Notre caméra analytique

The monograph, and DVD, Notre caméra analytique analizes the work by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi through essays by the two authors themselves as well as by a series of critics and theorists who have followed their work closely for some time.

Yervant Gianikian, Angela Ricci Lucchi, Notre caméra analytique, libro+DVD, Post-éditions, 288 pp., 22 €

For many years now Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi have been producing quiet, powerful, necessary work. While they have always been known in the world of experimental cinema, over recent years their films and installations have increasingly gained visibility among a wider audience.

Bearing witness to the considerable recognition that they are now receiving is a recent series of exhibitions and reviews dedicated to them. Bearing witness to the considerable recognition that they are now receiving is a recent series of exhibitions and reviews dedicated to them. In the last month, three events have confirmed the indisputable value now associated with their work: Gianikian and Ricci-Lucchi have received the FIAF award – Fédération Internationale des Archives de Films – attributed in the past to personalities such as Scorsese, de Oliveira, Varda and Bergman; a monograph has now been dedicated to them – that includes a DVD, Notre caméra analytique – published by Post-Editions, it contains essays by the two authors themselves as well as by a series of critics and theorists who have followed their work closely for some time. Finally the Pompidou Centre, in conjunction with the Festival d’Automne, has presented their films in an extensive retrospective that also includes video-installations, photographs and drawings, as well as a specially-created video. In spite of the severity of the themes and the stark design of the display, the exhibition has met with extraordinary success, not only with critics but also the public. Proof of the fact that rigour does not necessarily constitute a contraindication in terms of attendance.

Since the 1970s, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi have together assembled a veritable archive of filmed images from various sources: professional and amateur, of a private nature or made during adventurous travels and in many cases scratched and damaged by time. They have salvaged them from stores where they risked remaining buried for ever, or rescued them from being thrown away. Such as when dozens of films by Luca Cornerio were discovered in Milan in 1982, inside a case already destined for landfill in a room that had been his laboratory; films that went on to become a key source of their work.

Undaunted by the endless amount of material available, for four decades Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi have devoted themselves to further examining these images that have resurfaced from the past. Rather than allowing them to pass by quickly, as would normally be the case, they stop them and observe them. Driving them though is not a passion for the images themselves; although they use mainly found footage, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi are not archivists, or restorers, but makers. Their intention is to retrace the history of the twentieth and twenty-first century, removing it from rhetoric and to restore to the images of the past, a sense of fragments of living history, at the same time revealing the ambiguities and the ideological charge; identifying facts and gestures in which can be found the roots of the history that is yet to come. A traumatic history, made of discrimination, of oppression and violence that, permeating everything, culminates in colonial dynamics, totalitarianism and great wars. The two filmmakers recount this history through attitudes and consequences more than in decisive moments of action.

What emerges is the attitude of one who points, hunts, traps, imposes; seeing in the other not an interlocutor but an object destitute of every desire. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi take charge of this history – that leads to the present – because they are convinced that the past always resonates in the present. There is no nostalgia, instead the desire to return and capture what the images reveal if examined close up; a meaning that has remained underlying, deliberately omitted, the understanding of which can help to stem the violence and degradation of today.

To be able to analyse closely the original material, the two artists have invented a manual device, the analytic camera, that enables them to stop the images, isolate them and observe them frame by frame, passing them under the lens. Viewing, disassembling, analysing, cropping, reframing and then colouring, altering the pace and developing the sequence of frames are some of the many steps in the meticulous process that gives rise to their films. The results are original edits from which the sense of what we usually look at distractedly, emerges renewed. Their work follows a series of cycles. From Polo all’Equatore, 1986, Uomini anni vita, 1990, Animali criminali, 1994, Prigionieri della Guerra, 1995, Su tutte le vette è pace, 1998 Inventario balcanico, 2000, Frammenti elettrici 2002 and 2009, Carrousel de Jeux, 1997-2006, Oh, Uomo, 2004, Pays Barbare, 2013 are some of the stages in a journey of strenuous rigour that so far includes around fifty works.

There is no lack of autobiographical elements, albeit filtered and reinterpreted. In this sense the memory of the Armenian Genocide is fundamental and in some works, such as Ritorno a Khodorciur, dedicated to Giankian’s father, it becomes explicit. Among the recurring themes that are still being developed is also the suffering of the Russian avant-garde in the Soviet era.

Although they live in Milan, Italy, apart from a fine exhibition dedicated to them at the Hangar Bicocca, their work has been shown mainly in the experimental cinema circuit. They are given great recognition however in the United States and several European countries, first and foremost France. The latter in particular has supported the productions for some time; for example Pays Barbare, a film dedicated to Fascism, that begins with images of the crowd gathered in Piazzale Loreto on 29 April 1945. The events from the last month affirm this attention.

Notre caméra analytique

The monograph, and DVD, Notre caméra analytique analizes the work by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi through essays by the two authors themselves as well as by a series of critics and theorists who have followed their work closely for some time.

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