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*
LUCHINO VISCONTI
Luchino Visconti
Third edition

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GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH

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Publishing
This edition first published in 2003 by the
British Film Institute
21 Stephen Street
London W1T 1LN

The British Film Institute promotes greater understanding

and appreciation of, and access to, film and moving image
culture in the UK.

Copyright © Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, 1967, 1973, 2003

Cover design: Paul Wright/Cube

Typeset in Plantin by
D R Bungay Associates, Burghfield, Berkshire
Printed in Great Britain by Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 85170 961 3 (pbk)
ISBN 0 85170 960 5 (hbk)
Contents

Preface [2002] 1
A Note on Film Titles [2002] 6
Introduction [1967] 7
1. Ossessione 13
2. La terra trema 29
3. Bellissima 45
4. II lavoro 57
5. Senso 63
6. The Leopard 79
7. White Nights 94
8. Vaghe stelle delTOrsa 106
9. Rocco and His Brothers 123
10. Lo straniero [1973] 138
11. The Damned [1973] 146
12. Death inVenice [1973] 158

13. Ludwig [2002] 171

14. Conversation Piece [2002] 189

15. L’innocente [2002] 201

16. Retrospect [2002] 209

Select Bibliography 224

Filmography 231
Appendix: Theatre and Opera Stagings 243

Index 247
To Rosalind
Preface (2002)

The book you have in front of you was first published as part of the
Cinema One series in 1967 and republished in an updated version in
1973. The Cinema One series was the brainchild of James Price, an
editor at the London publisher Seeker & Warburg, calling on expertise
provided by two parts of the British Film Institute, the Education
Department under Paddy Whannel and Sight and Sound under Pene¬
lope Houston. The book on Visconti, number three in the series, was
commissioned by Peter Wollen, the publications editor at Education,
who thereby narrowly prevented Penelope from signing me up for a
book on Antonioni.
The contract for the book was signed in the summer of 1966. That
autumn I went to Rome with Rosalind Delmar, my wife. I saw, or re¬
saw, all of Visconti’s films to date with the exception of his
contribution to the resistance film Giorni di gloria and the full (Ital-
ian-language) version of The Leopard. Rosalind and I went together to
meet Visconti, who lived, when he was in Rome, in a converted farm¬
house on the via Salaria about 8 kilometres from the city centre. We
rang the bell and were admitted by a liveried servant. Two Afghan
hounds, similar to those which feature in the film II lavoro, lurked in
the background. We were shown into a drawing room which seemed
little used. There were loose covers on the chairs, on one of which was
strewn an unopened copy of L’Unita, the Communist Party daily news¬
paper. Visconti joined us, followed by the Afghans. The conversation
(it wasn’t an interview) was not particularly revealing except on a few
details. We came away with the sense of a strong and fairly unyielding
personality. There were doubtless people in his life to whom he showed
a different face. I wondered who they were. Meanwhile it was not hard
to see how a man like that could make the films that he did.
Completed in March 1967, the book was published in October and
sold reasonably well. By 1972, the first edition was out of print, Visconti
had made three more films and was making a fourth, and a new edition
was called for. Altogether less commitment and enthusiasm went into
the preparation of this revised edition than had gone into the first. Peter

1
had left the BFI, James had left Seeker’s, and my film tastes had
changed. The three films I was being asked to cover - Lo straniero
(1967), The Damned (1969), and Death in Venice (1971) - were, I still
think, among the least interesting in Visconti’s career. Nevertheless, I
wrote about them, and sent in my new material to ChristopherWilliams
who had taken over at the BFI. Chris discussed it with me, agreed some
small changes, and forwarded it to Seeker’s. There was then a wait of
several months. The new edition finally hit the bookstands, in spite of its
1973 copyright date, early in 1974. By this time the film Visconti had
been working on when the revised version of the book was com¬
missioned, Ludwig, had been edited and released. I had already seen it,
in the same three-hour version, in New York. Even in that reduced form
(Visconti had intended the film to be longer) it was clear that this was
not only one of his best but also one of his most personal films. One way
or another, I felt a bit of a monkey.
During the editing of Ludwig, Visconti suffered a severe stroke. He
recovered from it sufficiently to complete the film and then to make
two others, both good films if not outright masterpieces, Conversation
Piece (Gruppo di famiglia in un interno, 1974) and L’innocente (1976).
But his health was deteriorating rapidly and he died on 17 March
1976, shortly before his seventieth birthday. Finally, a full quarter of a
century later, I am pleased to present a third edition of this book,
bringing the story forward to include the last three films. During the
intervening period, I have come to a grudging recognition that Death
in Venice is not as vacuous a film as I thought it was at the time. But I
have also concluded that Ludwig, seen in a version which approximates
to Visconti’s original intention, is a very great film indeed. The material
added to this third edition is, among others things, a belated tribute to
this masterwork, which is also a summa of its author’s career.

