Image and Gesture: In Pursuit of the WWI Filmic Archive

Abstract

Between 1995 and 2004 Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi directed three films on World War I using a self-crafted method they called the “analytical camera”, which combined archival work and documentary research. Halfway between photography and film, these documentaries explore war images from a perspective that allows the filmmakers to construct a visual history of war. The main feature of the analytical camera is montage. From Walter Benjamin’s approach, montage is also the main task of historians, being a means for filmmakers to examine how historical meaning is configured in archives and hegemonic stories. Following Giorgio Agamben’s perspective, and also certain concepts proposed by Aby Warburg, this article intends to look behind the strategy of montage, that is, to explore the relationship between the movements of the image and its survival, in order to compose what we could call “gesture-images” of war. It should thereby be possible to trace the poietic gesture that brings the filmmakers into the sphere of politics, as Agamben suggested in his first book, The Man without Content (1970). This article explores the uses of military archives, letters and soldiers’ testimonies in the films Priggionieri della Guerra (1995), Su tutte le vete è pace (1998) and Oh! Uomo (2004). I will particularly focus on the last of the three, where the directors not only conclude the trilogy but also seem to cinematically anticipate the historical conflagrations to come.