Artavazd Peleshian’s Nature + Helena Wittmann’s Drift

At its essence, Nature is a stunning collage of nature footage at its most classically sublime: we see images of volcanic eruptions, sweeping deserts, swirling floods, waves of earthquakes, and collapsing icebergs and glaciers. Presented in black and white, mostly sourced from found footage, the immediate pleasure of Nature is the grandeur of these images. In the hands of Armenian legend Artavazd Peleshian—a contemporary of Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov, but whose innovations took him away from his peer’s experiments in staging and instead back to abandoned editing possibilities of Soviet montage—it becomes something else. His first film in nearly thirty years, Peleshian uses Nature to expand on his concept of “Montage-at-a-Distance” and its structural use of repetition to suggest patterns of thought. In doing so, he creates a film both wilfully universal and distinctly the work of one person. Unrated 15+ With thanks to Fondation Cartier

Listed by Container: Brisbane Film Society