As James Price conceived it, the Cinema One series was designed for
the educated general reader rather than just people in universities. The
late 1960s was a period of an intense cinephilia. On the one side there
were growing audiences for the burgeoning European (and worldwide)
art cinema and on the other there was a revived interest in Hollywood
- a cinema which had never lacked for audiences but had tended to be
regarded with suspicion by intellectuals. The books in the series were
mostly about individual film-makers and more or less evenly divided
between European directors (among them Godard, Visconti, Pasolini,
Melville, Straub) and American (Hawks, Fuller, Mamoulian, Sirk,

2
Kazan, and others), but there were also a couple of books on genres
(Westerns, gangster movies), and slipped into the middle of all this (at
number nine, to be precise) was a work of film theory, Peter Wollen’s
Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. At the time, film studies as a univer¬
sity subject existed in a small way in the USA and hardly at all in
Britain. In the 1970s the situation began to change. Film studies
became big business in universities throughout the English-speaking
world, generating a demand for a different, more academic kind of film
writing. Meanwhile the educated general reader whom James had had
in mind seemed to have got interested in something other than cin¬
ema. The Cinema One series withered. The best seller in the series,
and the only one to remain permanently in print, turned out to be the
least typical, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema.
Readers of the chapter on authorship in Signs and Meaning may
well have noticed that one of the texts that Peter Wollen draws on for
support is the Introduction to the Cinema One book on Visconti. As
a result of this and subsequent developments in film studies, the book
soon came to be better known for two pages of discussion of the so-
called ‘auteur’ theory than for the 150 or so pages devoted to Visconti
and his films. Indeed I found myself being credited with the almost
single-handed invention of a sub-theory, ‘auteur structuralism’, whose
main tenet was thought to be the belief that the defining characteristics
of an author’s work were not always those that were most immediately
apparent, nor were they necessarily things of which the author himself
was aware. In fact I did not think of what I was saying as particularly
original at all, although it was different from what most other people
were saying at the time. It seems to me now that I was caught in a
crossfire. Film theory was finding authors in the most unlikely of places
just at a time when literary theory was about to prospect a world of
texts within which the author function was redundant. Not many
people were yet aware of the implications of this contradictory devel¬
opment. Jean Domarchi, writing in the French magazine Cahiers du
cinema in the early 1960s, was one. There were doubtless others. But
it was more a case of ideas being ‘in the air’ than of any formulated
theory.
The theory extrapolated from the Introduction to the original
edition of this book has, ironically, done little to help the cause of film¬
makers like Visconti who were artistically very self-aware and really saw
themselves as authors in the most traditional sense. I would not deny
that one of the functions of criticism is to point out things about a work

3
of art which the author himself may not have been aware of. As D. H.
Lawrence put it: ‘Don’t trust the teller, trust the tale.’ But when, as
often happens, ‘trust the tale’ becomes trust me, the critic, because I
know more than the author, or trust me, the critic, because I speak for
the audience and the audience knows what it knows, which is less than
the author, but hey, who cares? - then a disservice is being done not
just to the work but to the audience itself. This does not matter in the
case of works which are unambitious, or in which there is a huge and
unbridgeable gap between ambition and achievement. But there is a
category of work, in film as in any other art, which sets out to do more
than can be derived from a reading of the signs entrusted to paper,
canvas or celluloid. Visconti’s films fall into this category. They are
works of grand ambition in the Romantic tradition and, like many
works of their type, are cast in a form which almost guarantees that the
ambition is not, and cannot be, perfectly realised. And yet their aspir¬
ation is part of what they are. Part of the critic’s job is to help the
audience understand the aspiration and to bridge, without concealing
it, the gap between aspiration and achievement. This approach to the
role of criticism was implicit in what I wrote about Visconti in 1967 -
in the main body of the text, that is, more than in the Introduction.
Although it has since become unfashionable, I do not think it is obso¬
lete, and I am happy to make it explicit here.

