Diego Marcon: Two Films

The work of Italian artist Diego Marcon sometimes marshals a grand cinema effect – 35mm cinematography, sumptuous sets, operatic performance poses – for the sake of a deconstructive practice closer to installation art than traditional cinema per se. Here are two striking examples.

Monelle (Italy, 2017)

A shot in the dark – in several senses. A flashbulb, accompanied by a crack which could be gunfire, illuminates for fleeting seconds the ambiguous tableaux of young bodies lounging against pillars, sleeping or already dead.

Inside the unsettling architecture of this official building (the Casa del Fascio in Como, once an animation studio), it could be a massacre, a giallo horror tale – or not. The cryptic inspiration for this spectacle is to be found in Marcel Schwob’s short 1894 novel of the title.

Each moment is separated by long periods of blackness and silence, with (as in Chris Marker’s La jetée [1962]) only a few moments of sound and movement to intrigue and disturb us.

This clever, 16-minute work evokes an infinite art gallery installation loop (and it exists also in that form, running 14 minutes), but it benefits from a maximum cinema-blackout and projection effect to truly spark our imaginations (like in the penultimate grave scene of Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry [1997]).

The Parents’ Room (Italy, 2021)

A condensed, 10-minute musical displaying many affinities with Leos Carax’s Annette (2021): tragic events in a family setting, weirdly lulling song recitals (score by Federico Chiari) – and, above all, an overall aura of the uncanny.

Where do the various components of human bodies, angelic voices, prosthetic make-up, animation and CGI digital effects begin and end?

Blackly funny and unsettling, it’s a jewel of discombobulated cinema.

© Adrian Martin October 2018 / September 2021