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PAOLO GIOLI, THE MAN WITHOUT A MOVIE CAMERA
A selection of Paolo Gioli's films
29.05.2025
- Artists
- Jean-Michel Bouhours
- Emmanuel Lefrant
Jean-Michel Bouhours and Emmanuel Lefrant present at the Villa Medici the book Quand l’œil tremble (Jean-Michel Bouhours, Light Cone Edition, 2024), an exploration of Paolo Gioli’s cinema. This presentation is enhanced by a screening of films in 16mm by the Italian master.
A self-taught painter born in Rovigo (Veneto), Paolo Gioli (1942-2022) turned to photography and experimental cinema in the late 1960s, after a stay in the United States. In Rome, he met members of the short-lived Cooperativa del Cinema indipendente (Gianfranco Baruchello, Tonino de Bernardi, Massimo Bacigalupo, etc.) and remained close to filmmakers such as Alfredo Leonardi and Pier Farri.
Paolo Gioli’s unparalleled ingenuity and imagination have enabled him to make complex films in total autarky. Many of his films question the latent content of mass media: Paolo Gioli comments on, analyzes and interprets these images, recontextualizing them within his own mental and visual universe.
What’s more, his inventions (such as the pinhole camera and filmfinish) shake up the doxa, and sometimes the historicity, of cinema.
Paolo Gioli revisits the work of precursors such as Étienne-Jules Marey, Henry-Fox Talbot, Nicéphore Niépce and Eadweard Muybridge, always in search of an original purity, and gives his experiments, inspired by the observation of Nature, an epistemological dimension: “Stripping away everything, reducing more and more to reach a high level with little, producing, expressing with nothing, hands in pockets”.
In one of his last research, inspired by the inventor of the Polaroid Edwin Land’s studies on the colors representation, he contributes additional reflections to Goethe’s observations on the psycho-perception of colors (On Color Theory). A short video excerpt of Paolo Gioli’s experiment will be shown
Program:
Del tuffarsi e dell’annegarsi. 1971. 11’.
Traumatografo. 1973. 25’.
Piccolo Film Decomposto 1986. 15’22.
Filmfinish. 1986-89. 13’.
Natura obscura. 2003-2013. 8’10.
Jean-Michel Bouhours
An experimental filmmaker, art historian and exhibition curator, Jean-Michel Bouhours has held a number of positions in public institutions: Chief Curator in charge of the Cinema department at the Musée national d’art moderne (MNAM), Centre Pompidou, Paris (1992-2003), then of the Modern Art department (2018-2021); Director of the Nouveau Musée national de Monaco (2003-2008).
In the field of experimental cinema, he is the author of : The Golden Age. Cahiers du MNAM (1993, ed Centre Pompidou) ; L’Art du mouvement (dir d’ouvrage. Centre Pompidou, 1996) ; Man Ray directeur du mauvais movies (with Patrick de Haas, 1997, ed Centre Pompidou) ; Monter Sampler (with yann beauvais, Ed Centre Pompidou 2001) Quel cinéma (Presses du réel, 2010), Michel Nedjar. Everything is a doll (Ed Buchet Chastel 2022). José Antonio Sistiaga: De Rerum Natura (San Sebastian, Spain, ed Kutxa Fundaxioa, 2022)
Emmanuel Lefrant
An experimental filmmaker and film programmer, Emmanuel Lefrant has been Light Cone’s director since 2007. In 2015, he relaunched the cooperative’s publishing activities by creating Light Cone Editions, which has published 10 books to date (Rose Lowder, Robert Breer, Germaine Dulac, etc.), all focusing on experimental filmmakers in the collection.
Practical information:
Thursday, May 29 at 6:30 pm
Michel Piccoli cinema room of Villa Medici
French and Italian
Free
