Silenzio di Pelešjan, Il

Until 1983 when French critic Serge Daney introduced his work to the Western world, remarkable Armenian auteur Artavadz Pelešjan was virtually unknown to international film fans. A well-deserved tribute to the original Armenian filmmaker, however, had to wait for the attention of Italian documentarist Pietro Marcello. Using extensive archive material, as well as clips from Pelešjan’s movies and from the ideologically kindred works of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, the Italian moviemaker constructs an atmospheric mosaic that looks into Pelešjan’s inventive approach to the use of film language. Marcello’s imaginatively filmed and experimentally poetic black-and-white shots of Moscow, where Pelešjan sought to make a name for himself among Russia’s avant-garde, wonderfully complement the essence of this brilliant, yet nearly forgotten, filmmaker’s work. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)