The Graven Face

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.

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 and outdoors surrounded by war and by his sisters. I have tried to reconstruct an extravagant film diary from which I have painstakingly torn out little pages of frames. These frames were exposed and abandoned on negative on a number of photographic reels, cut together at random in two sixty-meter reels in 35mm and acquired by me for 500 Lire from a flea-market vendor. Many frames were shot vertically, others only partially exposed, sometimes properly developed, sometimes not. I tried to animate these little reels using a flicker technique with light stroboscopic touches; in short, a film that could not be recommended to anyone.

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 pupil. When subjected to the stroboscopic rhythms of single frame animation—as in some archaic pre-animation—one's gaze at it is thrown off, going in search of a little dramatic action here and there in the face, through the quick cinematic nonsense of saucers and sclera. The eye of an ox, which degenerates in Buñuel's incision, is my own quaking ox eye.

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 shooting a Fatty Arbuckle imitator, cope with the invasion of perforations, not only from the top and center but from the edge. By now, when we can hardly tell the difference between frame and perforations, cinema’s two round-cornered rectangles, the image can be anything—a picture, or a zone of blank white.

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

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.

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.

"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, blackening in the spokes of a wheel, allowing regular slits, transforming it in this way into a true external shutter, that came to substitute for the missing one of my movie camera. A bicycle wheel that becomes cinema and vice versa. For example, his black window that is transformed into a number of tv screens, etc. With Duchamp I think I could make a film for every one of his works because intelligence, irony and alchemy are all proper to the cinema."

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

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.

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.

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.

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 as a limitless freezer of frames. Even more so, when the screen is a screen of a screen—a condition approaching the simultaneity of electronics. The usual battery of devices: Super-8, 16mm and slide projectors. A constructed series of film loops with scenes of [everyday] life, slowing down and accelerating the events on a solitary screen, so that life as it has been staged gathers itself up in a perpetual serial [process of] self-editing. On the tv screen a face is pierced through by the small filmic screen.

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.

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, according to the desires of the film image and its frame.

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 using a form of filmic doubling employing the technique of creating bispecular-asynchronous loops which mime—with extreme visual results—the actions and the objects on stage to make them stand out and to distance them from the action.