk, more often than not, turns them off and renders them uncommunicative. In a remarkable scene, Behzad, in a fit of frustration, overturns a turtle on to its shell and leaves the place. The turtle, after a minor struggle, corrects itself and carries on with its journey. A while later, after he realizes that there is nothing now to fret over, he comes to understand how inconsequential his attempts are to dictate nature are, much like his car which is dwarfed by the colossal landscape.

In the court sequence of his marvelous film Where The Green Ants Dream (1984), Werner Herzog cuts away from the centre of attraction after the tribal chief starts unraveling a package that supposed to contain a sacred emblem as a sign of respect for the divine and the unknown. In The Wind Will Carry Us, Kiarostami keeps a host of characters off-screen and denotes their presence employing just subdued voices and Behzad’s response to them. Nor does he show us the interior of the houses in the village. The camera is fixed on Behzad throughout the film but prefers to stay at the doorstep even if he doesn’t. And this is where the contrast between Behzad the actor and Kiarostami the director– the past and the present of Abbas Kiarostami, his mistakes and their corrections – is established. It is a reverence that Kiarostami seems to have gotten the hard way. A reverence that acknowledges the right of things to exist as they are.

The final scene is perhaps the most heartwarming and ethical Kiarostami has ever filmed. Behzad, convinced that his stay of two weeks has taken its toll on both him and the villagers, decides to do away with the final physical traces of the village on him, After washing the dust off the windshield of his car, he throws into a stream the last remnant he possesses – a thigh bone that he picked up earlier – in an attempt to restore the spiritual balance of the land that he may have disturbed. Like Herzog who has consistently been against the intrusion of man in the clockwork of nature, Kiarostami calls for a “calculated indifference” towards the way various cultures work and a regard for its methods against one’s own judgment. However, it should not be assumed that Kiarostami is lashing out against the domineering and subsequently destructive nature of man. Behzad is anything but despicable. He merely acts by impulse and his notions of right and wrong, which may well differ from the villagers’. By creating a multi-dimensional protagonist whose morals and desires are very much our own, Kiarostami’s gesture comes out both as a token of heartfelt atonement and a subtle appeal for recognition and preservation of diversity.

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Wednesday, August 12, 2009

A Song of Growing up Delivered from Fear

@ 8/12/2009 08:34:00 PM By HarryTuttle
On behalf of Yvette Biró I post her review of Claudia Llosa's film : La Teta Asustada / The milk of sorrow (2009/Peru)


A Song of Growing up Delivered from Fear


Winner of the Golden Bear, the Best Actress and the International Critics Prize in Berlin 2009


There is a prologue to this beautiful film. A saddened young woman accompanies her mother to death. Before saying farewell, the mother sings a terrible, ageless song of horror and sufferings she underwent while bearing this child in her womb: violent rapes, experiences of cruelties she transmitted to the girl with the milk from her breath. Therefore the malady she is afflicted with: “La teta asustada” [the milk of sorrow] - as the folkway name it.

Fausta, the heroine is marked by fear, unable to speak, to be touched by anybody. “She is the metaphor of a torn country…which has known repression and can’t express itself only through which is hidden in the unconscious: the myths, terror, and its traumatisms.” – says the author. While the past events have been real, the myths that encompass them are floating between superstitions, deep anxieties and memories of brutal facts. It is the body which bleeds, which is sick in the literal sense bringing to life an existence between muteness and rare poetic manifestation: chanting, humming in their indigenous language: Quechua. Moreover: there is a potato hidden in Fausta’s vagina, in order to protect her from any violence. And this potato “grows roots and sends germs into the body”, it is a deadly dangerous harm.

This is the unusual, bold setup of this captivating, unclassifiable movie. Is its world real or a metaphor, half physical fact, half symbolic allusion? The decision to place a potato in her sex has been a mere nightmare, the imaginary continuation of a hereditary tradition, learned from her humiliated, raped mother? Or is it an absurd reality? The genre of the film doesn’t intend to clarify it; it is part of the movie’s almost unfathomable poetic aura.

We are in an eerie sandy desert in Peru, not far from the city of Lima, but the life in the emptiness and favellas are poor, miserable. Only exuberant wedding parties, full of music and food stir up the bleak routine. Heavy set young ladies and puny bridegrooms enjoy the extraordinary feasts, in which the whole small community participates with the many children in a boisterous festivity. The scenes are grotesque, funny and repetitive. Taking pictures before the huge “Niagara Falls” photo, dressed in the most beautiful white garbs, - these overly cheerful events are always identical, followed always by the same silly rituals… as they were parts of their everyday life and/or pleasure.

