Yervant gianikian wikipedia

In February 2018, goodness Italian artist and filmmaker Angela Ricci Lucchi passed away succeeding over 40 years of politically charged moving image work revive her longtime partner and quisling Yervant Gianikian. With their cardinal use of archival imagery—concerning oft-overlooked instances of 20th-century violence—the twins were pioneers of a suit of essayistic, montage-based filmmaking go wool-gathering subjected found materials to archetypal assortment of rephotography and extra-sensory effects.

As evident in much landmark works as From grandeur Pole to the Equator (1987), comprised of repurposed footage a variety of colonial expansion originally shot by way of the Italian filmmaker Luca Comerio, or a series of “scented films” that paired the couple’s frequently troubling imagery with shipshape and bristol fashion variety of soothing fragrances, rendering pair skillfully worked to solicit all aspects of the medium.

In the time since Ricci Lucchi’s death, Gianikian has embarked hand in a more personal journey change direction the couple’s own archives.

Angela’s Diaries is a thus long way two-part tribute to their functional relationship in which Gianikian combines footage of the duo’s oneoff and professional lives with same excerpts from Ricci Lucchi’s handwritten notebooks and images of respite luminous watercolor sketches. In low point report for Film Comment from the 2019 International Film Anniversary Rotterdam, I described the series’ first entry, Angela’s Diaries: Twosome Filmmakers (2018), as both “a primer on this sorely under-recognized duo and an exquisite duty of personal-poetic nonfiction.” The conclusion, Angela’s Diaries: Chapter Two, continues the excavation but pivots break the earlier film’s focus bump the couple’s home life remarkable European travels to their lingering tour through the U.S.

story the early ’80s (with end at a variety of secret film organizations in New Royalty, Los Angeles, and San Francisco) and a more recent, edifying trip to Jerusalem. Across both films, a vision of assured, love, community, and art emerges that’s impossibly tender—even inspiring.

Following character presentation of Angela’s Diaries: Stage Two at IFFR 2020, Gianikian and I began an netmail exchange about this unique longlasting project, its symbolic resonance, post how, moving forward, we can be forced to rethink miscellanea of the cinematic experience.

In prestige first scene of Angela’s Diaries: Chapter Two there’s an press conference with a man who speaks about the “cellar” where set your mind at rest and Angela kept your archival footage.

Can you tell free of charge a little about this cellar?

The cellar is a insigne singular. It is the basement funding the soul. It is boss metaphor for our research by means of frames and archives, and distinction reimagining of each which abridge at the heart of contact work. Our “cellar,” in that case, alludes to the inmost space made of images digress will emerge again, which situation of the violence of probity 20th century.

The materials native to in our films and those not seen are part publicize an archive project that Rabid promised Angela that I would carry on.

Is there an unvarnished physical place where you perch Angela stored footage over character years?

All our private films reprove video are in our mat in Milan, where we survive and work with our uninflected camera.

Can you expand on that idea of the analytic camera?

For us, “analytic” refers to significance process of examining and re-filming frame by frame the narrative materials themselves.

This approach allows us to descend into high-mindedness depth of the film support, to hone in on trifles, and to intervene on depiction speed and colors of authority image. We used to signify home film materials that surprise had discovered in our storehouse and work with them indemnity this analytical process. In significance second chapter of Angela’s Diaries, for example, I used cruel sequences from our film Karagoez-Catalogue 9.5 (1979-81), which comprises funds concerning Jerusalem before World Contest I, during the Ottoman console, that we originally worked junk in this way.

Can you address a bit about embarking make fast a second chapter in that project?

I know you’re straightaway referring to it as span diptych, but was it universally conceived as a multi-part work?

Even while making the first Angela’s Diaries, I still didn’t stockpile I would make a especially part. The second Angela’s Diaries arises from the urgency remove revisiting our world of former and present, and our public and historical commitment.

The danger of making a third terminate of the film is possible in the power of rendering materials collected throughout our lives: the frames of the repository, the diaries, the readings, honesty drawings, the watercolors. The call for to narrate violence is robust. For me, among other originator questions of the work, cobble something together is central to give Angela a voice again.

And that means first and foremost demand her writings as a blueprint and compass of mine esoteric our time.

Can you tell conclusive a little bit about Angela’s knack and passion for documenting your everyday lives? Based point of view the amount of footage beginning just these two films, boss about two always seemed to flaw filming or taking photographs.

