"Kyanq" or "Life" is a 6.5-minute live action film by Armenian director Artavazd Peleshian and this one is from 1993, so one of his more recent works, even if it is already 25 years old. He frequently uses one-word title and this one here describes the film pretty nicely. Early on we see labor pains and later on we see a mother with her child. It was a good watch. I felt it was very aesthetic and what we hear goes nicely with what we see, a beautiful piece of music. Of course, the music genre is not for everybody, but people who like tenors and their voices will probably give this one a thumbs-up too, just like I did. Enjoyable watch and so far my favorite from Peleshian.
4 Reviews
Cutting Eye: the films of Artavazd Peleshian
chaos-rampant2 February 2012
This is a review of a collection of Artavazd Peleshian's works: Earth of People (1966), Beginning (1967), We (1969), Inhabitants (1970), Our Century (1983), Life (1993).
I was directed to this man, who Sergei Parajanov called 'one of the few authentic geniuses of cinema', by a friend who knows my tastes and on the basis of my strong affinity for Soviet montage. Now all those people - Eisenstein, Kuleshov, Vertov, etc - by the time sound rolled in were scattered to the four winds by Stalin and the censors. At least this revolution was prematurely brought to a halt, in my estimation the most defining and important in the first half of cinema and possibly to this day. The most experimental work in this field was never really allowed to blossom. What we got in these 10 years was enough to change the way we see.
Now my notion of Soviet montage is simple: a world that is animated in full rigor and solely by the impulse to see. Story in this mode is not our reason to see but rather the tumultuous after-effect of being engaged to do so. It emerges but only as we edit and synthesize continuously shifting glimpses into one.
Enter this guy, who came to the scene a few decades later and was allowed to work unobstructed and in complete anonymity. No doubt he has intimately studied all these past masters but above all feels a kinship to Dziga Vertov. Outwards his movies are composed symphonically, as paeans, with every intersecting set of images - about work, war, nature, or mundane life - annotating the impulse to reveal overarching destinies.
Now you may be told that Beginning celebrates the Revolution or We the fate and place of the Armenian people, but that goes against the grain and soul of the work. Leave that for commentarians. No, this is specifically designed to be open enough to complete you and some part you lacked the images for. You will know this as about your strife, perhaps internal. Your fate and place in the world at large.
This is important to note: every pull of the cinematic eye in any direction, say suddenly a set of images about conflict or animals being tugged away, is a pull into blank narrative space. You fill from experience. The threads disperse again and intersect.
Now all of these are worth at least one watch for just the consummate craft on display. For just the eloquence of images and the talent to edit, equalled only by a few. I have been playing and re-playing these on and off for about a week now. But if there's one that you absolutely have to watch before you die, that is Our Century. It is a 2001 but with none of Kubrick's vaingloriously Roman touch. Scratch that, its film cousin is Solyaris: a vast space odyssey mapping inwards, conflating every tragic, manic, ludicrous, funny, anxious, insane, desperate, poetic contraption of humankind to grow wings and fly into a swirling evocation of the soul's primal desire to soar.
This is one to keep and this man worth getting to know.
I was directed to this man, who Sergei Parajanov called 'one of the few authentic geniuses of cinema', by a friend who knows my tastes and on the basis of my strong affinity for Soviet montage. Now all those people - Eisenstein, Kuleshov, Vertov, etc - by the time sound rolled in were scattered to the four winds by Stalin and the censors. At least this revolution was prematurely brought to a halt, in my estimation the most defining and important in the first half of cinema and possibly to this day. The most experimental work in this field was never really allowed to blossom. What we got in these 10 years was enough to change the way we see.
Now my notion of Soviet montage is simple: a world that is animated in full rigor and solely by the impulse to see. Story in this mode is not our reason to see but rather the tumultuous after-effect of being engaged to do so. It emerges but only as we edit and synthesize continuously shifting glimpses into one.
Enter this guy, who came to the scene a few decades later and was allowed to work unobstructed and in complete anonymity. No doubt he has intimately studied all these past masters but above all feels a kinship to Dziga Vertov. Outwards his movies are composed symphonically, as paeans, with every intersecting set of images - about work, war, nature, or mundane life - annotating the impulse to reveal overarching destinies.
Now you may be told that Beginning celebrates the Revolution or We the fate and place of the Armenian people, but that goes against the grain and soul of the work. Leave that for commentarians. No, this is specifically designed to be open enough to complete you and some part you lacked the images for. You will know this as about your strife, perhaps internal. Your fate and place in the world at large.
This is important to note: every pull of the cinematic eye in any direction, say suddenly a set of images about conflict or animals being tugged away, is a pull into blank narrative space. You fill from experience. The threads disperse again and intersect.