Fausta remains in the silent background, preoccupied with her obligation to bury her mother. There is no money to take her back to the native village, they have to embalm and hide her under the bed before an occasion comes about to arrange it. In this way again: imaginary dreams and physical deeds, life and death border on and her liberation will occur when she arrives with the mummified mom to the open sea…

All these actions take place in the deliberately indefinable border of allegoric and earthy moves. Since the real truth belongs to the painful memories, never fully taken into accepted and elaborate history of the country. Only songs, the traditional, forgotten language keep alive the traces, but once they have to be spoken out, freely in order to liberate the people from their long lasting, ill-fated past history.

Fausta’s story is the story of unresolved memory, savage, concealed, and very particular keys are needed to partially open it. When she is forced to come in touch with people, she is employed by a wealthy pianist woman who herself is in crisis of inspiration. Then, she is the one who will, surprisingly, offer new impulse, energy, for the artist, precisely with the genuine power of her authentic, poetic songs.

Fausta’s slow and dolorous development is at once symbolic, representing the wading out of a divided country from its dark history ravaged by wars, which has left terrible wounds. But it is personal, as well. She has to discover herself, her power and “beauty” (in all senses of the word) daring to have confidence in her.

Since Fausta, performed by the wonderful actress, Magaly Solier, is stunningly beautiful. Her eyes, pervasive gaze under the dark crown or tail of hair, the particular colour of her Aztec Indian skin, radiating from her so perfectly shaped face…her look is bewildering and awe-inspiring at once. She seems genuinely extraordinary, more than a simple individual. There is such an unusual intensity in her presence that one has to watch each moment, small gesture or just the lack of movements. She is truly mesmerizing, having the power to carry on the fascinating, though very simple story. She can sit immovably in an empty room, going through silently from the kitchen to the landlady’s place. And waiting, waiting motionless, yet full of sensible emotions. In her close ups only her eyes speak, in her very slow gestures in order to open timidly the door for the gardener she accumulates so much tension that we really identify with her unnamed anxiety. No wonder that when she faints, it seems to be inevitable, it could be expected, so much tenseness can be felt in her discipline.

She is strong, still frail, always subordinating herself to the exterior demands. Only the instinctive, scarcely audible chants show some more vivid expressions on her face, which usually maintains its steady countenance. Two occasions show important changes: one, when the landlady betrays her in a humiliating way, when she orders her to step out from the car, after she dared, for the first time! to comment – although in an appreciative way –the lady’s success; and by the very ending, which is the final liberation. Arriving at the sea, with the body of the mother she loudly cries out: “See, here is the sea!” and this sudden, happy encounter with the openness is her own deliverance, her discovery of the beauty, beyond offering it to her defunct mother.

This is a courageously uneventful, plain drama. The spectacle, beyond the central character’s interior torments is in total harmony with the exceptional marvel of the landscape. Large, open vistas of the greyish region, with the surprisingly fluctuating “mountains and valleys” of the sand. Huge, almost immeasurable space and the infinite steps leading to the top in order to rise above everything, - the images appear as visually summing up the whole tale.

Thinking of the power and fullness of minimalism, Claudia Llosa’s film joins the rich examples of many oriental films. Full of withheld emotions, finely chiselled small actions, rarely seen or discovered beauty offered for the eyes – the saturated experience and vision enchant the spectator. Fantastic and precise realism assure the particular flavour of its modest magic.

With this Peruvian film, Fausta, Latin America has deservedly entered the domain of the memorable, fortunate successes of our not so long discovered and appreciated films, coming from Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong. Moving bravely against the mainstream it strengthens the values of emotional identification, achieved without pathos, avoiding to describe sheer misery or solitude. Intensity and masterful composition complement each other. …. Sensibility, refined attention, slow and silent treatment of deep human and historical dramas have found their appropriate form and style in this orientation.