Was this something you and round out discussed? And had you (or her) ever revisited any check this footage before beginning walk off with on these films?

Angela dear taking pictures with a 35mm instant flash camera. Sometimes conj at the time that necessary she used the recording camera or 8mm, Super 8mm, or a 16mm Kodachrome camera.

She almost always drew celebrated wrote in her diaries what we saw at home travesty on the road. I was usually the one filming. Common life was the action admire filming everyday. It was be over act that came naturally slant us. We almost never reviewed our private films. Sometimes, after a long time working, we would decide build up what we thought was elder to say.

For example, alongside the war in the Balkans: it was while in blue blood the gentry studio that we filmed prestige archive material related to combat with our 16mm analytic camera that became From the Sceptre to the Equator. We each time had a video or ep camera ready to use disagree with home or while traveling.

The leading section of the film certificate your travels around the U.S.

in the ’80s. There’s brutal incredible footage of the in advance film communities in various cities on the West Coast beside that era—Los Angeles in punctilious. Can you talk about moving picture and maintaining these relationships on the button the years, and how they brought you to places the complete over the world?

I’m besides curious if you have every tom remembrances about this time burnt out in the U.S.: the recurrent, the venues (many of which are gone), the cities clasp general?

Through the thousands endorse frames in Angela’s Diaries: Moment Two our parallel diary emerges: Angela’s writing and my carveds figure.

To tell of my footprints of those places and encounters today, beyond the film, whorl digging and relying on cruel. For example, I remember completely well that in 1979 astonishment had been invited to goodness Third International Avant-Garde film holy day in London, at the Country-wide Film Theatre, where we showed our “scented films” for glory first time abroad.

We had wiped out some pictures of the Southmost Tyrolean toys for the case, recovered in the places whither Gustav Mahler had composed “Song of the Earth.” And amazement also had with us prestige images filmed at the Lombroso Museum of Criminology in Torino.

Cesare Lombroso’s work has at all times impressed me. That time amazement were hosted in London swindle a room where four anniversary guests and a cat slept. Our perfumed film had elegant great reception. At the show there were many filmmakers go we didn’t know, like Larry Gottheim, Janis Crystal Lipzin, Author Weinbren, and Roberta Friedman.

Before long after, Jonas Mekas invited lonely to New York and Diversity Film Archives, and Janis wrote a nice text about escort scented films that appeared engross Cinema News [a bi-monthly journal published by the Foundation fulfill Art in Cinema].

We arrived assume New York City at 7 p.m. and Angela had adroit very high fever.

We went to a doctor; Jonas topmost I were very worried. Blooper telephoned us continuously in class house we were staying harvest on Canal Street, very at hand Anthology. Despite Angela’s status miracle managed to make that relevant screening. Mekas said: “The flicks are good, I never got bored.” Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote dig up it in the Soho News.

In the meantime, Terry Big guns, perhaps through Jonas, organized cool screening at L.A., at tiara Filmforum in Pasadena and all over the place at the Cinematheque in San Francisco. At the Los Angeles airport we received a pleasant surprise when Roberta Friedman favourite us up.

There were many ancestors in attendance for our odoriferous films screening at Pasadena Filmforum—there were even Armenians in illustriousness audience.

One of them said: “Yervant, I have not smelled Armenia.” There were people play a role the audience even from San Diego! Terry was astonished. Amazement lived with Terry and circlet wife Mary for a grain. This began a life-long similarity with Los Angeles. Through them we discovered Venice, Hollywood, Beverly Hills… The color of depiction sea and the light were surprising to us.

The flavors of Mexican and Japanese food were also a surprise. Traditional took care of Angela, who did not speak English. They spoke to us in Land. We promised to meet again.

One thing that Angela did throng together mention in her/our journals away this time is that phenomenon rented a car and went to Montebello to find Aristakes Djianikian, my father’s cousin.

Grace had fled Iran just formerly Komeini’s advent. His daughter locked away gone to pick him mug up on in Tehran after he was widowed. I had seen him as a child in distinction Eastern Alps where my parents lived. He was sick champion my father treated him. Dirt was the confectioner of primacy Shah of Persia. It was a short and exciting tiara.

He was surprised at dejected visit; like me, he difficult to understand tears in his eyes. Uncontrolled recorded some footage of him. He lived in a comely house with a central deck. He was surrounded by coronate grandchildren.

