Pays Barbare

(Barbaric Land)

a film by Yervant Giankian and Angela Ricci Lucchi

Produced by LES FILMS D’ICI

France 2013, 65 minutes

SYNOPSIS

“Every era has its fascism. A film necessary for us at this time, over fascism and colonialism. With our ‘Analytical Camera’ we returned to rummage in privates and anonymous archives of Ethiopia over the film frames of the Italian colonial period (’35-36). The Colonial eroticism. Ours is a dual reading, that of the images themselves and the way in which they were consumed. The naked body of women and the ‘body’ of the film. Images of the Duce in Africa. Body frames of Mussolini and the ‘mass’ 1945, after the Liberation.’

An Ethiopian woman on her knees wearing a top that leaves her breasts bare, a bearded soldier who washes her head symbolically: certain words recur in the captions, such as barbaric, primitive, pillager, bigamy. Among the films, we find a number of military sequences showing the violence of the Italian venture to conquer Ethiopia and the phrase: ‘Civilization now dawns in this primitive and barbaric country’. These constitute an image of Mussolini in Africa: a message to the masses via his physical attributes a unique, unequalLed icon.After being at the origin of many massacres without images, the last of his images are those of his massacre.” (Yervant Giankian and Angela Ricci Lucchi)

Biography

Thirty years of cinema and research tied the couple Yervant Gianikian (Armenia) and Angela Ricci Lucchi (Italy).

Established in Milan, they decided to dedicate themselves to cinema from the mid-1970s, beginning with the written performance for “perfumed films”; later they worked on the reconstructions of old films collected from their collection, which they coloured, turned, reprinted, re-edited.

Working as archaeologists on the paths of films, ideologies, and cultures, they have been able to create a cinema that is not only story and poetry but also proposes criticism and analysis.

Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s films have been premiered at major international festivals, from Cannes to Venice, from Toronto to Berlinale, from Rotterdam to Turin.

Retrospectives of their work have been hosted in the major cinemas of the world (from Cinémathèque Française to Filmoteca Española, from Cinemateca Portuguesa to the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley) and in museums such as MoMA in New York and Tate Modern in London. Among the places that hosted their installations there are the Venice Biennale, Cartier Pour Fond d’Art Contemporain in Paris, Fundacio “La Caixa” in Barcelona, Andalusian Center of Contemporary Art in Seville, Mart in Rovereto , The Witte de With Museum in Rotterdam, the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Hangar Bicocca in Milan.