Paolo Gioli

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 the rhythm of some erotic film images, making butterflies and eros pulsate together.

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 halfway along the aperture plate as they enter the motion picture camera itself. The images then are formed as an extremely dense series of lines as in a primitive video screen, such as the Nipkow. The cinematic rhythms of the film vary with the accelerations and decelerations imposed beyond the synchronism between movie camera and subject: with motion from top to bottom, or else with the movie camera lying sideways, (in that case the line is vertical) then, from left to right and vice versa. Of course without a shutter or claw [in the camera]. This filmic technique is well known in scientific cinematography, and it is this very combination that I most urgently desired to encompass in my graphic compositional concerns.

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 their sudden transformations when subjected to the photo-finish technique, transferring them, then imparting motion to them in a single animated sequence on the computer. This agitation, torn from photographic fixity [is] subjected, in turn, to distortion by its intersection with objects texture-mapped with those same faces. The passage from motionless quiet to paroxysmal interference; the animating startle of Bach’s cello.

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 "chapters", Gioli resurrects the vitality, captivating charm, and exuded sensuality of the voluptuous, iconic Hollywood superstar through the sequencing of the manipulated images - modulated object framing, subtle displacement, photographic blow-ups or visual recessions that simulate dimensionality and varying depths of focus - into a bold, risqué, and tantalizing "new" film starring the late actress.

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.

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, the inter-pulsations of the frames of film make me think of a sound I do not know.

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

Three persons wander on bridges and roads.