Preceded by Criminal Animals.

(Uomini, Anni, Vita/Men, Years, Life). Gianikian, who is of Armenian descent, and Ricci Lucchi originally planned to shoot their own documentary on Armenia, but determined that the most powerful images existed in old archival footage. As they recount, "It's impossible to forget the long waits, the often pointless trips to trace material for the film. The desire to look for documents filmed on the Armenian events and their surroundings. The events tied to family stories and to the diaries of exiles; the material, scattered like their people in continual flight, reassembled....The arc of time for preparation and completion of the film begins in 1987 with a trip to Soviet Armenia and continues on after a pogrom and an earthquake that parallels the political earthquake in the USSR." The resulting hypnotic, beautifully tinted "book of Armenian history" vaults from hallucinatory allegory and ethnographic detail to horrifying massacres. Events of the past speak to those of the present, as images of exodus particularly attest.

Music by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. (70 mins, Tinted, 16mm, From MoMA)

Criminal Animals (Animali Criminali) (Italy, 1994). Composed of turn–of–the–century footage of fighting animals, material appropriated for the fascist cause by Luca Comerio, whose footage is featured in From the Pole to the Equator. (7 mins, Silent, B&W/Tinted, 16mm, From the artists)