From the Pole to the Equator

To watch ‘’From the Pole to the Equator’’ is to feel that one has seen a ghost – many ghosts, human and animal, from places all over the globe. The spectral quality of this documentary is overwhelming. Two Italian film makers, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, have drawn upon turn-of-the-century film from regions that were then fabulously exotic – the Arctic, India, Africa and less remote but equally striking settings in the Dolomites and the Caucasus – and assembled it at a sleepwalker’s pace, with changeable color tints and a humming electronic score.

To watch ‘’From the Pole to the Equator’’ is to feel that one has seen a ghost – many ghosts, human and animal, from places all over the globe. The spectral quality of this documentary is overwhelming. Two Italian film makers, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, have drawn upon turn-of-the-century film from regions that were then fabulously exotic – the Arctic, India, Africa and less remote but equally striking settings in the Dolomites and the Caucasus – and assembled it at a sleepwalker’s pace, with changeable color tints and a humming electronic score. The result offers haunting glimpses of a world in the process of being conquered.

‘’From the Pole to the Equator,’’ which opens today at the Film Forum 1, draws upon the film archives of Luca Comerio (1874-1940), a pioneer of documentary film making who traveled widely and often recorded the interaction of people and animals; indeed, the abundant animal footage here is the contemporary film makers’ most chilling material.

The killing of a polar bear by Arctic explorers is recorded in elaborate detail (the score, by Keith Ullrich and Charles Anderson, makes such events especially chilling). And later on, African tribesmen gather around a felled rhinoceros to remove its horns as a trophy for visiting white hunters. The animal’s blood flowing in slow motion is incomparably eerie, as are other scenes in which captured or killed animals are offered up for the camera to examine. Surely Mr. Comerio had his own keen sense of the brutal effects wrought by European visitors in the areas he filmed, and Mr. Gianikian and Miss Ricci Lucchi heighten it even further. Their film ends with a cozy family scene of a well-dressed couple – we know nothing more about them, since there is no narration – playfully letting dogs have their way with a captive rabbit.

The archival footage used here also captures the quotidian life of far-flung regions, and ‘’From the Pole to the Equator’’ gives this a dreamlike quality: uniformed African children being taught to make the sign of the cross, European women peering at a train going by, white-suited Indians walking a broad, shady avenue. The slow, sleepy quality of these images, only a shade more mobile than still photography, freezes them in the viewer’s memory. The smallest, most ordinary gestures become indelible, like the sight of one Indian child grooming the hair of another. The first girl stares at the camera with the look of wonder, the self-consciousness and the trace of apprehension that seemed to greet Mr. Comerio in every setting.

Mr. Gianikian and Miss Ricci Lucchi create a subtle and disturbing momentum as they coax their film toward its concluding images of soldiers in combat. Some of these scenes are presented as tinted negatives, so scores of pale pink phantoms clamber over magenta hillsides on their way to destruction. This technique is as effective as it is unusual, and it creates a one-of-a-kind documentary of rare, insinuating power. THE FLOW OF BLOOD AND LIFE FROM THE POLE TO THE EQUATOR, directed by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi; music by Keith Ullrich and Charles Anderson; co-produced by the film makers and ZDF-TV (West Germany); distributed by Museum of Modern Art. —The New York Times