Paolo Gioli

Paolo Gioli's cinematic verification of Edwin H. Land's experiment in color perception.

A film made a single batch of 45 pin holes in a 50 cm hollow tube.

Feminine undergarments placed over a wooden tablet around which a film, itself impure, has been wound. Dissolving sexual fragments emerge. Whirling woven textures wrap around them.

A reflection on the material, on the filmic support. Strips of figures wander, fluxuate in the whirling kinetic rhythms imposed on them. These faces, these dispersed shattered bodies result from contacts (this is where they "touch") made by old photographic plates and anonymous fragments of film; everything is set onto and into a spiral.

A reflection on the material, on the filmic support. Strips of figures wander, fluxuate in the whirling kinetic rhythms imposed on them. These faces, these dispersed shattered bodies result from contacts (this is where they "touch") made by old photographic plates and anonymous fragments of film; everything is set onto and into a spiral.

A film completely excavated by rephotographing rolls of 35mm negative containing images made with the photo-finish (slit scan) technique, the so-called foto-lunga which has no frame line and therefore no individual frames. This sort of proto-film was born not as a film, but as a photograph; I caused it to transmigrate—using a horizontal scanning motion of the filmstrip typical of photo-finish—into a film, thus betraying its natural verticality. I rephotographed the photofinish negative through the gate of an old 35mm moviecamera causing it to advance using the crank handle at a velocity interpolated between the crank handle [of the old 35mm moviecamera] and that of my own [16mm] movie camera. I was interested in seeing figures transformed which had been destined to remain motionless and to see them reanimated.

Three persons wander on bridges and roads.

"Extracted from rolls of 35mm film on which I had made exposures using the photofinish technique. That is, images intended as photography, and therefore as still images. My inclination is to animate [still images] at the very limit of technical impossibility. Scanning these rolls of figures in a state of agitation, shooting one frame at a time, I wanted to extract a film from what was not a film, where frames precisely do not exist and where the process of hand-cranking exposures was indeed equivalent to that of a movie camera, without, however, being a movie camera. Of interest to me was the collision among images dispossessed of sequence, to which the possibility of motion had been given, a motion towards a kinetic narrative, no longer a photographic one, which narrates the end of the images themselves." Paolo Gioli

"Faces and figures found on reels of film by an unknown artist from the first few years of the 20th century. I fed the images through what was probably his own movie camera that I had purchased in Rome in 1972. The frames appeared vertically and horizontally, individually and in short sequences and so I allowed them to become superimposed [by rephotographing them in several passes] and dissolves were created naturally by the shutter of the old movie camera due to the speed of manual rephotography, by improvised slowing down or stopping of the camera. To summarize, a movie camera reshoots a movie camera and its viscera through its own gate, creating the animation of an unknown experimental artist." Paolo Gioli

This is not a short documentary on Rothko, but rather my reflection on his canvasses, that become so deeply assimilated with the screen, frames of film, the frame line. A film excavated from two books. A silent film that should be a sound film. The rhythms, the inter-pulsations of the frames of film make me think of a sound I do not know.

Made from fragments of a found porno film, where the frameline, which divides the images, becomes a mysterious plastic form, struggling in the center of the screen, vertically and horizontally. The blade of the shutter sections the bodies of eros, according to the desires of the film image and its frame.

"I have always been interested in the sequencing of images in books, where the possibility exists of imposing movement onto still images. Even this brief film takes its departure from the sequencing of a book that is animated but ends with inanimate images. A reflection on a daughter of the assassinated President of the United States and on another little girl: naked and dead, on a heap of peasants murdered on a country road. On the one hand, a life of privilege in a great mansion taken by a great photographer, on the other, death in the dust, taken by a war photographer." Paolo Gioli

Feature-length retrospective interview with Italian avant-garde filmmaker Paolo Gioli.

From Paolo Brunatto's series "Scheggie Di Utopia".

This digital video arose from the idea of trying to transfer to film all the photographic images I had created with the so-called “photo-finish” technique.

An anthology of short films by Italian film director Paolo Gioli.

From old plates of an anonymous photographer who worked in the 50s, I extracted this impossible film (plates that had contributed to the composition of one of my little books with the title Sconosciuti [Persons Unknown] Frame by frame, plate by plate, with strips of reflected light and strips of tens of faces, I tried to bring them into a single cinematic stream, thinking about a solitary, single face emerging from the darkness.

