The Analytical Camera: Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, Radu Jude

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, December 3rd at 7pm for The Analytical Camera, a program featuring two films by duo Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchialongside a film by Radu Jude, guest-curated by George MacBeth.

The so-called “analytical camera” of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi describes both a technical procedure of found-footage filmmaking and a form of militant investigation—an approach to a history of violence, and to its imaging. Since beginning to work together in the mid-1970s, they developed a painstaking process of rephotographing, tinting, toning, slowing down, and essentially recomposing nitrate “amateur” footage largely from the interwar period. Their breakout film From the Pole to the Equator (1986), which montages footage of a roaming frontier of expeditionary colonial violence recorded by the since-forgotten founder of Italian documentary, took them five years to make and involved rephotographing 500,000 single frames. Through this supple and haunting process of intervening to “re-signify” images on the brink of total disintegration, their largely silent films likewise “try to stop the forgetting” (Gianikian) of the twentieth-century’s violence, its victims, its perpetrators, and its many silent accomplices.

An affront against both chemical and cultural amnesia, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s analytical camera urges a non-didactic reflection on the true face of violence both then and now—often impassive, smartly attired, or else lighting, grinning, and mugging for the camera. These enormously influential and much-imitated films confirm the truth of two seemingly opposed twentieth-century apophthegms on history: L.P. Hartley’s observation, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there”; and Faulkner’s claim, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

This program combines two films by Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi, with a more recent work from the Romanian experimental filmmaker Radu Jude, which undertakes an analytical investigation into how cinema conceals as much as it reveals.

Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi​, Animali Criminali (1994, 7 minutes)
In a series of tableaux vivants, drawn from old film footage, animals are placed one in front of another to illustrate how in Nature every relationship is essentially between hunter and prey, life and death, in a ferocious struggle for existence.

Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi​, Images of the Orient: Vandal Tourism (2001, 62 minutes)
Working from archives of private film footage from a trip to India by the upper class of the late 1920s, during a period of strong anti-colonial outbreak, Images of the Orient: Vandal Tourism deconstructs the images and analyzes the attitude and behavior of Westerners in the East. Who are these travelers? What brings them here? Why do we find them disturbing? Along with the images, texts by Henri Michaux and Mircea Eliade are sung by Giovanna Marini.

Radu Jude, The Marshal’s Two Executions (2018, 10 minutes)
The Marshal’s Two Executions confronts two different views of the execution of Marshal Antonescu, the fascist leader of Romania during the Second World War. On one side there is silent black-and-white footage of the execution as recorded in 1946 by cameraman Ovidiu Gologanl, while on the other are scenes from a biographical film shot in 1994 by director Sergiu Nicolaescu.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program [​at​] e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.

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