ISTHEWAY.TV001 - Paolo Gioli "Film Stenopeico"

from Shinoby

DVD

ISTHEWAY.TV001 - Paolo Gioli "Film Stenopeico" main photo

film by Paolo Gioli. sounds by Shinoby. Italy 1973/1981/1989 16mm, b/w & color, silent, 13 min This film, as the Vertovian title indicates, was made without a movie camera, more precisely with a device custom-made to restore to images freedom from optics and mechanics. The act of substituting my device for a traditional movie camera is part of a project I have continued from that moment on towards weaning myself from a consumer technology, a toxin to pure creativity. This strange movie camera is a simple little hollow tube, one centimeter thick, two centimeters wide... with two reels to hold 16mm film pulled manually causing alternations of time and space. The images enter simultaneous through 150 holes distributed along one side in proximity to each frame, that come to make up 150 tiny pinhole cameras, also called stenopeic from the Greek stenos = narrow and from the stem op- from oráo = to see. Paolo Gioli was born in Sarzano, Italy, in 1942. After attending the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, he travelled to New York in 1967 on a study grant from the John Cabot Foundation, where he familiarized himself with the art scene of the time and discovered the “New American Cinema”. Once back in Italy, living between Rovigo and Rome, he traded one of his paintings for a Bolex camera. In 1969 he completed his first films, commencing an exploration of photography that still continues today. Gioli’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Centre G. Pompidou, Paris, France; Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Arles, France; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (Monaco); Musée Nicéphore Nièpce, Châlon-sur-Saône, France; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy; MART, Rovereto, Italy; George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; among others. His films have screened at San Francisco MoMA, New York Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Toronto International Film Festival, Cinemathèque Francaise, Paris, France; Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin, Italy, among many others. His works are in the collections of Galleria Nazionale d’art Moderna Rome, Italy; Centre G. Pompidou, Paris, France; the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Museum of Modern Art, New York. Paolo Gioli will participate in the 2015 Venice Biennial.