"Duchamp is certainly as complex as Joyce and to do something about him, I tried to dedicate to him this small film poem, using only a few images of images of his work, taken always from books and catalogues (that are made of typographic ink). For example, blackening in the spokes of a wheel, allowing regular slits, transforming it in this way into a true external shutter, that came to substitute for the missing one of my movie camera. A bicycle wheel that becomes cinema and vice versa. For example, his black window that is transformed into a number of tv screens, etc. With Duchamp I think I could make a film for every one of his works because intelligence, irony and alchemy are all proper to the cinema."

Cinematic flicker: flicker is introduced into the flutter of butterflies shot from small books. My intention was, here as elsewhere, to animate what is inexorably locked up in the fixity of typographic ink in a book. In this attempt, I brought into play the rhythm of some erotic film images, making butterflies and eros pulsate together.

Composed of still images from several photographs of the actress and pop icon Marilyn Monroe that have been manually transferred to film frame by frame, and animated through intermediate gradations within a series of successive, rapid fire montage visual "chapters", Gioli resurrects the vitality, captivating charm, and exuded sensuality of the voluptuous, iconic Hollywood superstar through the sequencing of the manipulated images - modulated object framing, subtle displacement, photographic blow-ups or visual recessions that simulate dimensionality and varying depths of focus - into a bold, risqué, and tantalizing "new" film starring the late actress.

It is well known that the disposition of the images drawn by Escher are neither for animation nor for pre-animation; actually, quite the opposite. His images appear to be the carrying out of metamorphic dissolves. A bird gives way to the recognition of a house, which turns into fish, which turns into birds, and so on. Not a single flapping of wings takes place; everything is reiterated and fixed, becoming immersed in and re-emerging from a static continuum. All of Escher is an homage to one of the major animating forces of the cinema: the cross-dissolve. Precisely there, I found cinematic attitudes: in the house which turns into fish and in everything that transforms into something else. I gradually managed to figure out various types of non-existent sequences and then finally found myself dissolved, crossing over metamorphically. —P.G.

Film made with a tiny pinhole camera and 16mm film.

I have several English style windows and this and a tree in winter have caused me to think about Fox-Talbot’s window—his first image, perhaps. Carried out, as usual, with the technique—but perhaps it would be better to say the discipline—of the flicker, which is, “the undulation, trembling, quivering, flashing, sparkling weakly” of the dictionary, in short everything of the cinèsi fosforescentica. Drawn from a thin monograph (it’s worth saying from typographic ink where there had been silver salts) I tried to shake my window using his where there had been a tree in winter. Cross-dissolving between real and not-real, between fixed and animated images of his lively works, seemed to me to reconstruct what would have perhaps happened to Fox-Talbot, filming my window in winter.

It all started with the notorious Buñuelian sliced eyeball, that surprises us every time. The eye of an ox, but still it's the eye of a woman! The anxiety of the incision is transformed into a saccadic, uncontrolled anxiety precisely of the eye and of its pupil. When subjected to the stroboscopic rhythms of single frame animation—as in some archaic pre-animation—one's gaze at it is thrown off, going in search of a little dramatic action here and there in the face, through the quick cinematic nonsense of saucers and sclera. The eye of an ox, which degenerates in Buñuel's incision, is my own quaking ox eye.

This extremely short film is dedicated to chronophotography, which—as is well known—is the prelude to cinema. As with one of my earlier films dedicated to Muybridge (The Naked Killer, 1982), this one was excavated from books and catalogues, that is, from typographic ink. I tried, in a certain sense, to reanimate the inanimable as does the photographer Duane Michals, having only, sometimes, three or four frames. I found older stroboscopic technology as well as more contemporary flicker effects to be very helpful here and there. I attempted to realize the cinematic identification of Skladanowksy with Avedon; contaminations, precisely, between creators of films and creators of photography, contemporary or not. It is surprising to see Michals, a contemporary photographer, bearing such a strong cinematographic resemblance to Londe, the proto-filmmaker. I hope, at least, to have told the story of their direct commingling, as if by a single secret author.

