The book deals with Diego Marcon’s practice through the analysis of three film and video works: Monelle (2017), Ludwig (2018), and The Parents’ Room (2020) are the artist’s most recent and complex projects, and while they do not constitute a trilogy, they are all emblematic of central aspects of his practice. In his own highly personal theory on passions, Marcon explores and reinvents archetypes taken from movie genres such as horror, slapstick comedy, and cartoons, creating characters and settings with undertones of the uncanny, the tender, and the ruthless.

Marcon opens a path through various filmmaking techniques, ranging from the experimentation of structuralist cinema to the use of special effects and CGI. The human condition is reflected with a dry sense of pathos, expressed in particular by his attention to childhood as a moment in which purity and wickedness go hand in hand in the human being, spawning a potential metaphor endowed with profoundly ambiguous sentiments and experiences. Lastly, the sound dimension takes on a structural role, dictating the emotional timbre of each of these works.