The Anti-Nanook

I mentioned the Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian retrospective at MoMA in an email. A couple of nights ago, I went to see the couple's best known film, Dal polo all'equatore [From Pole to Equator] (1986; 101 min.). According to the filmmakers and Jeffrey Skoller, who writes about the film in a very interesting essay in Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film, Dal polo is based on a film by Italian cinematographer (or, according to some, "documentary filmmaker") Luca Comerio, using travelogue footage he shot between 1899 and 1920. (Comerio was trying to get a job at the new institute for cinema set up by Mussolini; the film appears to have been a kind of demonstration of his breadth of knowledge of the art.)

Comerio's film makes use of many of the forms of non-fiction we've encountered already: not only safari and expedition footage, but actuality footage of various kinds and, at the very beginning, some white-knuckle images from moving trains and ice-breakers. ARL and YG re-printed the film, slowing sections of it down quite radically, and making other changes that focus the viewer's attention on the beauty and horror of Comerio's cinematography.

Quite a bit of the film falls into a category I will call "animal porn," by which I do not mean pictures of animals copulating, but rather images of wildlife that demonstrate how much of man's control and domination of nature is left out of most wildlife documentary, even (or especially) those films which purport to show us how animals "really are." (I am leaning here on the cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek, who describes the relation between human porn and narrative fiction film in an analogous way, in Looking Awry and elsewhere.) This material is both fascinating and somewhat difficult to watch. I highly recommend the film (playing again on Feb. 19) to anyone who wants to think about the afterlife of the nonfiction genres we've been studying, and the possibilities for their critical re-use by later filmmakers.