Dal Polo all'Equatore

«Dal Polo all'Equatore, the new film by the Italians Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, generates a very complex visual experience. The authors purchased the archives of Italian filmmaker Luca Comerio (1874-1940), who had started shooting with Lumière cameras after 1890 and continued to make (and collect) films during the First World War. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi reproduced in 16 mm, frame by frame, selections from Comerio's 35 mm films (which were still on nitrate support), and coloured the images. Comerio's material was then arranged in an elaborate montage accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Californians Keith Ulrich and Charles Anderson. The audience of Dal Polo all'Equatore can get a sense of what Comerio's original material must have been like, and since Comerio must have been a skilled filmmaker with obvious artistic pretensions and achievements, this in itself makes the film very interesting: we see well-crafted images of people, places and experiences that were already exotic enough when they were filmed for European audiences. With the passage of almost a century, this material has become as temporally remote for us as the places it presents were geographically remote for audiences of the time, a fact that is regularly highlighted by a series of damages to the 35 mm original that have been carried over to the 16 mm film.

The film is divided into passages that are not explicitly distinguished in the visual part, although they are generally signalled by changes in the music. In general, each passage is determined by a particular geographical setting. The opening section was first filmed from a train meandering through the Alps and later from an Alpine funicular descending from the mountains towards a village. The next section presents images shot by Comerio during an exploration trip to the South Pole. The camera focuses on the explorers observing and killing polar animals. The third section was filmed at the border between the Russian and Persian empires; in general, the local army is filmed apparently collaborating with the Italian visitors. The next section shows Italian soldiers and clerics working among Africans: Africans dance for Europeans, march in Europeanised clothes, a child is baptised, a group of African children follow a group of nuns to a school. The film then moves to India where we see street scenes, life on country roads, a woman dancing for the camera, a parade of European kings and soldiers, and the activities of Buddhist monks. Then it's back to Africa, first to Tangier, where we see street and port scenes, and later, after a series of portraits, to Eritrea (presumably), where the local populations seem to stage a series of mock battles for the camera, and finally to Uganda where Baron Franchetti – according to Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi, “the Italian version of T. E Lawrence” – kills a series of animals in spasms of death and moves his expedition from place to place with the help of dozens of Africans. The final section of the film, a little longer than the rest, features material from the First World War: soldiers marching, riding and cycling, soldiers fighting in the field and dying. At the very end of the section there is a shot of the words ‘LIVE THE KING’, formed by a flock of sheep. The film ends with a shot of a man holding a rabbit out of the reach of two dogs, to amuse himself with some women. [...] 

What makes Dal Polo all'Equatore remarkable is the particular way in which Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi analyse Comerio's material as they present it. Although we can see its usual beauty and power, we never see Comerio's images at a normal, ‘realistic’ speed. Generally speaking the finished film lingers between pause and illusion of motion, it is as if we are continually seeing the images come to life, slow down, come to life; as if we are observing the events we see through a medium that is itself coming to life. More importantly, the details of Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's precise control continually foreground elements of the images that would probably not be evident in the source material, or at least would not be there if they had presented Comerio's films in the same way as Lumière's films are presented in the anthologies distributed in 16 mm on specialised circuits. In Dal Polo all'Equatore, the slow and irregular rhythm of the images brings out particular details of expressions, gestures and actions in such a way that we seem to connect with people and events on a much more dramatic and revealing level than we normally experience when watching old films. I imagine that in Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's film we get in touch with people on a level that Comerio not only would not have expected, but would not even have wanted (according to Gianikian Comerio hoped to become Mussolini's documentarist in the sense that Leni Riefenstahl would later become one for Hitler). Dal Polo all'Equatore represents Comerio's cinematography in such a way that it comments on itself, on the original motivations for which he shot the images we see, and on the political implications of these motivations. It seems fair to assume that originally when Comerio shot these images, the significance of what he was doing was linked to notions of the civilising impact of European culture on African and Asian cultures, and the heroic nature of explorers on expeditions to exotic countries. The killing of animals in the Polar and African sections was undoubtedly intended to demonstrate the skill and valour of the hunter; and the beautiful portraits of exotic peoples also seem to be part of a mindset that looks favourably on sophisticated domination in the interests of heroic, glorious colonisation. [...]

