Yervant gianikian biography examples

In February 2018, say publicly Italian artist and filmmaker Angela Ricci Lucchi passed away followers over 40 years of politically charged moving image work be regarding her longtime partner and fifth columnist Yervant Gianikian. With their essential use of archival imagery—concerning oft-overlooked instances of 20th-century violence—the couple were pioneers of a homogeneous of essayistic, montage-based filmmaking lose one\'s train of thought subjected found materials to keep you going assortment of rephotography and extra-sensory effects.

As evident in specified landmark works as From honesty Pole to the Equator (1987), comprised of repurposed footage invite colonial expansion originally shot mass the Italian filmmaker Luca Comerio, or a series of “scented films” that paired the couple’s frequently troubling imagery with graceful variety of soothing fragrances, birth pair skillfully worked to question all aspects of the medium.

In the time since Ricci Lucchi’s death, Gianikian has embarked show a more personal journey clear out the couple’s own archives.

Angela’s Diaries is a thus a good two-part tribute to their manner relationship in which Gianikian combines footage of the duo’s correctly and professional lives with like excerpts from Ricci Lucchi’s handwritten notebooks and images of amalgam luminous watercolor sketches. In livid report for Film Comment from the 2019 International Film Party Rotterdam, I described the series’ first entry, Angela’s Diaries: Team a few Filmmakers (2018), as both “a primer on this sorely under-recognized duo and an exquisite uncalledfor of personal-poetic nonfiction.” The backup, Angela’s Diaries: Chapter Two, continues the excavation but pivots superior the earlier film’s focus musing the couple’s home life avoid European travels to their extensive tour through the U.S.

wear the early ’80s (with chicago at a variety of covered film organizations in New Dynasty, Los Angeles, and San Francisco) and a more recent, educational trip to Jerusalem. Across both films, a vision of philosophy, love, community, and art emerges that’s impossibly tender—even inspiring.

Following rank presentation of Angela’s Diaries: Page Two at IFFR 2020, Gianikian and I began an netmail exchange about this unique contemporary project, its symbolic resonance, roost how, moving forward, we may well be forced to rethink miscellany of the cinematic experience.

In class first scene of Angela’s Diaries: Chapter Two there’s an audience with a man who speaks about the “cellar” where cheer up and Angela kept your archival footage.

Can you tell immersed a little about this cellar?

The cellar is a metaphor. It is the basement manager the soul. It is undiluted metaphor for our research because of frames and archives, and magnanimity reimagining of each which survey at the heart of colour work. Our “cellar,” in that case, alludes to the medial space made of images defer will emerge again, which locale of the violence of magnanimity 20th century.

The materials curious in our films and those not seen are part pale an archive project that Raving promised Angela that I would carry on.

Is there an legitimate physical place where you instruct Angela stored footage over authority years?

All our private films bracket video are in our faded in Milan, where we secure and work with our deductive camera.

Can you expand on that idea of the analytic camera?

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

This approach allows us to descend into honourableness depth of the film support, to hone in on petty details, and to intervene on glory speed and colors of greatness image. We used to denote home film materials that awe had discovered in our stockroom and work with them cane this analytical process. In distinction second chapter of Angela’s Diaries, for example, I used awful sequences from our film Karagoez-Catalogue 9.5 (1979-81), which comprises reserves concerning Jerusalem before World Hostilities I, during the Ottoman interval, that we originally worked sure of yourself in this way.

Can you disclose a bit about embarking become a second chapter in that project?

I know you’re compacted referring to it as uncut diptych, but was it at all times conceived as a multi-part work?

Even while making the first Angela’s Diaries, I still didn’t remember I would make a alternative part. The second Angela’s Diaries arises from the urgency be proper of revisiting our world of ago and present, and our federal and historical commitment.

The chance of making a third zone of the film is potential in the power of rendering materials collected throughout our lives: the frames of the register, the diaries, the readings, distinction drawings, the watercolors. The for to narrate violence is arduous. For me, among other rudimentary questions of the work, schedule is central to give Angela a voice again.

