b. 1980 Yerevan, Armenia

Tigran Khachatryan’s film Nachalo is a conflation of the aesthetics of Russian avant-guarde filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov with modern day skateboarding videos. Intercutting found footage from classic Russian films with video of aimless packs of teenagers clowning around and attempting various perilous stunts, an affinity appears between the two genres that was not readily apparent before they were forced together: both rely heavily on montage to heighten their emotional pitch, and both are, at least ostensibly, “revolutionary.” However, this intermixing of genres and collision of time periods is also telling in its contrasts. There has, it seems, been a drastic change in the nature of transgressive activity in the post-Soviet era: rather than rallying against their oppressors as the mutineers of Battleship Potemkin did, Khachatryan’s contemporary rebels throw themselves into bushes, tumble down stairs with their pants down, and break their bones against hard concrete.