In this third edition of Visconti I have left virtually unchanged the entire
text of the second edition, which in turn reproduces in its entirety the
text of the first. The text is thus presented as if in quotes, as a historic
document. In the case of the 1967 Introduction with its much mulled-
over two pages on author theory, this is a scholarly obligation. I
considered the idea of revising other parts of the text, but what I wrote
at the time is in many ways so different from what I would write today
that I realised there was a danger of the whole thing just unravelling once
I started on it. So I have just left everything as it was, including the bits
that I no longer agree with.The only things I have touched in the text are
mistakes of spelling or capitalisation and some minor cosmetic matters.
Where a fact or a judgment seemed in need of correction or adjustment,
I have added a footnote (new footnotes are in square brackets). I have
also revised the Filmography, in accordance with a promise made in the
pages of Screen magazine in 1991, and added a Bibliography.
In the added matter at the end I have first of all covered the three
films made by Visconti since the second edition went to press. I have

4
then provided a retrospective overview of Visconti’s career and of
changing attitudes to his films both in his lifetime and since his death
in 1976. This overview involves a revision of judgments made in the
1967 and 1973 editions, a revision which is probably more radical in
respect of the 1973 edition than the 1967. I have, however, tried not
to be too radical in my revisionism and have done my best to make the
new parts of the book consonant with the old. Finally, at the sugges¬
tion of my current editor, Rob White, I have included in the retrospect
a brief statement of where I think authorship theory stands today,
nearly half a century after it first emerged in the pages of Cahiers du
cinema and thirty-five years after its reformulation in the first edition
of this book.

GNS
London, October 2002

5
A Note on Film Titles

All of Visconti’s feature films have, at some time, been released in

Britain and the United States, sometimes under their original title and
sometimes with an English title. Not all the English titles have been the
same on both sides of the Atlantic, nor have they all been particularly
felicitous. In this book Ossessione (1943), La terra trema (1948), Bellis-
sima (1951), Senso (1954), II lavoro (1962), Vaghe stelle delTOrsa (1965),
Lo straniero (1967), Ludwig (1973) and L’innocente (1976) are referred
to under their original Italian titles, but I have preferred English titles for
White Nights (Le notti bianche, 1957), Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i
suoi fratelli, 1960), The Leopard (II Gattopardo, 1963), The Damned (La
caduta degli dei, 1969), Death inVenice (Morte a Venezia, 1971) and Con¬
versation Piece (Gruppo difamiglia in un inter no, 1974).

6
Introduction (1967)

Luchino Visconti belongs, with Welles and Resnais, to a select company

of major directors whose international reputation was established early
in their careers and has been maintained, on the basis of a relatively
small output, ever since. Among his Italian contemporaries he is unique.
Unlike Antonioni or Fellini he did not have to wait for recognition.
Unlike Rossellini he has never been a prolific director, and has managed
to concentrate his energies over a quarter of a century on less than a
dozen meticulously prepared productions. Unlike De Sica he has not
degenerated as an artist with the decline of the movement that first
thrust him into prominence. His early films are now classics, and each
new film he makes is an eagerly awaited cultural event. And yet he has
remained obstinately impervious to changes in intellectual fashions. A
lonely and unassailable giant, his work has a devious consistency paral¬
leled, on the world scale, only by Fritz Lang and Orson Welles.
There are signs, however, that his hitherto impregnable reputation
is now beginning to suffer a decline, and that he is paying the seem¬
ingly inevitable penalty for his refusal to go any way but his own. His
career has always been bound up, in the public mind, with the Italian
neo-realist movement. His position with regard to the movement was
in fact equivocal. But so long as critical discussion was centred round
the problems of a realist aesthetic, Visconti’s films were always a key
point of reference. He has been seen, variously, as an embodiment of
the committed and realist ideal, as its greatest betrayer, and as the man
who most successfully transcended its limitations. Now that these
problems no longer have the actuality they had then, or even five years
ago, Visconti’s work has lost its particular exemplary role in the Kul-
turkampf. His latest films, though generally acknowledged, in a neutral
fashion, as important and monumental works, have disappointed many
people. They do not conform, somehow, to expectations built up on
the basis ofVisconti’s past work. Nor do they break unexpectedly into
the area where contemporary cultural battles are being fought.
What is happening to Visconti has happened before to other great
directors. With Renoir in the 1940s it was a case of his films seeming

