Shadows, Specters, and Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film – From the Pole to the Equator
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | December 8, 2005
Thursday, December 8, 2005, 6pm | Jeffrey Skoller in person!
The last part of a trio of screenings related to the release of the Department of Film, Video and New Media’s Jeffrey Skoller’s book Shadows, Specters, and Shards: Making History in Avant-garde Film. The Flow of Blood and Life From the Pole to the Equator is a monumentally unique documentary. Drawing on the film archives of pioneer documentary filmmaker Luca Comerio (1874-1940), Italian filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi use turn-of-the-century footage from regions that were then fabulously exotic – the Arctic, India, Africa and less remote but equally striking settings in the Dolomites and the Caucasus – and assembled it at a sleepwalker’s pace, with changeable color tints and a humming electronic score. The result offers haunting glimpses of a world in the process of being conquered. There’s no moralizing commentary to point up the contradictions that inevitably arise here—each viewer is left to dream his/her way through a phantasmagoria that extends the definition of Empire—building to the act of photography itself (Janet Maslin). 1987, Angela Ricci Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian, Germany/Italy/West Germany, 96 min, 16mm.
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Conversations at the Edge is a weekly series of screenings, performances, and talks by groundbreaking media artists.
CATE is organized by SAIC's Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and SAIC's Video Data Bank.
Programs take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State / Chicago, IL / 312.846.2600), unless otherwise noted.
