Nature (Artavazd Pelechian, 2020)

Armenian experimentalist Artavazd Pelechian has built a reputation on very little work, if by "work" we mean the actual length of film in circulation. But in fact he is a meticulous craftsman who spends years perfecting individual edits, treating him images in much the same way that a composer would employ notes and chords. Like a more populist Peter Kubelka, or a cinematic Anton Webern, Pelechian's aesthetic is based on density and expanse, the rhythmic organization of material. Several of his films are vaguely palindromic, or structured like a fugue. 

One of the remarkable aspects of Pelechian's work is that, for the most part, he is a found-footage filmmaker. But his films are completely unique within that avant-garde tradition. Whereas an artist like Bruce Conner made films that obliquely pointed to their origin, poking fun at the society of the spectacle that produced them, Pelechian chooses and arranges film images that meld into the whole of the film. Far from generating irony, Pelechian's films create an almost timeless atmosphere, as if we were looking at moments somehow captured before the advent of cinema itself. In this regard, Pelechian's only real peer is Robert Beavers, whose films also tend to feel like artifacts from a distant past.

Pelechian spent most of his career in the Soviet Union, making films that were an extension of the Montage tradition of Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin. However, he was not interested in the rapidity and bald signification of these films, the very aspects that made the style so effective as propaganda. Instead, Pelechian advocated what he calls "distance montage." In one sense, distance means exactly what it sounds like. Whereas Eisenstein's films are fundamentally about the relationships between two conjoined shots, Pelechian's relationships are not based on that absolute proximity. Images recur across the totality of the film, very much like motifs in a symphony. (From one shot to the next,  Pelechian's images are often very similar to each other. One of his frequent moves is showing some movement and then, in the subsequent shot, flipping its orientation, so we see a gesture from the left, and then the right, and back again.)

Pelechian's previous film, 1993's Life, was rather different from his other works. Not only was it in color; it also consisted of original footage. It mostly consists of close-ups on the face of a young woman who is in the process of giving birth. Like Pelechian's other films, there is no sync sound. Instead, he uses classical music, and he is generally partial to composers who can lend his sequences an air of importance -- Beethoven and Shostakovich are favorites. So in a way, Life was an oblique answer to Brakhage's Window Water Baby Moving, in that Pelechian never took his camera-eye off the young mother, and at the end, we see her with the child, a girl now aged six or seven. Life intensifies time, only to return to a long-term, macro-temporality. 

It's the same concept of the timeless that we see in films like Inhabitants and The Four Seasons. Here, we can maybe perceive another meaning of "distance," analogous to the "distant reading" of scholar Franco Moretti (and its cinematic equivalent, the "distant viewing" of David Bordwell and the Madison school). Pelechian is not concerned with individuals. He fixes his organizational gaze upon the big cycles and patterns of history, "life" writ large. Along with his musical style, this grand vision seems to have allowed Pelechian to make abstract cinema even under the restrictive aegis of the U.S.S.R. The films are non-ideological, because they are literally about everybody.

Nature, Pelechian's first new film in 27 years, arguably represents another shift in the artist's work. The 63-minute piece, commissioned by the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, retains most of the hallmarks of Pelechian's cinema. All the images are in black-and-white, there is an orchestral soundtrack, and it is organized according to rhythmic and gestural principles rather than an overt narrative. But Nature has some unique properties as well. For the first time, Pelechian retains some of the sync sound native to the footage he incorporates. And although the film has a broadly cyclical structure, it is also fairly direct in its message. Like Pelechian's other long film, Our Century (about space exploration), Nature contains somewhat longer clips, and they tend to retain their identity as well as operating within the overall texture of the film.

Also, there is a problem with the "timelessness" of Nature. This is Pelechian's first film to pull footage from the Internet, and so just on the level of medium, we see a movement back and forth from pristine 35mm to degraded streaming and video material. The evolution of Pelechian's medium is signposted in Nature, regardless of the subtle tapestry of the editing. But this actually serves the film well, because Nature is less about the eternal cycles of life on Earth, and more about their radical disruption.

After a prologue showing placid skies and isolated mountains, Pelechian provides extended footage of natural disasters, along with their vast human toll. Not unlike a YouTube "supercut" of "the earth fighting back," Nature is largely composed of video and cellphone images captured by people in the midst of tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and floods. We witness people being washed away, cars and buildings tossed about like toy models, and we frequently hear the sounds of people crying and screaming. We never engage with victims as individuals, though. Again, Pelechian is employing a wide-angle gaze on the current plight of the human animal, suffering from conditions we ourselves created.

We see volcanoes erupt, massive waves crashing down on villages, and scenes of the heaviest of weather. The title Nature may not be ironic, since that is indeed what we are witnessing. But it does speak to how dramatically we have deformed the earth's natural responses, resulting in extinction-level events on an almost daily basis. 

Obviously this material can be found on the web, which is replete with images of human misery. But Nature makes a different sort of intervention. By retaining his sense of the sublime, the trans-individual, and yes, the timeless, Pelechian reframes this disaster footage, showing it to be a disruption and an emergency. Pelechian's style and vision, far from exploiting or abstracting these tragedies, actually lifts them from the ordinary glut of "things seen," returning them to a place of dignity and awe. After all, not only are we a part of nature. Our technological extensions of ourselves are part of it too, and Pelechian's film implicitly asks us whether we will change what we now have the capacity to plainly see.