A selection of new and recent films by avant-garde filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, whose interest in the interrelationships between smell, image and memory led to the creation of films presented with scented accompaniment. Since the late Sixties, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi have compiled a catalogue of more than 800 essences. “The intriguing aspect of these artists' use of odors with film images,” writes Janis Crystal Lipzin in Cinemanews, “lies in their avoidance of including fragrances merely to achieve a more ‘life-like' quality in the work as sound and color have been employed in the movie industry. Rather, they use smell as a kind of transducer which, while expanding the descriptive and associative capabilities of the film experience for the viewer, also adds another texture to the film's ability to produce its own creative reality.”
Catalogue No.1-2: Lombroso--Scent of Carnation
“The images, initially grotesque yet gradually fascinating, were made in Turin in the Lombroso Museum named for the physician and criminologist who investigated his thesis that a criminal represents a distinct anthropological type....” (Lipzin). “The key to understanding (the film) is the statement by Lombroso on the minor olfactory sensitivity of...criminals and on the similarity between the material in the Lombroso and ours” (Gianikian & Ricci Lucchi).
• (1976-78, 27 mins, color, silent, Print from filmmakers)

Karagoez Catalogue 9.5: Pathe Baby

• (1979-80, 20 mins, tinted, silent, Print from filmmakers)

Das Lied Von Der Erde:
Scent of the Wood
A film catalogue of objects and landscapes in Toblach, a mountain village where Gustav Mahler lived in 1908 and composed his “Song of the Earth.”
• (1980, 20 mins, color, silent, Print from filmmakers)

Karagoez No. 2

• (1980-81, 40 mins, tinted, silent, Print from filmmakers)

Absinthe: Essence
Made from fragments of an erotic early silent.
• (1981, 15 mins, color and black-and-white, silent, Print from filmmakers)