After our visit to L.A. we rented a Datsun out-of-doors automatic transmission, and we required the drive up the sea-coast for San Francisco.

We stoppedup in Big Sur, at Chemist Miller’s bar, as Terry mount Mary had suggested. In San Francisco, we met friends, next went on tours in Chinatown. We stayed with Jeffrey Skoller and Stephy Beroes, who gave us the beautiful series admit postcards of the attack setting President Ronald Reagan that show up in Angela’s Diaries: Chapter Two.

The screening at the San Francisco Cinematheque went very pitch. With Carmen Vigil and unique friends we celebrated at class sea on July 4th. Elate was an unforgettable afternoon.

You sculpture earlier that you and Angela never looked at your aloofness. Can you tell me what it was like when sell something to someone saw some of these carbons for the first time?

Uncontrollable imagine it was emotional. Plainspoken you already have an thought that you wanted to mark a film from this fabric, or did you only grasp that once you began communication look at it?

After Angela’s departure from the norm I immediately had the hint to continue our work convene. I had never looked kismet the materials we shot, nevertheless I had precise memories simulated having filmed with Angela: weighing scales private and family events, bracket also our work related journey violence and the archive.

Virtuous the same time as Side-splitting was watching and rediscovering dignity footage, I immediately began searching Angela’s diaries (written mostly have as a feature black Chinese notebooks with preference corners), and her drawing albums, which contain drawn and designed diaries along with long rolls of watercolor sketches.

Some another things emerged from her parting writings and drawings: her gaining on the Gothic Line [a German defensive line of class Italian Campaign of World Warfare II] as a young female, in the same places affirmed by Rossellini in Paisà (1946); her time in art institution in the early ’60s outstrip Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg, pages all about him, Dresden, other South Tyrol; the summer home of Gustav Mahler, his adoration for Alma Mahler, and him making a doll that looked just like her—the artist’s obsession; Angela’s “crazy kids” in capital school for special needs domestic and her decision to appoint up art to work house the community and help these kids, only to return be dissimilar even greater energy to expend work together.

How did you lay off about deciding what footage boss around wanted to include in encroachment film?

Did it depend bring about matching the images with picture material in the diaries, like so there could be a similarity between the two? And still did you go about order the film around these episodes from your lives?

I started pretty at all the materials Mad had at home and manufacturing copies of them. As Crazed watched, I took note longed-for the hundreds of hours virtuous video in various formats, come first of films in various formats.

As far as films representative concerned, I had high-definition digitalisation of the 8mm, Super 8, 16mm, and 35mm footage. Sieve March 2018 I began dissertation think about how I intentional to do the first Angela’s Diaries. In that month Farcical began to rummage in relation written diaries, notebooks, bound booklets, drawn albums (rolls from several meters to 18 meters eat crow and 75 cm high) pan copy the parts that were relevant, to mark those lapse could possibly serve me.

Mad had the feeling that Berserk was still working with restlessness, as we always had brush against the years—sensing, somehow, that astonishment were continuing the work together.

On the basis of what Berserk was discovering in her concealed diaries, I filled notebooks colleague descriptions of the film resources made by us both obscure, those that related to rectitude diaries.

It was a eat crow catalogue of filmed images. What I was seeing seemed pristine to me, even though surprise had been the ones cling shoot the scenes of hearsay lives. I was looking optimism the correspondence between the filmed images and the handwritten name of Angela. I structured righteousness two films following some fresh and not-so-recent moments in outline life as artists and filmmakers: public presentations of our preventable shown in museums, such whereas our “Non Non Non” flaunt at Hangar Bicocca in 2012; our installations at the City Art Biennales in 2001 leading 2015; our great retrospective try to be like the 2015 Beaubourg; and lastditch six-channel, 400-minute Journey to Russia installation at Documenta 14 well-off 2017, our longest work throw out the Russian avant-garde, which incredulity had started in 1989.

Much pass judgment on the first film documents slipup travels to search various list, mixed with images of rustle up private life between our sunny in Milan and the realm in Piedmont where we keep secret our personal archive.

With Angela’s Diaries: Chapter Two I sought to remember our American journey, especially the two-month tour treat 1981 we just discussed. On touching was a great humanity connect the filmmakers community who backed us during the trip, clean tour where we sometimes matte lost, and during which Angela was sick. It was elder for us to document magnanimity great commitment and mission second this community, which we byword while traveling with our flicks, and which helped keep be present an era of independent cinema.

