Diego Marcon: La Gola

By turns mesmerising and perplexing, the films of Diego Marcon (b.1985) are populated by ersatz characters, such as computer-animated suicidal boys, actors wearing badly fitted prosthetics and silicone mannequins. His narratives pivot around looped scenes of latent violence and sweetness. Often structured using musical refrains, his vignettes variously elicit shock, disgust, suspense and nervous or sardonic laughter, and his new film, La Gola (2024), currently installed at Kunsthalle Wien FIG.1, is no exception. Ostensibly, the film bears out Marcon’s claim that he is not interested in telling stories but rather in cinematic genres and codes and the structures of language.¹ It is divided into four chapters, each of which features an exchange of letters between Gianni FIG.2 and Rossana FIG.3, two characters ‘played’ by hyperreal silicone mannequin busts. Shot in alternating portrait close-ups, the scenes are respectively accompanied by a cloying male and a dulcet-toned female voiceover. The mannequins remain static throughout, apart from their CGI-animated eyes, which blink, reflect light and shadow and, in Rossana’s case, become glassy with tears.

The four-part epistolary structure of La Gola is compounded by the content of Gianni’s letters, each of which recounts the details of one dish from a four-course gourmet meal prepared by a chef named Baptiste. By contrast, Rossana’s letters relay, in excruciating detail, four medical events that mark the progressive bodily shutdown of her mother, who is suffering from dementia. Only the opening and concluding forms of address – ‘Dear’, ‘I miss you’ or ‘I long for a hug’ – give any indication of the pair’s relationship. The letters, which are exchanged over the course of the four seasons, are exclusively focused on the narrative arc of their structural ends: Gianni’s dessert and Rossana’s mother’s death.

As Marcon has stated, the characters in La Gola speak purely for the sake of speaking rather than to communicate.² However, throughout the script, signifiers create associative chains that proliferate their own axes of meaning. When Gianni’s first letter begins, he is seen sleeping in a garden chair surrounded by sunlit greenery FIG.4, his eyes blinking open to comedic effect at the mention of the ‘magnificent yolk’ in his Zuppa Pavese starter. Although Rossana’s first letter does not acknowledge Gianni’s directly, it inversely resonates with it. Her account of her mother’s bodily putrefaction – ‘small sores […] covered in yellowish crusts’ – is a grim counterbalance to Gianni’s gastronomic description. Such metonymic play continues across the pair’s letters: the ‘shimmering’ rice of Gianni’s risotto transmogrifies into the ‘rice water’ of Rossana’s mother’s diarrhoea. Gianni’s venison course is ‘sealed under a large bell of dark chocolate’, while Rossana’s mother’s ‘black as tar’ melena offers another odorous ambiance. In the final chapter, the ‘creamy airy filling’ of Gianni’s Torta Fedora finds affinity with Rossana’s description of her mother in a dream, wearing a wedding dress that is ‘snow white and full of tulle’.³ Marcon consulted with a restaurant critic and a medical practitioner for the precision of these descriptions, which oscillate between the sublime and the abject – the twin poles of the ‘otherness’ that constitutes the self.⁴  

Binaries proliferate throughout La Gola: man and woman, light and dark, luxury and labour, pleasure and suffering. Gianni’s exploration of exquisite flavours takes place against pink-hued skies and diffuse lighting, whereas Rossana is set against dramatic dark landscapes accompanied by portentous thunder and lightning, her face illuminated by extreme chiaroscuro. Marcon’s interest in the Giallo horror genre, as epitomised by the films of Dario Argento, and melodrama in general is evident here. His use of these cinematic tropes and the binary contrasts between Rossana’s pitiful suffering and Gianni’s blissful ignorance can be amusing, depending on one’s proclivities for scatological humour and the absurd. However, La Gola is not solely a formal experiment. Although the film’s ersatz and cinematically promiscuous nature cast doubt on any secure meaning, the mannequins retain the power to elicit genuine emotion beyond the ‘intellectual uncertainty’ that Ernst Jentsch attributed to the uncanny feeling triggered by the new and the unfamiliar.⁵

Marcon’s stereotypes – of the male aesthete and the dutiful daughter – are not neutral. A reversal of their gender roles would disallow the film’s comedic and tragic tropes to circulate as fluently and as unnervingly as they do. Gianni embodies the art for art’s sake argument, while also parodying that position. As his second letter asserts: ‘To speak of the art of flavour, the word painting could be seamlessly replaced with the word cuisine’. His invocation of Futurism – a synonym for a totalising vision of art, technology and masculinist authority – in relation to his Torta Fedora ironically desublimates its sadistic power, while maintaining a connection to the movement’s fascistic mindset.

Rossana represents the women who take care of the ill and the dying and have no time to sublimate their desires. However, she is also a motif of an ethics of art that refuses what Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941–96) referred to as ‘the fright of real tears’.⁶ For the film director, to portray real suffering betrayed its irreducible reality. He therefore turned from documentary to fiction, whereas Marcon deploys cartoonish fakery and humour to address difficult subjects. Even when tears well up in Rossana’s eyes FIG.5, it is difficult to feel the kind of pity that would situate her purely as a sufferer to be sympathised with. Yet, La Gola does tap into the viewer’s deep-seated fears and emotions. The gentle timbre of Claudia Albé’s voice, as she recites Rossana’s letters, guides the audience through the stages of a parent’s physical deterioration in such a soothing manner that one might be reminded of their own experiences of caring for or witnessing a dying relative. It pares away the modes of seduction that keep us from seeing the void underlying existence. Like almost all of Marcon’s works, the navel of this film is a confrontation with death.⁷ Rossana has the last word: ‘But Mum said nothing else’.

A kind of parallax effect occurs in the installation of La Gola at Kunsthalle Wien, where Marcon has given special consideration to the viewing apparatus. An island of red upholstered cinema seats is placed in front of the screen, in the centre of a cavernous, red-carpeted gallery with red-painted walls and a red velvet curtain at the entrance FIG.6. The film opens with an extended sequence in which a baroque musical score by the artist’s long-time collaborator Federico Chiari accompanies the word ‘Ouverture’, which is emblazoned on the screen in scarlet Edwardian script FIG.7.⁸ Instead of politely concluding after a few seconds, the composition’s overpowering melody re-energises itself and continues frenetically for two minutes before the first letter begins. Viewers are caught in this extended anticipatory time, the white screen illuminating them in the space and spotlighting any latecomers as they select a seat or choose to linger on the margins.

After the culmination of the film and the credits, the glare of the white screen returns, the film’s internal illumination reincorporating its viewers into the mise-en-scene of the installation. Rather than the ‘sleepy spectator’ that Roland Barthes described in a 1975 essay, who catches eroticised glimpses of shadowy bodies leaving the cinema, Marcon’s spectator is hyper-alert.⁹ They are part of the work as spectacle. This phenomenological relationship between gallery-goers and the object on display offers respite from the film’s endlessly turning binaries and brings its self-reflexive irony into the realm of shared social affect. Although this is dependent on the cinematic, it exceeds it, moving us towards the fright of real tears and laughter.