Yervant Gianikian (1942) and Angela Ricci Lucchi (1942–2018) are a pioneering Italian filmmaker duo whose collaborative work over more than four decades made a unique imprint on avant-garde and experimental cinema.
Gianikian studied architecture in Venice before turning to film in the mid-1970s. Ricci Lucchi was a painter who had studied with Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg before moving to Milan—where she met Gianikian in 1974—and began a lifelong artistic and personal partnership.
From the 1970s onward, they developed a distinctive cinematic language that transformed found and archival footage into deeply reflective works of historical and poetic inquiry. They devoted themselves to recovering and reworking historical film materials—ranging from early cinema footage to documentary records of war, upheaval and colonial encounter.
Central to their practice was the creation of an “analytical camera”—a handcrafted method of re-filming, slowing, recoloring, and reframing images to reveal hidden layers of meaning in archival material. Through this approach, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s work exposed the latent politics of cinematic images, interrogating themes such as war, violence, displacement and power in the twentieth century.
Over the course of their career, they produced numerous influential films including Dal polo all’equatore (1986), Prigionieri della guerra (1995), Su tutte le vette è pace (1999), Oh! Uomo (2004), and Pays Barbare (2013), as well as the personal I diari di Angela – Noi due cineasti (2018), a homage to Ricci Lucchi’s life and artistic partnership with Gianikian.
Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s work has been shown and celebrated internationally in major museums and festivals—including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Centre Pompidou and Jeu de Paume in Paris, Tate Modern in London, and the Venice Biennale, where they were awarded a Golden Lion in 2015.
Their films are known for blending historical critique and poetic intensity, transforming traces of the past into evocative confrontations with memory, violence, and the politics of representation.
Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi @DAI:
Roaming Assembly#33 ~ The Script That Passes Through Here ~ a field of unresolved presence
