From the pole to the equator

The film was made in Milan between 1984 and 1986. The original sound-track was composed in San Francisco and Los Angeles in 1986. Dedicated to Luca Comerio, pioneer of the documentary-cinema, who died in 1940 in a state of amnesia. The chemical amnesia, the mildew, the physical decadence of the image is the film material state. A film about travelling, about memory, about the desire for exotic spectacle as the form for our ideological dream of conquest and cultural pillage. The as yet unknown archives of Luca Comerio, a pioneer of Italian documentary-cinema were photographed frame by frame from the positive of the projection and from the original negative. Comerio’s camera follows the baron Franchetti in Sfinge Vera in Uganda in 1916. The Italian “Lawrence” and Mussolini’s future agent in Africa and the “camera+treno”, “camera+automobile”, “camera+dirigibile”, “camera+aereo”, “camera+teleferica”, “camera blindata interventista-futurista” of marinette glorifies the war, the only hygienic thing in the world. The film does not make use of narration but has a “mini-mal” sound-track made by Keith Ullrich and Charles Anderson.