Paolo Gioli, a native of Veneto, was born on October 12, 1942 in Sarzano (Rovigo). In 1960 he attended the Open School of the Nude at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice where he lived and worked for a number of years. In 1967 he set off for New York, where he lived and worked for a year; there, he was granted a scholarship from the John Cabot Fund. In New York he discovered the New American Cinema, met gallerists Leo Castelli and Martha Jackson and became acquainted with the New York School of painting. Forced to interrupt his stay in America and to return to Italy because of visa problems, Gioli moved to Rome in 1970. Those were the years of the Martin Luther King and the Robert Kennedy assassination and stricter rules were applied to temporary visas by the U.S. Immigration Office. In Rome, he got in touch with the CooperativaCinemaIndipendente which revolved around the Filmstudio, an important point of reference for all Italian experimental filmmakers. He produced his first films in Rovigo and Rome. Following in the footsteps of the Lumière Brothers, he developed and printed the films himself using only a motion picture camera for his entire laboratory. During his stay in Rome he became deeply interested in photography, thoroughly investigating its origins. In 1976, he moved to Milan where, in addition to filmmaking, he devoted his time to photography. In the Polaroid that he calls humid incunabulum of modern history, he found a surprising means of further extending his research in instant photography, pouring chemicals onto surfaces other than film such as paper or canvas thus bringing photography closer to the realm of the “visual arts.” In the early eighties, he returned to Polesine, where he was born. He currently lives and works in Lendinara.
Gioli’s name is often associated with those Italian filmmakers who frequented the Cooperativa Cinema Indipendente centered around the Filmstudio in Rome. But this is really an over-simplification derived more than anything else from a need to classify this artist who is unique in the Italian world of film and whose research is particularly original. When he moved to Rome in the early Seventies after his forced return from the United States, Gioli did establish contacts with that group, but by then it had already become inactive. In any case, he was always somewhat distant from it because his interests were more strictly focused on the nature of the medium. These interests were already evident in his paintings from that period which constitute the lyrical transposition of his new research onto canvas. The diptych Vast Surface of the Source (of light) (1970) and Cone of Light (1972), are emblematic of those years, true metaphors of film which even in a physical sense incorporated the object to which they make reference.
Gioli took nothing for granted in his investigation of the filmic apparatus; instead he explored its limitations. He wondered about screens (prior to the history of film, there must be a history of the screen as an object!), about projection, about the dark (someone must investigate the history of darkness in the history of film after the history of the rectangle in film!). He enhanced the aesthetic nature of negative images as opposed to the intrusiveness of positive images and he broke the rigid rule of the frame line. He invented a multilayer screen with colour silhouettes to add colour to his black and white films and used motion picture cameras without lenses on still figures to force them into motion even where there was none. His research was not formalist in a limiting sense; rather, he invented little stories which he filled with tragi-comic contents thanks to his highly skillful manipulations. His writings, which are few in number, have been re-presented here. Some of them have been shortened for reasons of space and accessibility. They shed a great deal of light on the rigor of his research. Complex, but always full of imagination and explanatory to some extent, these texts by Gioli recall the mental processes of some of the work of Gertrude Stein in their associations of ideas. Lyrical and dense with an ever increasing rhythm, better suited to recitation than to silent reading, they are presented only in Italian to ensure that their musical nature will remain intact.
Secondo il mio occhio di vetro 1972, 10’9’’, 16 mm
[According to My Glass Eye]
Though the title seems to allude to the punchline to some horrific joke, the glass eye in question would seem to be the lens of the camera. A performative pixellated negative/positive split-screen evocation of Vertov’s Kino eye, but instead of privledging the vision of the machine, it evokes the shocks and relays of seeing and being seen by the camera to the accompaniment of insistent East Indian drumming.
01.-.Paolo.Gioli..-.Secondo.il.mio.occhio.di.vetro.1972.DVDrip.XviD.CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi
Del tuffarsi e dell’annegarsi 1972, 10’25’’, 16 mm
[On Diving in and Drowning]
A formal and perfomative exploration of the act of diving, recalling at once Yves Klein’s celebrated “Leap into the void” and Riefenstahl’s Olympia. Here, the stasis of death is played against the movements and transformations of the living to create the major aesthetic and existential tension of the piece.
02.-.Paolo.Gioli.-.Del.tuffarsi.e.dell’annegarsi.1972.DVDrip.XviD.CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi
L’operatore perforato 1979, 8’53’’, 16 mm, silent
[The Perforated Operator]
The chance mutilations of a 9.5mm print of a silent film about the making of a film provide the starting point for this elegant and economical meditation on the limits of cinema and the material process of making a film.
03.-.Paolo.Gioli.-.L’operatore.perforato.1979.DVDrip.XviD.CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi
Piccolo film decomposto 1986, 18’45’’, 16 mm, silent
[Little Decomposed Film]
An imaginative investigation of the bizarre, erotic and grotesque subtexts which inform the work of Muybridge, Marey, and others who stood at the threshold of the invention of cinema and those who stand just at its periphery, like Michals and Warhol. A disabused catalogue of the marching soldiers, the physically deformed, the contortionists, the nude male wrestlers, and the nude women performing fetishized everyday actions which populate the symbolic realm of the cinematic unconscious.
04.-.Paolo.Gioli.-.Piccolo.film.decomposto.1986.DVDrip.XviD.CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi
Quando l’occhio trema 1989, 10’57’’, 16 mm, silent
[When the Eye Quakes]
An hommage to Buñuel, drawing heavily on footage from L’Age d’Or and the famous razor/eye sequence of Un Chien Andalou. This hommage becomes the jumping off point for an extended meditation on the eye as symbolic and physical locus for moving pictures.
