Artavazd Pelešjan
L'inizio

This is an Armenian master of few words and many actions, revered and rightly praised by certain scholarly critics. The work under review is a short film made at the beginning of his career, a diploma project at the Russian film school and a worthy counterpart to certain Soviet montage cinema where the images, always in frenetic movement, are accompanied by equally obsessive and obsessed music, in this specific case, that of George Sviridov, Time, forward!, also the soundtrack of the eponymous 1965 film.

In just under ten minutes of images and music, a constant feature of his production, about fifty years of recent human history are retraced here, with particular attention to the Soviet revolution from which everything started, leading to an uncertain destination, so much so that the short film might as well have been renamed From Beginning to End or vice versa, complete with napalm and nuclear apocalypse and with an ending that is far from enigmatic, a patched-on addition from the subsequent We of 1969, in which a child stares fixedly at us, judging us and ultimately condemning us for all that has been committed by us, my strictly personal interpretation. Watch it.