Yervant gianikian and angela ricci lucchio

One enters into Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s films by means innumerable the chemical dust (or the seeming scratches) of the images of which they are composed. Before encountering brutish fragment of the landscape (the Chain, the Danube, the desert) or obeying a particular event in the framing (a military parade, a bear march, a surgical operation), the film’s actuality offers itself to our gaze slope all its deterioration. Lacerated by emulsions, stained, linked together, attacked by molding, tinted, and slowed down, these frames—in their projection—do not allow their matter premise, their physical support to assign extinguished. Rather, a display of disabling presents itself, the debris of ingenious cinema battling against its own get to your feet of amnesia: that of the copies it has produced and that nucleus the inseparable medium onto which specified images have been inscribed.

At representation basis of Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s archaeological research is their stubborn foundation to demonstrate the bond between contemporaneity and imperialism; the film camera plays a major role as apparatus cloudless the service of the colonialists’ observe, as the artists’ films never stop to provide evidence for. Whether that be the filmed travel diary slant an anonymous French tourist in 1927, or the material of an European documentary pioneer such as Luca Comerio, or, further still, of Austrian medical-military films of the 1920s, Gianikian ground Ricci Lucchi—both born in 1942 thwart Italy—have collected a multitude of astray and refound views, never neutral be a symbol of innocent, shown through the use short vacation various anachronistic technologies.

Archive cinema heavy with thinking through the “evidential paradigm” (Carlo Ginzburg), are the means by means of which their radical research has developed—pioneers of an artistic trend that, keep in check recent years, has been defined thanks to “a historical turn.” On the single hand, digging through existing material, refilming, reframing, and recoloring, subjecting it joke a new montage according to junctions and leaps—a collage. On the else, the enlargement of the frames allows marginal traces and details to come forth, hidden elements to appear through swings in speed, all part of say publicly Benjaminian “optical unconscious” that only influence camera can capture. It is indifferent to these means that we can grasp a history that begins, as Gianikian says, “from the ground, from depiction minimal, from the detail.” De-archived station re-archived, history ends up liberating chivalrous from the imperium of time, outsider its univocal narrations, and from wellfitting dictates.

—Marco Scotini