Architecture and trauma?

Heinz Emigholz explored the Villa Cargnacco of the Italian national poet Gabriele d’Annunzio on film. The rooms personally designed by the poet traumatized the filmmaker. Filled with objects that were supposed to provide d’Annunzio with a perfect backdrop for his poetic existence, Emigholz experienced it as a nightmare scenario during filming.

March 24, 1997, a Monday in Gardone on Lake Garda. We are filming in the fifteen rooms of Villa Cargnacco, which Gabriele d’Annunzio moved into in 1921 and lived in until his death in 1938. It is part of the Vittoriale, a museum theme park in honor of d’Annunzio, which d’Annunzio himself designed and decorated together with his personal architect Giancarlo Maroni for almost two decades.

I had always been drawn to this place because of its garish opulence, but I had never filmed there before. Filming is an analytical act. Things and circumstances are seen through in their course. The world constructed by Gabriele d’Annunzio consists of projections that reveal their existence as backdrops without any accompanying interpretations.

He tried to create the ideal environment for a writer by means of interior architecture. The concentration of writing was to be objectified in a collection of books, objects, cult objects and fetishes. Like small shocks, these objects were intended to keep the constant flow of memories and the topicality of culture alive. This representation of the human spirit is not intended as a private one, but stands for a political offensive into the world of those to be enlightened.

D’Annunzio’s privacy thus becomes a political space and a propaganda vehicle of a certain being that is derived from a political sphere of power – an unambiguous interpretation of the real that owes itself to violence and merges into it. The camera work in this place led to consequences. I perceived the shooting day as a nightmare and was traumatized.

The dark and cramped rooms only allowed for a few shots with our heavy 35mm film camera. The shots were only possible in the few corners where daylight was able to penetrate the set of his drug den. Its inventory, the dust on the layers of cultural junk and the wire-mesh shelves with thousands of books began to disgust me. That evening we stopped work and left, my project was dead.

Gardone, June 24, 2002, another Monday at Villa Cargnacco. I had overcome my trauma and we started a cinematographic jam session. We, that is Irene von Alberti, Elfi Mikesch, Klaus Wyborny and I, and we documented the rooms of the villa and its inventory with our light, light-sensitive cameras at the same time, each in a very specific camera style. The film “D’Annunzio’s Cave” will be created from the wealth of material obtained in this way.

“Unbehagen” – more about Heinz Emigholz’s cinematic exploration of the Italian national poet’s villa in Baumeister 2/2015.

Photos: Giovanni Vanoglio, Augusto Rizza