Interval 4. Yervant Gianikian y Angela Ricci-Lucchi

Pays barbare

7, 8 and 14 May, 2014 - 7:00 p.m.
Place
Edificio Sabatini, Auditorio

Despite being responsible for an extensive filmography that began in the mid 1980s and gained broad recognition and international acclaim, this programme presents one of the few screenings of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi’s film. The double session of Pays Barbare, included within the Intervalos series, is also complemented by a conversation with both film-makers as they cite the main themes that have comprised one of the most committed, rigorous and complex poetics in the recent image in movement.

The work of Gianikian-Ricci Lucchi reviews, analyses and shows tragic episodes – erased in the present – that have determined the history and ideologies of the 20th century; for instance, reordering the world in the colonial documentary (Dal polo all’equator, 1986), or the mutilation of bodies in diaspora in the First World War (Oh! Uomo, 2004), yet always through a meticulous exploration of recovered film archives. These film-makers paralyse the hastened bombardment of images, keeping the historical document in their “analytical camera” – in the words of Yervant Gianikian – a deceleration and manipulation device that, ultimately, searches for the viewer’s ethical glance, which grows inside a spectral and anachronistic image, found between memory and the event, that reoccurs inside the film theatre.

Thus, Pays Barbare narrates from fragments, ruins from the past forgotten in the present – Italy’s brutal invasion of Ethiopia under Mussolini’s dictatorial government. Narrated in chapters, the film uses amateur ethnographic images, recovered from private and anonymous archives, that veer towards another rhythm and chromatic tone. Pays Barbare reflects upon the same cinematic material, its relationship with history and memory, with the body and vision, but also with cinema and destruction. Equally, it shows the construction of the new man of totalitarianism massacring the erotised primitive ‘other’, looking towards the annihilation of the historical document itself, the celluloid both film-makers work on obsessively. Gianikian-Ricci’s latent images not only allude to the large shadow hanging over the 1930s today, but also to the colonial inheritance of the present. In their own words: The barbarian country in question did not remain deeply confined to history, but rather it continues to loom ominously on the current European landscape, going by the names of Ceuta, Melilla and Lampedusa.

Programme

Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi. Pays Barbare
Film, 2013. Screening format: HD. Original Version, Subtitled, 63’. Films d’Ici and Cinenómada.
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
7 May, 2014
Second screening: 14 May, 7 p.m.

Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi. In conversation
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
8 May, 7 p.m.