Semiotica di 87 ore. Etica, estetica, semioetica delle immagini panottiche

Costanza Quatriglio’s docufilm 87 ore raises numerous issues of a semiotic nature. The last hours in the life of Francesco Mastrogiovanni - a primary school teacher subjected to involuntary psychiatric treatment in the psychiatric ward of the Vallo della Lucania hospital where he will subsequently die in inhuman conditions - are recounted by means of the images of the facility’s video surveillance system. This enunciational option prompts a reflection on the confines and juxtapositions of ethics and aesthetics. Mastrogiovanni’s body, immobilized in a bed in its death throes, is transliterated into an oblivious scopic object, just as his incarceration, reiterated and reproduced by the video cameras which silently immortalize him, becomes a metaphor for the hegemony of a surdetermining gaze. This paper therefore intends to investigate these aspects of the film, semiosic offshoots which urge a serious discussion about the semiotic specificity of the image as a reverberation. Before becoming a film, the oppressive takes of 87 ore are in fact a merciless testimony, cause of the unspeakable torment of Mastrogiovanni’s family. Only after a series of semiotizations can one apply an aesthetic dimension capable of dilating or syncopating the 87 hours of images. Images of control, but also images which control, a delicate double dimension on which, in an era dominated by the imaginary of pervasive panopticism, it appears more than ever useful to carry out a theoretical investigation.