Transparencies

Mario Blaconà / Italy / 2024 / International Premiere / 7 min.

synopsis

Heavy words bounce off the images of silent walls like another screen. Black-and-white shots taken with a handheld 16 mm camera follow empty corridors, blind windows, and bars of the former Risiera di San Sabba concentration camp in Trieste. They are permeated by György Ligeti's fragmented and nervous electronic composition Artikulation. The memory of the motionless walls is framed by an excerpt from the Italian translation of Jean Baudrillard's book La trasparenza del male (The Transparency of Evil).

“During the 16 mm film shooting and development workshop held by Labbash Film in Trieste, I visited the Risiera di San Sabba, a place I had only heard about until then… I thought about how complex and ambiguous history is, how one question can have ten different answers that contradict each other, and I concluded that whatever I did in the short time I had to make this film had to be as far removed as possible from a rhetorical idea of representing evil.” — Mario Blaconà

Source: PerSo Film Festival.

biography

Mario Blaconà (b. 1987) is an Italian director, dramaturge, and film critic. He combines various audiovisual formats in his documentary essays. In 2018, he was one of the finalists for the Premio Solinas award for documentary film with his project Benq5.