’Pays barbare’ [Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi, 2013]

We pore over material relating to Italian colonial Ethiopia (Abyssinia), recently unearthed in a private film archive. We scour those individual film frames of colonialism, studying them with a magnifying glass, and transcribe the captions. The material was intended for private home viewing, in silence. In these filmic fragments, examined by hand, without a projector, are indications of who owned the films, those sequences to which they returned over and over. Ours is a dual reading, that of the images themselves and the way in which they were consumed. An Ethiopian woman on her knees wearing a top that leaves her breasts bare, a bearded soldier who washes her head symbolically: certain words recur in the captions, such as barbaric, primitive, pillager, bigamy. Among the films we find a number of military sequences showing the violence of the Italian venture to conquer Ethiopia and the phrase: ‘Civilization now dawns in this primitive and barbaric country’. These constitute an image of Mussolini in Africa. –