1. Early life and education

2. Professional and personal life

3. Major works and Collaborators

4. External links

5. References

Early life and education

Tom Palazzolo was born in a working-class neighborhood in north Saint Louis, Missouri. His father was the son of Italian immigrants and his mother was third-generation Irish.^[1] Palazzolo grew up with his three siblings, Bob, Lynn, and Janis. He attended a Catholic elementary school where he had to repeat the fourth grade because of poor grades.^[1] Evading his parents wish for him to attend an all-boys Catholic high school, Palazzolo ended up attending the public Beaumont High School.^[1] He participated in football and basketball during his time in high school.^[1] Palazzalo's growing interest in drawing led to his participation in a Draw Me! contest which eventually resulted in his enrollment in a mail-in Art Instruction Schools.^[7]

After graduating high school in 1957, Palazzolo went on to work at a McDonnell Douglas plant for a year, and then enrolled in the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, where he studied commercial art.^[7] Sarasota was home to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and circus performers would often pose for students. There, his painting became influenced by circus signage and imagery. ^[7]

Inspired by friend and classmate Bernie Beckman, Palazzolo applied to the the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and was rejected.^[7] A year later, in 1960, he moved to Chicago and applied to the school again in person and was accepted. During his time as a student Palazzolo became very interested in Chicago's architecture, neighborhoods, attractions, and people. In 1963, he signed up for a photography class taught by Ken Josephson, a photographer and professor at the school. Josephson encouraged Palazzolo to take up photography after he had been discouraged from painting by professors because of his unconventional painting techniques.^[4] Palazzolo studied and showed with artists Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, and Karl Wirsum, who were part of the Chicago Imagist movement of the late 1960s.^[8] After studying at SAIC from 1960 to 1966, Palazzolo eventually graduated and was granted a Bachelor's and Master's of Fine Art degree in photography.^[7]

Professional and personal life

As a young adult, Palazzolo and a group of friends formed the Floating Cinematheque, a secret film society that met in apartments around Chicago. He also regularly attended Monday night screenings at the Second City that were curated by exhibitors under the name Aardvark.^[9] Screenings at film festivals and in groups like Aardvark where helpful for the promotion of Palazzolo's films, with Roger Ebert in regular attendance and eventually reviewing some of Palazzolo's films. ^[10] Many of these films faced the chagrin of the Chicago Police Censor Board, which determined whether films should be censored or not. Once the Motion Picture Association of America adopted a rating system of films in 1968, local censorship boards became a thing of the past, and dwindled the motivations of underground film groups.^[7]

In 1968, after gaining some media attention for his documentary films, Palazzolo was invited by the United States Information Agency to tour the Middle East, Ceylon, India, and Turkey for three months to screen his films publicly. Palazallo was married to long term girlfriend Marcia Daehn in the same year in order for her to join him on the trip.^[7]

Palazzolo then taught documentary film classes at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1981, and he eventually went on to teach for 36 years at Richard J. Daley College ^[9][11]. Palazzolo and wife Marcia Daehn had three children, Sarah, Amy, and Todd.^[2]

Major works and Collaborators

Early films of Palazollo's include Love It / Leave It (1973), a document of the Naked City Beauty Pageant in Roselawn, Indiana and a variety of midwestern parades.^[12] Where he lacks a technical finesse it is made up for with his genuine interest in the goings on around him. ^[12] Often a participant or a close observer to the action, Palazollo works to reveal the absurdity of midwestern norms and values.^[13] Palazollo approaches the subject of parades again in Your Astronauts(1970), where he uses noise from a cafeteria as a soundtrack for the chaos of the Apollo 11 parade.^[14] Palazollo found particular interest in the high number of subarban residents who had made their way into the city for occasions like these.^[14]

In 1972, Palazzolo met sixteen-year-old Jeff Kreines, a high school dropout from New Trier High School. Palazzolo viewed one of Kreines's documentary films when judging a contest for student filmmakers at the Chicago Public Library. He admired Kreine's Cinéma vérité style films, and the two collaborated on a total of eight films together, the most notable being Pets on Parade and Ricky and Rocky.^[7] Ricky and Rocky follows Ricky, an Italian, and Roxanne, who is Polish, through their surprise wedding shower that has been thrown for them by Ricky's family. ^[15] The camerawork in Ricky and Rockyemphasizes the family and their style as more eventful then the wedding shower itself.^[16] The film won awards at the Ann Arbor Film Festivel and the Bellevue Film Festival.^[15]

Kreines later introduced Palazzolo to Mark Rance, a fellow student from New Trier, and the two soon became collaborators. Their first collaboration was in 1975 about a nudist colony in northern Indiana, titled Sneakin 'n Peakin'. During this time Palazzo worked on independent projects including Jerry's, an inside look at the hectic nature of Jerry's Deli in Streeterville, Gay for a Day, which chronicled a pride parade, and I Was a Contestant at Mother's Wet T-shirt Contest, filmed at Mother's Bar and Club on Division Avenue.^[17] Rance and Palazzolo's most well-known documentaries were Marquette Park and Marquette Park II, which documented still-existing bands of Nazis who protested black families moving into Marquette Park in the mid-1970s.^[18] These films were shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and later at Cannes Film Festival. Rance eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he became the director of the FilmForum cinematheque.^[7]

Other collaborators included Allen Ross, who helped found Chicago Filmmakers. In 1980, Ross and Palazzolo created Nonna, a portrait of Palazzolo's Italian grandmother.^[4] By this time, the independent film industry was vastly changing due to a rise in costs and the introduction of video. While many filmmakers switched to video, Palazzolo went on to create two more films - this time narratives, titled Caligari's Cure (1982) and Added Lessons (1991). These films were not as well received by critics. However, Palazzolo continued making short documentary films including a TV commercial for Deel Ford, a Labor Day picnic in East Chicago, and a look into a Chicago campaign stop of third-party presidential candidate John B. Anderson.^[4] During this time, Palazzolo began to put a focus back on painting and lithography. In 1999, Palazzalo had an show of paintings, prints, and photographs at the Jaqueline Ross Gallery in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago.^[7]

External links

• Tom Palazzolo on IMDB
• Tom Palazzolo at the Video Data Bank
• Tom Palazzolo at the Independent Video Archive

References

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