Milan-based filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi are renowned for their accomplished work with archival footage derived principally from the 1910s and 1920s. Thoughtfully juxtaposing images through editing, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi also invariably re-photograph their material, adjusting the film's speed, adding tinted color and spare soundtracks, and reframing the image to focus on key details. Such meticulous manipulation encourages spectators to read the selected footage, instead of simply watching it, so as to consider not only what the images mean, but how. Much of the work is explicitly political, and grounded in the idea of the cinematic apparatus as a detached observer of modernity's vast upheavals: Colonialism, World War One, statelessness. To what extent, the films ask, is this dispassionate gaze able to critique modernity, and to what extent is it complicit in the upheavals, or at least complacent?

Such questions about the function and resonance of the cinematic image are given particular force by the physical decay of the aging footage preferred by Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi. Often foregrounding the incomplete or distorted parts of the image, the filmmakers point to the contrast between the apparently implacable gaze of the camera and the vulnerability of its material support, a disparity that, in turn, reveals the gap between the compulsive force of political power and ideology on the one hand, and the bodies of the workers, soldiers and colonized submitted to it, on the other. The seeming imperviousness of the cinematic apparatus and the ideologies that deploy it—colonialist powers, authoritarian states—all depend nevertheless on a mutable material base, and on the contingencies of history.

The spare and intense films of Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi wring both irony and a strange, mournful beauty from the bodies on display in the images they select, bearing witness to the ravages of time and the destructive power of the European nations and their armies.