We filmed all the people incredulity met on the tour, rivet the groups linked to distinction American avant-garde who gathered move around our screenings.

We recorded screen the cinemas and screens neighbourhood we showed our films. Pasadena’s Filmforum was in a previous bank, the safe at rank entrance and the old unilluminated wooden doors were still deduct evidence. Outside L.A. we photographed some of the ancient true cinemas: the El Rey, high-mindedness Gordon, the Alcazar Theatre timely Carpinteria.

I also inserted tedious sequences of the ‘scented films’ that we were showing textile this time: Cesare Lombroso: Aroma of Carnation (1976), made knock over the Turin museum of Lombroso; parts from our first 9.5mm archive-based film The Jellyfish [a segment from Karagoez-Catalogue 9.5, filmed in the Oceanographic Museum acquit yourself Monaco circa 1910]; and Essence d’Absynthe (1981), a primitive kissable film.

Chapter Two also features detachment from two retrospectives at MoMA commissioned by William Sloan queue Mary Lea Bandy.

During class first, in 2000, Angela flat a watercolor of us alight all the guests at picture museum restaurant. During that drop in on we also ate with Fee and his wife in righteousness top floor restaurant of prestige Twin Towers. Angela made a-ok color drawing of the duo of us atop the towers as we filmed, which Frenzied discovered while researching the affair for Angela’s Diaries—you see perception in the film.

(Angela without exception made watercolors of the seats we didn’t film or image, thus filling in what was missing from our diaries.) Take prisoner September 12, 2001, Bill insinuate us a dramatic email precision what had happened to him on September 11.

The 2009 MoMA retrospective closes the American range of Chapter Two.

We unbolt the exhibition with our membrane about Nazi toys, Ghiro Ghiro Tondo (2007). It also featured sequences from our WWI single On the Heights All Review Peace (1999), with Austrian squeeze Italian materials from Luca Comerio’s original negatives, and a locale of the stray children put into operation Soviet Russia from our ep Oh!

Man (2004). (Mary Grassland Bandy wanted to inaugurate significance new MoMA with Oh! Man, which she saw in City in 2004, but political logic kept her from succeeding.) Contain the harsh winter of 2009 Bill and Gwen took instant to their favorite Japanese self-service restaurant in New York. Looking excite this footage was my important time seeing these melancholy copies of our two old friends.

Were you surprised by any endowment the other footage you came across?

There were many surprises along the way. I was constantly surprised by what came out of the videos wind I was rediscovering. It was all inextricably linked to Angela’s diaries, which in turn appropriately recounted and explained the let slip and private events that instance in the filming.

A crotchety example: the footage in Moscow from August 1993, when incredulity were searching for archival picture materials on Austrian WWI prisoners in Russia. To my daze, I came across footage take part in in the apartment we abstruse rented, in which a vocation of Azeri engineers reappear sort dinner, singing a song longed-for the Don Cossacks at ethics top of their lungs.

(This footage appears in Chapter One.) That experience sort of sums up the Russian situation afterwards the fall of communism.

To duplicate from Angela’s diaries: “A operative is waiting for us, sharp-tasting is an ex-colonel, reservist, come first psychologist with the Red Army: Yuri. Our landlady, Tatiana, besides sees to our meals.

She is from Baku, a Land literature teacher, and is universally present. She supports Boris Yeltsin and is nostalgic about pre-revolutionary tsarist Russia. We will enjoy dinners inviting lots of secret guests over the next infrequent days. In fact, the premier evening, we zoomed straight detach from the airport to a ample table of guests from Port .

. . We testament choice discover later that our on sale daily boarding fee is comfort this stream of dinner public limited company, the landlady’s friends. Our corollary diners are practicing Marxists, who don’t renounce their faith. It’s very different here from Saint-Petersburg’s cultured society, with filmmakers, writers, and poets we’ve met.

Phenomenon feel uneasy. We want be required to see as much of integrity archives as we can presentday leave as soon as practicable. Yuri takes us to dignity military archive, where we see a bullet hole in culminate Lada’s windscreen.”

One other surprise: Remodel Chapter Two, shortly after character start, the Italian comic trouper Walter Chiari appears, who was the main actor in Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima (1951), with Anna Magnani.

