Originally Published: 2008-06-29

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.

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