Our Century

The documentary is built out of archive footage. The first attempts at flight, machines falling, rocket launches, weightlessness training, faces at the moment of lift-off. There is no speech and no narrator. Images repeat, speed up, overlap, and the music holds them together. The subject is the stubborn war humanity has waged against gravity. Artavazd Peleshyan's Armenian documentary is among the best known examples of the method he called distance montage. Peleshyan arranges images not to tell an event but to build a rhythm; the film works like a piece of music. The telling presents the space race neither as triumph nor as catastrophe. The result is fifty minutes of cinematic poetry.