Peleshian: Life & Nothing Less
For over sixty years, Artavazd Peleshian—Артавазд Пелешян; Արտավազդ Փելեշյան—has been slowly sifting through the mountain of debris that has built up around the cinema. His films seem to intrude upon a present which smugly believes that it has solved all the old problems from a static horizon, that all is over and done with, that everything has been settled. What is left is merely the production of ghosts.
In Kyanq (“Life”), made in 1993, Peleshian ignores the diegetic revolution which followed the discovery of the power of cutting within a single sequence. Cross cutting has become another prison, and making a film seems almost unimaginable without recourse to its seductive shifts and its promises of infinite simultaneity. But passing through Eisenstein and Dovzhenko, starting again after the hard-won miracles and defeats of the past, Peleshian has come out from the other side. He has made a second beginning for cinema by rearranging ideas of the past.
The film opens with a beautiful woman in close-up profile, apparently in the throes of ecstasy. Soon, an arm in scrubs enters the frame and we see that she is actually in a medical theater (the hand is a doctor or relative’s; blurred vertical planes are parts of the metal delivery bed; a glowing orb is hospital lighting). She is in labor, which is a mundane and sentimental subject for a film. The use of the close-up in film, crowding the screen with sweat and ‘emotion’, is an easy manipulation of the viewer’s emotions. It also bares the chill of forensic pathology, which seizes the living as if the body were a puzzle useful only for illustrating hazard or solving its own crime. The soundtrack is music by Verdi, which stops and starts fitfully until it is finally freed from the film’s editing, adding a skipping unreality to the formal ‘realism’ of Life. The only other sound is a heartbeat amplified over the beginning (and note, not the electronic blip of a monitor), which remains slightly audible under the requiem mass.
Though the film follows the simple timeline of a woman giving birth, the editing follows the inward time of a mother. The use of extreme close-up is now clear: in the epochal scheme of a general, universal time, the close-up is used to make myths into statues or it captures momentary passions as if these passions or myths were the only ones in the world. But through a subtle use of jump-cuts, the viewer starts to feel an odd remove from the girl’s lovely features. She begins to resemble a landscape, as in those old enigmatic Dutch paintings where hills and rivers form a great human face. We have returned to painting, the first inspiration of filmmakers, but the laws of perspective and the order of objects are far less important than the alternation of internal and external time. Filming and watching take time, are revealed in time, try to trick time by poking it full of holes (visible first in the sprockets of exposed film, as it feeds and moves in light projection). Life is made of different times, a fact which seduces us into believing that time is all that governs life and that all time is reducible to the power of a dominant course.
Rembrandt said: Life etches itself onto our faces as we grow older, showing our violence, excesses, or kindnesses.
Do not children kill their mothers in childbirth, all or in part, with the violence of birth, with the all the terrible duties that child-rearing demands? And one of the last taboos—maybe also the first, if we accept that the horror of incest is inseparable from it—the link between orgasm and birth is also the possibility of dual death and the ruthless affirmation of Life over death which dictates that the life of the child is a supreme right against its mother. Life at all costs—the greatest of tyrannies, a monstrous physical drive which unleashes a tsunami of living over the earth: the atrocious flood of total creation. Life as something that equals what is most terrifying within it—of it—the blank face of a genetic machine wanting itself and nothing else, consuming itself via the temptation-engines of a chattering god of sheer velocity (this is also the god of information, beloved of the tech wizards). It is not the phantom of Death that haunts the living, but the phantom of Life. And the individual life strives to fool this specter, to shock it in its own wild onrush by producing a single life in the monolithic barrage of limitless coming-to-be. Bearing witness against this crude biological nihilism which William Blake identified as The Beast, the machine mills of the slavers’ empire, one single life then occurs as many—each without repeat, yet each one the selfsame in the body of the swarm.
