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The Images Festival of Independent Film and Video just completed its 13th year, a departure from previous years in many ways. The venue changed (this year the festival was held entirely at Innis College, where the University of Toronto's Film Studies Department is housed); there was a complete change of staff, with this year's festival headed up by Executive Director Kelly Langgard, formerly of the Herland festival in Calgary, and Artistic Director Mike Hoolboom, one of Canada's most prolific and accomplished experimental filmmakers; and the programming tended to be more coherent, more oriented towards experimental work, and to include a fair bit of material that was not brand new.
It was a real treat, for example, to be able to see the films of Armenian artist Artavazd Pelechian, who has been working since the late sixties in Russia, but whose work only became known in the West over the past decade or so. Many of Pelechian's films have never been seen in Toronto, and I had previously only come across most of them in terrible video copies, so what a pleasure to see IN THE BEGINNING (1967), THE INHABITANTS (1970), and THE SEASONS (1972) projected in glorious black-and-white 35mm film! IN THE BEGINNING uses an aggressive Soviet-style montage in an ironic, satiric mode: found footage of crowds rushing forward in riot or revolution is cut together with images of political leaders - Stalin, Hitler - who appear to be directing the movements of these senseless, careening masses who never quite meet. In THE INHABITANTS, human crowds are replaced by herds of stampeding animals (elephants, rhinos, deer), and flocks of birds. The film is, if anything, even more perfectly cut than IN THE BEGINNING, and the result is unsettling and enigmatic. Pelechian's greatest work is THE SEASONS, which is constructed using "original" rather than "found" footage: documentary material of life in a remote Armenian mountain community. The film is cut so that its final last few shots seem to re-order the entire work in retrospect, shifting the level of expression to the mythic and the metaphysical...