From the Pole to the Equator

Directors: Yervant Gianikian, Angela Ricci Lucchi
1987, 96',color

This rarely screened 16mm experimental film is drawn from the 1910 archives of Luca Comerio, a pioneering Italian documentary filmmaker who photographed ‘exotic’ peoples from the North Pole to the Equator. Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi rephotographed and hand-tinted Comerio’s spectacular footage of early Arctic whalers, Cossack-like soldiers riding on horseback, missionary schools, hunting and warfare in Africa, British India at teatime and Italian Alpine troops in World War I. They refashioned Comerio’s work in order to tease out the ideology written upon— and between—every image: in Gianikian’s words, “the violence of colonialism as it plays itself out in different situations and spheres.”