Against this omnivorous shadow—a cellular destiny which rises out of the solitary reflections given us by our vague notions of science, by a primary education that teaches biology as fate and terror only—Peleshian projects a woman in contortions, giving birth down by the walls of the hegemon. Things get smaller in the film. Life shrinks down to a mouth, a hand, a slight bewitching smile, ringlets of hair and beads of sweat. And here we realize that exaltation—accompanied by an Italian death mass and the heart’s regular drum—is always done alone, and that its joys must be betrayed by the world from which each ecstasy severs it time and again. Entering back into the crowd (via the film, via an audience she cannot know), what is unique returns in this disorder of movement and gesture—which is everyone’s autobiography. Just as when ‘something strikes you’, striking the eye with an immense force: a face on the bus, corner stoop faces, faces and faces from whose vast gallery one singular expression comes into clarity for an instant and then returns—on the verge of life or leaving life, there is nothing else at this hypothetical moment—almost caught at the corner of the eye.
It is strange that in extreme close-ups, faces seem at their most indistinguishable but also at their most familiar (you mistake someone for someone else and stare at them to be sure, staring ever more intently until you are far more than unsure—you are lost in that other face). The film’s other close-ups are of hands. The human hand is midway between the features of the face and the wild movements of the limbs. Hands riddle and grasp, make knots, then relax for a split second; they curl like mites, tree branches, or Chinese brushstrokes; hands touching, climbing, cradling, joining. Think of those famous handprints in red ochre found on cave walls—and finding that which is before art in these images, we still foolishly call this act which far outstrips any cultic or imaginative art, just as erroneously as we do the images made with hands, an ‘expression!’—palms measuring breadth, and not just the span of vital time but the time of an imprint that will remain for an accidental 80,000 years. The Peleshian-captured hands clench and constrict life, that nothing be left undone. It does not matter whose hand the woman in the film clasps—anyone, someone, for a moment the only one (perhaps all together, all those she has met, summed up in a stranger’s hand). Dark supposition: that everyone only knows life by their separation from life, lives peering at Life across an impenetrable gulf. But life is also the work of hands.
She raises a finger to the corner of her mouth with its intricate sloping shadow, touching the ghost of a smile. The woman is lost in some reverie and giving birth would seem a strange time for letting the mind wander. But from the jump cuts, we know that Peleshian has edited this sequence internally, so it is far from certain when moments like this actually occurred (I counted 15 cuts in a sequence which accounts for about 5 minutes of the film’s 7-minute running time). At the end, the child is tossed to her mother like a bag of apples, after being bathed in torrents of spurting water (there is no afterbirth or blood, another conscious omission). The young woman and her child then stare at the camera in freeze-frame. I can think of a thousand reasons why you shouldn’t have, but you did, despite all—and I now understand why in the flood of existence you added one more as if you were adding nothing at all. This is Peleshian’s only film in color, which ads credence to the rumor it was to have been his last (Happily, it was not). Color is the first sight of a guileless world seen by guileless eyes, eyes soon to fall upon the architecture of black and white and the gridlines of working rooms.
“Fac eas, Domine, de morte transire ad vitam…” Verdi’s Requiem Mass, 1874: deliverance (and delivery, “Libera animas omnium…”) and liberation (from life, from hell, the lion’s jaws), faithful souls, holy light, deepest pits. “Grant O Lord that they might pass from life death…” Thus is the connection between life and the freeing from life, death and multiple birth sealed (Verdi’s Offertorio is cut and partially repeated on the soundtrack). Now the hand at her mouth, in her hair, rack of contractions. Take and in taking, receive, “Tu suscipe pro animabus illis, quarum hodie memoriam facimus.” The others—all souls—hostias, “we offer…”
by Martin Billheimer
Endnote/ Links:
Artavazd Peleshian’s entire completed work takes about two hours to view (his longest is his latest, the 63-minute La Nature, 2019). Kyanq and many others can be seen here: https://www.ubu.com/film/peleshian.html
Peleshian and Godard: https://kinoslang.blogspot.com/2013/07/before-babel.html
Peleshian speaks: http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/going-the-distance-20120106