Our Analytical Camera

Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi​, Images of the Orient: Vandal Tourism (still), 2001.

On the occasion of The Analytical Camera, a screening at e-flux Screening Room on December 3 at 7pm featuring works by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi alongside Radu Jude (check for details here), we are publishing Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s 2017 text in which they articulate the technical and methodological foundations of their “analytical camera.” Central to their practice, as exemplified in their landmark film From the Pole to the Equator (1987), the duo has been reworking archival footage to examine and “resignify” the documentation of colonial and fascist violence. By slowing, reframing, and enhancing historical images, their practice exposes what such materials obscure and repress, offering a critical lens on the ideological narratives embedded within them.

***

We travel cataloguing and we catalogue travelling, through a cinema we film anew. Our original sources are reclaimed from documentary archives, including the private collection of Luca Comerio (1876–1940), a pioneer of documentary cinema.1

The construction of an analytical camera lets us get close to, even to enter deep within each individual frame. We have control over the speed of the film, the details, the color. We can freeze and reproduce the archive material in unusual ways. This is how we undertake our cataloguing: of all the images we find and possess, we archive those which have caused the strongest emotions in us. Using the old to create the new, bringing hidden significance out of the past, turning original meanings upside-down. End-of-millennium memories of actions and ideologies.

Around From the Pole to the Equator

The look of a studio.

In the spring of 1982, we found out about Luca Comerio’s last laboratory in Milan. It was in the basement of a small building on the outskirts of the city, towards the motorway. The studio had a nineteenth-century look. The Prevost camera with which Comerio, initially the only operator, filmed in the First World War was set upright on a wooden titler. The contact printer, also made of wood, was like a little cupboard with two black fabric curtains at the bottom, concealing the two baskets which held the actual film. In the camera, the film was drawn by a single wheel with eight sprockets. The films were kept on a wooden table with bakelite holders. The studio was being demolished. With no prospects for the future, the owner (and only worker) had already dismantled and destroyed the Lumière printer with a hammer. Out of desperation. Various rusty bits and pieces were placed in buckets outside in the courtyard, exposed to the rain, where the wooden developing frames were also stacked. Inside, there were other objects, filmmaking mechanisms on pedestals covered with heavy black canvases and tied up with rope. The inflammable documentary films were kept in a cellar. They had been earmarked for burning. We looked at a few frames from a piece of footage. We saw them still, by hand, back-lit on the opaque glass on the table. A toned and painted sailing boat: the sky blue, the sea pink.

We weren’t going to see more if we couldn’t have everything.

We could never have made From the Pole to the Equator without having physical and mental possession over the material. This was material we had been collecting for years, to build, up our own “archives of archives,” closely related to our work on film as a form of art. For a transposition of archives into non-traditional forms. Using old to create new. A personal study of the given material, of what it hides, in the details of its 18x24mm frames and its original film speed. For a new understanding of a collective memory captured in documentary material. Luca Comerio died in a state of amnesia in 1940. The materials in his archives, the collection of footage made by him and other early operators, was also in a state of amnesia: chemical, mold[ed], the physical degeneration of the emulsion. A film-panorama of the world before the Great War. From the Pole to the Equator is the new form, the new meaning of the footage of this primitive archive. A story of travel, of exploration, of conquest, cultural rape, religious and military imposition, exotic and colonial adventure.

The Analytical Camera

We constructed an analytical camera, consisting of two elements, for our film. The 35mm original travels vertically in the first one. It accepts Lumière sprocket holes as well as films with various widths and various degrees of decay of the support and of the emulsion, right down to loss of the frame line and even total cancellation. Movement is applied manually using a crank: this is due to the precarious state of the sprocket holes, and the continual fire hazard posed by the inflammable material. The jaw consists of two moving teeth instead of four. Photographic lamps are used with the temperature varied by a rheostat. This first part of the camera was made by transforming a contact printer. The second, suspended, part is aligned with the first, from which it takes the image in transparency. The camera has the characteristics of a microscope, more photographic than cinematographic: closer to [Edweard] Muybridge and [Étienne-Jules] Marey than to the Lumières, one might say. At least 347,000 frames were shot [in this way] for From the Pole to the Equator. The camera is equipped with mechanisms for lateral, longitudinal, and angular sliding in all directions. It can respect the entire frame, its original structure, and its velocity of appearance in the philological sense. Or it can penetrate deep into the photograph to observe the details, at the edges of the picture, in the uncontrolled areas of the viewfinder. The camera can respect the original toning or hand-coloring of the frame, but it can also paint vast areas of the film if required. The film speed depends on the original speed, always different for every piece of footage, as well as on the emphasis that is to be given. Generally speaking, the value of the slow motion is 3–4 per frame. The value increases in the more elusive parts, in what happens in a single frame or fragment of footage. The camera works within the sequence, sometimes breaking it down into a number of separate sequences. It compares the original repertoire to highlight the details. Using the techniques first experimented with by Mikhail Kaufmann in 1928, it travels through both time and space.