This film was constructed using the so-called “photo-finish” technique employed in sporting events. The same principle was applied, precisely, to the motion picture camera. The subjects are explored and self-explored using a thin slit arranged horizontally halfway along the aperture plate as they enter the motion picture camera itself. The images then are formed as an extremely dense series of lines as in a primitive video screen, such as the Nipkow. The cinematic rhythms of the film vary with the accelerations and decelerations imposed beyond the synchronism between movie camera and subject: with motion from top to bottom, or else with the movie camera lying sideways, (in that case the line is vertical) then, from left to right and vice versa. Of course without a shutter or claw [in the camera]. This filmic technique is well known in scientific cinematography, and it is this very combination that I most urgently desired to encompass in my graphic compositional concerns.

Realized on the occasion of one of my photographic exhibitions of the same title dedicated to the Etruscans of Volterra. I intended to bring alive the funerary faces on sarcophagi, that, curiously, in shape resembled tv sets. I shot faces in color of living acquaintances in order to superimpose them on marble faces of dead people unknown to me, trying to give them an identity like those of the living. Using a battery of devices composed of a Super-8 projector, a 16mm projector and another one for slides, I rephotographed everything with a video camera directly on a unique screen effervescing with three cones of images in color, in black and white and at various speeds. The dissolves, both manual and non-manual, are manual in the proper sense of done by hand, mine and those of others; they were added simultaneously, to create variable human shutters.

It is known that Muybridge was at the same time a great photographer and a killer, executioner of his wife’s lover and that into his own station physiologique (to use Marey’s term for his own working laboratory), it seems, not a single black man ever entered. Female servants, the unemployed, artists’ models supplied by the State, musclemen, the infirm and prostitutes were all undressed there. They all ran, people as well as animals under the sun of Palo Alto. In this P. T. Barnum style atmosphere, a melancholy Noah’s Ark, Muybridge himself would appear as a laborer nude.

In L’operatore perforato (1979) that plump sprocket hole comes into its own. It multiplies like a virus, riding serenely on the surface, nearly obliterating the images trembling underneath it. Near the close of the film, we watch another cameraman, perhaps shooting a Fatty Arbuckle imitator, cope with the invasion of perforations, not only from the top and center but from the edge. By now, when we can hardly tell the difference between frame and perforations, cinema’s two round-cornered rectangles, the image can be anything—a picture, or a zone of blank white.

In L’operatore perforato (1979) that plump sprocket hole comes into its own. It multiplies like a virus, riding serenely on the surface, nearly obliterating the images trembling underneath it. Near the close of the film, we watch another cameraman, perhaps shooting a Fatty Arbuckle imitator, cope with the invasion of perforations, not only from the top and center but from the edge. By now, when we can hardly tell the difference between frame and perforations, cinema’s two round-cornered rectangles, the image can be anything—a picture, or a zone of blank white.

I have a fixed idea about the screen that while it has no depth, we know that it is sprayed by 24 frames a second at the same point for an infinite amount of time. Were it possible to freeze into a solid the sum of all the images, the screen would be seen as a limitless freezer of frames. Even more so, when the screen is a screen of a screen—a condition approaching the simultaneity of electronics. The usual battery of devices: Super-8, 16mm and slide projectors. A constructed series of film loops with scenes of [everyday] life, slowing down and accelerating the events on a solitary screen, so that life as it has been staged gathers itself up in a perpetual serial [process of] self-editing. On the tv screen a face is pierced through by the small filmic screen.

A film eroticized by prolonged baths in silver salts. Complete exposure of reclining bodies and their lascivious perambulations. Licentious characters in incestuous copulations of carnal metamorphoses and abnormal couplings. The transformations of their bodies in totemic visualizations of a uniquely local rite. Made up of fantastical phallic doublings and entanglements of purely fantastic flesh in dissolution. The entropy of a gymnastic grotesque. A film of smiles and happiness.

Self-shot: a film shot without a camera operator. Sole witness: the movie camera. Fixed, directed at a single expanse, obedient to the orders of wires that I manipulate: characters splitting in two through the asymmetrical filtration of the comings and goings of self-irony. Composed of various extracts of historical films, such as the Eisensteinian battleship, intercut with stairways of various sorts; the unceasing use of negatives persecuted by positives and vice versa; a cinematic-theatrical dialogue between philosophical doubling and filmic doubling.

