Luchino Visconti, a master of world cinema

Cinematheque Ontario honours Italian director with a retrospective from July 18 to August 23

Luchino Visconti: a director, a myth, a master. While shooting, he usually used two cameras and left a third one running in order to capture moments of improvisation and reality and to steal a scene that was not written in the script. On the set, as in life, he was a perfectionist and he never had doubts on how to execute what he had in mind. The man and the artist have always been in symbiosis. He’s been described as a refined intellectual, an aristocratic communist, a punctilious master who was often picked on because of his introverted personality and for his declared homosexuality and accused erroneously of presumption. It was criticism that Visconti has always tried to exorcise with a desired distance. “I am aware that I am sensitive to certain criticism; I understand that what took place on an elevated and serious cultural level is undertaken civilly and constructively free of antipathy and personal preconceptions or resentments,” the director openly declares, underlining that “public judgment etches itself in what I’d call a more emotional way.”
Cinematheque Ontario dedicated a retrospective to master Luchino Visconti: 14 films that will be shown from July 18 to August 23 at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Not at all commercial, Visconti’s works have had a profound influence on Italian cinema.
Born in Milan in 1906, he became passionate about theatre and music as a young boy and, at barely 21 years of age, he travelled to Paris, where he met Jean Cocteau, Coco Chanel, and he became Jean Renoir’s assistant in Une partie de campagne. In 1939, he returned to Rome and collaborated in a variety of cinematographic projects and in 1943 he filmed Ossessione, which was a part of the budding wave of Neo-realism. And then the turn in La terra trema, which was filmed in Sicily – and which was inspired by “I Malavoglia” by Verga – and Bellissima, which starred Anna Magnani.
In 1954, the masterpiece Senso was considered the favourite for the Mostra del cinema of Venice (the Leone d’Oro went to Romeo e Giuletta by Renato Castellani) but three years later Visconti succeeded in conquering an award with Le notti bianche.
The wave of success was not without criticism and so in 1960 Luchino Visconti was censured and accused of obscenity with his Rocco e i suoi fratelli. On April 13 of the same year the president of the province of Milan even suspended shots with an amendment that accused the film of being “not very moral and defamatory.” This was without realizing that soon it would become one of the masterpieces of Italian cinema.
After this era of religious zealousness, in 1963, another masterpiece arrived: Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), adapted from the novel by Tomasi da Lampedusa and which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. For Luchino Visconti, it was time for reflection and between 1969 and 1973 he achieved a sort of spiritual testament that was baptized with the term “the German trilogy”: La caduta degli dei, Morte a Venezia and Ludwig.
The following year brought the film Gruppo di famiglia in un interno and, in 1976, just before Visconti's death came L’innocente.
Each film showed a different style, but in each one Visconti included contrasts and conflicts, giving much importance to social and psychological problems.
“I speak more about Realism than Neo-realism. We have to assume a moral attitude when facing events, life: in an attitude that, in short, that allows us to see with a clear, critical eye how society is today and recount facts that are part of this society. Neo-realism is a term that was invented because we needed something new. But we treated themes that one was permitted to treat from that visual angle that has always been typical of an Italian artist,” declared Visconti in 1960 in an interview given to Mondo Nuovo.
It was the year of Rocco e i suoi fratelli when Visconti dug into the dreams of immigrants and, through images, described the difficulty of a southern Italian family that had moved to Milan. The plot: after the death of the father, four brothers are dragged by their mother into the rich metropolis where another brother has decided to live after completing military service. It’s there, in that jungle of buildings, that the family must survive: two sons try out a boxing career in order to put some money in their pockets, another takes a wrong turn, another ends up defeated. A film that was in Luchino Visconti’s mind for a long time and that, after Ossessione and Terra trema, had remained in the fibres of his imagination for almost two years.
The family theme was also the main plot for many of his other works, like Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), La caduta degli dei (The Damned) and even Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece) in which Burt Lancaster played an old intellectual that finds himself at odds with a bourgeois family that is uncouth and devoid of values. Among the stars are Silvana Mangano and Helmut Berger, life and work companion until the time of Visconti’s death.
Lancaster is also the protagonist of Il Gattopardo, with Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon, which is set in the period of the Garibaldi landing in Sicily with the antic nobility serving as a background. The final scene of the palace dance, where the bourgeoisie drinks to the thwarted revolution, makes it to this day a cult movie. The half-hour long scene, with the background music of an inedited waltz by Verdi, required of Luchino Visconti 36 days of uninterrupted filming.
While Giancarlo Giannini and Laura Antonelli were the stars of L’Innocente, adapted from a novel by Gabriele D’Annunzio that puts a spotlight on the cult of marginality and the concept of love as a physical and erotic act. The wife of Tullio Hermil gives life to a child born from an extra-marital affair. The man, a rich libertarian, doesn’t accept the child and leaves him to die by exposing him to the cold. An interesting note: for the scene in which the woman goes for a clandestine visit to her lover, Visconti ordered a veil similar to the one that Medardo Rosso used in “Donna Velata-Impressione di sera al boulevard” from 1893. That veil that leaves only a glimpse of the face’s profile represents the treacherous nature of the woman with which her husband eventually falls in love with again.

His film Senso, considered a scandal and a dishonour from a patriotic point of view, was excluded from the awards of the Mostra di Venezia because of political interventions. The film is set during the Third War of Independence: the countess Serpieri (played by Alida Valli) becomes the lover of an Austrian official Franz Mahler until she is discovered to be a prostitute and, once this is revealed to the authorities, he is shot as a deserter.
Visconti returned to the Lido years later with Le notti bianche, shot at Livorno, in the Venezia quarter, and starring Marcello Mastroianni, Maria Schnell and Clara Calamai.
One of the cinematographic testaments of the greatest value left by Visconti is the German trilogy that he shot between 1969 and 1972. The first film, La caduta degli dei, is the phase of power. Starring Helmut Berger and Dirk Bogarde, it brings to the screen the penetration of Nazism in the upper strata of the bourgeoisie. With Morte a Venezia, based on the novel by Thomas Mann, it is the period of decadence that is depicted through a 50-something musician who falls in love with a vacationing girl. Solitude and folly are on the other hand the final act that is Ludwig. An excellent Romy Schneider plays the role of the empress Sissi by the side of Helmut Berger. A film that depicts a “different” sovereign that at barely 19 years old ascends to the throne of Baviera. Her ambitions are art and music while she finds she mustdeal with the Austro-Prussian War. Ludwig is deposed because he was of an infirm mind before dying under mysterious circumstances.
In 1973 the film was distributed in a 3-hour edition, but some 10 years later it was reintegrated in the original 4-hour montage. It was during the making of this film that the director suffered a stroke and was left paralyzed in his leg and his left arm.
Without letting himself be overtaken by the disease, Visconti succeeded in finishing Gruppo di famiglia in un interno snf, immobilized in a wheelchair, and in directing his last film L’innocente. This last film was centred again on the objective of the existential journey of individuals, on doubt and internal conflict. Visconti loved to repeat: “While ravens flock together, the eagle soars alone,” and in life as in work, he always went where it was possible to fly high.

Publication Date: 2008-06-29
Story Location: http://www.tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=8419