Special programme of short films and videos by Diego Marcon followed by a conversation between the artist and Eva Sangiorgi, Director of Viennale
Diego Marcon’s work draws upon different cinematic vocabularies from diverse genres including musicals, melodrama, horror and slapstick comedy. His uncanny, singular imagery employs various technical devices such as robotics, prosthetics and CGI. Words, sounds and gestures contribute to the troubling uncertainty or ambiguity that underpins Marcon’s work. Specially-commissioned soundtracks or scripted dialogue are fundamental to his films, developed with careful attention to language and its mutability.
In cooperation with Stadtkino im Künstlerhaus
Tickets are available at www.stadtkinowien.at and directly at the cinema – Akademiestraße 13, 1010 Vienna.
Film programme
- Fritz, 2024 (4 minutes)
Inside a woodshed illuminated by an autumn dawn, a young boy is jodeling a melancholic tune accompanied by distant voices off-screen. No details provide any explanation for the macabre situation in which the boy finds himself or the weird things he does, such as kicking the wall to make himself spin around. Suspended between childhood and adulthood, humanity and puppetry, Fritz looks like a character who is dead tired of life and its expectations of meaning. - Head falling 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 2015 (5 minutes)
Working mainly in video and film, Marcon is familiar with the consequences of being inundated with visual information. In 2015 when the film was made, he was overwhelmed by viral online images of the Paris attacks and the refugee crisis. In an attempt to disconnect from this constant stream of images, Marcon turned to animation. - Ludwig, 2018 (4 minutes)
A lone blond boy with dark eyes is confined to the pitch-black bowels of a ship at sea. Where the boy finds himself or how he got there remains uncertain. He sings a romantic aria that magnifies the unsettling effect of the animation. The jarring combination of animation, classical music and the vulnerable figure of a young child creates an overwhelmingly disturbingly melancholic scene. - Monelle, 2017 (16 minutes)
Monelle was filmed at night inside the infamous Casa del Fascio, the headquarters of the local Fascist Party in Como Italy, designed by Giuseppe Terragni under Mussolini’s rule. The building is immersed in darkness as flashes of light illuminate adolescent girls sleeping amidst the space for just a few seconds at a time. Next to the bodies, strange humanoids are lurking, materialising and vanishing in a flash like ghosts. - The Parents’ Room, 2021 (10 minutes)
A dark recital of tragedy and ambivalence. The narrative follows the operatic account of a man, who sings of the murders of his wife and two small children, and his own suicide. The juxtaposition of the domestic setting with the characters’ misfigured forms elicits feelings of confusion and revulsion. The employment of CGI effects and prosthetics gives rise to an uncanny, cartoonish characterisation that cultivates the film’s overall distortion of reality. - Untitled (All Pigs Must Die), 2015 (1 minutes)
An edited sequence from Disney’s Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968). In the fragment of Disney narrative, the character Owl is sleeping peacefully until Piglet crashes into a window above him and wakes him up. Marcon loops the scene, so that Owl is continuously woken up by the crash – narcolepsy (a lethargy induced by chronic disruption of sleep) is closely followed by cataplexy (a sudden physical collapse associated with strong emotions). - Dolle, 2023 (30 minutes)
The main characters in Dolle are two moles and their sleeping babies. The parents repeat a set of numbers over and over again, sometimes stumbling. Small signs, such as the hooting of an owl and water dripping from a tap, illustrate the passage of time and keep the viewer waiting for a turn of events that never comes.