As a premise for my way of making films and working with film, the most important thing is the movie-camera understood almost as a laboratory (for the shooting and printing of films)… I express my love for the cinema through the movie-camera; in terms of time requirements and production costs, I’m beginning to invent them for myself.  Free films made freely.

One of the last of the generation of filmmakers to emerge from the period of the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s—when the Italian underground flourished, briefly, in dialogue with developments in North America—Gioli’s work represents a continuation of avant-garde investigations of the aesthetic and technological materials of the medium. The avant-garde legacy is clearly signified, throughout Gioli’s filmography, in his frequent quotations from Duchamp, Vertov, Eisenstein, Richter and Buñuel. Across four decades and nearly forty films, Gioli inherits and reworks the legacies of the surrealist avant-gardes as well as that of the New American Cinema he first encountered in New York City in the late 1960s.

Born in 1942 in the city of Rovigo, not far from Venice, Gioli originally studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. It was not long until Gioli’s experience of European and American avant-garde film would lead to the purchase of his first 16mm camera. Though Gioli has eloquently described how he used it the way the first Lumiere cameramen did in the late 1800s—for both shooting film and as an optical printer—his first film, Traces of Traces, was made without a camera, applying pigments to clear leader, using his fingers, hands, arms and other body parts, as well as paintbrushes and rubber stamps. Traces of Traces is a record of the impressions made by the artist’s body, including the texture of skin and contours of the flesh—and we should not forget that the Italian word for film is pellicola (from pelle: skin). Gioli made his first film-pellicola as an analogue of skin, conceived as the interface between the human being and the outside world. It is a film that announces one of the central concerns of all of Gioli’s work to follow: the human body, desire, and the physical and psychological processes involved in sense perception.

While continuing to work in film, he also began experimenting with photography—making photographs with what he called “stenopeic” devices (from the Greek stenos opaios, narrow aperture). He built many different sorts of pinhole cameras from very unusual materials, including boxes of various dimensions, shipping tubes and containers, seashells, loaves of bread, walnuts, saltine crackers, perforated soup ladles, buttons, traffic cones, cheese graters, salt shakers and the human hand. He also experimented with large-format pinhole cameras using large sheets of Polaroid positive film and pioneered the technique of Polaroid transfers. 

Gioli has made many pinhole motion pictures since the early 1970s, including Pinhole Film (Man without a Movie Camera), as well as his very recent film Natura obscura. With these devices, Gioli says, he “explores” what is in front of him, recording the world without the interference of optical lenses and without the imposition of a single, stable perspective. The exposures on the film strip merge together in diffused lap-dissolves of very simple images of windows, bodies, household objects, tree and plants, which are remarkable for their auroral beauty. The irregular dimensions of the apertures, the slight variations in the distance between apertures and in the length of exposure all combine to lend Gioli’s images their fragile intensity.

Ultimately, Gioli’s investigations center on the physical and psychological processes of perception and cognition. For Gioli, the film camera locates—in the mysterious, apertured interior of the camera obscura—an analogous encounter with the earth as it registers itself onto light-sensitive materials. And this analogy between the camera and the human body—the body with its apertures and orifices, with its skin—will be the dominant leitmotif of all his films, beginning with his first gesture of pressing his pigmented body to clear celluloid and culminating in his meditations on the erotic dimensions of the cinematic apparatus, as seen in When Bodies Touch.

Gioli’s interest in film as a surface upon which the earth imprints its image leads to his subsequent meditations on motion and the historical development of motion pictures out of the camera obscuras of the Renaissance and various other optical devices and retinal toys of the 19th century. However, Gioli’s cinema takes us even further back towards the birthplace of photographic images, the first positive heliographic image of a window in Joseph Niepce’s studio. (Niepce’s image, as well as similar photographs by Fox Talbot, are in fact reprised in the opening section of Pinhole Film.) And it is at that moment of photographic invention, it seems, that Gioli locates the splitting of nature between the earth and its representation, between reality and its picture, as cinema’s primordial wound, to which the history of its development can be seen to respond. In Gioli’s often frantically cut films, the procedures of editing and montage seem ever to repeat the splitting away of human consciousness from nature, with each cut reenacting the animating wound of the alienated modern(ist) artist. However, in a perhaps paradoxical fashion, Gioli’s pinhole cameras, with their filmstrips immediately exposed to the world, express the artist’s regressive desire for a clearing away of alienating consciousness and a return to an energeia of nature—to an experience of conceptually unbound phenomena—that tempts the artist with the promise of knowledge—though at the cost of oblivion.

Ever refusing to divorce poetics from ideology—and stubbornly insisting on a “do it yourself” creative autonomy that is exemplary in its resistance to any fetishization of technology—Gioli makes art in which aesthetic experimentation might be a prelude to psychological and ideological renovation. To that extent, each of his films—though none more than his pinhole films—express a desire for a new beginning, a fresh start, both for filmmaking and for sense perception. And perhaps this, most of all, is the task of avant-garde and experimental film artists from Futurism to today: to make films that take spectators to very edge of human understanding, to the very limits of their own selves, where they can open their eyes, perhaps, and see what is there. – adapted from “Free Film Made Freely: Paolo Gioli and Experimental Filmmaking in Italy,” by Patrick Rumble, CineAction, no. 78 (2009)

On April 16 and 17 Paolo Gioli will be joined in conversation with David Bordwell, Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies, Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Patrick Rumble, professor of Italian, European Studies, and Visual Culture Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will also introduce the evening of April 17.