Paolo Gioli

Natura Obscura (2013)

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

Tessitura calda (2013)

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. ...

When Faces Touch (2012)

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 photographi ...

When Bodies Touch (2012)

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 photographi ...

Extremotions (2009)

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 ...

I volti dell’Anonimo (2009)

"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 horizontal ...

Il finish delle figure (2009)

"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 impossibili ...

Rectoinverso (2009)

Three persons wander on bridges and roads. ...

Rothkofilm (2008)

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 ...

Children (2008)

"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 ...

Frameline (2008)

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, accordin ...

Face : canvas : texture (2002)

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. ...

Paolo Gioli: Antologia film (2002)

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

Volto telato (2002)

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. While in the process of completing it, I used single frame digital animation to shoot the faces and ...

Face Caught in the Dark (1995)

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 ...

Images Overtaken by the Wheel of Duchamp (1994)

"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, ...

Flutter (1993)

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 th ...

Filmarilyn (1992)

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 " ...

Metamorphic (1991)

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 h ...

Pinhole Film (The Man Without a Movie Camera) (1989)

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

When the Eye Quakes (1989)

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 ...

Finestra davanti ad un albero (1989)

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 flick ...

Piccolo film decomposto (1986)

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, fr ...

Filmfinish (1986)

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 ...

The Naked Killer (1984)

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 enter ...

The Perforated Cameraman (1979)

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 ...

The Screen, Just the Screen (1978)

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 ...

When the Film Gets Hot (1974)

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 bo ...

Hilarisdoppio (1973)

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 ...

Unstable Figures Amidst Vegetation (1973)

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 th ...

Cineforon (1973)

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 usi ...

Traumatografo (1973)

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 sect ...

Futurist Europe (1973)

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

According to My Glass Eye (1972)

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. ...

A come Alice (1972)

Anonimatografo (1972)

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 an ...

Images Disturbed by an Intense Parasite (1970)

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 amoun ...

Real Image / Virtual Image (1970)

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 vision ...

Commutations with Mutations (1969)

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 ...

Tracce di tracce (1969)

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. ...

Avant-Garde Prayer (1969)

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

Paolo Gioli: Free Films Made Freely (2007)

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

Ritratto di Piero Bargellini (2005)

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

The Cinema Machine (1979)

Directed by a group of avant-garde filmmakers, the film is an investigation of the less edifying aspects of film industry. ...

The Perforated Cameraman (1979)

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 ...

Hilarisdoppio (1973)

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 ...