Photograph
courtesy – La Biennale di Venezia
Out
of Competetion - La Biennale di Venezia - Film Festival
I Diari di Angela / Noi Due Cineastri – Yervant Gianikian
Every day of her life, Angela kept a diary, filled with words
and drawings, in which she recorded public and private matters, meetings,
things she had read, everything. Including the account of two trips to Russia (1989-90). The period of the
collapse of the USSR. A diary that
she had been keeping in small Chinese notebooks, since before Dal
Polo all’Equatore (1986), on our uninterrupted work on the violence
of the 20th century. From our tours in the United
States with the “scented films” of the late seventies to the Anthology Film Archive of New York and the Berkeley Pacific Film Archive... Now I reread these diaries and see
again the film-diary of all those years. I am alone now, after many years of
life and artistic work together. I took her up into the Eastern Alps, which she loved and where we used to walk together.
Angela comes back to life for me in the handwritten words, jotted down with a
light touch, that accompanied her drawings, her watercolors, rolls of paper
stretching for tens of meters. I look at our private, forgotten films.
Recordings that lie behind our work of reinterpreting the documentary film
archives and giving them new meaning. Everyday life, made up of simple things,
the people we felt close to who accompanied us on our journeys, our research in
the world of stock footage, a trip to Soviet
Armenia with the actor Walter Chiari.
Testimonies that we gathered over the course of time.
Director. Yervant Gianikian, Angela
Ricci Lucchi.
Photograph
courtesy – La Biennale di Venezia
“This
is my memory of Angela, of our life. I reread these notebooks and discover
others I didn’t know about. New elements in her last writings and in the
drawings: on the Gothic Line as a little girl, on the “front line” in the World
War II. Art school with Oskar Kokoschka in Austria. The pages on him. Dresden.
South Tyrol, the house where Mahler composed The Song of the Earth, his love of
Alma Mahler, the making of the doll with her features, the artist’s obsession.
Angela’s
“crazy children” in the special school who made her give up art for a civil
engagement that lasted for years, in order to help them. Only to return with
new strength to the work of art we were creating together. One last private
roll contains the whole of her life as a child, in the family, in public. My
effort. Reexamining all the notebooks of Angela’s infinite Diary and the
backward look of our private films, which accompanied our research. My
desperate attempt to bring her back to my side, to bring her back to life, the
continuation of our work as goal, as mission, through her notebooks and
drawings, a sort of map for action in the present, containing its guiding
principles and envisaging its continuation. Angela and I have prepared new and
important projects to carry out. The promise, the oath, to continue the work.”
Yervant Gianikian
Director’s Statement
Photograph
courtesy – La Biennale di Venezia
Contessanally – a moving
tribute celebrating the life and art of the director’s late partner in life and
in at.
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