Yervant Gianikian

The memoirs of Raphael Gianikian, Yervant’s father, who survived the 1915 Armenian genocide in eastern Turkey.

In this filmic comment on Fascist ideology - which uses footage from the recently discovered archives of Luca Comerio - invisible hands push captive animals to fight among themselves.

Found footage anti-war film comprising film documents of the Austro-Hungarian and Italian army on the Alpine front, and from first generation picture material by war-film pioneer Luca Comerio.

African Diary uses footage from a filmed personal diary shot in Algeria by an anonymous Frenchman between 1927-1936. Here, they reprise his cinematic jottings as he followed in the footsteps of the 19th century Orientalists like Flaubert.

Comprised of images shot by amateur photographers and German soldiers in the Balkans from the twenties through the forties, BALKAN INVENTORY was begun by Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi in response to the tragedy unfolding in the former Yugoslavia.

Milan-based duo Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi create an astonishing work of militant poetry with this found-footage chronicle of Mussolini's brutal invasion of Ethiopia.

Primarily constructed from scientific films about the atmosphere from the turn of the last century.

Decaying nitrate film: cinema as an incendiary explosive bomb of memory.

After Prisoners of the war and On the Heights all is Peace, this film concludes Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi's trilogy on the first world war. From the emblem of totalitarianism to individual physical suffering, the directors use this representation of man's rampaging violence to draw up an anatomical inventory of the damaged body and examine the consequences of the conflict on children, from 1919 to 1921. From the deconstruction to the artificial reconstruction of the human body, they try to understand how humanity can forget itself and perpetuate these horrors.

Every day of her life, Angela kept a diary, filled with words and drawings, in which she recorded public and private matters, meetings, things she had read, everything. Including the account of two trips to Russia (1989-90). The period of the collapse of the USSR. A diary that she had been keeping in small Chinese notebooks, since before Dal Polo all’Equatore (1986), on our uninterrupted work on the violence of the 20th century. From our tours in the United States with the “scented films” of the late seventies to the Anthology Film Archive of New York and the Berkeley Pacific Film Archive...

The title Dal polo all'equatore was first used by the pioneering documentary maker, Luca Comerio, for a compilation film of 1925; it was used again by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi for their film of 1985. Much of the original has been re-worked: the 'found footage' has been re-shot, slowed down, tinted, and re-edited with a sound track of minimalist composition. As a result, the exotica of colonial travel and sport take on new and sinister meanings. The acts of violence, especially those of hunting, recur in patterns that suggest visually that war is a logical development. A close examination of the work, starting with the opening sequence of a railway journey, explores the centrality of questions of memory and history to this remarkable and influential film.

Using images shot in Russia and Armenia from World War I to the 1930s and retrieved from a Soviet film archive, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi constructed a meditative film about the status of Armenians as a people without a state. Inspired by the diary of Gianikian’s father, People, Years, Life uses rare footage depicting the region’s major historic events: the end of Tsarist Russia, violence in the Caucasus during World War I, the 1918 Armenian exodus from Azerbaijan. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s treatment of the material manipulates the speed of the images, adds color and music, and magnifies various parts of the image, so that the movement of bodies across the frame begins to carry the weight of exile, mourning, dispossession.

Painted by Picasso in 1937, Guernica is a universal icon against the war. In 2014, the artists Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi conceived a new film that tells the history of 20th century upon the painting. In 2023, years after Angela’s passing, Yervant accomplishes this task.

Gypsies in Italy, '40s. An 8mm home movie which depicts the emigration of a rom family aboard an horse-pulled wagon. A delicate portrait.

Amateurish voyeurism in a pre-tv era. Glances of female bodies (un)covered by swimsuits on the beach.

In this short film, screened and commissioned by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi revisit regions at war or in crisis through archive images of the 20th century.

This archive footage from the 1970s reveals the social upheavals and differences of the people in different Asian and African countries. The amateur shots reflect the social and economic conditions in these countries before their development as tourist areas, or before its people were afflicted with devastation and wars. The images are indifferent to a suffering they don't yet seem to know, and which has to be viewed anew with the knowledge and distance of today.

French Vietnam, early '50s. A military colonial movie. The city under military occupation, traveled by foot and bicycle. Small-scale eroticism.

Russia, its culture and conflicts, the 1920s and 1930s, the avant-garde movements persecuted by the authorities. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi open the precious workshop of their creation to us: old films, photographs from the Tsarist era, the Russian Revolution, and the years that followed, Angela Ricci Lucchi's watercolors, comments, texts (Chekhov, Anna Akhmatova, Nina Berberova, Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Pushkin, Mandelstam), fairy tales for children. And then the figures encountered during their travels in Russia, “living archives” to whom the two filmmakers want to restore presence and voice. In this way, we discover the materials that feed their new film, in preparation, "Journey in Russia" (2017), making this, as the suffix of the title indicates, "A propos de," "About," a sort of catalog. Gradually, however, these notes acquire an autonomous dimension that encompasses a poetic universe: the intimate sphere of the artists.

Excerpts from a collection of 9.5mm films dating from 1900 to 1928—including theatrical films, anthropological documentaries, and home movies—that reveal much about life during the silent-film era. —MoMa