Friday, September 07, 2018

Out of Competetion - La Biennale di Venezia - Film Festival – I Diari di Angela / Noi Due Cineastri - Yervant Gianikian

 
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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