Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi return to MoMA, nearly a decade after their 2009 retrospective, with this poignant portrait completed by Gianikian following the death of Ricci Lucchi, his lifelong partner and collaborator, earlier this year. The intricate, affective montage, structured around readings of Ricci Lucchi’s illustrated diaries, embodies the tenets of the pair’s political cinema. Since the 1970s, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s vivid manipulation of archival images of war and repression in the 20th century ran parallel with an urgency to infuse bygone images with immediacy—to treat them as “object[s] of the present.” A sustained meditation on memory and the passage of time, the film opens up a life in images—travelogues in Turkey, Armenia, and Russia; quietly touching domestic moments; and footage of the pair surrounded by their work in recent exhibitions—to new meanings. Simultaneously a private gesture, a living catalog, and a grand filmic document, Angela’s Diaries evokes Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi through both their radical artistic vision and a shared love of life.
Organized by Sophie Cavoulacos, Assistant Curator, Department of Film
Support for the exhibition is provided by the Annual Film Fund. Leadership support for the Annual Film Fund is provided by the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation and Steven Tisch, with major contributions from Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP), Yuval Brisker Charitable Foundation, The Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston, Marlene Hess and James D. Zirin, Karen and Gary Winnick, and The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art.