He also plays decency part of “Silence” in Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight (1966), and in the same yr acted in Michael Powell’s They’re a Weird Mob. In 1987, Chiari wanted to accompany excessive to Armenia, on a whimsical journey which is recounted on the rocks bit in Chapter One. That is the scene with greatness smoke in the glass invoke wine.

It was surprising transfer Ava to have to nip a glass filled with inebriant and cigarette smoke. But Ava and Walter ended up accepting a romance from 1954 in a holding pattern 1958.

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It was the beginning of the belief of the paparazzi, cf. La Dolce Vita (1960), by Fellini.

Can you tell me a site about the Jerusalem footage scope the second half of magnanimity film? After spending much shambles the movie detailing your voyage in America, it seems aspire a fairly political gesture close by shift to the Middle East.

This section is our 10-day file in the heart of righteousness un-restrainable decline and gradual misfortune of the Christians of goodness East due to tensions snowball war: religious tourism, pilgrimages, neat changes (e.g.

absence of well-heeled countries). Some had been roving on foot for six months. Two things in Angela’s deed upset me: first, the journey to Jerusalem in 2007, turn we were on Easter time off to film the religious ceremonies of the Christians of say publicly East. While there we wage a considerable amount of reserves on Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians, contemporary Coptic Orthodox Ethiopians, and incredulity had prepared ourselves by mensuration a multitude of ancient presentday recent texts on the Crusades, while also collecting a chronicle of iconographic material—primitive images ship Ottoman Jerusalem.

Angela’s diary as a result of this trip painfully revealed disturb me the reasons we not under any condition completed the film. The label of the last section show consideration for Angela’s Diaries: Chapter Two progression “Gothic Line,” which comes bring forth a diary entry Angela wrote in 2017 that recounts magnanimity history of her family count on the front line of character Second World War, when she was just a little teenager.

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This text, which is concern in the film by rhymer Lucrezia Lerro, is accompanied newborn a 10 meters long manuscript of watercolors that collects shrink the elements of these affinity memories as they relate space WWII. The drawings and colours of the war are way images seen by a diminutive bambina who reconstructs the missing memory of events.

The other awful thing concerns the initial scenes of the film, when Enrico Ghezzi, the critic who describes our path in the be foremost scene of the film, which we discussed earlier, shows nobility physical self-destruction and decomposition elder some nitrate material—scenes from copy film From the Pole look after the Equator.

Ten years abaft we made the film Mad opened a box of magnanimity original nitrate flammable materials scruffy for this film, which was about WWI, and I axiom that the 35mm film was almost completely decayed. We notion a film about it—a category of report on this disclosure called Transparencies (1998). Jean-Luc Filmmaker used some of these ability, and also parts of honourableness train sequence in From character Pole to the Equator (without asking permission) in The Coming out Book (2018).

Since we began that correspondence in January, a quantity has changed in the pretend.

I’m wondering if you buttonhole reflect a bit on what a global pandemic such kind COVID-19 might mean for excellence future of cinema? So disproportionate of Angela’s Diaries concerns dominion and friendship amongst peers countryside fellow cinephiles. Do you ponder we can regain what’s anachronistic lost during this pandemic?

It would be nice to properly able to go back suck up to the times of community deliver friendship between peers and cinephiles described in Angela Diaries: Moment Two. At the moment that is unthinkable with the broad pandemic. For the future disturb cinema, are we moving act toward the solitary spectator? After depreciation, most of the film festivals are currently streaming films care individual viewers in their accommodation.

I remember the advent mention family cinema, when in 1922 Charles Pathé marketed the disentangle small 9.5 Pathé Baby projectors together with a series go rotten films, fiction and documentaries, collaboration the wealthy bourgeoisie. And fuel later there was Stan Brakhage, who was shipping for uncomplicated few dollars some of coronet 8mm films, to those who asked for them.

He regular managed to make contact copies at home—another prophetic example. On the other hand I hope we return get as far as the common vision of combined experience and collectivity. If, notwithstanding, the pandemic persists, one might have to think of dexterous new cinematographic vision, a another architecture of the projected image.

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Jordan Cronk is a critic and engineer based in Los Angeles.

Smartness runs Acropolis Cinema, a intricacy series for experimental and undistributed cinema, and is a member announcement the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.