curated by  Vittoria Coen

Group Show

GALLERIA CIVICA di Arte Contemporanea, Trento
 

TEMI Catalogue, 1998

pp. 73-75
 

Essay by LUIGI SERRAVALLI
 

Epistemic Cineaste

Stefano Cagol was born in Trento in 1969, and completed his studies in Brera in 1993. Since that time, he has received monetary grants for investigating the technological
world of creating imagery. This research has been carried out in Trentino as well as in Salzburg, Venice, Dresden, Basel, Lithuania, Slovenia, London, Toronto, Milan, again in
Toronto (which, by now, is a place he calls home) and again in Salzburg and Basel.
Deleuze writes (in The Image of Time, Einaudi, 1997), "The concepts of cinema are not established by cinema". In other words, cinema has become philosophy. The subject reflects on and foresees how the film will be: its execution will be the object of a previous subject, and the object will return to the subject, that is enriched and transformed in the process. Cagol's cinema is not fictional cinema (that is, a short story
or novel). First of all and most of all, it is technological cinema. In fact, machines have always played an enormously important role in cinema. Wim Wenders, commenting on a modest Polaroid camera in Alice in the Cities, notes, "An image never comes out like I had imagined it or wanted it to be". That is, the machine intervenes in a virtually independent manner... sometimes, even haphazardly. However, the subjective choices of the author regain command during the editing process.
In the summer of 1994, Cagol took a course in photoengraving at the International School of the Graphic Arts in Venice. He learned about studies on audio distortion that had been carried out by a specialized institute in Padua. He analyzed visual imagery, and gained complete practical knowledge of the working relationship between scanner and printer. His understanding of physics, chemistry, optics and acoustics was continuously expanded for the creation of a difficult, scientific, futuristic, elitist cinema destined for a specialized public.
Not much of the old director's role has remained. He has become an engineer engaged in production, shooting, projection, printing and the special effects he succeeds in
creating, using and associating in a story without traditional syntax. With continuous changes in color, picture and sound. The angles from which the motion picture camera operates are always improbable, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Cinema, as I said, is no longer fiction. It only tells its own infinitely subjective story as subject-object. The technical problems that Cagol learns to recognize, unravel, resolve and actualize are
infinite. It is the birth of a language that still frequently takes a form resembling Babel. There is a certain order in the infinite symbols of Babel. The imagery explodes, the colors are new, unpredictable, solarized and boosted, and the cuts between the scenes are always different from what you expect. The repetitions and iterations are obsessive.
Post-modern deconstruction runs rampant in a universe where the wreckage of old systems floats by. Perceiving, thinking, interpreting. A hermeneutic cinema which interprets itself. "I would shoot this scene in a different manner tomorrow. And
yesterday, I wouldn't have shot it like I'm shooting it today": Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations. Understanding and interpretation unfold. Nietzsche's The Gay Science
is at the basis of this fortunate technology. Cinema has truly become "The Voice of Phenomena", if I may paraphrase the title of a book by J. Derrida; that is, it's cinema in which phenomenology is no longer (as George Bataille would say) the "conditioned reflex" that it is for many others. Among other things, the viewer himself becomes an active, creative participant. The film is how he interprets it. The film is a complex of the various decoding operations carried out by thousands of viewers (again, from J. Derrida). A truly authentic world that opens outward toward a future millennium. The "how it ends up" of "fiction" is replaced by "being there" as liberating self-analysis.