The Stations of the Year, by Armenian Artavazd: a poetic approach to a documental regime of sensitivity

Abstract

The research field of documentary cinema is very rich when it comes to scientific approaches to an object that is very tough to define. That is so for documentary film usually tries to apprehend reality such as it is, without reenacting or such, proposing an indexical parameter of filmmaking as an ethical, formal and stylerelated commitment. Documentary cinema is, eminently, about an argument built upon our material reality. Being so, Armenian Artavazd Peleshian’s documentary The Stations of the Year (Vremena Goda, 1975) has been chosen to be analyzed because it presents singularities which make it a very special and meaningful piece of work, such as its resemblance to a document of a way of experiencing a reality through a particular sensibility instead of being a mere document of social facts. To analyze it, it has been used a methodology which takes a careful look on the inner mechanics of the audiovisual work along with a contextual analysis of the production process, which together must provide scientific rigor. The following paper aims to better understand how a film, which aspired aesthetically to register the way of feeling of a group of people, works.