Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi's Animali Criminali

Abstract

Since their 1986 feature, Dal Polo all'Equatore/From the Pole to the Equator, Milanese duo Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi have made works rephotographing, reframing, tinting and re-editing archival material, altering the speed of the film and adding carefully composed soundtracks. Their seven-minute short, Animali Criminali/Criminal Animals (1994), is a powerful example of their methods. A concise and tightly conceived piece consisting of ten segments of animal combat, the film suggests some complex connections between the themes of orchestrated violence, animals and the cinema. While animals already appear at pivotal moments in Dal Polo, Animali Criminali – whose images were gleaned from the same archival source – is made up exclusively of animal footage.1Dal Polo is compiled from films of early European explorers' expeditions. It harks back to the three registers of early cinema that established animals' appearance in and as moving images: the scientific, the wild and the sensational.2 These codes continue to inform the visuality of the cinematic animal in current commercial and experimental moving image work. Animali Criminali belongs to the middle period of Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's oeuvre, following the ‘scented’ films of the 1970s and the ‘recycled’ films of the 1980s. But their essayistic body of work as a whole coheres around the themes of organized colonial violence, war, and what one might call the illustrious spirit of fascism, from the 1920s to the present day.3