Images d’Orient – “Tourisme vandale”

Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian have built up a major reputation with their poetic and essayist montage films. With the aid of historical film material they found after lengthy and intensive searches through all kinds of film archives (so the expression ‘found footage’ is not really applicable) they brought the past to life beautifully to edify the present and future.This film is another building block in their impressive oeuvre. Based purely on authentic material, they provide a picture of the first tourist journeys by the rich European elite to exotic climes, in this case mainly India. The title of the film also anticipates the vast and destructive mass tourism we know today. The film shows great contrasts: people who are barely able to clothe themselves, have hardly anything to eat and can barely live, confronting those who dress in the latest fashions, eat off porcelain, damask and silver and stay in grand colonial residences. The two worlds remain strictly divided. Fear of touching or being touched.The images were shot in the 1920s, the time of blossoming resistance to colonialism. The filmmakers do not provide any direct commentary. They chose several (diary) texts by Henri Michaux and Mircea Eliade from that time and had them sung by Giavanna Marini.