CANADIAN PREMIERE. Born in Armenia in 1938 and trained at VGIK in the 1960s, Artavazd Peleshian has lived through the entire postwar Soviet period and its aftermath. Revered by filmmakers as an authentic genius of the seventh art and referenced in its histories as a ​“missing link” connecting the legacy of Soviet montage with more modern uses of the technique, Peleshian rests his reputation on 12 short films made between 1964 and 1993. Across these films, Peleshian employs an innovative contrapuntal approach to montage in which visual and aural sequences recur in different contexts and variations, spiralling back and forth, to create a ​“magnetic field around the film.” His filmography was considered complete until, to the surprise of many, he released a new film in 2019, made entirely from material retrieved online that he reworked in his signature style. The result is a relentless montage of a world in flux, whose inhabitants are no match against the elemental forces of nature.

Nature
(La nature)
France/Germany/Armenia 2019
Artavazd Peleshian
62 min. DCP

“In Eisenstein every element means something. For me the individual fragments don’t mean anything anymore. Only the whole film has the meaning.”

Artavazd Peleshian

“Compared to the instantly televised images of disasters raging right now, [Nature] can feel as if you are getting your news from an Old Testament prophet.”

David D’Arcy, The Art Newspaper