7
8

Visconti with Marcello Mastroianni in Algiers for the filming of Lo straniero

to change and criticism being left behind. With John Ford, more
recently, it could hardly be said that his films had changed, but the
critical revolution brought about by the influence of Cahiers du cinema
means that he lost his place in the Pantheon in favour of different idols,
from the same or from another generation. In both cases, however, a
further turn of the wheel has restored them to their former position,
though in a different guise. The liberal critique which put forward La
Grande Illusion and The Grapes of Wrath as artistic and humanitarian
ideals and neglected French Cancan and My Darling Clementine has
been superseded. The authors survive, but only on the basis of a thor¬
oughgoing reappraisal of their work.
The principles which guided the revaluation of Ford and Renoir
can now, I think, be legitimately and fruitfully applied to Visconti. It is
not a question of reviving old polemics or laying down new dogmas,
but of breaking down certain received ideas and establishing the basis
of a more comprehensive interpretation. It is not possible to avoid
polemic entirely, or even dogmatism. Misunderstandings still circulate,
and demand to be contested. And, to a certain extent, the method of
contesting them involves laying down, explicitly or implicitly, criteria
of understanding which have to be taken as axiomatic.
The misunderstandings that require to be contested date back a long
way, to the problems raised by the neo-realist aesthetic in the 1940s.
One way of getting round these problems would be to disregard them.
At twenty years’ distance the arguments are beginning to look a bit
threadbare and out of date. Two things make this easy solution
impossible. One is the persistence of part of the general aesthetic of neo¬
realism, its naturalism-with-a-social-conscience, in the minds of many
people. The other is the undeniable fact of Visconti’s connection with
the movement and the need to produce a responsible redefinition of this
connection. Visconti without neo-realism is like Lang without Expres¬
sionism and Eisenstein without Formalism - and without the Russian
Revolution.
At the same time the most important job to be done remains that
of liberating Visconti from the heritage of past polemics; to free his
early work from the conventional and stultifying image of masterpieces
of realism and his later work from the charge of being a degeneration
from his former ideals. This does not mean exalting the later work at
the expense of the earlier, but making it one’s primary concern to con¬
sider the work as a whole, as the product of a single intelligence, and
to seek out the connections between each film at whatever level they

9
are to be found. In Visconti’s case the connections are multifarious,
and can be traced in his choice of actors, his use of decors, his con¬
cern with certain historical questions, and so on. The development of
each film out of problems posed by the last can also be easily demon¬
strated. But there are further links within his work which exist at a
deeper level, less easily discernible, and which are perhaps even more
important. It is these hidden structural connections which bind his
work together and which combine to form a picture of the author and
his work which is far more complex and interesting, as well as more
coherent, than is generally imagined.
It is necessary, at this point, to make clear certain assumptions about
the concepts of authorship and of structure which have guided me in
this work.The so-called auteur theory can be understood in three ways:
as a set of empirical assertions to the effect that every detail of a film is
the direct and sole responsibility of its author, who is the director; as a
standard of value, according to which every film that is a film d,’auteur is
good, and every film that is not is bad; and as a principle of method,
which provides a basis for a more scientific form of criticism than has
existed hitherto. The first interpretation is manifestly absurd. Any pro¬
ponent of the theory who puts it forward uncompromisingly in that
form both trivialises the theory and commits himself to a statement that
is demonstrably untrue.The second is simply gratuitous and leads only
to a purposeless and anti-critical aesthetic dogmatism. It is only in the
third interpretation that the theory has any validity. As a principle of
method the theory requires the critic to recognise one basic fact, which
is that the author exists, and to organise his analysis of the work around
that fact. Whether one is trying to get to grips with a particular film or to
understand the cinema in general, let alone when one is studying the
development of an individual director, the concept of authorship pro¬
vides a necessary dimension without which the picture cannot be
complete.
But the principle of authorship does not stop here. If it were simply
a recommendation to look at films in terms of their directors it would
hardly be an advance on what we know already. However, one essential
corollary of the theory as it has been developed is the discovery that the
defining characteristics of an author’s work are not always those that are
most readily apparent. The purpose of criticism becomes therefore to
uncover behind the superficial contrasts of subject and treatment a
structural hard core of basic and often recondite motifs. The pattern
formed by these motifs, which may be stylistic or thematic, is what gives

