TOSHI ICHIYANAGI`S AVANT-GARDE ALERT COMPOSING AND SOME OTHER GREAT LOSSES

 

ALERT CINEMA IN THEORY AND LIFE PRACTICES

(Well, there's one thing you can't lose... It's that feel...)

I would like to start this post with the repeated information about David King's Web TV sequenced program "Exploratory Visions", previously announced via the "Friends of the Armchair Traveler" blog. Impressive 60 minutes of recent experimental film and video production (a part of which I would not dare to include in my presentation programs) yet you can follow the two more days at the address: 

https://www.salto.nl/programma/the-screening-room/

I am looking forward to watch the second part of this little avant-garde net show, about which you will be informed in due course and based on a number of relevant sources such as this www point. I owe a lot to David and our friendship, just to mention. BTW, during our exchange of emails and hopefully valuable life experiences I reflected on the enormous losses for the avant-garde art scene during the past year. So, before the coming holidays, we should remember, among others, Nick Zedd (1958-2022), Paolo Gioli (1942-2022) and Toshi Ichiyanagi (1933-2022).

Nick Zedd (1958-2022)

Since I previously elaborated on my personal chatting experience with him and paid tribute in relation to the opus and hard-to-digest Nick Zedd attitudes (you read about it in my earlier posts), this time, as a kind of homage contribution, I would like to place a few of my humble works along with basic remarks about forever lost masters Gioli and Ichiyanagi.

As Wikipedia states: “Paolo Gioli (12 October 1942 – 28 January 2022) was an Italian painter, photographer, and experimental film director. Gioli was born in the northeastern Kingdom of Italy and attended the "Academy of Fine Arts in Venice". Early influences include Hans Richter and Walter Ruttman. He did not take an interest in film until he lived in New York in 1967, where he discovered the "New American Cinema school of filmmaking”. 

Paolo Gioli (1942-2022)

I have presented Paolo Gioli's films at Cine Club Split in the fall of 2019, and in the announcement of the program I included an excerpt from an interview conducted with Paolo Gioli by the Italian journalist and writer Caludia D`Alonzo for the needs of the digital online publication "Digimag Journal":

“Claudia D’Alonzo: When did you begin to understand that the modalities of production and perception of cinema imposed by standardized production were too strict for you?

Paolo Gioli: I realized this through something that may seem banal but which was decisive: when I realized that I could not immediately control what I had just shot. If someone does research on images he must be able to immediately see the shots. Reading the history of cinema, I read the things that everyone had read but that evidently no other auteur had ever taken into consideration. I asked myself: how did the first people who made films develop them? At the time there was no laboratory: Meliés, Lumière, Edison did not go to a laboratory, they were their own laboratory. Cinema was created through them and they had found a way to develop their own things by themselves. And reading French texts on the history of cinema I found what I imagined to find. At the beginning there were bits that they threw into some development liquid and developed them like that, like a bowl of spaghetti, just to verify whether the material developed or not. Then they thought of building a can in which they rolled the film, they left it there soaking in a bucket, they waited 6 or 7 minutes, just as if they were developing film. Then they put it in water to wash it, they unraveled it and hung it out to dry. After having read these things I began to do the same.

Claudia D’Alonzo: So what interested you was controlling the development phase and print phase?

All of Paolo Gioli's Cinema ("RARO VIDEO") - https://www.rarovideo.com/

Paolo Gioli: Development is one thing. In development you see what you have done. When you have a negative you’re alright, you edit the negative and as you go you accumulate 6 or 7 meters, you realize that everything changes. Everyone said to me: but cinema film is different, it’s not like photographic film, it’s different. I didn’t believe them, so I bought some film, and I developed it as if it were any old photo film and I saw it was the same thing. Everyone was so obsessed with technicality… they all felt these technical barriers, complicated stuff full of secrets: it’s so stupid. Film is film. In other words I had to do it myself and not listen to what other people said. Then I realized that I could make a film from morning to evening! I would shoot a piece, if I liked it I would edit it, piece by piece, and so forth. Once I had finished I would print everything in a laboratory. I printed some pieces myself, I would make the positive with an old camera, I used it like Lumière did, he used the camera to shoot and print: you put the new film in contact with the developed negative, you shoot a white light, for example from a wall, and you impress the positive film. Which is what happens in the laboratory, the printer does exactly that. From then on I began working autonomously, even on duration. This notion that a film must last an hour and a half, derives from focus group tests on audiences, they noticed that spectators have had enough after two hours. This notion of an hour and a half created itself, it’s an old story. But this is true for commercials too: if they are bad those two minutes are unbearable, if they’re good you never want them to end.