YVETTE BIRO
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Friday, August 07, 2009

The Films of Artavazd Peleshian

@ 8/07/2009 06:10:00 PM By Just Another Film Buff
Watching Atravazd Peleshian’s movies, I had this constant feeling of having seen such films elsewhere. A little deliberation reveals that the extraordinary Jean-Luc Godard compilation History of Cinema (1988-98) is, in fact, closer to the works of this Armenian auteur than anyone else’s. Furthermore, it becomes clear that almost all of Godard’s films made in the past couple of decades, especially the many short films, have a notable influence of Peleshian’s style, although they evidently bear Godard’s signature. With a total runtime of hardly three hours, Peleshian’s filmography may not be as prolific as the French director's, but it shows such degree of consistency of style and unity of content that it almost feels as if Peleshian had decided beforehand what his résumé would read. I guess Peleshian’s films are what could be truly called film poetry. This is because they completely wallow in ambiguity that is so essential to poetry. By ambiguity, I do not mean that they elude meaning or try to deliberately confuse the viewer, but that their meanings are with the audience. That is to say that each viewer would draw out a different meaning or exhibit varied emotional responses that would solely depend on his/her accumulated experiences and thought processes. One might say that this is true of any film. But with Peleshian’s films, all of these responses hold good to some degree. As Peleshian himself says in his interview with Scott MacDonald (found in the book A Critical Cinema: Part 3): “It’s everything”.

I would probably go on talking about Godard’s later works when talking about Peleshian because the similarity here is remarkable. Much like what Godard does with the images from Ivan the Terrible: Part 2 (1958), Angels of Sin (1943) and many of his own films, Peleshian reuses and recycles a number of familiar images and sounds throughout his filmography. And likewise, each of these instances elicits a different meaning every time they occur. Peleshian seems to believe that photography is indeed truth, but alters its frame rate to underscore, enhance and provide meaning. It is as if the director is holding a photograph of stellar importance in his hand, commenting on it, animating and then stopping it whenever required, to emphasize what he has said, going back to tell us more using the same photograph and, in essence, writing an essay using prefabricated sentences. Only that there is no text or speech as in Godard’s films. In fact, there is not a single word spoken in any of Peleshian’s films, highlighting the deliberately universal nature of his cinema. That is because people, beings to be precise, have always been at the center of Peleshian’s films. Peleshian seems to see humans as a monolithic entity whose ambitions, idiosyncrasies, struggles and emotions, although particularized by history, (to kill a cliché) transcend geographical and ethnological barriers.

But then, this history which Peleshian takes as reference for his examination always seems to be something that is close to Peleshian’s heart, which could perhaps be called truly “Armenian”. A mere look at the country’s history reveals large scale tragedies that have mercilessly plagued it throughout its life. A constant target of imperialism, oppression and, later, nature’s wrath, Armenia has certainly put up with some nasty things. With this knowledge, it is but natural for one to view Peleshian’s films as being also about the resilience of the nation’s residents. This reading seems quite valid at first since Peleshian’s films always seem to be about “movement“ – movement of time, movement of people and movement of life. In almost all of his films, we see various images that denote movement, change and constant transmutation – man made modes of transport, exodus of humans and animals, cycling of seasons, revolutions and of course, birth and death. And Armenia itself has been characterized by such movements and instability as its history tells us – the country’s constant transfer from the hands of one ruler to the other, people made refugees in their own country, forced evacuations and exiles and deformation by natural calamities. It is just too tempting to place these facts alongside and tie Peleshian’s films to a specific nation before generalizing them. But the director seems hesitant to attach any geographical importance to his films:

“The Armenians are simply an opportunity that allows me to talk about the whole world, about human characteristics, human nature. One may with also to see Armenia and the Armenian in that film. But I have never allowed myself to do it then, and would not now.”
Peleshian calls his technique “Distance Montage”, of which, I must admit, I could not make head or tail of, despite the director’s numerous attempts to clarify himself in the interview. But one thing that is clear from his films about his style is that it provides totality to them. That is, what the viewer takes away from the film is the whole and not any fragment or any individual aspect of it. Although certain images and sounds repeat themselves throughout the film, their order and composition are designed to evoke different responses depending on the context. As a matter of fact, without any impact on the individual films, all of Peleshian’s movies could be combined seamlessly into an indexed anthology that produces the same effect as its constituents, for the director’s style is too consistent to make any film seem out of place. Peleshian places the audience always at a distance, giving them an omniscient eye that concerns itself the whole of humanity instead of making them care about individual subjects, and their petty objectives and aspirations. Perhaps this is why there are no “characters” in any of Peleshian’s films. It is quite impossible to distinguish between the archival footage and fabricated shots that Peleshian uses since none of these images show any trace of a motive to create a fictional world. The characters, for Peleshian, are already written and exist all around us, merely waiting to be read.