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

Can you tell first class a little bit about Angela’s knack and passion for documenting your everyday lives? Based stash the amount of footage affluent just these two films, spiky two always seemed to fur filming or taking photographs.

Was this something you and recede discussed? And had you (or her) ever revisited any disregard this footage before beginning run on these films?

Angela highly regarded taking pictures with a 35mm instant flash camera. Sometimes like that which necessary she used the cut camera or 8mm, Super 8mm, or a 16mm Kodachrome camera.

She almost always drew significant wrote in her diaries what we saw at home thwart on the road. I was usually the one filming. Quotidian life was the action game filming everyday. It was button act that came naturally take delivery of us. We almost never reviewed our private films. Sometimes, from the past working, we would decide cheap what we thought was manager to say.

For example, about the war in the Balkans: it was while in influence studio that we filmed high-mindedness archive material related to contention with our 16mm analytic camera that became From the Situation to the Equator. We universally had a video or coating camera ready to use learn home or while traveling.

The eminent section of the film file your travels around the U.S.

in the ’80s. There’s detestable incredible footage of the in advance film communities in various cities on the West Coast sooner than that era—Los Angeles in peculiar. Can you talk about end result and maintaining these relationships have an effect the years, and how they brought you to places every bit of over the world?

I’m as well curious if you have woman in the street remembrances about this time weary in the U.S.: the masses, the venues (many of which are gone), the cities beginning general?

Through the thousands carefulness frames in Angela’s Diaries: Sheet Two our parallel diary emerges: Angela’s writing and my angels.

To tell of my tyreprints of those places and encounters today, beyond the film, implementation digging and relying on vicious. For example, I remember entirely well that in 1979 incredulity had been invited to honourableness Third International Avant-Garde film ceremony in London, at the Folk Film Theatre, where we showed our “scented films” for ethics first time abroad.

We had fell some pictures of the Southmost Tyrolean toys for the dispute, recovered in the places annulus Gustav Mahler had composed “Song of the Earth.” And astonishment also had with us prestige images filmed at the Lombroso Museum of Criminology in City.

Cesare Lombroso’s work has on all occasions impressed me. That time incredulity were hosted in London dull a room where four celebration guests and a cat slept. Our perfumed film had uncut great reception. At the lattice-work there were many filmmakers delay we didn’t know, like Larry Gottheim, Janis Crystal Lipzin, Author Weinbren, and Roberta Friedman.

Presently after, Jonas Mekas invited careless to New York and Medley Film Archives, and Janis wrote a nice text about map out scented films that appeared well-off Cinema News [a bi-monthly serial published by the Foundation pick up Art in Cinema].

We arrived hold New York City at 7 p.m. and Angela had spruce up very high fever.

We went to a doctor; Jonas impressive I were very worried. Filth telephoned us continuously in position house we were staying populate on Canal Street, very proximate Anthology. Despite Angela’s status surprise managed to make that fundamental screening. Mekas said: “The pictures are good, I never got bored.” Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote message it in the Soho News.

In the meantime, Terry Cannonry, perhaps through Jonas, organized systematic screening at L.A., at reward Filmforum in Pasadena and other at the Cinematheque in San Francisco. At the Los Angeles airport we received a agreeable surprise when Roberta Friedman choice us up.

There were many mass in attendance for our sweet films screening at Pasadena Filmforum—there were even Armenians in interpretation audience.

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

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

One thing that Angela did war cry mention in her/our journals close to this time is that incredulity rented a car and went to Montebello to find Aristakes Djianikian, my father’s cousin.

Forbidden had fled Iran just heretofore Komeini’s advent. His daughter esoteric gone to pick him vegetable garden in Tehran after he was widowed. I had seen him as a child in justness Eastern Alps where my parents lived. He was sick person in charge my father treated him. Explicit was the confectioner of illustriousness Shah of Persia.

It was a short and exciting meet. He was surprised at gray visit; like me, he locked away tears in his eyes. Unrestrained recorded some footage of him. He lived in a appealing house with a central courtyard. He was surrounded by realm grandchildren.

After our visit to L.A. we rented a Datsun destitute automatic transmission, and we imposture the drive up the slither for San Francisco.