Paolo Gioli`s CCS presentation A4 paper announcement (scan) found on the official Ian Gibbins web page (thanks for keeping this dear friend...)

Claudia D’Alonzo: You lived in two important contexts for the whole experimental cinema scene, New York at the end of the Sixties and Rome during the second have of the following decade… 

Paolo Gioli: I wasn’t making movies when I was in New York . At that time I was mostly drawing. I followed the circuit of little cinemas that showed these “forbidden” films, underground films. But from there I understood a lot of things. For example, wandering around the bay of New York at night, in quite dangerous places, by chance I saw a little cinema with a line of people outside. A lot of the people waiting in line were holding these little boxes in their hands, I just thought they were strange spectators. I sneaked inside too. I found out that those spectators were really auteurs and that the boxes were boxes of Super8 film. You didn’t know what was going to come out of it, the people in line gave their films to the projectionist. At a certain point the police ruptured into the cinema, everyone out, turned everything off, and identified everyone present. I had a tourist visa and was terrified.

Paolo Gioli - Quando l'occhio trema (1989)

Claudia D’Alonzo: So even in America there was not all this freedom that people imagine. When you read about that era it seems as though things were so simple, very free and shared, even in the management of spaces created in the most unthinkable places…

Paolo Gioli: No, all of Mekas’s exhibitions were very organized. Here is my little video collage link , official. But then there were as many autonomous places, pontoons and barges where you could sleep too. There were film slide projections, mostly in Super8. Most of these were psychedelic films that implied the use of various substances during the course of the evening. I never used anything like that but all the possible substances available at the time were shared right in front of me."

More about Paolo Gioli you can find on this web addresses:

http://digicult.it/digimag/issue-045/cinemahacking-interview-to-paolo-gioli)

http://www.paologioli.it

Here is the link for my little video homage to the work of Paolo Gioli:

Darko Duilo - Pale After Rain (2022)

Toshi Ichiyanagi, “avant alerter”, was a Japanese avant-garde composer and pianist. He provided film scores for some of the crucial works of Toshio Matsumoto (1932-2017) whose short works little retrospective i have curated at the Cine Club Split during the spring of 2011. and the cycle composed of some of his features was presented several years later,

Toshi Ichiyanagi (1933-2022)

Besides, Toshi Ichiyanagi composed some of the main works of Yoshishige Yoshida (presented at the CCS too). For better understanding of a function of “avant-garde alerting” I am adding one more of my recent works (dedicated to Toshi Ichiyanagi and "soundscape filled" with one of his composition) to this post:

Darko Duilo - Living Space (2022)

Some of the works by Yoshida and Matsumoto with Ichiyanagi soundtracks you can find free to watch (stream) on the "Internet Archive" web:

https://archive.org/

Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

And for the end of this session of the experimental cinema encyclopedic entries I was planning to use the opportunity to present you some underrated works form “alerting video producers” teams, but my contacts with those YouTube channels are lost. Instead, here is one more You Tube clip with Toshi Ichiyanagi`s composition:

Ichiyanagi Toshi - Duet for Piano and String Instrument (1961)

And, what happened to my love life? Well, for the end of this post let me get you a little bit depressed with this one (premiered exclusively for the "Friends of the Armchair Traveller”):

Darko Duilo - Royal Cut Sutro (2022)

Well, at least there's one thing you can't lose...

It's that feel...

Greetings from Split, Croatia…

 

Darko Duilo

 

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