The first lasting structures weren’t built for the living, but for the dead.
Megaliths, the ‘great stones’ erected during the Neolithic and Bronze Age, are the beginning of architecture, the first expressions of our domination of the planet and her resources; of our ability to alter and shape the earth. They signal the r/evolutionary moment some 10,000 to 5,000 years ago when our ancestors razed the forests to cultivate plants and breed the animals they’d tamed, spreading and multiplying in an ever expanding pattern of settlements and chiefdoms, boom and bust.
Through the agency of stone, the gods, and the cosmic dead, these first farmers affirmed their divine right to the spaces they cleared and claimed. They carved petroglyphs on living rock, constructed tombs for the ruling elite and raised monoliths and stone circles to mark social and religious boundaries that transformed the natural landscape into a cultural landscape; a ritual topography that linked soil and sky, past and present, with man at its center.
The great stones bear witness to a time when we first stood apart from the wilderness and looked back at it in awe; the moment of separation and the birth of the modern world: the biblical Fall. Like visual cues, the monoliths direct our gaze across time and space to ancient horizons that enclose us still. Facing them we confront ourselves and our origins in an agrarian death cult to which we are heir.
A journey into the sacred landscapes of prehistoric Armenia, “Embers of the Sun” evokes a primeval earth transfigured by monuments of mysterious design: rock art found in the desolate volcanic wastes of the Geghama and Syunik mountains, solitary monoliths and cyclopean tombs in rural fields, and the megalithic complex of Zorakarer; vestiges of a lost Bronze Age cosmology that haunt the modern mind.
The impressionistic aesthetic of analog video – the cinematic equivalent of watercolor or polaroid – conveys the emotional impact of the monoliths and the numinous beauty of the spaces they address. Equally integral is the soundtrack by the British group Urthona, taken from the album “Urthona plays Atlantis?”, a collaboration of the band with legendary musician, writer and prehistorian, Julian Cope. Neil Mortimer’s thundering guitar, Michael York’s ethereal duduk (a traditional Armenian wind instrument), and Cope’s ritualistic percussion conjure up a vanished realm that mirrors the film’s images in sound: the vastness and majesty of the mountains, the raw energy of the elements, the intimation of ancient powers, cosmic and chthonic.
At once a lyrical documentary and archeological science fiction, “Embers of the Sun” is an apocalyptic vision of the future in the past. In the prehistoric landscape it sees a post-historic age where civilization ends where it began: an event horizon through which we disappear – by ecological disaster, famine, plague, or genocide – leaving only the ruins of our dreams behind..
Director: Zareh Tjeknavorian
Writer: Zareh Tjeknavorian
Producer: Visa Koiso-Kanttila
Camera: Vahagn Ter Hagopian
Editing & Sound Design: Alina Tjeknavorian
Music: URTHONA
Runtime: 12 minutes 27 seconds
Country of Origin: Armenia
Country of Filming: Armenia
Language: English
Subtitles: English
Set amid the remote hills of Eastern Bosnia, THEN COMES THE EVENING provides a quiet meditation on the seemingly uncomplicated pastoral lives of two women. Through simple and precise composition with attention to light and texture, the mundane details of their lives are rendered with the tactile richness of an oil painting. Their every action and word is infused with ceremony, ritual, and intangible cultural heritage in this intimate yet epic examination of how nature and humanity interact.
Maja Novaković
