CURA.

Diego Marcon: While playing with my dog, I purposefully hit her on the nose with a slipper, and she started to sneeze blood.

DM: That was the moment I discovered wickedness, and that pain could be inflicted for no reason, and even with pleasure.

DM: Coming of age can’t exist without narrative—whether that be literature, cinema, or the lyrics of a song. It seems like a genre, and as a genre, it has its own codes

DM: It seems like most people easily empathize with children—they are able to easily reach a sensible and vulnerable dimension. For me, children are like Trojan horses: they help me to ‘get in,’ and once there, we play together.

DM: I am not sure making movies is a collaborative medium per se—actually, I think it is a pretty hierarchical practice, and often it is only the film director and a few other figures who are venerated. In any case, perhaps the aim of such control is a sign of vulnerability itself. A completely designed, controlled, or programmed set, is of course a failure and a pathetic effort. The more structure there is, the more I feel the emptiness behind it, the void it tries to organize, and I think my interest in structure primarily lies here.

DM: Melancholy is characterized by a sense of loss of something that we can’t really grasp. In this sense, I think melancholy is very connected with coming-of-age. What is lost might be childhood, but what is childhood exactly? I just finished reading Tove Ditlevsen’s Childhood, and she writes that it is “long and narrow like a coffin.” In relation to melodrama, I don’t see much contradiction: generating feelings towards cinema is planned—it is a discipline that can’t be improvised, if we’re speaking about studio or fiction movies. Structure might be a part of the path to get there.

DM: Despite the fact that structure, repression, rules, and so on might give pleasure and satisfaction in specific contexts, this is not reassuring or comforting to me!

DM: I think more about space than architecture. I like their narrative quality. An exhibition for me is dramaturgy, and the venue—with its features—is one of the most important elements for the development of this dramaturgy. Space plays a huge role in the reading of a piece and the way we approach it, both physically and emotionally. Artworks are not in a vacuum, they are in space: its specificities are fundamental for the works themselves. Exploring architecture in an audiovisual way often means moving with the camera through the space, suggesting a path through the editing. This is the opposite of what happens in Monelle, where we don’t have an image edited after an image, but darkness. The attempt was to portray the building as a monolith, through the repetition of its recognizable structural elements. For that reason, among others more conceptual and speculative, the film is set in Casa del Fascio in Como by Terragni: because it is a dialogue between pure geometrical forms, very iconic, and repeated in space. For me, it is the materialization of a virtual space, and this underlines the ambiguity that crosses the whole film between real and virtual, analog and digital, horror and comedy, silent film and musical, and so forth.

DM: My interest in certain kinds of poetry, and especially in nursery rhymes, is because I am interested in structure, and they rely on it.

DM: Horror interests me very much because horror movies need to scare people, and build tension and suspense. To do so, even the most bad or boring horror movie has at least one trick or use of audiovisual language that is compelling or interesting. One of the films that most influenced me I think has been The Blair Witch Project, which I saw in 1999 at the cinema when it came out. It was so scary and mind-blowing. I rewatch it once a year and it still scares me a lot.

DM: I have difficulties thinking about the audience because it is composed of many different subjectivities that I don’t know and can’t know. They have different backgrounds, paths, personal stories, and memories. I can partially relate to that I feel I am part of. I think audiences are deeply engaged in cinema, even if in a way that doesn’t allow any exchange, except maybe an economical one, in terms of feature-length films.

DM: I would love to read how you think I developed this way of visualizing melodrama that differs from the popular cultural form associated with it!

DM: For me, the goal is never to communicate. I don’t trust much in communication, and I don’t feel the need to communicate, at least not to an audience who I can’t be in contact with anyway. But I do think that cinema can give form to emotions through specific uses of its language. Finding the ways is perhaps one of the aspects behind the languages developed by artists, and they differ. Other disciplines know how to better communicate emotions to an audience they generally believe to be stupid, like advertising, marketing, certain politics. It’s less nice.

DM: Ludwig was the first time I used music in a piece. It both structures the video (its length, but also the movement of the camera and the actions) and its emotional temperature.

DM: I am working on a dance film, trying to understand how it could be funny to use the chroma key.

DM: I am not sure they are. After all, the father in The Parents’ Room, whilst killing his children, noticed the missing button on his son’s pajamas, and the nice, blue polish on his daughter’s nails… in Dolle, Father-Mole and Mother-Mole are constantly worried about the coughing, and the asthma of one of their babies, and in general that they can sleep well…

DM: The main difference with Cattelan’s hanging boys is the context. More than in a video, Fritz hangs in exhibitions and art spaces instead of in a public space. This context and the format (the fact that Fritz is a video, a screened or projected image) make a radical difference. In this way, I feel Fritz is closer to Collodi’s Pinocchio. With him, Fritz also shares a particular relation to life and death, being weirdly trapped between the two. Moreover, with Pinocchio he might share being in the position of constantly pleasing someone else. For a while, I wanted to work on a jodel piece with Federico Chiari—the composer I have worked with since my earlier works. I wanted to work on a composition for voices that might be both a mourning and a call—as the historic use of the jodel by farmers. The starting point has been the sound of voice, and the use of it in the jodel. The sketch came later.

DM: There is a joy for me in the making. That’s why every film has its own process, different from the one before. I understood that it was vital for me to disregard my own expectations, and to place myself and my close collaborators every time in an experimental position. There is a sense of wonder and surprise in this way of working that I find very important. I can write, plan, and structure any aspect of film production as much as possible, but there is always a moment when the real arises. When this happens, finding ways to confront it and turn it into the process is the most joyful part, especially when done with a crew of friends. I make films mostly to work and spend time with them.

DM: While first thinking about The Parents’ Room, I wanted it to be a stop-motion animation, made with hyper-realistic puppets and sets. But I never liked the flickering movement of stop-motion animation, which couldn’t be avoided because of the very specific quality of its process. It might be that I wanted it to be an animation because I don’t want to work with actors. So, I thought that if I made puppets, to be moved from the inside by performers into a human-size set, I would have solved both of those problems. Then thinking about prosthetics came. While I was in Tuscany with Lorenzo Cianchi coloring the masks, I told him that it would be funny to make a film with a family of moles counting endlessly. We laughed, but then I thought it was a good idea. I don’t know why I use moles. The moles came to me.

DM: I watched cartoons when I was a kid, but I wasn’t into them like, let’s say, anime or manga lovers. I started to be more into cartoons and animation later. In my work, animation came in a quite natural way. In 2014 I realized Pour vos beaux yeux, a film entirely made by Super8 mm shots of clouds. My first animation piece was the film after. It has been like tracing an outline to a cloud, making it a figure.