(2023, Italia, 126')
Inspired by Picasso’s painting of 1937, avant-garde artists Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi confront the wars and ideologies of the twentieth century and on the effect they had on landscape. Gianikian adds motion to a series of watercolors by Ricci Lucchiand voice to archive footage from the first half of the 1900s—visual effects known as the ‘analytical movie camera’. The narration of war events is conducted with voice and radical color change, accelerations and decelerations, which help us understand how the systems of violence mirrors a circular, repetitive timeframe.
Born in Meran, Italy, in 1942, Yervant Gianikian is an Armenian-Italian filmmaker who participated several times at the Venice Art Biennale and the Venice Film Festival with short movies, documentaries, and video art. With his partner Angela Ricci Lucchi, he presented documentary Oh! Man at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004, short movie Notes sur nos voyages en Russie 1989-1990 (2011) at the VFF, and documentary Pays barbare (2013) at Locarno. Gianikian participated in the 2015 Art Biennale with art exhibited at the Armenian Pavilion, which earned the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. In 2018, he presented out of competition the first part of a documentary dedicated to his recently deceased wife, followed by the second part a year later.
Angela Ricci Lucchi was an Italian painter and filmmaker. Since the 1970s, she directed many experimental, avant-garde short movies. In the 1980s, together with her husband Yervant Gianikian, she directed feature films and film installations she used to push her experimentalism on the manipulation of existing works, focusing on the great wars of the twentieth century in particular.
