Special Events | This year we pay tribute to one of cinema’s great independent filmmakers, Artavazd Pelešjan, whose immense yet concise body of work has finally been restored and will soon be available for international distribution thanks to Coproduction Office.

Armenian-born (1938) and educated through an in-depth study of both Soviet and European cinematic traditions, Artavazd Pelešjan has always rejected the label of “documentary cinema” when applied to his work.
A truly extraordinary filmmaker, his artistic life spans decades yet is distilled into less than three hours of edited footage: between 1963 and 1994, Pelešjan made “only” nine films — including two genuine masterpieces, The Seasons and We — which together constitute the entirety of his body of work.
His is a cinema without dialogue — cinema as a “langage d’avant Babel” — a poetics shaped through archival materials, anti-naturalistic editing, and a profoundly organic relationship between image and sound. “At the centre of his practice lies what he himself defined as ‘distance montage’: as an alternative both to Eisenstein’s linear and metaphorical montage and to Vertov’s Kino-Eye — masters and starting points of his artistic formation — Artavazd Pelešjan developed a cinematic language grounded in a fluid and vortex-like conception of cinematic time and space. Rather than relying simply on the succession of images, his cinema is built through echoes, counterpoints, and resonances that traverse the entire film, with sound and music taking on a structural role”.

“The true missing link in the history of cinema”. It was the French critic Serge Daney who, in the 1980s, first recognised the extraordinary stature of Artavazd Pelešjan’s cinema, devoting a lengthy article to him in “Libération” and effectively “rediscovering” a filmmaker who would thereafter be internationally celebrated by film festivals, critics — especially in France — and directors of the stature of Jean-Luc Godard.