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We wish to thank Paolo Vampa and Paolo Gioli for providing rare personal prints for this screening.
Born in 1942 in Sarzano di Rovigo Gioli began working in ceramics then moved into painting and drawing in Venice in the early 1960’s and lithography in the late 60’s. Time spent in New York in 1967-68 left a deep and lasting impression as he encountered the New York painting scene and American experimental cinema and resolved to make films. Returning to Italy, Gioli lived in Rome from 1969-75 and this marks the years of intense production in many different mediums. It is during this period that Gioli makes many of his most accomplished films – shooting, developing and creating his own prints. From 1976 – 81 in Milan his interest in cinema and photography intensify and he invents special techniques for transferring photo images to silk and wood. The 80’s and 90’s saw a remarkable run of productivity and recognition with many major museum and gallery exhibitions throughout Europe and newfound attention to Gioli’s film work particularly in France. At present Gioli lives in the countryside in Lendinara, Italy where he continues to remain faithful to his investigations in all mediums.
Breaking the frames, splitting the screen, nesting images inside of perforations like a compress on an open wound, erstwhile “Man Without A Movie Camera” pinhole wizard Paolo Gioli has often made image gathering devices from button eyes, snaps, and seashells. Gioli’s “Stenopeico” devices can composite images from apertures that run the length of the human body from toe to crown. Even when using a conventional 16mm Bolex camera, Gioli often employs external shutters both natural and unnatural, in the form of jerry rigged sewing machine attachments or the intermittent trembling of springtime tree leaves set against the lens -“The resulting image is what the wind gives us.” This is only one area of Gioli’s film work however, many of his most intense films do not use pin- hole methods but do give a remarkable display of split- screen, overlapping negative and positive imagery, uncanny superimpositions and mirror images.
The accompanying visual logo for the Gioli’s “Vampa Productions” films is a photonegative image of a man whose face is wrapped in a criss-crossed blindfold bandage. True to form, phantasmal perturbances retinal trauma, kaleidoscopic mirror mutations and stigmatic reception are conjured up optically and metaphorically in essential films like Hilarisdoppio (1972), Traumatograph (1973) and the amazingly inventive Immagini disturbate da un intenso parrasita / Images Disturbed by an Intense Parasite (1970).
L’Operatore Perforato (1979) capitalizes on the sprocket- hole that appears mid-frame in 9.5 mm film not so much as an organizing absence but as a physical incision, a chameleonic entity, a tear in the fabric of existence. Gioli’s animated investigations of Bert Stern’s contact sheets of Marilyn Monroe in Filmarilyn (1992) links Marilyn to Muybridge reanimating the eroticism and melancholia of Norma Jean.
Gioli’s photographs and silk screens are better known than his over 30 films, works that are seldom seen outside of Europe, a situation crying out for rectification. Raro Video have now released an excellent selection of 14 films by Paolo Gioli in a double dvd set complete with a video interview with Gioli and a 64 page bi-lingual booklet. This will hopefully introduce his work to a new audience. A limited number of his films are in distribution in Paris but several of the titles on our program are not in distribution and all of the prints screened are from the personal collection of the Gioli himself.
Gioli’s photographic work directly references to early photographers like Bayard, Niépce, Eakins, Muybridge and Marey. His film work cites Duchamp, Bunuel, Eisenstein and Artaud while evoking partial comparisons with countless other artists From the perspective of these shores, Gioli is an original, a missing link connecting the classical period of the American and European Avant- Garde with contemporary experimental practice. This work deserves greater exposure and we are pleased to present a program that highlights a small but important part of Gioli’s film oeuvre.
Film sprockets most usually appear outside the image area but Pathé 9.5 film was designed with a perforation that appeared in the middle of the image. Gioli examines the images from a 9.5 mm film which depict a cinematographer in the act of filming a heroine in the midst of fictional plight. The intensity of the camera operator is mirrored by the operations of the filmmaker- Gioli, as he conducts a analytic fantasia – a forensic report that examines the central puncture wound through the surface of the film. Gioli uses the perforation as another kind of screen, a cavity to be filled, an aperture to look through, the edge of a magnetic vacuum that forms uncanny compositions and associations with the surrounding landscape of the film images. These perforations have the power of a hole in the sky suggesting that the universe itself is back-lit.