05.-.Paolo.Gioli.-.Quando.l’occhio.trema.1989.DVDrip.XviD.CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi
Hilarisdoppio 1972, 19’9’’, 16 mm
[DoubleHilaris]
An hilaris in Roman times was a day of celebration; it might be one devoted to a single god, or to an important family event, such as a child reaching puberty. Here, the entire film devoted to the celebration of Gioli’s favorite trope: the mirror image. The sound track functions sometimes to isolate the image in silence, sometimes to add dramatic tension, and at intervalsto brings us back to the realm of everyday life.
06.-.Paolo.Gioli.-.Hilarisdoppio.1972.DVDrip.XviD.CiNEMAGROQTESQUE.avi
Film stenopeico (l’uomo senza macchina da presa) 1973-1981-1989, 13’6’’, 16 mm, silenzioso
[Pinhole film (The Man Without a Movie Camera)]
A series of staccato pinhole film sketches in color and black and white from 1973, 1981 and 1989, titled according to subject: window, objects, body, clock, face, outside. The use of the pinhole movie camera is more than a simple technical ploy, it’s a tactic in a larger strategy of destabilizing the basic givens of cinema. Here the focus is on focus itself and the formation of the image within the frame as well as the relationship between frames; both image and frame line are revealed as variable and subject to variation.
07.-.Paolo.Gioli.-.Film.stenopeico.1973-89.XviD.DVDrip.CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi
Traumatografo 1973, 26’5’’, 16 mm
[Traumatograph]
Divided into segments labeled with a series of dates, images of decapitations, amputations and car wrecks join the everyday life of home movies and artistic hijinks in the mirror of repeated loops and the mirroring of the image itself. The sound track blends music, sound effects and everyday conversations to add an odd poignancy to these violent juxtapositions, underscoring the fragility of human life.
08.-.Paolo.Gioli.-.Traumatografo.1973.DVDrip.XviD.CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi
Immagini travolte dalla ruota di Duchamp 1994, 13’3’’, 16 mm, silent
[Images Overtaken by the Wheel of Duchamp]
An exacting visual free association on Duchamp, focusing on circular and rotary motifs from bicycle wheels, to breasts, to roto-reliefs. An hommage which reveals much about the inspiration of Gioli’s own visual vocabulary while imparting his own kinetic stamp to it. “And besides, it’s always the others who die” he reminds us at the end, quoting Duchamp’s own epitaph.
09.-.Paolo.Gioli.-.Immagini.travolte.dalla.ruota.di.Duchamp.1994.DVDrip.XviD.CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi
Filmarilyn 1992, 11’12’’, 16 mm, silent
A kinetic repurposing of celebrated photo sessions with Marilyn Monroe. By careful reanimation, the work manages to revive the gentle spark dormant in the spaces between the static frames on which she was captured and which made of her a captivating yet dead fetish object.
10.-.Paolo.Gioli.-.Filmarilyn.1992.DVDrip.XviD.CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi
Commutazioni con mutazione 1969, 6’35’’, 16 mm, silent
[Commutations with Mutation]
A jaw-dropping silent collage film in color and black and white, which deploys a vast
range of techniques: rephotography of television, taping bits of 8mm and 16mm film – both found footage and footage shot by the filmmaker – whole and slit in half on top of 16mm clear leader, lettraset transfers, drawing, punching, and scratching
the film strip. The originality here is in the pure unfettered inventiveness, deployed in the service not so much of the destruction of cinema but of an imaginative expansion of the possibilities by any means necessary.
11.-.Paolo.Gioli.-.Commutazioni.con.mutazione.1969.DVDrip.XviD.CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi
Filmfinish 1986-1989, 12’27’’, 16 mm, silent
A series of silent short film sketches segmented and titled thematically: selfsexploration, athlete, hand and other rhythms, cyclist, spirals go and come, fanning out, waterbound. The upright, segmented linearity of the film strip and its contents is displaced into erotic, physical, cyclical fluidity, oriented along the filmstrip instead of across it.
12.-.Paolo.Gioli.-.Filmfinish.1986-89.DVDrip.XviD.CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi
Immagini disturbate da un intenso parassita 1970, 37’52’’, 16 mm
[Images Disturbed by an Intense Parasite]
An extraordinarily dense exploration of the frame organized into short segments, each with a thematic title. The frame is transformed from a static immovable border to a dynamic process. Frames and framing appear first as sprocket holes within the frame, framing other images. Then as negative/positive multiple overlays of images creating multiple frames within the frame, using video post-production techniques. Next, images overlayed within the frame become frames for other images and the trope of mirroring erupts as a kind of special case of an image
which defines and reflects upon itself. Finally, the viewer, then, the visual pyramid enter the picture. Imagery runs a vast gamut from pre-existing home movies to television. A collage sound track provides a parallel variety of forward impulsions for the undertaking from tribalism to Wagner.
13.-.Paolo.Gioli.-.Immagini.disturbate.da.un.intenso.parassita.1970.DVDrip.XviD.CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi
Volto telato 2002, 2’52’’, DVD
[Face: Canvas: Texture]
Focusing on the human face, this work further extends Gioli’s visual investigations of the “givens” of cinema using the tools of digital video. A Bach prelude played by Casals creates a stately regularity which anchors the regularly paced yet extreme transformations of the image with a parallel forward motion. This work brings to mind the relentless transformations of Commutazioni con Mutazione but in a more economical and distilled fashion.
14.-.Paolo.Gioli.-.Volto.telato.2002.DVDrip.XviD.CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi
and a good doc about Gioli’s work (in Italian without subs)
[DOC-ITA]Schegge.di.Utopia.-.Il.Cinema.Underground.Italiano.-.Paolo.Gioli.CiNEMAGROTESQUE.avi
and here’s his website
http://www.paologioli.it/pg.htm
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