10
an author’s work its peculiar structure, both defining it internally and
distinguishing one body of work from another.
The structural approach, which has evolved, by a kind of necessary
accident, out of the applications of the auteur theory and resolves many
of the difficulties of the theory as originally put forward, brings with
it, however, problems of its own. It narrows down the field of inquiry
almost too radically, making the internal (formal and thematic) analy¬
sis of the body of work as a whole the only valid object of criticism. In
doing so it is in danger of neglecting two other equally basic factors.
One is the possibility of an author’s work changing over time and of
the structure being variable and not constant; the other is the import¬
ance of the non-thematic subject matter and of sub-stylistic features of
the visual treatment.
A completely structural approach to the work of a director seems
to me at the present time unfeasible, except in very rare cases, of whom
Visconti is not one. Despite the extreme formal and thematic con¬
sistency revealed in his films, the fact remains that he has changed and
developed over the years. No single and comprehensive structure can
be discerned, unchanging, underlying the whole of his work from
Ossessione in 1943 to Vaghe stelle delVOrsa in 1965. Nor is he a director
with whom the ostensible subject, in all its facticity, is a matter of no
importance. He has carried over from La terra trema and the heritage
of neo-realism, into his later films, a respect for the hard, intractable
documentary fact which cannot be assimilated into any simple analytic
pattern. In most of his films the precise geographical and historical set¬
ting is as significant for our understanding of the work as the kind of
themes that emerge from the story and way it is told. Any analysis of
his films, whatever its starting-point, is bound to take all these factors
into account.
What I have preferred to do, therefore, rather than focus exclusively
on elucidating the common underlying structures, is to consider the
films singly, attempting in the analysis of each to bring out its relation¬
ship, hidden or overt, to the rest ofVisconti’s work. I have also dwelt
at length, at the beginning of some chapters, on external factors: on
the social and historical background in which the film is set; on the
problems surrounding its production; and on the general ‘accidentalia’
without which it would not have any substance. The arrangement of
the book is dictated by these considerations. Basically it is chronolog¬
ical. But I have taken three films out of order so as to place them next
to the work with which they most require to be compared - II lavoro

11
with Bellissima, The Leopard with Senso, and Vaghe stelle delTOrsa with
White Nights. The result of this shuffling exercise, as anyone who knows
the order of Visconti’s films will have realised, is to place at the end
Rocco and His Brothers, Visconti’s most ambitious and perhaps least sat¬
isfactory film. The reason for putting it there is partly negative: there
didn’t seem anywhere else to put it. But there is also another reason,
which is that of all Visconti’s films it is the one which most successfully
defies analysis on purely internal criteria, and challenges the critic to
look outside the narrow world of his private inquiry to problems which
exist outside.

12
1: Ossessione

Visconti’s interest in the cinema developed late. At an age when Orson

Welles was directing Citizen Kane, when Alexandre Astruc could com¬
plain that he was ‘already twenty-six and had not yet made Citizen
Katie’, and when most aspirant directors would be starting as docu-
mentarists or serving a long and laborious apprenticeship in the
industry, Visconti was still living in seclusion and undecided about the
future nature of his artistic interests. An accomplished musician,
interested also in painting (interests which remain latent in his film
work for a long time to emerge again more fully with Senso in 1954),
his only foray into the world of spectacle was as set-designer for a play
by G. A.Traversi in 1928. He was nearing thirty when in 1936 he left
Italy with the intention of working in the cinema in England or
France.
As luck would have it, and thanks to a chance meeting with Coco
Chanel, he found himself, shortly after his arrival in France, attached
to Jean Renoir’s semi-permanent production team in charge of
costumes and then as assistant director on Une partie de campagne and
Les Bas-Fonds.1 In an interview on BBC Television in 1966 he has
recalled this experience mainly in terms of what it meant to him pol¬
itically, to escape from a Fascist country and to find himself working
on equal terms with a group of left-wing enthusiasts, many of them
Communists, in the heady atmosphere of the Popular Front. That this
part of his experience had a lasting effect on him and helped to shape
his future political commitment there can be no doubt. What is harder
to assess is Renoir’s influence on him as an artist. There is an obvious,
if superficial, analogy between aspects of Renoir’s aesthetic in the
1930s and Italian neo-realism ten years later, just as there is between
the French Popular Front and the post-war Italian left-wing bloc, to
which Visconti belonged. Visconti’s career seems therefore like a bridge
between the two. But on a personal level the differences between the
two artists are far more striking than the similarities. Visconti’s debt to
Renoir is mainly stylistic and is confined to one film, Ossessione, which
he made during the war. After that, when Visconti begins to find his

