Background and career
Artavazd Peleshyan (Armenian: Արտավազդ (Արթուր) Փելեշյան, romanized: Artavazd (Art’ur) P’eleshyan; also Pelechian, Peleshian; born February 22, 1938) is an Armenian director of essay films, a documentarian in the history of film art, a screenwriter, and a film theorist. He is renowned for developing a style of cinematographic perspective known as distance montage, combining perception of depth with oncoming entities, such as running packs of antelope or hordes of humans. Filmmaker Sergei Parajanov has referred to Peleshyan as "one of the few authentic geniuses in the world of cinema". Peleshyan was awarded the title of Merited Artist of the Armenian SSR in 1979, and Merited Artist of the Russian Federation in 1995.
His films have been described as being on the border between a documentary and a feature film, somewhat reminiscent of the work of such avant-garde filmmakers as Bruce Conner, rather than of conventional documentaries. However, it has been noted that his work, unlike Maya Deren's, is not firmly within the avant-garde, and that it does not try to explore the absurd. Peleshyan's films have been summarized as "a poetic view of life transferred onto film."
He has made extensive use of archive footage and for the first time used only original footage in his most celebrated film, Seasons of the Year, shot by cinematographer Mikhail Vartanov. Telephoto lenses are often used to get "candid camera" shots of people engaging in mundane tasks.
Most of Peleshyan's films are short, ranging from 6 to about 60 minutes long, and feature no dialogue. However, music and sound effects play nearly as important a role in his films as the visual images in contributing towards the artistic whole. Nearly all of his films were shot in black-and-white.
In 2020, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presented Artavazd Peleshyan: La Nature, a major exhibition that premiered his first new film in over twenty-five years, Nature, and highlighted his enduring influence on documentary and experimental cinema.
