Nachalo – Beginning

Inspiration for Tigran Khachatryan’s work was provided by the motion picture The Beginning (1967) by the Armenian film director Artavazd Peleshyan. Peleshyan’s production was made on the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution and Khachatryan’s on the 90th one; both have the revolution – the passage from an ancien régime to a new order – as their central theme. Many Soviet filmmakers were concerned with the topic of the Bolshevik revolt; suffice it to mention Dziga Vertov or Sergei Eisenstein. All of them faced the issue of combining the revolutionary contents of their productions with avant-garde explorations in the area of cinematography.
 
Peleshyan’s oeuvre evolved on the ground of similar considerations. He described The Beginning as “dramaturgy based on the movement of people’s masses and devoted to great revolutionary processes which lie at the foundations of the social transformation of the world”. Peleshyan’s film was assembled from archival materials, including earlier Soviet films; the director’s broad conception of the revolution included, among others, the death of Lenin, the Second World War, the detonations of the nuclear bombs or the Black American liberation movement. Peleshyan perceived the revolt as an „explosion of energy” that must be rendered in a motion picture. The composition of The Beginning, which effectuates the theory of counterpoint montage formulated by Peleshyan, is an congregation of choreographic arrangements in which the counterpoints of image and sound, motion and stillness keep the film at the boiling point.
 
Khachatryan inserted into Peleshyan’s film fragments of recordings taken by his own contemporaries: anarchists and skaters. Images of riots, pressing throngs and aggressive fighters are interspersed with scenes of teenage clownery and dangerous feats of acrobatics. Khachatryan synchronized the soundtrack of The Beginning with the moments of bizarre accidents sustained by the youngsters. To the rhythm of shots and explosions, the young people fall off roofs and bridges or roll down the stairs. On the basis of Peleshyan’s concept of not integrating pictures during montage, but splitting them by introducing new episodes, Khachatryan enquires about the continuity of revolution, the revolution’s fall, and the nature of rebellion in the post-Soviet reality. His contemporary rebels do not rise against the oppressors, but throw themselves into shrubs or sway with their trousers down. In Peleshyan’s motion picture, the revolution has the face of a bold-eyed girl; in Khatcharyan’s video, that of a naked, masturbating man.