Artavazd Peleshian

Artavazd Ashoti Peleshyan (Armenian: Արտավազդ (Արթուր) Փելեշյան; born February 22, 1938 in Leninakan) is an Armenian director of film-essays, a documentarian in the history of film art, 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. The filmmaker Sergei Parajanov referred to Peleshyan as "one of the few authentic geniuses in the world of cinema". He was named Renowned Master of the Armenian SSR Arts in 1979.

His films are on the border between documentary and feature, somewhat reminiscent of the work of such avant-garde filmmakers as Bruce Conner, rather than of conventional documentaries. However, his work, unlike Maya Deren's, is not avant-garde, nor does it try to explore the absurd. It is also not really art for art's sake, like the work of Stan Brakhage, for instance, but is generally acknowledged, rather, as a poetic view of life transferred onto film.

He has always made extensive use of archive footage, mixed in with his own shots, with fast inter-cutting between the two. Telephoto lenses are often used to get "candid camera" shots of people engaging in mundane tasks.

Most of his films are short, ranging from 6 to about 60 minutes long. They 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.

His early films, made when he was still a student at VGIK, were awarded several prizes. Twelve films by Peleshyan are known to exist. The Beginning (Skizbe) (1967) is a cinematographical essay about the October Revolution of 1917. One of the unique visual effects used in this film is achieved by holding snippets of film still on a single frame, then advancing only for a second or two before again pausing on another, resulting in a stuttering visual effect.

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