The overwhelming power of images over words is the dimension of time. Twenty-four seconds can be told, but in the passing of the words everything is already over. A photograph nails history to the present. A video, on the other hand, does much more: it forces the viewer to experience the race towards the future moment by moment, with all the emotional consequences of a tragic and already known future. Images not recommended for sensitive audiences. It will be a paradoxical reaction to the omnipresence of cameras in our life. It will be that we are all sensitive to time. The video on the Mottarone massacre shocked many people. Starting with the mayor of Stresa Marcella Severino: “The sight of this video left me stunned”. The prosecutor of Verbania Olimpia Bossi is also against the diffusion of the film, “for the due respect that …
The overwhelming power of images over words is the dimension of time. Twenty-four seconds can be told, but in the passing of the words everything is already over. A photograph nails history to the present. A video, on the other hand, does much more: it forces the viewer to experience the race towards the future moment by moment, with all the emotional consequences of a tragic and already known future. Images not recommended for sensitive audiences. It will be a paradoxical reaction to the omnipresence of cameras in our life. It will be that we are all sensitive to time. The video on the Mottarone massacre hit many people. Starting with the mayor of Stresa Marcella Severino: “The sight of this video left me stunned”. Against the spread of the movie is also the Prosecutor of Verbania Olimpia Bossi, “for the due respect that we are all obliged to bring to the victims, to the pain of their families, to the condolences of an entire community”. Those images, he recalls, were extrapolated from the video surveillance system of the cable car and were acquired by the investigators. And they are acts of which “publication, even partial, is prohibited as they relate to proceedings still in the preliminary investigation phase”, as well as “images from very strong emotional impact moreover, never disclosed even to the victims’ families “.
The president of Rai, Marcello Foa, invites the public service to carefully evaluate all the implications, starting with the ethical ones, with respect for the victims. There is a limit to the sacrosanct right of the press, observes the vice president of the Senate, Roberto Calderoli, while social media talk about pornography of pain: “That video adds nothing to the news, it only tickles the lowest curiosities”.
Instead it adds time. And perhaps it is not out of curiosity but out of empathy that many have gone to look. There is nothing bass. It’s not a pulp sequence or a competition to see who impresses you the most. It is not the thrill of the roller coaster. Are the terrible 24 seconds, lined up one after the other, on a radiant Sunday in May in which we have all been involved. Seeing them is not like hearing them tell. And whoever wept for those 14 dead, whoever hoped for the only surviving child, does not do them any wrong if they find the courage to open their eyes. Just as it does not protect them by turning away and forgetting. In that powerful video there is all life with its risks, sliding doors, paradoxes. And time in fact. There is the lake at the bottom, the green of the trees. The toy with the red belly on its way to the top of the mountain hangs by a thread. The timer is about to go off. The little Eitan he’s probably telling his dad “we’re here”. Only the two of them can be seen in the front row on the abyss of those 24 seconds that are about to become ours too.
The cabin approaches the station with the imperturbability of the ship docking and then suddenly rears up, shows her belly, slides back picking up speed: one, five, ten seconds, one hundred meters. The crash into the pylon it’s very strong, nobody can stay standing. The tower acts as a springboard and the arm of the cable car comes off, the leap into the void is the last sequence. The impact is not seen, it is swallowed by the hump of the mountain that sucks it in. Dark for us, dark for them. And meanwhile in another frame the attendant raises his head and understands that something is wrong, he sees the rope break, he puts in his broken marionette ballet helplessness and despair.
This isn’t exactly pornography. It is not the first time anyway. The tsunami of Piazza San Carlo in Turin on 3 June 2017 he killed three and wounded 1,672 but it is thanks to the videos that we understood how the wave was formed, if we had the impression of being there. And we were on Mount Meron in Israel in the drama of the fleeing crowd, among the coffins of Bergamo in the midst of the Covid storm, covered in dust sotto le Twin Towers, annihilated in Thailand on December 26, 2004 when waves twenty meters high claimed 230,000 victims, close to Eriksen as his heart stopped. Together within the time that concerns us all, which always has a surprise and a lesson for everyone.
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