In being a brilliant master of montage as well as a widely respected theorist, Artavazd Peleshian, an Armenian working in Moscow, is a true descendent of Eisenstein and Vertov. In today's terms, he is something of an Armenian Bruce Conner, using the collision of images to create a whole, in nonverbal cinematic poems. The Four Seasons is a breathtaking dramatization of the hardships and the vigor of rural life, set to the music of Vivaldi. Scenes from a wedding ceremony are crosscut with the rigors of shepherding through the months (Peter Scarlet compares Peleshian to Werner Herzog in his "canny instinct for the transcendental implications of capturing amazing human feats in slow motion"), and we are left with the very strong sense that everything, even marriage, has its season. In In the Beginning, the movements of the crowd (another kind of herd) are depicted in entirely appropriated footage, again with music being the only commentary.