Monday, November 20, 2017

From the Pole to the Equator (1987)

directed by Yervant Gianikian + Angela Ricci Lucchi
Italy
98 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Most of the time when I talk about found-footage movies, I'm talking about horror movies like The Blair Witch Project, [REC], or Cloverfield that claim their contents were "found" by somebody else in the aftermath of some terrifying event, usually on a battered camcorder or cell phone. But the term was used earlier to describe a particular kind of experimental film that re-assembles old, degraded film stock to form a narrative entirely different from that which the material originally depicted. The two directors of From the Pole to the Equator are quite prolific in this format, while some other notable names are Peter Delpeut, Pere Portabella, and individual films such as Mother Dao the Turtlelike.

Often, the goal of these films is to make explicit undertones that were never intended to come to light in the original materials. These films can be overtly political and I would go so far as to say that the format has its origins in radical leftist politics. With From the Pole to the Equator, the goal is to dismantle and examine the colonial gaze and the nature of tourism. The footage it employs has a heavy focus on early ethnographic work, the kind that was mostly intended to use populations of distant parts of the globe as showpieces to bolster the intellectualism of high-class white academics.

In the beginning, all we see is a series of trains, and then a montage of polar explorers shamelessly butchering various animals. The recontextualizing of these expeditions in which polar bears, walruses, seals, and other large game were shot puts human beings in a threatening light, and dehumanizes them to a great extent- the animals become helpless, the humans become strange figures with branchlike limbs and round heads who advance mercilessly to employ their killing machines against the wildlife. With no expressions they use their machines to trap the bears, machines to kill the bears, machines to haul the bears onto their sea-faring machines after they've killed them.

The footage isn't just presented without alteration, it's sped up, slowed down, and replayed in order to highlight each intricate detail in which the colonial gaze can be seen reflected. A woman shrouded in layers of clothing meant to shade her unacclimated skin slowly, very slowly, teaches a class of young children somewhere in Africa how to cross themselves, clasp their hands in prayer, raise their arms above their heads. Behind the camera, a phantom voice can almost be heard encouraging its subjects to perform whatever action they want to capture. Repurposing these travelogues and exposing the racism and othering inherent in them shakes out the pockets of these disintegrating nitrate films to give them one last chance to say their piece before becoming lost to time.

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