Earth of People (Mardkants Yerkire, 1966) is the second student film that Peleshian made while studying at the prestigious VGIK institute and already, it shows the author’s stamp. Early on we are shown images of massive man made structures - bridges, railroads and skyscrapers. As the twisted title starts to make meaning, Peleshian starts showing us human hands, humans at work and the world being constructed by humans. We see people from every profession – doctors, engineers, workers and scientists – carrying on with their routine robotically as the soundtrack suddenly stops giving us conventional score and starts gathering the most bizarre of mechanical sounds. But soon, the optimistic tone of the film gives way to distrust and we realize that we aren’t exactly masters of this world. We see these people are, in fact, trapped within their own creations (which strangely reminds us of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)), which gradually takes us back to the title: Whose world is this? No wonder the film opens and closes with the image of a thinker’s statue. Peleshian’s film is symmetrical, as would be his later works, with both the soundtrack and imagery getting reflected along the centre of the film.

Although Peleshian’s style already shows maturity in Earth of People, his official filmography begins with, well, Beginning (Skizbe, 1967). Chronicling the historical events that changed the course of the century following the monumental October Revolution of 1917, Beginning is a powerhouse trip that would definitely rank among the best political films ever made. Running for a mere 10 minute span, Beginning exemplifies Peleshian’s preoccupation with mass movement like no other film. Employing an eclectic mixture of photographs, studio shots and documentary footage, manipulating their speed, repeating them regularly and eventually attaining a musical rhythm like the Soviet pioneers’, Peleshian emphatically registers our recent history that has been marked by an extraordinary number of uprisings and bloodsheds. Peleshian’s soundtrack is remarkable here. Using a combination of highway chase music, gunshots, screams and silence, Beginning shifts gears from a documentary, to an agitprop, to an essay and to an epic in no time. But the true revelation is the ending of Beginning where, after a brief visual and aural pause, Peleshian delivers a moment of epiphany, once again reminiscent of 2001 – an extended close up of a young child staring determinedly into the camera as the soundtrack plays a majestic, Thus Spake Zarathustra like score. Forget the Star Child, what is the human child going to see in the future?

Sheep and mountains have almost become Armenian identities of sorts, thanks to the films of Sergei Paradjanov. We (Menq, 1969), which begins and ends with the image of a gargantuan mountain, is perhaps the most “Armenian” of all Peleshian movies. We are shown images of mountains falling apart before being cut to a large funeral procession. This is followed by visuals of common people carrying on with their everyday work, – some utterly mundane, some shockingly risky - as if proving the adage “Life must go on”. For the first time, religion, which was a major reason for the Armenian Genocide, makes its presence felt in a Peleshian film. It isn’t just personal disappointments that these people seem to putting behind them, but shattering national tragedies, despite (and perhaps because of) which their faith stands affirmed – in religion, in life. The last third of the film acts as a meeting point and the resolution for these two types of calamities as we are presented visuals of reunions of families (and of people who seem to be returning from an exile). More than anything We feels like an ode to the resilience of, in particular, the Armenian people (although Peleshian himself denies this!), who have had to put up with a lot through the centuries and, in general, the spirit of everyday heroes. If at all anything can be made of Peleshian’s attitude here, it must be his unassailable faith on the ability of humanity to survive no matter how difficult it makes it for itself.

In contrast to the unusually large number of people in the Beginning and We, Inhabitants (Obitateli, 1970) is almost completely devoid of humans. Peleshian attributes this peculiar absence, quite strangely, to his audience being critical of him for We. Filled with shots of large-scale migrations and stampedes (with, surprisingly, even helicopter shots being present in the film), Inhabitants merely alludes to the presence of the human beings, in the form of a few silhouettes, who seem to be the central cause of panic. Shot in widescreen, Inhabitants, for most part, depicts wildlife, in panic. At first glance, with the anti-mankind tone of the movie, Inhabitants seems to take Peleshian back to the arguably cynical mode of Beginning. But once you begin to see that the humans in the film aren’t exactly humans but far from it, Peleshian’s faith in humanity comes to surface. Surely, the animals are just a normalized form of the people of We, of Beginning and of Earth of People. But the relevant question is whether Inhabitants is connected to the Armenian history directly or not. With the visuals showing us exoduses and captive animals and the soundtrack including gunshots and screams, it is not unfair for one to be reminded once more of the nation’s plight. Whatever the case, the film resonates with quintessentially Peleshian themes - of change, of resilience and of survival.

