From the Pole to the Equator
(Dal polo all’equator)
Screening on Film
$10 Special Event Tickets
Italy, 1986, 16mm, color, 101 min.
From the Pole to the Equator is the name given to a documentary compiled in the late 1920s by filmmaker Luca Comerio, which drew on footage from around the globe to celebrate the vitality and achievements of European colonialism – most of all Italian fascism. Using this material, as well as other footage shot or collected by Comerio, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi refashioned Comerio’s work in order to tease out the ideology written upon –and between–every image. The fact that so much of the film had begun to decay gives it a layer of abstraction and serves as a comment on the contingent nature of the images and their ideology and, in Gianikian’s words, “on the violence of colonialism as it plays itself out in different situations and spheres.”