Now all of these are worth at least one watch for just the consummate craft on display. For just the eloquence of images and the talent to edit, equalled only by a few. I have been playing and re-playing these on and off for about a week now. But if there's one that you absolutely have to watch before you die, that is Our Century. It is a 2001 but with none of Kubrick's vaingloriously Roman touch. Scratch that, its film cousin is Solyaris: a vast space odyssey mapping inwards, conflating every tragic, manic, ludicrous, funny, anxious, insane, desperate, poetic contraption of humankind to grow wings and fly into a swirling evocation of the soul's primal desire to soar.
This is one to keep and this man worth getting to know.
Masterpiece: Life, Birth, (Death)
martinflashback26 November 2022
Warning: Spoilers
Kyanq ("Life"), made in 1993 opens with a beautiful woman in close-up profile, apparently in the throes of ecstasy. Soon, an arm in scrubs enters the frame and we see that she is actually in a medical theater (the hand is a doctor or relative's; blurred vertical planes are parts of the metal delivery bed; a glowing orb is hospital lighting). She is in labor, which is a mundane and sentimental subject for a film. The use of the close-up in film, crowding the screen with sweat and 'emotion', is an easy manipulation of the viewer's emotions. It also bares the chill of forensic pathology, which seizes the living as if the body were a puzzle useful only for illustrating hazard or solving its own crime. The soundtrack is music by Verdi, which stops and starts fitfully until it is finally freed from the film's editing, adding a skipping unreality to the formal 'realism' of Life. The only other sound is a heartbeat amplified over the beginning (and note, not the electronic blip of a monitor), which remains slightly audible under the requiem mass.
Though the film follows the simple timeline of a woman giving birth, the editing follows the inward time of a mother. The use of extreme close-up is now clear: in the epochal scheme of a general, universal time, the close-up is used to make myths into statues or it captures momentary passions as if these passions or myths were the only ones in the world. But through a subtle use of jump-cuts, the viewer starts to feel an odd remove from the girl's lovely features.
Do not children kill their mothers in childbirth, with the violence of birth, with the all the terrible duties that child-rearing demands? It is one of the last taboos: the link between orgasm and birth is also the possibility of dual death, and the ruthless affirmation of Life over death which dictates that the life of the child is a supreme right against its mother. Life at all costs-the greatest of tyrannies, a monstrous physical drive which unleashes a tsunami of living over the earth: the atrocious flood of total creation. Life equals what is most terrifying within it-of it. Of life-the blank face of a genetic machine wanting itself and nothing else, consuming itself via the temptation-engines of a chattering god of sheer velocity. It is not the phantom of Death that haunts the living, but the phantom of Life. And the individual life strives to fool this specter, to shock it in its own wild onrush by producing a single life in the monolithic barrage of limitless coming-to-be. Bearing witness against this crude biological nihilism which William Blake identified as The Beast, the machine mills of the slavers' empire, one single life then occurs as many-each without repeat, yet each one the selfsame in the body of the swarm.
Against this omnivorous shadow-a cellular destiny which rises out of the solitary reflections given us by our vague notions of science, by a primary education that teaches biology as fate and terror only-Peleshian projects a woman in contortions, giving birth down by the walls of the hegemon. Things get smaller in the film. Life shrinks down to a mouth, a hand, a slight bewitching smile, ringlets of hair and beads of sweat. And here we realize that exaltation-accompanied by an Italian death mass and the heart's regular drum-is always done alone, and that its joys must be betrayed by the world from which each ecstasy severs it time and again.
She raises a finger to the corner of her mouth with its intricate sloping shadow, touching the ghost of a smile. The woman is lost in some reverie and giving birth would seem a strange time for letting the mind wander. But from the jump cuts, we know that Peleshian has edited this sequence internally, so it is far from certain when moments like this actually occurred (I counted 15 cuts in a sequence which accounts for about 5 minutes of the film's 7-minute running time). At the end, the child is tossed to her mother like a bag of apples, after being bathed in torrents of spurting water (there is no afterbirth or blood, another conscious omission). The young woman and her child then stare at the camera in freeze-frame. I can think of a thousand reasons why you shouldn't have, but you did, despite all-and I now understand why in the flood of existence you added one more as if you were adding nothing at all. This is Peleshian's only film in color, which ads credence to the rumor it was to have been his last (Happily, it was not). Color is the first sight of a guileless world seen by guileless eyes, eyes soon to fall upon the architecture of black and white and the gridlines of working rooms.
"Fac eas, Domine, de morte transire ad vitam..." Verdi's Requiem Mass, 1874: deliverance (and delivery, "Libera animas omnium...") and liberation (from life, from hell, the lion's jaws), faithful souls, holy light, deepest pits. "Grant O Lord that they might pass from life death..."
