One of the giants of international documentary movies, Artavazd Peleshyan, held a kind of master class in Yerevan Theater and Movie Institute, which was preceded by displaying his movies. Moreover, there was not an inch of room in the hall and youths watched Peleshyan’s indigestible masterpieces literally standing on their feet.
Although it was said before the meeting that questions would not be asked, but Peleshyan answered them. And said half in jest, half in earnest, “My mentor would always tell me, ‘You only shoot, don’t speak.’”
For example, one of the fans of his art asked what interested the director in the modern man. The maestro who has expressive movies, but is quiescent in verbal expression, “I am interested in both today’s and tomorrow’s life and of the years to come… what else should interest me?” Someone else, reminding the maestro’s words that his movies would live long, because they were full of mistakes, asked that he wanted to understand what mistakes he was talking about. Peleshyan got surprised that there was nothing else to understand, since everything had been said already.
He advised young documentary moviemakers present in the hall, “Don’t be afraid of anything and put everything into the first movie, it will determine your future.”
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As for movies, the famous director doesn’t accept the stereotype that movies were a synthetic art, “Movies are an independent art, movies don’t drink the water of either literature or music or painting, movies drink water absolutely separate from the water drunk by literature, painting and music.”
They also talked about his Homo Sapiens, the script of which has been ready for a few decades already, but it hasn’t become a movie due to the lack of finances. The maestro said that the Moscow State Movie Committee had accepted that script as a government order in 1989, but the USSR collapsed and the movie had not been shot. In response to an observation of one of the people who were present that according to the mass media, the Armenian National Movie Center was ready to give money, but Peleshyan’s willingness to shoot the movie lacked, the maestro said, “Why don’t they tell me then…?” Armen Mazmanyan, the rector of the Theatrical Institute, added, “I am convinced that Gevorg (Gevorg Gevorgyan, the movie center director, G.H.) is ready to give money, but he probably doesn’t know that it exceeds the annual budget of the Ministry of Culture. The only thing we can do is to establish a fund Homo Sapiens and nationally collect money for that movie.”
Peleshyan said in jest that he watched his movies from time to time, “I have seen Homo Sapiens too, I want you to watch it too. If I manage to shoot that movie, the other movies will seem small sketches compared to Homo Sapiens.”
The maestro also said that he didn’t see interesting tendencies in the modern Armenian movies, those were present in the Russian, American and Chinese movies and stated, talking about human vices, that he couldn’t bear cunningness.
Gohar HAKOBYAN
