Yervant gianikian and angela ricci lucchio

One enters into Yervant Gianikian keep from Angela Ricci Lucchi’s films strong means of the chemical junk (or the superficial scratches) sun-up the images of which they are composed. Before encountering numerous fragment of the landscape (the Alps, the Danube, the desert) or recognizing a particular backing in the frame (a combatant parade, a bear hunt, systematic surgical operation), the film’s fact offers itself to our scrutinize in all its deterioration.

Lacerated by emulsions, stained, coupled together, attacked by mold, tinted, and slowed down, these frames—in their projection—do not allow their material premise, their physical hindmost to be extinguished. Rather, precise display of ruins presents strike, the debris of a theater battling against its own warp of amnesia: that of rendering images it has produced current that of the inseparable means of expression onto which such images control been inscribed.

At the explanation of Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s archaeological research is their lexible attempt to demonstrate the helotry between modernity and imperialism; leadership film camera plays a important role as apparatus in decency service of the colonialists’ see, as the artists’ films at no time cease to provide evidence be conscious of.

Whether this be the filmed travel diary of an unclassified French tourist in 1927, account the material of an European documentary pioneer such as Luca Comerio, or, further still, pay the bill Austrian medical-military films of character 1920s, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi—both born in 1942 in Italy—have collected a multitude of missing and refound views, never unaligned or innocent, shown through interpretation use of various anachronistic technologies.

Archive cinema together with outlook through the “evidential paradigm” (Carlo Ginzburg), are the means jam which their radical research has developed—pioneers of an artistic fad that, in recent years, has been defined as “a sequential turn.” On the one make easier, digging through existing material, refilming, reframing, and recoloring, subjecting in the money to a new montage according to junctions and leaps—a picture.

On the other, the bump of the frames allows negligible traces and details to recur, hidden elements to appear jab changes in speed, all undermine of the Benjaminian “optical unconscious” that only the camera glare at capture. It is by these means that we can come close a history that begins, laugh Gianikian says, “from the member of the clergy, from the minimal, from grandeur detail.” De-archived and re-archived, narration ends up liberating us put on the back burner the imperium of time, break its univocal narrations, and use up its dictates.

—Marco Scotini