Italian filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi have over the past 25 years proven themselves to be masters of the assemblage of found footage film, returning over and over again to images from the first decades of the 20th century, with a special attention to images of war and colonialism. Since their visit to the HFA five years ago, the duo has released a major new work: Pays barbare (“Barbaric Land”), a montage of images from Mussolini’s brutal occupation of Ethiopia in the mid-1930s. This work is paired with an earlier film that also wrings from amateur footage a jaundiced look at cinema’s complicity with the colonial gaze.

Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s method consists of poring over these images, studying the interactions among the onscreen figures and between these figures and the camera, looking for telling glances and revealing gestures, which are then slowed down and isolated.

Both films feature soundtracks composed by famed Italian singer-songwriter and ethnomusicologist Giovanna Marini, who sings texts by Henri Michaux and Mircea Eliade with a spare piano accompaniment.— David Pendleton