Piero Heliczer

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Piero Giorgio Heliczer (born June 20, 1937 in Rome , Italy , † July 22, 1993 in Préaux-du-Perche , France ) was an Italian-American writer, screenwriter, poet, actor, publisher and underground filmmaker . Heliczer is part of the New American Cinema .

Live and act

Born in Italy with a German-Jewish mother and an Italian-Polish father, he came to film as a child: when he was four years old, he was voted the “most Italian-looking child” in a talent competition and played in several films as a child actor . Heliczer's father, a doctor and resistance fighter , was tortured and executed by Germans when the boy was seven years old. According to Piero Heliczer's own accounts, after the war, at the age of ten, he had an uncredited supporting role in Vittorio De Sica's film Ladri di Biciclette ( Bicycle Thieves , 1948). Heliczer's mother rejected Italian neorealism and its portrayal of poor, lumpy children and decided to emigrate to the United States. Piero attended high school in the USA and began studying at Harvard University in 1955 , which he dropped out after two years. He moved to Paris , where he founded the publishing house The Dead Language Press together with his schoolmate, the writer and musician Angus MacLise .

The Dead Language Press

Heliczer and MacLise published “alternative” authors, such as the Finnish poet and translator Anselm Hollo , the New York beat poet Gregory Corso and the underground film pioneer Jack Smith , in whose film Flaming Creatures Heliczer (1961) played and whose The Beautiful Book was published in 1962.

The Beats around William S. Burroughs had their base in Paris in a small hotel on Rue Gît-le-Cœur, 9 , which became known as the Beat Hotel . Her hard core included Brion Gysin , Harold Norse , Ian Sommerville and Gregory Corso.

The underground film

From 1960 to 1961, Heliczer made his first film in London , The Autumn Feast (1961), in collaboration with British filmmaker Jeff Keen . In 1962 Heliczer went to New York and quickly got into the environment of Andy Warhol and his Factory suite. From 1963 Heliczer appeared in several Warhol films, including two screen tests .

In 1964 Heliczer bought his own camera and began making films in the inexpensive 8 mm standard format. Although he sometimes had some films copied to 16 mm format, Heliczer was one of the few New York underground filmmakers who limited himself mostly to the narrower standard format regular 8 . Heliczer's films followed Jack Smith's camp aesthetic, they were technically of primitive quality and mostly had a violent sexual theme that was directed against Catholicism . They were often perceived as obscene and unreasonable by the moviegoers . During a screening of his film Satisfaction in 1965, a moviegoer was so enraged that he overturned the projector and attacked some people around Heliczer.

Heliczer usually made silent films that he set to music afterwards by playing a tape recorder. His screen adaptation of Burroughs' Naked Lunch from 1968 is, for example, a “film for a tape recorder that does not require a projector”. Sometimes Heliczer had the soundtrack recorded live by musicians posted behind the screen; one of these spontaneous backing bands, who musically accompanied his film installation The Launching of the Dream Weapon in the spring of 1965 , later became known under the name The Velvet Underground . In November 1965 Heliczer shot the film Venus in Furs with them , one of the band's first known film and sound documents. These footage were in turn filmed by a CBS news team for an episode of Walter Cronkite presents entitled "The Making of an Underground Film" . This TV report was to be the only TV appearance by both Piero Heliczer and The Velvet Underground. Angus MacLise, who at that time was still the band's drummer and contributed numerous soundtracks to Heliczer's films, also appeared in a number of his films (including Satisfaction ) as an actor.

Unsuccessful later years

A turning point in Heliczer's life was a handsome reparation payment from the German government as compensation for the murder of his father. Heliczer gave some of this money away to friends, but kept part of it in order to found an association of filmmakers in Paris based on the example of the film makers' cooperative established in New York . He also bought a dilapidated property near Préaux-du-Perche in Lower Normandy . Heliczer's filmmaking cooperative was unsuccessful, however, and so he went to Amsterdam , where he lived on a houseboat in the mid-1970s. Vandals sank the ship, and so the now homeless filmmaker was drawn back to New York, where he actually lived on the streets for a while. In 1984 he managed to return to Normandy, where he worked in a bookshop for the remaining years. In July 1993, the 56-year-old was killed in an accident with his moped.

aftermath

Of the more than 17 films that Heliczer made, some have been lost or lost , and only a third of them are still in circulation. Heliczer's publications are just as rare: there are no known surviving copies of some of his writings. In 2001 the poet Gerard Malanga compiled a collection of Heliczer's still available literary material under the title A Purchase in the White Botanica . A compilation of Heliczer's films is still pending.

Filmography

  • 1961: The Autumn Feast . 16 mm, 14 min.
  • 1965: Dirt . 16 mm, 12 min.
  • 1965: The Launching of the Dream Weapon
  • 1965: Venus in Furs 16 mm. 16 min. Color, mute (music from tape)
  • 1967: Joan of Arc . 16 mm, 11.5 min.

Not dated, between 1964 and 1967:

  • The Soap Opera . 16 mm, 13 min.
  • Satisfaction . 16 mm, 10 min.
  • The Stone Age . 16 mm, 24 min.

Publications

  • The Soap Opera . Trigram Press, London 1967

posthumously:

  • Piero Heliczer, Gerard Malanga (Ed.): A Purchase in the White Botanica . Granary Books, 2001, ISBN 1-887123-57-1 . Collected poems.

Web links

Individual references and sources

  1. ↑ Uwe Husslein: Pop goes art. Andy Warhol & Velvet Underground . Institute for Pop Culture, Wuppertal 1990, p. 10
  2. ^ A b c David Lewis: Piero Heliczer Biography. Allmovie.com, accessed October 30, 2016 .
  3. ↑ Uwe Husslein: Pop goes art. Andy Warhol & Velvet Underground , p. 40
personal data
SURNAME Heliczer, Piero
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Heliczer, Piero Giorgio
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian-American writer, screenwriter, poet, actor, publisher and underground filmmaker
DATE OF BIRTH June 20, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Rome , Italy
DATE OF DEATH July 22, 1993
Place of death Préaux-du-Perche , France