A chance encounter of a name within the biography of a controversial filmmaker led director Oliver Bruck to a photographer that captured disappearing civilizations with her camera. Mirella is a documentary about the life and career of Mirella Ricciardi, a Kenyan-born photographer.
Bruck contacted Ricciardi after coming across her name mentioned in a biography on Nazi propagandist filmmaker and photographer Leni Riefenstahl. An unusually presented documentary, the film is told with archival footage and photographs dating back to the 1920s paired with Ricciardi’s interviews, which never show her directly facing the camera. “It’s horrible to be old. I hate it,” she says, explaining that she doesn’t wish to be remembered looking older. She requests that only photographs of her at younger ages are used while she’s talking. Viewers see glimpses of her present self from over her shoulder or part of the side of her face. We’ll also see stills of her partially obscured by a camera or from behind speaking with Bruck.
The film starts with Ricciardi’s upbringing by her parents, who came to Kenya in the 1920s to hunt elephants for ivory and wound up buying farmland and staying on. Ricciardi describes learning the basics of photography in Paris; she saw an ad for the New York Institute of Photography around 1950 and in 1956 began taking her first tribal photographs. Over the next four decades, Ricciardi photographed countless Indigenous African and Amazonian people as a means of recording their customs before they were lost to time and modernism. Her work was published in a number of books, the first of which was Vanishing Africa in 1971, and continued to go on photography trips until her health and age forced her to stop.
Ricciardi, for her part, offers a refreshingly self-aware attitude of her life in Africa, saying “We lived in the kind of surreal world of privilege and wilderness.” She also mentions the criticism she’s received over the years for her privilege in being a wealthy white woman and the accusations of colonialist opportunism, i.e., that she exploited her photo’s subjects to build her status as a prominent photographer. Her perspective is that it was never her intention to be exploitive and she only wanted to photograph beauty. While it might be considered too complicated of a question to be answered in a biographical documentary, it was, at least, raised.
Mirella is a fairly complete, straightforward account of one of the twentieth century’s most recognized woman photographers. Frequent montages of her photography act as little windows into different scenes of her life throughout the years. The film concludes with a lovely before and after sequence, with Oliver traveling to Ricciardi’s former home in Kenya and filming outside of and around her house, juxtaposing older film footage she had from around the 1980s with his own footage in Summer 2023. It’s a fitting end and is absorbing to watch how much has changed and stayed the same. 3.5 stars, would recommend.
Will public libraries benefit from screening this artistic documentary?
Librarians would offer patrons a wealth of beauty by streaming Mirella. It holds broad appeal to photographers, both amateur and professional by showcasing Ricciardi’s use of high contrast black and white photography, speaking at length about the art form and her motivation.
What academic courses would find value in showing Mirella?
Academic librarians would have a resource for numerous academic subjects by acquiring this film for their DVD collections. Given Ricciardi’s life and experiences detailed in the film, history courses could delve into the topics of women and gender in photography, art history, African history and colonialism. Film students might take notes on filming techniques for creatively including physically illusive subjects, while film history buffs may find happy surprises in Ricciardi’s personal association with the classic Italian film La Dolce Vita and director Michelangelo Antonioni.
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