We obstructed in Big Sur, at Physicist Miller’s bar, as Terry turf Mary had suggested. In San Francisco, we met friends, so went on tours in Chinatown. We stayed with Jeffrey Skoller and Stephy Beroes, who gave us the beautiful series attention to detail postcards of the attack tenderness President Ronald Reagan that put in an appearance in Angela’s Diaries: Chapter Two.

The screening at the San Francisco Cinematheque went very convulsion. With Carmen Vigil and newfound friends we celebrated at influence sea on July 4th. Bare was an unforgettable afternoon.

You figure earlier that you and Angela never looked at your haughtiness. Can you tell me what it was like when restore confidence saw some of these copies for the first time?

Mad imagine it was emotional. Outspoken you already have an entire that you wanted to stamp a film from this subject, or did you only become conscious of that once you began differentiate look at it?

After Angela’s departure from the norm I immediately had the sensibility to continue our work merger. I had never looked concede the materials we shot, nevertheless I had precise memories do paperwork having filmed with Angela: expend private and family events, present-day also our work related hide violence and the archive.

Bundle up the same time as Berserk was watching and rediscovering birth footage, I immediately began inquisitive Angela’s diaries (written mostly display black Chinese notebooks with untiring corners), and her drawing albums, which contain drawn and inscribed diaries along with long rolls of watercolor sketches.

Some different things emerged from her finishing writings and drawings: her heart on the Gothic Line [a German defensive line of greatness Italian Campaign of World Warfare II] as a young lad, in the same places stated doubtful by Rossellini in Paisà (1946); her time in art kindergarten in the early ’60s come to mind Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg, pages all about him, Dresden, snowball South Tyrol; the summer backtoback of Gustav Mahler, his passion for Alma Mahler, and him making a doll that looked just like her—the artist’s obsession; Angela’s “crazy kids” in excellent school for special needs family tree and her decision to test up art to work farm the community and help these kids, only to return add-on even greater energy to travelling fair work together.

How did you sneer at about deciding what footage set your mind at rest wanted to include in inculcate film?

Did it depend sentence matching the images with authority material in the diaries, desirable there could be a compatibility between the two? And happen as expected did you go about grouping the film around these episodes from your lives?

I started ready at all the materials Uncontrollable had at home and manufacture copies of them.

As Funny watched, I took note clamour the hundreds of hours have a phobia about video in various formats, soar of films in various formats. As far as films flake concerned, I had high-definition digitalisation of the 8mm, Super 8, 16mm, and 35mm footage. Agreement March 2018 I began take over think about how I juncture to do the first Angela’s Diaries.

In that month Unrestrainable began to rummage in give someone his written diaries, notebooks, bound booklets, drawn albums (rolls from duo meters to 18 meters extensive and 75 cm high) give permission copy the parts that were relevant, to mark those walk could possibly serve me. Side-splitting had the feeling that Uncontrolled was still working with connect, as we always had squat the years—sensing, somehow, that awe were continuing the work together.

On the basis of what Hilarious was discovering in her covert diaries, I filled notebooks strip off descriptions of the film funds made by us both folder, those that related to magnanimity diaries.

It was a extensive catalogue of filmed images. What I was seeing seemed fresh to me, even though amazement had been the ones denomination shoot the scenes of slip-up lives. I was looking seek out the correspondence between the filmed images and the handwritten rustle up of Angela. I structured glory two films following some new and not-so-recent moments in slip-up life as artists and filmmakers: public presentations of our see to shown in museums, such in that our “Non Non Non” trade show at Hangar Bicocca in 2012; our installations at the Venezia Art Biennales in 2001 near 2015; our great retrospective mass the 2015 Beaubourg; and doing six-channel, 400-minute Journey to Russia installation at Documenta 14 ordinary 2017, our longest work suggestion the Russian avant-garde, which phenomenon had started in 1989.

Much panic about the first film documents in the nick of time travels to search various annals, mixed with images of bright and breezy private life between our fondle in Milan and the turf in Piedmont where we vacation our personal archive.

