Edit. Artavazd Peleshyan film “Planet of People”. Part 1
One of the basic principles of editing, which Eisenstein established, has long been known: one frame, encounters another frame in the installation and gives rise to a thought. The mounting theories of the 20s pay the main attention to the relationship between neighboring cadres. Eisenstey: called it the “assembly joint”1, Vertov – the “interval”2. At the same time, Eisenstein in a creative polemic with Vertov contrasted Vertov’s “kino-eye” with his slogan “kino-kulak”, that is, “see” Vertov against his “understand”. These are two completely different approaches to the ideological and editing interpretation of the original film material. Vertov did not break away from direct observation of reality and put the filmed into a poetic image, he retained the actual primacy of the vital material. Eisenstein created his own reality and molded the primary material of his films into something new. In fact, both theories speak of a system of author’s worldview for measuring and evaluating the filmed material. Documentary director Artavazd Peleshyan invented his new method of film montage to measure the system of author’s worldview. He called it remote editing. I became convinced that I was interested in something else, that the main essence and main emphasis of installation work for me is not in gluing frames, but in pasting them, not in their “docking”, but in their “undocking”. It turned out that the most interesting thing for me begins not when I connect two editing pieces, but when I separate them and put a third, fifth, tenth piece between them. 3 For Peleshyan, the main thing in the film is his idea and he came to the fact that the ideological meaning is best achieved not in the junction of two frames, but in their interaction through many links. Due to this distance between the reference, main frames, the range of expressiveness increases and the capacity of images that the film carries grows. This method of remote editing is also called “intuitive-spiritual”, since the viewer’s perception of such films requires the same spiritual effort as the author.
The film “Land of People” is an educational work by Artavazd Peleshyan, a test of a pen. As a whole, it is built by a still different method of installation – on the associative clash of personnel connected by a single topic. The main theme of the film is the constant knowledge of the beauty of the world made by a person in his life and work, it is unfolded on the material of the big city, shown during the working day. But already in it the main intensity of images exists in the force field, ringed by the same initial and final frames. The film begins with Rodin's turning sculpture The Thinker, a symbol of the eternal expression of human thought. A thinker shot from below, he is a poet, according to Rodin’s primary plan, begins his observation – a reflection on the planet of people. From the very first editing gluing, one of the main features of the editing of this film is visible: the director mounts not just images, he mounts movements. The turn of the Thinker from left to right is mounted by the escalator parallels moving upwards, then the runway horizon is slowly overturned, the intricate diagonals of empty railway tracks are overturned. It's morning. The camera on the bus passes under the bridge. From under a dark bridge, on a bright sky, a shadow-drawn, beautiful hromada of one of Stalin’s Moscow skyscrapers opens. All episodes move, flow into one another. Here it is appropriate to recall the origin of the concept of cinematography from the Greek words for “recording movement”. The following shots of massive high-rise buildings with rhythmic glowing windows stand out with a musical accent. We can immediately say about the musical system of the film: the musical accents, the emotional and rhythmic nature of the music of each episode is not accidental. In an effort to enhance the expressiveness of images, the director mounts not only the image, but also the phonogram, getting on the screen a combination of sound-visual images fused together and working as much as possible on the main idea of the film. Organized in this way, the film turns into a semblance of a living organism with a system of complex internal connections and interactions. So, the hromada of stone buildings is mounted with immovable figures of Atlanteans, who, based on the montage phrase, keep it on themselves. The profile of the stone Atlanta in turn is mounted with a dark profile of the man on the bus against the background of a sweeping cityscape in the window. At the same time, this profile of a man, pensively propping his head with his hand, is remotely mounted with the first frames of the bronze "Thinker" using a hand gesture at the face. It should be noted that almost the entire film is built on close-up plans. It is through close-ups that the director conveys the generalization and expresses the idea. The close-up in the film is almost always an image, it is more expressive than the average, where the object is surrounded by household details. All images born on the screen have their intensity and longitude. So, following the image of the male thinker-Atlante, we see two short frames, barely marked female profiles. Then the bus door opens and the reality of the city bursts into the film in the form of the synchronized sounds of the street, the noise of roads and cars. The length of the frames works on a generalized editing image: short shots of the train doors opening again and again and people coming out of them lead us from the private bus in which we observed people now to the general repetitive movement of many, many people in the city.
With this montage, the director comes to the universal expression of the theme. In addition, these frames are combined with the rhythmic noise of the machine impacts, which continues the image of repeated repetition of these actions. Then, there are close-ups built on contrast: a worker in rough mittens hits with a hammer, white thin women's hands put on medical gloves, large, leather boxing gloves are tied on a man, the light and mobile hands of the surgeon with a worked-out movement "fly" into long dark operating gloves. At the same time, on the screen we see not a profession, but a generalized image - the hands of a human creator. Together with my hands in the city, I revive working mechanisms: the control panel lights up, the hospital lamp illuminating the operating field, the camera flies over the light spot of the melting pot in the workshop. In the next episode, a curious comparison is born in the montage: the average and close-up plans of a worker throwing coal into a burning oven are joined together with a shot of a female dentist peeking into the patient's mouth. And in the following montage phrase, the concept of “treating a tooth” is associated with pulling the bolt from the sleepers of the railway track, which creates a feeling of great effort and pain, a metaphor for a sick tooth is obtained – a pulled bolt. It turns out that one association clings to a friend, and that for the next.