Artavazd Peleshian

Creator of the "distange montage," Artavazd Peleshian, one of the key Soviet documentarians, removed the boundaries of feature and documentary films, editing both sequences as a real poetical unity. His "distange montage" was a new step in the development of film editing. Even his student works (The Earth of the People 1966 and the Beginning 1967) shot at VGIK, the oldest film school in Moscow, Russia, were awarded numerous prizes and he gained recognition among filmmakers. In 1975, he petitioned the Soviet authorities to allow the blackslisted cinematographer Mikhail Vartanov to film his ambitious next project and together they created the masterpiece Four Seasons (1975). It was Pelechian's first film without any archive footage thanks to Vartanov's exquisite black and white cinematography. Alongside his very successful solo career, Peleshian was invited to direct archive footage by such masters as Lev Kulidzhanov for Zvyozdnaya minuta (1973) and Andrey Konchalovskiy for Siberiade (19