Pelechian suffered less overt suppression than his, to some, more abrasively confrontational friends making films in Soviet Armenia. After Mikhail Vartanov was blacklisted and fired from directing at Armenia’s sole film studio for making The Color of Armenian Land (1969), a film about dissidents [Sergei] Parajanov and painter Minas Avetisyan, Pelechian successfully lobbied to have Vartanov work with him as a cinematographer – a collaboration that resulted, during the mid-70s, in Tarva Yeghanaknere. This is a mesmerically odd, lyrical and disquieting work of orbital echoes, in which the forces of life and death entwine closely. Farmers shift their sheep for feeding up and down mountainous terrain in step with seasonal changes, clutching them tight as they tumble over each other almost as one down snowy inclines, and through river rapids that buffet and draw them under. In summer comes harvest, and the motion is echoed, as workers roll clumps of hay down a hillside. Textural splendour resides in the glittering creases of men’s rain-lashed coats and other details worked over by the elements, even as we sense the relentless energy required to survive, and submit the self to its place in nature’s forcefield. It’s astounding that a film so chaotic and perilous can feel at once so organically harmonious. It’s all in the tumbling rhythm as humans and animals navigate a nature unleashed full-tilt, and gravity at its most unforgiving. “Do you think it’s better elsewhere?” asks one of several sparse intertitles, reinforcing a sense of human universality to events in a film with few language-based signposts.

Carmen Grey, The Visionary Cinema of Artavazd Pelechian, “ArtReview”, 25 November 2020