Aporias of Planetary Domination. From the Pole to the Equator by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi.

The essay places a pivotal film of contemporary experimental cinema, "From the Pole to the Equator", by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, within a vast system of visual relationships. From the archaeological dimension of the sequences recovered from the archives of the pioneer Luca Comerio to the film's ability to anticipate many subsequent trends in found footage cinema, the essay investigates a series of questions on the connection between cinema, history and visual culture: the evidentiary utility of documentary images, the anthropological components of the filmic gaze, the post-colonial horizons in the process of resemantizing images. By crossing various research methodologies, the essay highlights how the images recovered and reworked by the authors thanks to the "analytical camera" procedure are able not only to illustrate the system of values of the period - the nationalist rhetoric, the colonialist one, the superiority of man over nature - but to explode with new meanings thanks to the creative force of the intervention of Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi.