Transcendental Style in the Cinema of Arby Ovanessian: An Analysis of “La Source” (Cheshmeh, 1971)

Though an immensely popular and influential artist in his own country in the years before the Iranian Revolution, the films of Arby Ovanessian have not yet achieved anything like a sizable following despite favorable critical attention. If only because his work represents a serious challenge to our sense of the significant, of the meaningful and the spiritual, Ovanessian would be worth our scrutiny. But there is another reason we must study him: his best film, La Source, allows us to cultivate a mode of “transcendental” we have largely forgotten or ignored. Ovanessian, reminds us, teaches us, that the business of art is but to be expressive of the Transcendent. It may well be accurate to say that one purpose of the transcendental style in the cinema of Ovanessian is to encompass many meanings in order to get at something greater than those meanings. If we know a transcendental style by its generation of an idea of spiritual unity we are progressively attached to that idea through the vision of Ovanessian’s film. Implicit in Ovanessian’s art, in the transcendental project, is the requirement of a vision which is always renewing the event of spiritual unity, moving our secular world on to the next stage of that quest which is always to be performed.