How can one speak about his films? About the image that pulses like an electrocardiogram that never goes flat? And about the sound, a true resonance of space? How can one forget Tarva Yeghanaknere? The Armenian shepherds and their animals swept away by a torrent, perhaps drowned, overturned, carried off by the current? The peasants fleeing before chained bales of hay or rolling down slopes – here of snow, there of scree? And in Menq, the Armenian people in tears in the archival images of the successive repatriations (from 1946 to 1950): a return to the homeland, embraces, reunions, bodies overwhelmed by emotion and by the editing, which within these images, coils like a vortex, a vertigo, a loss of bearings … Whatever the subject of the film, Pelechian sets in orbit a disoriented human body, immersed in the turbulence of matter, where nothing human remains, nothing simply human, and where the elements – earth, water, fire, air – return. Not man in the cosmos, but the cosmos in man. In this living-state cosmogony, I seem to see a Vertov in the age of Michael Snow, a Dovzhenko alongside Godard, Wiseman, or van der Keuken. I recognise in it the fatal, almost paranoid flirtation between science and poetry, when the filmmaker, with cruel precision, extracts his share of terror from aesthetic emotion. Serge Daney, “Libération”, 11 August 1983 Here, the Armenians are simply a point of departure – an opportunity to speak about the world at large, about human traits and human nature. One may, of course, choose to see Armenia and the Armenians in the film. But I have never intended to speak about a specific nationality. I would not have allowed myself to do so then, nor would I now. If I had meant only the Armenian people, I would not have had the courage to call it Menq (We). The Armenian people are a “we” that forms just one part of a larger “We.” Every element, every frame, contains the genetic code of the whole film. There are no accidental shots. Each detail has been carefully conceived and stands as a reflection of the whole.

Artavazd Pelechian, interviewed by Scott MacDonald in A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, University of California Press, Berkeley 1998