Piero Heliczer

Piero Heliczer (June 20, 1937 – July 22, 1993) was an Italian-American poet, publisher, actor and filmmaker associated with the New American Cinema.

Life and career

Heliczer was born in Rome to a German mother and a Polish father, both of whom were Jewish refugees in Italy. His father was a doctor engaged in the Resistance who would be tortured and killed by the Gestapo.

Heliczer's film career began at the age of four when, ironically, he won a contest for the "most typical-looking Italian child." Acting under the name "Pier Giorgio Heliczer," he played minor roles in Italian films as a child, including, by his own account, an uncredited supporting role in Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948). When Heliczer was seven years old, his father, a doctor and resistance fighter, was tortured and executed by the Gestapo. The boy emigrated with his mother to the United States in the 1940s, graduated high school at the top of his class, and enrolled at Harvard in 1955. After two years he dropped out and moved to Paris, where he co-founded the Dead Language Press with his high school friend, the poet and composer Angus MacLise.

Dead Language Press

Heliczer published "alternative" authors, including himself, MacLise, the Finnish poet and translator Anselm Hollo, the Beat poet Gregory Corso, and the underground filmmaker Jack Smith, in whose film Flaming Creatures Heliczer appeared in 1963. Andy Warhol began organizing similar events in 1966; his Exploding Plastic Inevitable incorporated many of the same techniques and performers.

In November 1965, during the filming of Venus in Furs, the Velvet Underground and Heliczer were featured in a CBS News segment titled "The Making of an Underground Film," which aired the following month. Afterwards Mekas wrote in the Village Voice, "Three new film-makers have appeared on the scene with glimpses of beauty and promises for the future: Andy Meyer, Robert Nelson, and Piero Heliczer." The Last Rites also made a lasting impression on the playwright Richard Foreman, who recalled it years later as one of his favorites.

Mekas was even more impressed by Dirt, writing in the Village Voice: Among all the new movies (it has been quiet lately on the underground scene) Piero Heliczer's Dirt touched me most deeply. Its beauty is very personal and lyrical. And every frame of it is cinema. I cannot do justice to this beautiful work in one paragraph. It was shot on 8mm and much of its beauty and its cinema come from 8mm properties of camera and film. It is all motion. Together with Brakhage's Songs, Branaman's abstractions and Ken Jacobs's not yet released work, Heliczer's Dirt is one of the four works that use 8mm film properly and for art's sake.

Later years

Many years after the murder of his father, Heliczer was awarded a sum of money by the German government in compensation. He gave much of it away to fellow artists, but kept enough to try and establish a filmmaker's cooperative in Paris like the one in New York. He also bought a small house in Normandy. The filmmaker's cooperative was not a success, so he moved to Amsterdam, where he lived on a houseboat for a time. Vandals sank the boat, leaving him homeless, and he spent some time living on the streets of New York.

His daughter Thérèse Casper (née Heliczer) began making a documentary film about his life in 2013. Another daughter, Wynn Heliczer, is an actress.

Filmography

Year Film Description 1961 Autumn Feast with Jeff Keen, Angus MacLise, Tony Conrad, et al. 1964 The Soap Opera with Angus MacLise, Jack Smith, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, et al. 1965 Dirt with Angus MacLise, Mario Montez, Harry Smith, Gerard Malanga, Andy Warhol, Charles Henri Ford, Barbara Rubin, Jack Smith, Bobby Driscoll (in his final film role), Dee Dee Driscoll, Edie Sedgwick, Sally Kirkland, John Cale, Marian Zazeela, La Monte Young, Storm de Hirsch, Jonas Mekas, et al. 1965 The Last Rites a multimedia "happening" 1965 Satisfaction with Sally Kirkland, Barbara Rubin, Gerard Malanga, Jack Smith, Angus MacLise, John Cale, Mario Montez, et al. 1965 Venus in Furs with Barbara Rubin, Lou Reed, John Cale, Angus MacLise, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker, et al. 1967 Joan of Arc with Tony Conrad, Tuli Kupferberg, Andy Warhol, et al. ? Stone Age with Tom Raworth, Jackie Curtis, Viva, Jack Smith, Gerard Malanga, et al. ? New Jerusalem with Tony Conrad, Antoine Perich, et al. ? Bessie Smith 1968 Don Byron with International Velvet, Gerard Malanga, et al. ? The Naked Lunch with sound by William Burroughs ? Session at New Palz ? St. Therese de L'Enfant 1969 St. Therese Part 2 1970 Acquarium [sic] ? Cocaine Fancy ? Robin Hood ? Rein ? Allez Allez Les Morts ? U.S.A. vs. Piero Heliczer ? I'm In With the In Crowd ? The Plays of Piero Heliczer 1975 Opal

Publications

Imprimatur 1281, Dead Language Press, Paris, late 50s / early 60s. you could hear the snow dripping and falling into the deers mouth [sic], Dead Language Press, Paris, late 50s / early 60s. & i dreamt i shot arrows in my amazon bra: a poem in eleven takes, Matrix Press / Dead Language Press, London, 1963. The Soap Opera, Trigram Press, London, 1967. Includes illustrations by Andy Warhol, Wallace Berman and Jack Smith. The First Battle of the Marne, Dead Language Press, London, November 1969. The Plays of Piero Heliczer, Vols. I–III, Dead Language in cooperation with Paris Filmmakers Cooperative, Preaux, 1971 The Handsome Policeman, Moon Dragon Press, 1976. Sundays Child, early 80s. Abdication of the Throne of Hell, Amsterdam School Of Poetry / Vertaling Hans Plomp, Amsterdam, 1981. Leadbelly, ca. 1988. The Perfect Detective, Sovo Production, Amsterdam, 1989. And I Am Not Afraid of the Dark, The Beehive Press, New Jersey, 1991. A Purchase in the White Botanica: The Collected Poetry of Piero Heliczer. Edited by Anselm Hollo and Gerard Malanga. Granary Books, 2001, Exiled from Amsterdam, Artistiek Bureau, Groningen, 2021. Poems & Documents, After 8 Books, Paris, 2021. Edited by Sophie Vinet and Benjamin Thorel.