By Maria Dianela Torres Valencia

How can we link the landscape and the music of cinema? With this in mind, this essay shows the formal relationship between the cinematographic montage of landscape and music based on a film by Artavazd Peleshian. If the landscape and the human being are a cyclical totality, the work in the field has a dialectical relationship which is both sensory and rhythmic with nature. Thus, geography and climate are presented as a being-environment in an audiovisual sense.

The cinema allows to record, manipulate and express nature which can be understood as a fragment of the world. With this filmic reflection and with the reappropriation of sequences from the film Seasons of the year (Artavazd Peleshian, 1972), a filmic dialogue related to the theory of distance montage and personal archive is proposed. If with the montage a new relation of images and sounds is possible, the meaning is presented as a self-reflective exercise.

Music in relation to the representation of nature is a cinematographic impression of reality. The human being-nature idea goes together with music in a spherical and bilateral correspondence. Peleshian’s images seem to always be in motion, with visual and musical rhythm, either because the camera moves or the elements in the frame do it (animals, people, water, vehicles, etc.).

This unacted cinema seeks to reflect reality in a space-time determined by a choreographic camera that shows an audiovisual perception of the world. The montage is the center of the staging. The light dazzles the planes in the dark, the images reach a certain whiteness causing sequential contrasts.

The camera navigates experientially, all the time in circulation: it breathes and moves with what it captures. Music transforms the different soundscapes. The visual rhythm is related to the weather, like a symphony that has visual harmony: ambient sound with temperature. The reality perceived from Peleshian’s cinema is linked to its notion of montage at a distance, where there is no clash of opposing shots; but relationships between the planes bilaterally, from the general to the particular and vice versa.