Head 1975, 16mm, 12 minutes
Yawning 1975, 16mm, 2:20 minutes
Itch 1975, 16mm, 4:30 minutes
Untitled 1976, 16mm, 4:25 minutes
Thinker 1975-6, 16mm, 6:40 minutes
Staggeringly simple films: a man itching his back, a man thinking, a man yawning, but like the works of Samuel Beckett, these minute gestures stand in as grand statements of the human condition, akin to the films of Bas Jan Ader and Marcel Broodthaers. Rarely seen, these are gems of Armenian avant-garde art and are gestures of deviance; political commentaries that positively reverse the image of isolation current among cultural pessimists, as a seizure of space in a world of standardization, of the mass society. Hamlet Hovsepian’s film is not only the result of a small revolt against the deadly passivity of this society. The reduction it carries out, its silence, gives a universal turn to the meaning of emptiness, to the abstract space, and the frequently extended time.
View Hamlet Hovsepian’s films on UbuWeb