Generally the conquerors seem bored and boring, humourless and pretentious, almost oblivious to their surroundings. Towards the end of the third section we see a portrait of a young woman; we see her performing a folk dance with a man, in front of a crowd of people, presumably natives of reason. In the middle of the crowd sit two men: one I think is some kind of local dean, the other is an Italian officer. As the dancers dance, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's reproduction of the framing highlights the exotic, fluid movements of the dancers. Everyone in the frame seems to be observing the dancers, except for the Italian officer, who looks off screen, seemingly unaware of the dance, daydreaming, one might infer, of future conquests or more civilised environments. While members of exotic cultures seem to enjoy what they do [...] and often seem happy to face the camera's eye, the Italians draw energy only from the pleasure of domination: we see them raising their rifles and firing, standing stiffly in their military uniforms, marching in parades. They seem as disengaged as the bourgeois hunters in Peter Kubelka's Unsere Afrikareise, a film with which Dal Polo all'Equatore has much in common, at least thematically.

The subtle analysis made by Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi through the precise modulation of the speed at which we see Comerio's individual shots is confirmed to an extended extent by the soundtrack and use of colour. [...] Anderson and Ulrich's music is mysterious, haunting; it tends to emphasise the sinister aspect of the events we are watching, even in cases where the images themselves seem relatively neutral. The music helps to convey an overwhelming sense of sadness about the events that Comerio documents, about what has been lost through the colonisation and domination of humans and animals. It also at times dramatises our complicity in the events, sometimes the people we see seem to dance to the rhythm of the music we are listening to, particularly during the first episodes filmed in Africa. This momentary synchronisation of images and sound reaffirms a fact that has always been implicit: that we, sitting in a cinema, fascinated by the people and events that Comerio has filmed, are the users not only of his filmmaking, but also of the process of power and domination that he documents for us. Indeed, Comerio's material dramatises – more, perhaps, than any old film I have seen – the degree to which the camera represents the vanguard of empire. [...] The schizoid emotional quality of Dal Polo all'Equatore is emphasised by Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's evident care for colour. In a general sense their colour is reminiscent of that used in early films: monochrome toning and in some cases hand-colouring, frame by frame. However, the way the colour is articulated is different from the use of colour in the few contemporary prints of early films that I know of. Most of Dal Polo all'Equatore is tacked on, but although the colour is monochrome within each shot, it nevertheless changes from moment to moment. [...]  

Overall, the colour in Dal Polo all'Equatore has a double impact that benefits the overall spirit of the film: the colour makes the film more sensually beautiful; more visible (certainly this is one of the most beautifully sensual films of recent years) so that we can experience at a deeper level the horror it captures and our complicity in it».  (Scott MacDonald, "Dal Polo all'Equatore", in Yervant Gianikian Angela Ricci Lucchi, ed. by Sergio Toffetti, Hopefulmonster, Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Firenze/Torino 1992, pp. 35-45)

Travel Notes [Cinemambiente 1998]

Gute Reisende sind herzlos

Good travelers are heartless

Elias Canetti

From the travelogues of Hale's Tours to reportages on great exploits and exotic lands, from the road movie to the thousands of invented and untold stories of conquered spaces and lost or rediscovered identities, the theme of travel has accompanied the entire history of cinema, in all its genres and areas of production, the very metaphor of the new medium capable of restoring the movement of the world.

The brief itinerary proposed here allows us to observe some areas of the prolific relationship between the camera and the environment constituted by the travel film. These are works and materials that concern different dimensions of travel – some probably permanently disappeared – in which constant, however, is the exercise of looking at a reality, a place, a culture, an “elsewhere” reached through physical movement. Colonial conquest, exploration, scientific discovery, family vacation, as well as ritual and soul-searching, are the main passages of this reconnaissance, which reveals first and foremost the importance of the possibility of creating images, which document but also represent a determining factor shaping travel itself.