With Angela’s Diaries: Chapter Two I hot to remember our American journey, especially the two-month tour senior 1981 we just discussed. Not far from was a great humanity adjust the filmmakers community who endorsed us during the trip, tidy tour where we sometimes change lost, and during which Angela was sick. It was essential for us to document influence great commitment and mission do in advance this community, which we maxim while traveling with our flicks, and which helped keep be real an era of independent cinema.

We filmed all the people awe met on the tour, entire the groups linked to description American avant-garde who gathered alternate our screenings.

We recorded sliding doors the cinemas and screens neighbourhood we showed our films. Pasadena’s Filmforum was in a earlier bank, the safe at nobleness entrance and the old sunless wooden doors were still drain liquid from evidence. Outside L.A. we photographed some of the ancient true cinemas: the El Rey, rendering Gordon, the Alcazar Theatre be bounded by Carpinteria.

I also inserted different sequences of the ‘scented films’ that we were showing on this time: Cesare Lombroso: Ooze of Carnation (1976), made unfailingly 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 effort Monaco circa 1910]; and Essence d’Absynthe (1981), a primitive bedroom film.

Chapter Two also features dissociate from two retrospectives at MoMA commissioned by William Sloan most recent Mary Lea Bandy.

During probity first, in 2000, Angela finished a watercolor of us soar all the guests at position museum restaurant. During that look up we also ate with Expenditure and his wife in distinction top floor restaurant of authority Twin Towers. Angela made unblended color drawing of the unite of us atop the towers as we filmed, which Wild discovered while researching the fabric for Angela’s Diaries—you see place in the film.

(Angela in all cases made watercolors of the seating we didn’t film or pic, thus filling in what was missing from our diaries.) Put forward September 12, 2001, Bill change us a dramatic email pointer what had happened to him on September 11.

The 2009 MoMA retrospective closes the American useless items of Chapter Two.

We unfasten the exhibition with our coating about Nazi toys, Ghiro Ghiro Tondo (2007). It also featured sequences from our WWI disc On the Heights All Silt Peace (1999), with Austrian lecturer Italian materials from Luca Comerio’s original negatives, and a place of the stray children be pleased about Soviet Russia from our husk Oh!

Man (2004). (Mary Judgment Bandy wanted to inaugurate grandeur new MoMA with Oh! Man, which she saw in City in 2004, but political rationale kept her from succeeding.) Upgrade the harsh winter of 2009 Bill and Gwen took more to their favorite Japanese edifice in New York. Looking as a consequence this footage was my chief time seeing these melancholy carbons copy of our two old friends.

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

There were many surprises along the way. I was constantly surprised by what came out of the videos go wool-gathering I was rediscovering. It was all inextricably linked to Angela’s diaries, which in turn fittingly recounted and explained the uncover and private events that exemplar in the filming.

A inquiring example: the footage in Moscow from August 1993, when surprise were searching for archival picture materials on Austrian WWI prisoners in Russia. To my wonder, I came across footage thud in the apartment we esoteric rented, in which a gathering of Azeri engineers reappear win dinner, singing a song magnetize the Don Cossacks at prestige top of their lungs.

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

To reiterate from Angela’s diaries: “A technician is waiting for us, bankruptcy is an ex-colonel, reservist, current psychologist with the Red Army: Yuri. Our landlady, Tatiana, as well sees to our meals.

She is from Baku, a Land literature teacher, and is again present. She supports Boris Yeltsin and is nostalgic about pre-revolutionary tsarist Russia. We will imitate dinners inviting lots of nameless guests over the next occasional days. In fact, the leading evening, we zoomed straight suffer the loss of the airport to a heavy table of guests from Capital .

. . We determination discover later that our priceless daily boarding fee is relieve this stream of dinner suite, the landlady’s friends. Our duplicate 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. Astonishment feel uneasy.

We want tip see as much of nobility archives as we can dowel leave as soon as conceivable. Yuri takes us to probity military archive, where we see a bullet hole in wreath Lada’s windscreen.”

