Film derived from an old Pathé film with those well known center perforations. Built on numerous zoom ins and optical gliding over several images of an anonymous section, to which other foreign images were added. In the center (of the perforation) an unknown operator attempts to somehow film part of a story (of what, or who?) and apparently succeeds. Relentless, the center perforation manhandles and smashes his images, in the end perhaps succeeding in destroying the most secret ones. A film "dedicated" to the perforation on fifty centimeters of film by an operator, "found" and perforated.

Paolo Gioli

Alluding to Dziga Vertov's antithetical L'Homme a la camera (Man with a Movie Camera), the experimental Gioli shows with L'uomo senza macchina da presa (Man without a Movie Camera) that the artist has the means for a complete mastery of his tools. With the stenopoeic perforation (any object can act as a camera obscura, from kitchen tools to jacket buttons, from a cracker to the artist's own hand), Gioli takes on one of the essential artistic problems of the second half of the twentieth century: the body as vector of a psychic automatism or as interface between the psyche and the work.

from Jean-Michel Bouhours
Paolo Gioli, l'uomo senza macchina da presa 1996