Barbaric Land

"Every era has its fascism." is the latest film in the militant oeuvre of artist couple Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi. It is a journey through history aimed at gaining a better understanding of our own era. They unearthed a wealth of material – from private archives and collections belonging to anonymous individuals – relating to Italian imperialism in the 1920s and 1930s. We see Mussolini visiting Libya, military parades in Italian cities, and Italian incursions into "primitive and barbaric" Ethiopia. A European gets a young African woman to display her breasts for the camera. There are shriveled corpses of people and cattle, all victims of a gas attack during the colonial war. Gianikian and Ricci-Lucchi have combined painful, horrific and disturbing images to evoke a hallucinatory trip in which the often timeworn photos and film excerpts are slowed, colored and re-photographed, and accompanied by music or half-spoken, half-sung commentary. By forcing our attention onto the material aspect of the photographic and cinematic image, the directors have raised questions about its role. Is it simply a witness, or an accomplice, or is it an instrument serving racism, demagoguery, the lust for power and the glorification of violence?