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

He also plays blue blood the gentry part of “Silence” in Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight (1966), and in the same harvest acted in Michael Powell’s They’re a Weird Mob. In 1987, Chiari wanted to accompany penalty to Armenia, on a creepy journey which is recounted top-hole bit in Chapter One. That is the scene with high-mindedness smoke in the glass oppress wine.

It was surprising purport Ava to have to tipple a glass filled with dine and cigarette smoke. But Ava and Walter ended up getting a romance from 1954 imminent 1958. It was the origin of the notion of nobleness paparazzi, cf. La Dolce Vita (1960), by Fellini.

Can you background me a bit about birth Jerusalem footage in the especially half of the film?

Tail end spending much of the haziness detailing your travels in Ground, it seems like a open-mindedly political gesture to shift rant the Middle East.

This section keep to our 10-day diary in say publicly heart of the un-restrainable fall back and gradual disappearance of greatness Christians of the East naughty to tensions and war: godfearing tourism, pilgrimages, its changes (e.g.

absence of rich countries). Manifold had been traveling on socle for six months. Two astonishing in Angela’s diaries upset me: first, the trip to Jerusalem in 2007, where we were on Easter holiday to album the religious ceremonies of description Christians of the East. Patch there we shot a sincere amount of materials on Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians, and Coptic Conformist Ethiopians, and we had set ourselves by reading a assemblage of ancient and recent texts on the Crusades, while too collecting a lot of iconographic material—primitive images of Ottoman Jerusalem.

Angela’s diary of this animated film painfully revealed to me significance reasons we never completed birth film. The title of blue blood the gentry last section of Angela’s Diaries: Chapter Two is “Gothic Line,” which comes from a archives entry Angela wrote in 2017 that recounts the history asset her family on the advance line of the Second Terra War, when she was evenhanded a little girl.

This paragraph, which is read in position film by poet Lucrezia Lerro, is accompanied by a 10 meters long scroll of watercolors that collects all the smatter of these family memories bring in they relate to WWII. Distinction drawings and colors of greatness war are thus images bizarre by a little bambina who reconstructs the lost memory befit events.

The other upsetting thing events the initial scenes of leadership film, when Enrico Ghezzi, magnanimity critic who describes our follow in the first scene jurisdiction the film, which we field earlier, shows the physical self-annihilation and decomposition of some caustic material—scenes from our film From the Pole to the Equator.

Ten years after we feeling the film I opened dinky box of the original caustic flammable materials used for that film, which was about WWI, and I saw that nobility 35mm film was almost utterly decayed. We made a hide about it—a sort of statement on this discovery called Transparencies (1998). Jean-Luc Godard used varied of these parts, and extremely parts of the train string in From the Pole flesh out the Equator (without asking permission) in The Image Book (2018).

Since we began this correspondence live in January, a lot has altered in the world.

I’m guesswork if you can reflect uncomplicated bit on what a very great pandemic such as COVID-19 health mean for the future waning cinema? So much of Angela’s Diaries concerns community and concord amongst peers and fellow cinephiles. Do you think we throng together regain what’s been lost midst this pandemic?

It would just nice to be able fit in go back to the cycle of community and friendship 'tween peers and cinephiles described heavens Angela Diaries: Chapter Two. Lips the moment this is inconceivable with the global pandemic. Get something done the future of cinema, watchdog we moving toward the private spectator?

After all, most make public the film festivals are latterly streaming films for individual addressees in their homes. I about the advent of family celluloid, when in 1922 Charles Pathé marketed the very small 9.5 Pathé Baby projectors together unwavering a series of films, tale and documentaries, for the opulent bourgeoisie.

And then later hither was Stan Brakhage, who was shipping for a few ready some of his 8mm pictures, to those who asked assimilate them. He even managed tutorial make contact copies at home—another prophetic example. But I hankering we return to the habitual vision of shared experience skull collectivity. If, however, the omnipresent persists, one may have competent think of a new cinematographic vision, a new architecture grip the projected image.

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Jordan Cronk is unblended critic and programmer based return Los Angeles.

He runs Acropolis Cinema, a screening series transfer experimental and undistributed films, and task a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.