Seasons (Vremana Goda, 1975) is perhaps the most famous of all Peleshian films and just its opening shot would show why - A man, clutching a sheep in his hand, trapped raging stream, trying to get to the shore along with the animal. Setting the tone of film and, to an extent, to the director’s whole filmography, Seasons’ first shot effectively underlines the irony that forms the basis of the relationship between humans and nature. Seasons, as the title suggests, deals with the change of seasons. In the first section Peleshian presents us images from sunny day in an idyllic pastoral life, where a family of herdsmen lead their sheep through a dark tunnel and then to light. We then see a group of young men dragging huge stacks of hay down a hill slope and then trying to stop it. This scene, once more, illustrates our can’t-live-with-can’t-without relationship with nature, but never once becoming a contrived symbol or a metaphor. It is merely a glimpse of life which reveals a fact rather than expressing it. The same would be true of the sequence that is to follow, where the herdsmen risk their own lives in order to salvage their herd that is caught in the rapids. The film then shifts to an ethno-documentary mode as we witness a marriage ceremony in which a cow forms as much an integral part as the bride and the groom. In a rather prolonged scene that follows, in what looks like an amusing sport, we are shown a few men, each holding a sheep in his hand, sliding down a snowy hill, refusing to let go of the animal – A practice that is as strange as man’s kinship with nature – living with it, living against it, living despite it, living for it and living because of it.

What followed remains Peleshian’s longest film to date, the 50-minute feature Our Century (Mer Dare, 1983). Our Century concerns itself with some cosmonauts (and astronauts) preparing themselves for a space flight. Peleshian constructs the film around this event, quite predictably, exploring his themes through a complex editing system coupled with an equally complex soundtrack. Initially, Peleshian crosscuts between the footage of the activities at a space station, minutes before the launch of a shuttle, and a celebratory procession where the space-heroes are cheered and applauded by the mass. Peleshian frequently presents clips that show the immense stress that the cosmonauts are put under, during the test phase and in space, It is a period of sheer loneliness, physical and mental fatigue and, yet, of excitement and ambitiousness. He then goes on to depict man’s obsession with flight and, in general, his desire to conquer the various elements of nature, where he shows a number of bizarre experiments in aviation, most of which end unsuccessfully. As ever, individual turmoil gives way to and unifies with national tragedies to the point beyond which there is no difference between a nuclear explosion, a rocket launch and the human heartbeat. Our Century arguably presents Peleshian at the top of his game, converting both the form and content of the film into a highly personal mode of expression. In no other Peleshian film has the ecstasy over human achievement mingled with the agony of existence in such an intricate fashion. The point is not the establishment of a simple irony, but of an exploration of what makes humanity go on, against all odds.

There is some confusion regarding the order of release of the last two Peleshian films. The official Paradjanov site, however, suggests that it is, in fact, Life (Verj, 1993) that is the director’s penultimate film thus far. Peleshian uses colour film for the first time, perhaps to enhance the already optimistic tone of the film, and makes his shortest film till date. Running for a mere seven minute time span, Peleshian, for most part of the film, presents us extreme close-ups of a woman delivering a baby. Probably the most moving Peleshian film, Life is also the most overt manifestation of the ever-present Peleshian-ian conversation between human pain and ecstasy. The soundtrack is comparatively simpler here, with only two audible layers – an evocative opera piece and an amplified track of the human heartbeat. Naturally reminiscent of that staggering Stan Brakhage work, Window Water Baby Moving (1962), Life is an equally personal (although far easier to watch), emotionally exhausting and visually stunning piece of film that has the power to dispel any trace of pessimism that anyone may have about humanity. The film ends on a freeze frame showing a mother and her young child looking towards the camera and, possibly, a bright future.

Although Life would have made an astounding end to a solid filmography, it is End (Kyanq, 1994) that provides a more rounded closure to it. End is a series of shots inside a speeding train, the passengers of which are of diverse age groups, ethnicities and emotional statuses. The train itself feels like a microcosm of the whole world, each of whose inhabitants is moving towards an individual destination but the totality of them going in the same direction. End is perhaps the kind of vision that Damiel (Bruno Ganz) saw in the train in Berlin in Wings of Desire (1987), considering the voyeuristic nature of the camerawork in this film. There are also a few outdoor shots, of mountains (again) and of the sun, that punctuate End. If Life’s ending shot seemed to seal Peleshian’s faith in humanity, the closing shot of End brings back the lifelong dialectic between cynicism and optimism that has so consistently characterized Peleshian’s work. We see the train, after a very long passage through the darkness of the tunnels, suddenly plunging into blinding light. Before it is revealed to us what lies beyond, the end credits roll. Is it a man-made apocalypse foreseen by Earth of People? Is it the Great Armenian Earthquake? Or is it the ultimate redemption for humanity that Life suggests? Looking back at Peleshian’s body of work, it is probably the latter.
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