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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
A Cartography of Gestures. Notes About an Installation (Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi, La marcia dell'uomo)
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Thematic issue / Section thématique
2006-10-01
2023-10-06
2006-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Christa Blümlinger
2006/10/01
Université de Paris III
2036-461X
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A Cartography of Gestures. Notes About an Installation (Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi, La marcia dell'uomo)
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A CARTOGRAPHY OF GESTURES
NOTES ABOUT AN INSTALLATION: LA MARCIA DELL'UOMO
(Y. GIANIKIAN, A. RICCI LUCCHI, 2001)
Christa Blümlinger, Université de Paris III




  The very title of Yervant Gianikian's and Angela Ricci Lucchi's installation - La mar-
cia dell'uomo (2001) - seems to favour one of its three series of images from archival
footage above the others: an ensemble of chronophotographic film strips that is pre
sented here under the heading Homme nègre, marche. The three-part projection there
fore takes as its starting point a problem of photographic representation that can be
considered not only in terms of perceptual theory and epistemology but also of the
history of technology. Employing the cinematographic technique of varying film
speeds, to the point of bringing the film to an apparent standstill, Yervant Gianikian
and Angela Ricci Lucchi explore the phenomenon of the photographic snapshot as
encountered at the end of the Igth century. According to Michel Frizot, this involves on
the one hand the iconography of the pose (which has its origins in visual art) being
replaced by a non-conventional, but for that a "truer" recording of movement, one that
is paradoxically capable of capturing the gesture in a clearly defined manner, "as if
immobilized", I and on the other hand a scientific tool with which to analyze a physio
logical question, making it possible to find new answers by breaking down a movemen
into a succession of distinct elements.
 In Etienne-Jules Mary's Station physiologique, ethnographers and natural scientists?
took sequential photographs of Africans who were brought in from the Universal
Expositions and other similar venues (Fig. I); the shots were taken in analogue fashion
to those of Europeans marching, according to a principle of equality derived
scientific principle of comparison: namely in front of a light rather than a dark back
ground, but otherwise in the same staged setting. Men, women and children stride past
the camera at a suitable distance, crossing its field of view. They all cover the same dis-
tance, measured by a chronometer that is occasionally visible in the picture. Each per
son's individual walking speed results in a different number of instant photographs,
and if these images are animated, the filmic "shot" has a correspondingly varied dura-
tion. Although in Gianikian/Ricci Lucchi's analytical treatment of the archival materi
al these single frames are animated to produce moving images, the use of freeze frames
means that they nevertheless remain perceptible as an original sequence of sti
tinct elements. Increased modulation of the number of single frames duplicated for a
freeze frame leads to a variability of the viewing experience, in particular through rep
etition. In this way, Gianikian/Ricci Lucchi present the black African children stepping
out of line in longer stilled film images, and similarly emphasize through the enlarge
ment of the image area a certain Barthesian punctum - incisive moments and touching
details (Fig, ). By means of differentiated repetition, La marcia dell'uomo accentuates
gestures, procedures and looks. This not only highlights the realm outside the current
                                                                      A CARTOGRAPHY OF GESTURES




                Fig. I - Etienne-Jules Marey, Station physiologique


field of vision, it also creates an imaginary dimension that points beyond the referen-
tiality of the depicted gesture.
   The recycled chronophotographic film footage is presented as a loop on the first of
three relatively large screens that have been installed close behind one another. The
other two series of images, also consisting of archival footage, are to be read in compar-
ison with Mary's shots. The first involves images of Africa filmed by European trav-
ellers in search of a "foreign" experience. Like Mary's series, however, neither the expe-
dition footage from 1910 nor the Standard 8 private footage shot in 1960 is shown at
normal running speed. In the installation they are subjected to the same analytical
interruption in the form of distinct yet continuous "stoppages" of varying duration.
The differentiated single frame work of Gianikian/Ricci Lucchi makes particular

