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    Village Voice (New York, NY)
    February 8, 2005, Tuesday

    ATROCITY EXHIBITION

    by j. hoberman

    Oh! Uomo
    Directed by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi
    February 3 through 9
    Anthology Film Archives

    " The appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen,
    almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked," Susan Sontag
    wrote in Regarding the Pain of Others. The success of The Passion of
    the Christ notwithstanding, that sounds a bit hyperbolic--still, if
    Sontag is correct, there should be a line around the block at
    Anthology Film Archives this week for Oh! Uomo (Oh! Man).

    The latest archival assemblage by Milan-based filmmakers Yervant
    Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, Oh! Uomo is the final panel in
    their World War I triptych. The previous films dealt with the
    massacre of civilian populations, but Oh! Uomo is more viscerally
    horrifying, focusing largely on the effects of modern warfare on the
    human body. The movie's title is taken from Leonardo da Vinci and so
    is its premise, namely that images of suffering will promote empathy.
    Da Vincian too is the scientific interest in human anatomy.

    War has no rationale here. Oh! Uomo naturalizes carnage in its first
    shot with graceful biplanes wheeling through a bird-filled sky. (Even
    before World War I broke out, Italy had used this new
    invention--another da Vinci idea--as the means to bomb the restive
    natives of their colony Libya.) The arrival of a military band cues
    music: Ghosts already, soldiers on horseback are shown riding out of
    the stables toward the battlefield, while priests make an offering.
    The officers, shown in negative, include Mussolini (perhaps a
    flash-forward). Then shells explode and the earth is consumed in the
    conflagration. So much for combat.

    Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi have been making archival films for nearly
    20 years--the encyclopedic actualite compilation From the Pole to the
    Equator remains their most widely seen work, but their style has been
    widely imitated. The couple treats each scrap of unearthed footage as
    though it were a holy relic. The original film is step-printed and
    slowed down to reveal fleeting expressions and gestures, as well as
    to emphasize the material nature of the scratched, blotchy, fragile
    celluloid stuff itself. The preciousness of the preserved footage is
    underscored by color tinting. But no matter how beautiful the ruddy
    gold or electric chartreuse, the effect is not exactly distancing.

    "The gruesome invites us to be spectators or cowards, unable to
    look," Sontag notes in apparent self-contradiction. So it is with Oh!
    Uomo, once pain arrives in the form of maimed children and starving
    war orphans. Unfortunately, the filmmakers feel the need to up the
    sensory ante. The choral keening that accompanies the image of one
    bedridden girl escalates into a rhythmic mock wailing that grows
    increasingly abusive with footage of a dead child atop a mountain of
    corpses. (The filmmakers have made this mistake before--accompanying
    People, Years, Life, their account of the 1915 Armenian massacres,
    with a discordantly cloying requiem.) Sound is intermittent
    throughout Oh! Uomo, but the movie is almost always a stronger, more
    awe-inspiring experience without the presence of an editorializing
    musical counter-irritant.

    The underlying question, of course, is, will these sights turn people
    against war? The Bush administration must think so--at least to judge
    from its news management style, blocking images of American
    casualties, let alone those of civilians or enemies. "The Face of
    War," the most notorious section of Ernst Friedrich's 1924
    photography collection War Against War!, documented the hideously
    blasted, melted, shattered features of World War I's wounded
    survivors. (These "broken mugs," as the French called them, also
    appeared in Abel Gance's 1938 anti-war feature J'accuse.) A similar
    gallery of destroyed and reconstructed faces is at the heart of Oh!
    Uomo: Eyes are surgically removed, ears repaired, jaws refastened.

    The filmmakers end their terrifying expose on a strangely positive
    note with the production of heroic cyborgs. The wounded learn how to
    screw on their new hands or fit into prosthetic legs. Many are
    cheerful; they smile as they model their afflictions. Humanity has
    successfully turned itself into an object.



    GRAPHIC: The face of war: Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's Oh! Uomo

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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