Free Films Made Freely: Paolo Gioli and Experimental Filmmaking in Italy

As a premise for my way of making films and working with film, the most important thing is the movie-camera understood almost as a laboratory (for the shooting and printing of films) ... I express my love for the cinema through the movie-camera; in terms of time requirements and production costs, I'm beginning to invent them for myself. Free films made freely. --Paolo Gioli Given the large amount of attention that the film industry routinely gets from scholars and critics, it is surprising how little we have come to know about avant-garde and experimental film-making in Italy. We understand a great deal about avant-garde films in France, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, and yet Italy's contributions in this area have been almost entirely neglected by film scholars and historians in the English speaking world. Even in Italy, there is surprisingly little attention given to the filmic avant-gardes, beyond a relatively short list of studies by a handful of scholars--most notably Adriano Apra', Massimo Bacigalupo, Bruno Di Marino, Raffaele Milani, Carla Subrizi, Mario Verdone and a few others. It's certainly not for a lack of films and filmmakers, however. Ever since the Futurist filmmakers Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna conducted their first experiments with music and projected light in the 1910s, visual artists have explored the potential of film as an expressive medium. (1) The list of important filmmakers in the Italian underground would include the Futurists Corra, Ginna, F.T. Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, Emilio Settimelli, Remo Chiti (all co-authors of the Manifesto of Futurist Cinema in 1916 and the film, A Futurist Life, that resulted from it that same year) but also later filmmakers such as Luigi Veronesi, Cioni Carpi, Silvio and Vittorio Loffredo, Nato Frasca', and a long list of filmmakers associated with the neo-avant-garde, including Paolo Gioli, one of the few contemporary filmmakers still experimenting on celluloid. These names represent a vast continent of audio-visual experimentation that remains greatly under-explored--and almost entirely unknown in North America. In what follows, my goal is to shed some new light on experimental filmmaking in Italy, focusing primarily on films made since the 1960s, and to do so by examining some aspects of the work of Paolo Gioli. One of Italy's most important contemporary experimental filmmakers, Gioli inherits the legacies of the European and North American avant-gardes while fashioning a body of work whose unique contributions to the theory and practice of experimental film we are now in a position to recognize. Neo-Avant-Garde Film in Italy Independent cinema ... is today a reality even in Italy. The phenomenon first spread from the United States towards Anglo-Saxon Europe, subsequently touching upon the entire continent. As usual, we are last in this race ... This cinema must, slowly but surely, become a cinema of liberation. ... This cinema is nothing other than a cinema of revolt. (2) --Editorial Board, Ombre elettriche, 1967 Even a general understanding of Gioli's films might benefit from some historical contextualization. Avant-garde filmmaking in Italy--that is, the elaboration of a collective mode of independent film production, distribution and exhibition--had two important historical moments over the last century: Futurist filmmaking, taking place during the 1910s, followed several decades later, by a second, neo-avant-garde film movement identified with the independent Film Cooperative (the Cooperativa Cinema Indipendente, or CCI) of the late 1960s. While there certainly were filmmakers experimenting in noncommercial film in the decades between these two movements, their work was largely produced outside any clearly defined film movement: most notably by Luigi Veronesi in the 1930s-40s, followed by Silvio and Vittorio Loffredo and Cioni Carpi in the 1950s-60s (Carpi completed many of his films outside Italy, including his outstanding animated film One Day an Airplane which he made in Montreal in 1963 with support from the National Film Board of Canada). …

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