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CHRISTA BLÜMLINGER




              Fig. 2 - First screen (1985)


aspects stand out that would not be as visible if shown at a realistic film speed. For the
vlewer, the film temporality is split; it oscillates between past recording and present
viewing, the result not only of being slowed down or brought to a standstill but also of
enlargement, colour tinting and repetition. Traces of decay in the original material
become apparent: its resolution, light and contrasts display extreme heterogeneity.
   In the re edited version of the early film material, the visit by two white safari hunters
to a West African hut village shows itself to be an asymmetrical circulation of attributes
and attitudes: If, as would be guests, the white visitors sit on the ground with the black
people, the gesture exposes their attempt to disguise a feeling of being out of place. And
if the colonized black people sit at the table wearing top hats and petticoats, their "inap.
propriate" dress reveals a game of subversion (Fig. 3). At the end of this second image
sequence, a filmlc configuration of the point of view is elaborated as a hierarchical rela.
tonship between safari hunt and trophy collecting, white and black, the gesture of con-
quest and of subjugation. Looped as an installation and in a reworked format, however,
this configuration is not to be regarded as a fixed convention but instead as a possibili
                                                                A CARTOGRAPHY OF GESTURES




                      Fig. 4 - Third screen (1960)

ty of what is past. Finally, in the third image, which has been extremely alienated by
means of deep violet colour tinting, sexual difference as a component of a postcolonial
dispositif of power is emphasized by transforming a holiday film from the era of mass
tourism. A Western voyeur, wearing dark glasses to avoid being seen watching, looks
on while half-naked black women dance around him for money (Fig. 4). Here, too, the
gaze and gestures are dissected by freezing, enlarging and repeating the shot.
  With their precise selection of film footage, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi at the same
time propose an archaeological view of "ethnographic" film collections in the broadest
sense: a new cartography of these human geographies. As far as the archaeological view
is concerned, Gianikian's rereading of the chronophotographic gait not only traces an
iconographic or ethnographic path in all its ambivalent referentiality, but also the
archaeology of a dispositif in which the images are inscribed: it is a well-known fact
that in carrying out his physiological motion studies Etienne-Jules Mary was less inter-
ested in the illusion of reproduction than in the analysis of a process. As his assistant
Lucien Bull reports, Mary believed that "the projection did not allow him to discover
more than the attentive analysis of a print" 3 In the context of this installation, Marey's
paradoxical material is treated entirely in the sense of his own invention, in other
words not with the illusionistic logic of the Lumière Cinématographe, but rather in a
very specific mode of visibility (between immobility and variable mobility) that is clos-
er to pre-cinematographic viewing possibilities such as the Zootrope. It becomes appar-
ent that this experimental arrangement is based upon a scientific view that regards the
physiological nature of the human gait as paradigmatic for the progression of the
mechanism of the apparatus, following a pattern of "displacement/standstill/dis
ment/standstill".4
  Gianikian's approach is also archaeological in the sense that it is interested in the
body and circulation of the films within and beyond the archives, not simply in terms
of their representative content. In line with Foucault, one could say (particularly with
regard to the two other films that make up the installation - the expedition film from
I910 and the private film material from 196) that in the reuse of the material a stag.
nating language serves as a basis of a circulating language, one which also takes int
account the possible field of the films' original use. The progressive arrangement of the
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     CHRISTA BLUMLINGER