In June and July 1962 Marilyn Monroe’s last photo shoot with Bert Stern took place at the Bel- Air hotel in Los Angeles. The production of George Cukor’s Something’s Got to Give turned into a debacle and was shut down. Monroe found herself at loose ends without a film in sight. In the hotel room with the assistance of three bottles of Dom Perignon Marilyn dispensed with inhibitions and clothing but remained actively playful, emotionally truthful even on the edge of consciousness. Vogue magazine had commissioned the photos but requested additional shoots finding the results from the initial session to be either too explicit or too stark. Of the 2,571 photographs only 20 were originally published –Marilyn died on the eve of their publication, and others did not appear in the magazine until the mid- 80’s. Eventually many of the photos and contact sheets were seen though book publications and exhibitions. Currently there is an exhibition of 52 of the photos at the Musee Maillol in Paris.
Gioli steals into this site of seduction, exhuming a dialogue between the photographer and the star where gift and theft were in a balancing act. The filmmaker animates static proofs rekindling the synaptic flash between the frames resurrecting Marilyn herself. Monroe’s veiled and unveiled poses and the editorial violence with which she lacerated or crossed out disfavored images now seem to make her an accomplice in this new work as it echoes many of the filmmakers gestures across his oeuvre. For Marilynfilm plays as a new dialogue where once again Marilyn toys and submits to possession but it is as if she comprehends and acts upon Gioli’s aesthetics and they both seem to speak together simultaneously in a common tongue.
An homage to Luis Bunuel, to “saccadic tremors” optical quaking and to the cloud that passes through the moon like a razor slicing an eye.
Sound collaboration: Roberto Soldati
A spinning thaumatrope of real and mock trauma, the black mirror turned against itself and dissected with a questioning stare. Sacramental massacres, the useless abattoir of the battlefield and the pantomime of the auto crash. Moulage. Montage. The collision of images, the breaking of glass, the lifting off of the face mask to find the face of another. A body, a vision that Gioli has referred to as bicorporal. The film frame is a membrane ,the windshield we travel with and sail through, a seal that is meant to be broken. The screen splits and we lose our heads. - Mark McElhatten
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. - Keith Sanborn
Call it the “Desecration of the Host.” What is this infinitesimal and intense parasite that feeds upon these images altering the foundations and the innards of the picture in order to live? And what transformation and fate awaits the viewer who ingests this film? What disturbances in the field might visit our own visuomotor systems due to our own curiosity and consumption?
Gioli’s tour de force of dislodged frames, torn hybrids of film – video –negative-positive overlays and manual silhouettes far from producing a visual cacophony arrive at a new synthetic form distributed into discrete chapters. The encyclopedic range of imagery – home movies, cartoons, sports et al. subsumed in such systematic fashion brings to mind certain works by Jurgen Reble, Michele Smith and Henry Jesionika. The tropes and treatments active in Parasite make it a signature Gioli film. Diagrams of the visual pyramid implicate our participation and are often displaced to indicate funnels of oral emissions or criss-crossings that form diamantine shapes. The soundtrack incorporates music that seems to be made of up of the ululations of Central African pygmies, Burundi whisper singing, passages from Wagner’s Das Rheingold, baroque cello, Debussy and more.
Images Disturbed by an Intense Parasite is dedicated to the Venetian artist Emilio Vedova one of Italy’s most important contemporary artists. Vedova still active -made mobile paintings, geometrical canvases that break with the rectangle in L shapes or two sided circular disks, painted sculptures and pieces that move along guided rails and other spectator manipulated works.
Vedova collaborated with Luigi Nono making moving light collages and set pieces for the composer’s operas from the 60’s into the 80’s. Nono made his first electroacoustic work for tape in 1960 entitling it Ommagio a Emilio Vedova. Gioli’s film in fact can be seen as perhaps a kind of homage or a dialogue employing a cinematic answer to Vedova’s works. -Mark McElhatten
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Sun Oct 8: 3:30
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