The components of violence and cultural imposition of Western voyages of conquest in the first decades of the century are, for example, shown in the work of recovery and reworking of original materials carried out by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, who with the power of images alone manage to construct a lucid discourse on the role of the camera as an expression of a will to appropriation and domination. It is the same colonialist gaze analyzed by Peter Kubelka in his African journey in the 1960s, following a group of whites engaged in a safari.

The reliance on cinema as a possibility to record the real, to bear witness to natural events and human endeavors appears evident in the works of volcanologist Haroun Tazieff, who filmed apocalyptic scenarios and spectacular eruptions, or in the conspicuous documentation left by Alberto Maria De Agostini during his wanderings in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, or again in the images of early mountaineering expeditions to the great peaks, not without political implications in some cases, such as the document on the ascent of Nanga Parbat in 1938, which becomes an example of Nazi propaganda. The exploration of the environment as a human challenge, a ground for confrontation with the force and sometimes the hostility of nature, is still visible in the first filmed documentations of Antarctic expeditions, in which the narrative and spectacular vocation of cinema peeps out even where one would presume total adherence to realistic subject matter.

What becomes immediately clear in this chapter of the history of travel is that there is no truly achieved goal and conquered space, if not properly documented, no expedition and enterprise that can renounce being filmed and thus make its own contribution to the construction of an imaginary made of heroes and great adventures, of immense spaces real and unknown. Immersed in the silence of their innocence, and in the seduction of their genesis – possible in many cases despite difficult environmental conditions and thanks to daring actions – such images enchant today as they did then. The crossing of a last sailing ship filmed by Henrich Hauser, in which neither places of departure nor points of arrival are shown, becomes the emblem of the experience in itself of movement, a hymn to the deepest sense of travel. Of which the deviations from the desired outcomes, the failures, renunciations, tragedies or simply the impossibility of creating the longed-for image (the summit as well as the return) must also be collected. But the fascination with travel to distant and extreme lands can also become an explicit advertising tool, as happened with the African and Asian cruises organized by Citroën between the 1920s and 1930s, in which human enterprise and produced image turn out to be totally inseparable.

Another type of relationship with the environment is that traceable in home movies shot during family vacations: Gustav Deutsch rereads anonymous materials from the 1950s and 1960s, offering an interesting catalog on the amateur gaze in its attempt to capture places – in this case those deputed to tourism – and preserve memories.

Travel as an encounter with “other” worlds and cultures, rapprochement and self-discovery, is the theme finally of some works in which the dialogue with the environment is constructed on the basis of the awareness that movement is not the prerogative of the person holding the camera. Ulrike Koch's documentation of the migration of nomadic Tibetan herders to the great salt lakes of the Himalayan plateau, a tribute to a sacred dimension of travel; Bill Viola's contemplation of natural landscapes and animal presences, Chris Marker's reflections from the “two extreme poles of survival” – Japan and Africa – or even the crossed gaze proposed in another work by Deutsch (who juxtaposes his images of an Austrian in Morocco with those of a Moroccan in Austria), suggest modes of travel based on dialogue, confrontation, meditation: observing the movement of nature and its inhabitants, with respect and hesitation, leads to a movement of consciousness, a production of thought, an activation of memories. The relationship with a place is no longer established through topographical and cultural appropriation, but through an appreciation of differences, the maintenance of a subjectivity and a historical understanding. Travel as discovery and adventure belongs perhaps only more to mythology and nostalgia, just as the very conditions of image production and consumption turn out to be profoundly transformed with respect to the eras evoked here. The cognitive potentialities of travel, and therefore of the images borrowed from it, are then entrusted, rather than to a movement in space guided by a ravenous gaze in search of the pure and the uncontaminated, to an ability to stand in any different place, to let this otherness speak and be absorbed, also tracing its historical motivations and welcoming the dimension of memory that that place can give off in those who try to approach it.