Self-shot: a film shot without a camera operator. Sole witness: the movie camera. Fixed, directed at a single expanse, obedient to the orders of wires that I manipulate: characters splitting in two through the asymmetrical filtration of the comings and goings of self-irony. Composed of various extracts of historical films, such as the Eisensteinian battleship, intercut with stairways of various sorts; the unceasing use of negatives persecuted by positives and vice versa; a cinematic-theatrical dialogue between philosophical doubling and filmic doubling.

A filmic homage to the German mime Helfrid Foron, a student of Etienne Decroux who worked with acrobats and tight-rope walkers. He frequently collaborated with contemporary musicians, among them Mauricio Kagel. My intention was to displace his gestures using a form of filmic doubling employing the technique of creating bispecular-asynchronous loops which mime—with extreme visual results—the actions and the objects on stage to make them stand out and to distance them from the action.

This film is an accumulation of semi-stroboscopic figures with features invisible to the eye, that remain in the human cerebral cortex located at the top of the brain. Nature and people are compressed and disturbed by geometric forms that struggle among themselves stroboscopically, appearing flat but transparent, penetrating the other images, causing them to contract in movements joined at the center of the screen, but more fluid at the edges. This pulsing together awakens the figures to a twofold life: mirrored and not mirrored, a result of their being filmed one frame at a time, directly, non-stop.

Pier Farri's Futurist Europe focuses on Futurism as the first avant-garde film movement in history.

Traumatografo is a film, the principal purpose of which is to comfort those who fear death by the gallows or scaffold. It is divided into three parts: in the first, slaughter by automobile is shown; in the third, by military engagements; in the center section children pantomime syncopated movements from top to bottom. The secret, twilight imaginings of a wreckless character in the horrifying motion of falling or ejection in triplicate from an auto-trauma-mobile, the alternation—through the manipulation—of his original motion, offers us, as a source of comfort, the bicorporeal vision of him as he travels along the parabola of his fall from a residual sequence of a most personal and fatal leap.

To split the visual realm in two: one is permeated with a schizo-imaginific detour, the second vibrates in a collateral contrast. When the split screen goes off, it's hard to tell the difference.

The film relates the beliefs the author held for a certain time concerning water and diving into it. It all begins with a dive and with a whirlpool that never existed; two visual prototypes on the basis of which the mischievous view of the author created a filmic inversion of water and its flow, of the diver and of the imaginary whirlpools. This expansion, unforeseen in spontaneous natural phenomena is, however, foreseen by the very little spontaneous nature of the diver, who, after repeated efforts, ends by realizing a plunge which is at once fatal and desired.

This film was shot a frame at the time using laborious extreme optical close-ups. Anonimatograph: the reanimated image of an unknown amateur at the beginning of the century who becomes middle class as he focuses on friends, movie camera in hand, indoors and outdoors surrounded by war and by his sisters. I have tried to reconstruct an extravagant film diary from which I have painstakingly torn out little pages of frames. These frames were exposed and abandoned on negative on a number of photographic reels, cut together at random in two sixty-meter reels in 35mm and acquired by me for 500 Lire from a flea-market vendor. Many frames were shot vertically, others only partially exposed, sometimes properly developed, sometimes not. I tried to animate these little reels using a flicker technique with light stroboscopic touches; in short, a film that could not be recommended to anyone.

Strains of Wagner's Das Rheingold and African tribal ululations collide with bi-/tri-sected television footage while negative-positive visuals smash heedlessly into their mirror images, an unbounded series of “meaningful” artistic fender-benders that amount to little of resonant substance.

A film that has chosen as its protagonist its own negative and will remain committed to that choice until the very end. More precisely, nearly positive, or rather, not all negative, it detains two characters in constant solitude afflicting them with visions and apparitions of the epoch of man and the epoch of the cinema.

An artist's self-portrait problematizing the choice between tradition and the avant-garde, between being free or being disciplined.

Executed and printed with two hands, that is to say, made using all possible means of imprinting the right and arm freshly applied ink, sand paper, stamps, etc. Everything was done on non-emulsion clear leader.

Composed using three different formats, that have been made to co-exist: super-8, 16mm, and 35mm on a single 16mm support, clear leader. The variations in size caused the original frame lines to overlap, subjecting them - and with them their images - to a singular diabolical rhythm. The above-mentioned formats were glued together, one at a time, fragment on top of fragment, using transparent adhesive tape.