Thus is the connection between life and the freeing from life, death and multiple birth sealed (Verdi's Offertorio is cut and partially repeated on the soundtrack). Now the hand at her mouth, in her hair, rack of contractions. Take and in taking, receive, "Tu suscipe pro animabus illis, quarum hodie memoriam facimus." The others-all souls-hostias, "we offer..."
Though the film follows the simple timeline of a woman giving birth, the editing follows the inward time of a mother. The use of extreme close-up is now clear: in the epochal scheme of a general, universal time, the close-up is used to make myths into statues or it captures momentary passions as if these passions or myths were the only ones in the world. But through a subtle use of jump-cuts, the viewer starts to feel an odd remove from the girl's lovely features.
Do not children kill their mothers in childbirth, with the violence of birth, with the all the terrible duties that child-rearing demands? It is one of the last taboos: the link between orgasm and birth is also the possibility of dual death, and the ruthless affirmation of Life over death which dictates that the life of the child is a supreme right against its mother. Life at all costs-the greatest of tyrannies, a monstrous physical drive which unleashes a tsunami of living over the earth: the atrocious flood of total creation. Life equals what is most terrifying within it-of it. Of life-the blank face of a genetic machine wanting itself and nothing else, consuming itself via the temptation-engines of a chattering god of sheer velocity. It is not the phantom of Death that haunts the living, but the phantom of Life. And the individual life strives to fool this specter, to shock it in its own wild onrush by producing a single life in the monolithic barrage of limitless coming-to-be. Bearing witness against this crude biological nihilism which William Blake identified as The Beast, the machine mills of the slavers' empire, one single life then occurs as many-each without repeat, yet each one the selfsame in the body of the swarm.
Against this omnivorous shadow-a cellular destiny which rises out of the solitary reflections given us by our vague notions of science, by a primary education that teaches biology as fate and terror only-Peleshian projects a woman in contortions, giving birth down by the walls of the hegemon. Things get smaller in the film. Life shrinks down to a mouth, a hand, a slight bewitching smile, ringlets of hair and beads of sweat. And here we realize that exaltation-accompanied by an Italian death mass and the heart's regular drum-is always done alone, and that its joys must be betrayed by the world from which each ecstasy severs it time and again.
She raises a finger to the corner of her mouth with its intricate sloping shadow, touching the ghost of a smile. The woman is lost in some reverie and giving birth would seem a strange time for letting the mind wander. But from the jump cuts, we know that Peleshian has edited this sequence internally, so it is far from certain when moments like this actually occurred (I counted 15 cuts in a sequence which accounts for about 5 minutes of the film's 7-minute running time). At the end, the child is tossed to her mother like a bag of apples, after being bathed in torrents of spurting water (there is no afterbirth or blood, another conscious omission). The young woman and her child then stare at the camera in freeze-frame. I can think of a thousand reasons why you shouldn't have, but you did, despite all-and I now understand why in the flood of existence you added one more as if you were adding nothing at all. This is Peleshian's only film in color, which ads credence to the rumor it was to have been his last (Happily, it was not). Color is the first sight of a guileless world seen by guileless eyes, eyes soon to fall upon the architecture of black and white and the gridlines of working rooms.
"Fac eas, Domine, de morte transire ad vitam..." Verdi's Requiem Mass, 1874: deliverance (and delivery, "Libera animas omnium...") and liberation (from life, from hell, the lion's jaws), faithful souls, holy light, deepest pits. "Grant O Lord that they might pass from life death..."
Thus is the connection between life and the freeing from life, death and multiple birth sealed (Verdi's Offertorio is cut and partially repeated on the soundtrack). Now the hand at her mouth, in her hair, rack of contractions. Take and in taking, receive, "Tu suscipe pro animabus illis, quarum hodie memoriam facimus." The others-all souls-hostias, "we offer..."
stupid short movie
mrdonleone13 December 2009
something called 'life' could be pretty boring, and the images we get to see, actually are very boring. the thing we all suspect this film will be about, is a 'life' shown in pictures or in this case, in a short film. the question remains: how can a life be nice to see? we must confess: we hate life, even if we are optimists, we never are happy with the way things are in our life. an experimental picture like this, could be really boring. I already said it: this picture is boring, so we have no great expectations anymore. when you're watching some BEEP that's called 'Life', you should know before you watch, it's going to be a hell of a time to sit it out. so what is this life about? well, nothing but the birth of a baby. I asked myself if this is staged or not, because it was obvious the actress hired to play the part of the mother was laughing instead of crying her lungs out to give birth to her baby. and wow! the baby is suddenly there, like a magic trick that worked, like an illusion, and the baby is very hairy too! ha ha, it made me laugh, what a stupid movie was this?
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