by Diego Marcón monelle, 2017, is a violent work. Not in its visual content – there’s no gore or physical abuse – but in the way it cultivates somatic unease. The nearly fourteen-minute film is made up of just thirty individual shots, each lasting no more than a second, with the screen darkening for several moments in between. We spend the majority of the film shrouded in darkness, our only sensory input being the flickers of unexposed celluloid on the screen and ambient shuffling noises. In sharp, abrupt flashes of images – each accompanied by a loud metallic pop – we move through the Casa del Fascio, the former headquarters of the National Fascist Party in Como, Italy, encountering several young girls sleeping or bent over and a possibly dead older woman dragged. The tension rises several times in the darkness before dissipating with the pictorial flash like a jump scare. With each successive burst, the afterimage of these often horribly mundane scenes lingers in the dark projection. The experience recalls the visual and auditory effects of early flash photography – the shocked faces of Jacob Riis’ sordid subjects or the frozen expressions of Weegee’s crime scene photographs. Marcon returns the violence of the camera to us, actualizing the pure fear that emerges from the experience of total exposure.
In his heart, monelle is a hybrid, combining the clinical rigor of structuralist cinema with the psychological intensity of a horror film, and the analog authenticity of 35 mm film with the artifice of computer-generated imagery. As always with Marcon, the sense of foreboding in monelle takes on deeply personal valences – for an American like me, the loud noises, coupled with the imagery of young adults in an institutional environment, evoked associations with mass shootings. The first time I visited Sadie Coles to see the film, I couldn’t spend more than a few minutes with it, my relief at living in a country with strict gun restrictions overshadowed by memories lying on the ground during school shooting practice or…as happened once in my high school – SWAT team raids. For an Italian, I imagine, the film’s cold light reflecting off a perfectly preserved relic of Mussolini’s regime, a building designed for the sole purpose of espousing fascist rhetoric, would reveal a traumatic connection to a past that many would prefer to forget. . Curiously, Marcon himself advocates the preservation of Fascist architecture, writing that “abduction always underscores an ennoblement of the object of abduction”, a “perverse reverence” of what it seeks to cleanse. monelle wounds, even triggers, spectators, not by subjecting us to traumatic images but by holding them in, bringing out the far more terrifying horrors of history or experience that are held within our psyches.
The remnants of that violence clung to me as I ascended the gallery stairs to an empty exhibition space on the second floor. It’s rare for a gallery to feel haunted – indeed, its neutral white walls and bright lights usually exorcise any trace of the past. With the bang still audible in the background and a dark black wall to the right, the film continued to haunt me. After a time immersed in the sparse darkness of monelle, I found the sterility of the gallery disturbing in itself: should I be here? Is it coming?