13
own feet and to establish an independent personality, all traces of
Renoir’s influence disappear. They are, however, present in Ossessione,
in the method used to establish a character, in the relationship of char¬
acter to landscape, in the use of a fluid and yet probing camera, and,
on a more generic plane, in a shared debt to the naturalist tradition -
in Renoir’s case Maupassant and Zola, in Visconti’s Giovanni Verga
and Italian regional literature.
In 1940 it was Renoir’s turn to come to Italy to make a film of La
Tosca which was a cross between Sardou’s original melodrama and
Puccini’s opera. For this film Visconti worked on the adaptation and
then as assistant director. Renoir was not able to finish the film him¬
self. He had just directed the opening sequences when Italy declared
war on France, and Renoir left for the USA, leaving the film in the
capable but uninspired hands of Carl Koch. Opinions differ on the
subject of the finished film. In distant retrospect, Visconti regards it as
mediocre and banal, falling far short of what he himself had envisaged
and what Renoir might have made if he had stayed on. But something
of La Tosca, whether echoes of the realisation or images of how he him¬
self would have made the film, remained lodged in Visconti’s
imagination to appear in the making of Senso, the most ‘operatic’ of
Visconti’s films, fourteen years later.
The problem which faced Visconti in 1954, with Senso, was that of
going beyond the realist aesthetic. In the early 1940s, however, this was
hardly yet an apposite question. What seemed necessary at the time
was the opposite - to achieve some elementary form of realism in the
context of a national cinema that was totally insipid and conformist.
Visconti belonged, if only on the margins, to a kind of artistic resist¬
ance movement that was beginning to grow up round about 1940.The
members of this movement, young critics and aspirant directors cen¬
tred round the Cine-GUF2 and the review Cinema, were all partisans,
for political as well as aesthetic reasons, of a realistic cinema. Their lit¬
erary idol was Verga, the great Sicilian late-nineteenth-century writer,
and their ideal was a transcription into cinema terms of the natural¬
ism, or more exactly verismo, ofVerga’s novels and stories. But behind
all the references to tradition what most of them wanted, and some of
them achieved, was something quite different. Not all of them (one
thinks particularly of Michelangelo Antonioni) emerged as realists of
any description, let alone veristi or Vergani. There was a certain confu¬
sion even in the literary references themselves. Verismo as a diffuse
aesthetic fell as far short of realism as Verga, as an artist, rose above it.

14

Rustic realism: the influence of Renoir (opposite)

But intellectual confusion does not stop ideas from being influential,
and one of the first people to undergo the influence of the prophets of
neo-realism, and to translate their ideas into practice, was Visconti.
Ossessione, his first film, was produced in 1942, in an atmosphere
of general disturbance. Italy was fighting, and beginning to lose, a war
around the Mediterranean. Within months of the film being finished
the Allied forces landed in Sicily and began working their way slowly
through the peninsula. The film did not emerge properly into the light
of day until some years after the war, and then only in a severely muti¬
lated and shortened version. As a result of these circumstances many
legends have attached themselves to the story of the making of the film
and an aura of mystification has come to surround its interpretation.
The general purport of the legends is to bolster up the image of Osses¬
sione as a precocious, maligned, and yet marvellous flower of the still
inexistent neo-realist movement. Both in the legends and in the
interpretation there is a nugget of truth. The film has origins in the cult
of verismo and was to serve as an inspiration, of a kind, to later neo¬
realist production. But there is also a lot of legendary dross and more
than a suspicion of critical alchemy in the proceedings. When the dross
has been removed and the alchemy exposed, Ossessione emerges as a

