Oh! Uomo

Oh! Uomo occasionally goes into very great detail about the First World War, yet it is also about all wars and this makes this political and poetic film emphatically topical. It is made up of found-footage – with the footage found often having been very meticulously and stubbornly sought. Of all the collage-film makers who work with archive footage, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi are undoubtedly the greatest craftsmen. The quest for that one special facet looks like the method of the classic diamond polisher who knows just how to get light out of a rough stone. The film makers show – occasionally with gruesome concreteness – what war can do to people, how war can change people for good. They do not look away from the horrors and that makes their film so topical. Despite the present flood of war footage, the pictures that really make clear how gruesome the consequences of war can be are all too often censored. That conflicts with the convictions of, for instance, a Leonardo da Vinci (from whose writings the title is borrowed), who thought that the most terrible pictures of war should be shown, so that people (‘Oh! Man’) would realise what they were doing to others. The makers have already made films with material from the First World War: Prigionieri della guerra (1995) and Su tutte le vette è pace (1996). They regard this film as the completion of a trilogy. With, at their request, a special mention for their historical adviser Diego Leoni. (GjZ)