TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s Analytical Camera, by Miriam DeRosa

Resulting from the filmmakers’ artisanal effort, the analytical camera is a special tool built at the beginning of the 1980s in order to complete the procedure of re-filming the footage belonging to and collected by Italian cinema pioneer Luca Comerio, which the artists found in 1981 in a lab in Milan, Italy. Comprised of documentaries, scientific materials, ethnographic and travel films, as well as films from the WWI, this archive was of crucial importance for the authors and for the mise au point/optimisation of the analytical camera: on it, is based Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s famous feature length From the Pole to the Equator (Dal Polo all’Equatore, 1987). The film is not simply a preserved version of Comerio’s original film with the same name, but rather a personal reading based on the assemblage, re-filming, and intervention on the sequence selection, temporal scale and the chromatic palette of the original. This is precisely what the analytical camera is ultimately designed for: allowing for a new reading of old filmic materials to “re-signify” them, and to create a relation bridging the past they are inspired by, the present they enter in the form of a new film, and the future they let envisaging. Before representing a unique mechanical object then, the analytical camera is a philosophical object – a machine à penser: it elicits new meanings developed from the archival materials, it places them within the authors’ ethical framework and weaves a new temporal flow combining the time of History with that of the authors’ experience, which is destined to address and engage the spectators.

The filmmakers conceive the analytical camera in a highly ethical fashion, as its function is ideally that of contrasting the fast-paced rhythm characterizing much of the materials dating back to the fascist period, which were notably inspired by Futurism and its praise of machines, progress and speed. The analytical camera intervenes on the film breaking such speed and allowing for a deeper, closer, more pondered look. Because of the analogy between the attraction for speed typical of the Italian cultural context of the early twentieth century and the immediacy characterizing global digital media, the critical empowerment enabled by the analytical camera is a feature the artists have often underlined as being key for our age, thereby coupling the historical value of their yield and the symbolic meaningfulness it has nowadays.

If in Dal Polo the artistic view and the aesthetics deriving from it finds an exemplary shape, the interest and the urge to approach archival footage manipulating its technical features emerges way earlier. In 1978 the authors found some archival materials in Pathé Baby format, measuring 9.5 mm of width, which according to them was impossible to accommodate on a standard editing table.^[4] After initially scrutinizing it with a magnifying glass, a first version of the analytical camera was built as a pragmatic response to the necessity to work on this format, eventually creating Catalogue 9.5 – Karagöez (1981), an early experiment which has been defined as one of their “first major work of ‘recycled cinema’.”^[5] In this film, and increasingly so as the production grows over time, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi slowed down the pace of the film, to the point that the gaze of the spectators can penetrate through the grains of the stock. The frames are repeated, their temporal length exacerbated in order to allow the eyes to enter them and browse therein. This is possible because the analytical camera is in fact composed by two cameras – the first running vertically where films of various formats are accommodated; this has a claw that stabilizes the film strip while it rolls thanks to a handle which runs manually. On the speed of the handle depends that of the film. The second camera is employed more as a microscope and it is placed in line with the former; it works almost in a photographical manner and has the function of absorbing the image deriving from the first camera via rear-projection.

The mechanic of the analytical camera has been the subject of many scholarly inquiries but the filmmakers have never circulated any image of it. The descriptions currently available are based on a seminal text Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi devoted to their practice^[6] and on several fragmented details gathered in numerous interviews.