     three screens plays a not insignificant part in this. It should be understood not on
     a chronological arrangement (I895-1910-196), but also and above all as an ep
     logical comparison of different functions of photographic and filmic recordings of
     "Other"*. Between Marey's analysis of a physiological difference, the gesture of colonial
 exoticism from the Comerio Collection and the attitude of the private film-maker (as
 that of the postcolonial, consumption-oriented mass tourist) lie the various *life.
 worlds" and experiential horizons of Western thinking that determine the figuration of
 «Black African" gestures and locomotion respectively.
      The installation's chosen dispositif does not, therefore, produce a genealogy of
 ethnography, nor is it a history of nomads from the point of view of the sedentary pop
 ulation. The visitor wandering between the screens does not encounter a linear arrange
 ment but rather something that could be termed a new cartography of filmic gestures
 and movements as described above. This could also be defined with the concept of the
 thizome in Deleuze/Guattari's sense of the term, as a non-hierarchical form that is
 defined solely by a circulation of states: "What is at question in the rhizome is a relation
 to sexuality - but also to the animal, the vegetal," they write in Mille plateaux, "|-] All
 manner of becomings'"."5 Continuing with the Deleuzian paired concepts of the map
 and the tracing, one could say that here the reuse of the archive material leads back
 from the supposed competence of the photographic or cinematographic "trac
 world to a performance of the cartography which permits the study of the unconscious,
 the generation of new propositions and desires. La marcia dell'uomo (Marcia d
 quista) deals with a deterritorialization of specific forms of perceiving the world, organ.
 izing expeditions of discovery and setting up archives. This is in line
 tendency to criticize the standardizing representation of the history of mankind in the
 Hegelian tradition and to seriously question the definition of identity from a Western
 perspective. Of course the history of ethnography (even in the broadest sense, as the
 participatory and reflexive observation of a culture) can by no means be regarded as
 homogeneous. Its ambiguity is underlined by cultural theorist James Clifford:
  "Ethnography, a hybrid activity, thus appears as writing, as collecting, as modernist col
 lage, as imperial power, as subversive critique.* Gianikian/Ricci Lucchi take precisely
 this ambiguity into account when creating new links between all kinds of ethnograph-
 ic traces. The work of Gianikian's "analytical camera", whose specific modulation of
 standstill and movement, of framing and interconnection proceeds in the manner of a
 rhizome, as described by Deleuze/Guattari: "By variation, expansion, conquest, capture,
 offshoots." This cartography of photographic and filmic gestures considers its own
 variability in terms of the form of modulation, and consequently avoids a Manichaistic
 presentation of ethnographic-photographic-cinematographic positions.

                                                (Translated from German by Jacqueline Todd)



 1 On the snapshot shutter Etienne-Jules Marey writes: "[..] Un temps de pose assez bref pour
       que les objets en mouvement soient représentés dans l'épreuve avec des contours aussi nets
       que s'ils eussent été immobiles". Cf. E.-J. Marey, Le Mouvement (Paris: Masson, 1894), P. I4,
       quoted from M. Frizot, "Comment on marche. De l'exactitude dans l'instant," La Revue du
       Musée d'Orsay, no. 4 (Spring 1997), p. 78.

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                                                                     A CARTOGRAPHY OF GESTURES



2 In 1898 the ethnographer Felix Regnault published a study on the human gait, for which
   Etienne- Jules Mary wrote a foreword, based among other things upon chronophotographic
   studies of the gait of African people; cf. F. Regnault, A.-C.-O. De Raoul, Comment on Marche.
   Des divers modes de progression, de la supériorité du mode en flexion (Paris: Charles-
   Lavauzelle, 1898). On this subject see also M. Frizot, "Comment a Marche. L'algorithme ciné-
   matographique," Cinemathèque, no. 15 (Spring 1999), pp. 15-27. Marta Braun brings togeth-
   er an ensemble on human locomotion from the Station physiologique (compiled at a later
   date) under the following heading: "African village of the universal exposition I900." See M.
   Braun, Picturing Time. The Work of Etienne-Jules Mary 1830-1904 (Chicago: University of
    Chicago Press, 1992), Pp. 380-81.
3 L. Bull "Quelques Souvenirs personnels de mon maître E.-J. Marey," Bulletin de l'AFITEC, hors
   série (I954), pp. 3-7, quoted from M. Frizot, "Les Reliques en roulaux", in D. Paini (ed.), La
   Persistance des images. Tirages, sauvegardes et restaurations dans la collection films de la
    Cinémathèque Française (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 1996), p. 21. Long believed lost,
    Mary's chronophotographic films - whose gomm format allows higher photographic reso-
    lution than the cinematographic films available at the time - were rediscovered in the 198os
    and later restored onto 35mm film by the Cinémathèque Française.
 4 On this principle in the work of Regnault and Marey see M. Frizot, "Comment a Marche" ,op.
    cit., p. 21.
 5 G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis:
     University of Minnesota Press, I987), p. 21.
6 J. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art
     (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), P. 13.
 7 G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, op. cit., P. 21.




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