Movies: Paolo Gioli

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 ...

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...

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 horizo...

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 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 th...

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 photo...

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 p...

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...

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...

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...

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 r...

"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 hori...

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....

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, p...

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....

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 -...

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, ...

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 c...

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

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 ...