fa yUL
■ Wk
wHfe
i1
very different, and furthermore a greater rather than a lesser film, than
its first admirers would ever have claimed.
Given a chance to direct a film of his own, Visconti’s first idea was a
version of a short story by (significantly enough) Verga, L’amante di
Gramigna. When the project was refused by the censors he turned
instead to a suggestion of Renoir’s, an adaptation of an American
thriller, James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, which had already
served as the basis for a French film in 1939 and was to be filmed again
byTay Garnett in Hollywood in 1946.The story, widespread but poorly
documented, has it that the choice of Cain’s novel as scenario was a sub¬
terfuge to deceive the Fascist censorship, which rubber-stamped the
project as inoffensive on paper but was then horrified to see the most
un-Fascist image of Italian life portrayed in the finished film, which
transferred the action to an Italian setting. The censors then attempted
to ban the film outright, but it was reprieved, so the story runs, only on
personal instructions from the Duce himself.
This story, though somewhat inaccurate,3 is quite significant. It
manages at the same time to exaltVisconti as a crusader for the new real¬
ism and to denigrate him subtly by suggesting that this aristocratic
dilettante had friends at court who gave him an influence and an escape
route denied to lesser mortals. In fact Mussolini did not reprieve the
film, and Ossessione’s troubles did not end with the end of Fascism.
More important, just as the censorship difficulties which Ossessione
encountered have been misrepresented as simply a question of Fascist
politics (they involved the Church, bien-pensant opinion generally, com¬
mercial distributors, and even the American occupying forces), so
Visconti’s artistic intentions are simplified and belittled by the empha¬
sis placed on the element of national realism in the adaptation.

Cinema criticism is often curiously nationalistic. While literary critics

have acknowledged for a long time the profoundly renovating role
played by American literature in the development of the Italian novel
in the 1930s and 1940s, their cinema confreres have on the whole
failed to recognise the debt of the Italian cinema to the same source -
and to the American movies. It is partly the fact that in literature the
connections are more obvious to the academic mind: Pavese wrote a
thesis on Melville; Visconti did not write a thesis on Griffith. But there
remains a strange reluctance to accept the obvious. The fiction persists
that Visconti chose The Postman Always Rings Twice for no better reason
than that it would not upset the censor and that the changes he made

16
in his adaptation had no other purpose than to Italianise its indiffer¬
ent theme. It never occurs to anyone to think that the story might have
appealed to him precisely because it was American, and that he might
have changed it not just to make it more Italian but to make it more
Visconti. Ossessione certainly is very Italian, and it is also more realis¬
tic than Tay Garnett’s film of the same novel. But there is a lot more
to it than that.
Ossessione is a film about the destructive power of sexual passion. A
man turns up by chance at a roadside country inn, stays on as a
labourer and falls in love (or in desire) with the inn-keeper’s wife and
she with him. They decide to leave together, but after half an hour on
the road she turns back and he goes away alone. A few weeks later the
husband and wife encounter him again by chance in a nearby town
and the husband, innocently, insists that he go back with them. On the
journey the lovers, mainly at her instigation, murder the husband in a
staged accident. They settle down uneasily to run the cafe. Unease and
mutual mistrust grow when she collects on the old man’s life insur¬
ance and he suspects her of having used him to wield the hatchet to
serve her own financial purposes. In retaliation he spends an afternoon
with another girl, but slips away when he realises that the police are

Gino arriving ... and departing (overleaf)

closing in. The lovers are reconciled, but as they drive away to escape
imminent arrest their car skids off the road and she is killed.
Melodramatic as this summary may sound, particularly the ending,
it is not half so melodramatic as the novel orTay Garnett’s rather literal
adaptation. Visconti has in fact purified the story line considerably,
removing the elements of crude and even ridiculous poetic justice in
which the novel abounded (such as having the man acquitted of the real
murder but sentenced to death for the accident) and adding or expand¬
ing elements only in order to introduce an extra dimension of structural
coherence behind the apparent arbitrariness of the plot. The arbitrary
and accidental character of events and, even more, the arbitrariness of
human (but not divine) justice is an important feature of the novel, and
also appears, rationalised in a half-hearted and uncomprehending
fashion, in the Garnett film. Visconti rejects it utterly. Tragedy in his
films is never a trick of providence, and in Ossessione, as later in Vaghe
stelle delVOrsa, the tragic outcome arises from the neces-sary logic of the
situation into which the characters are thrown.
Turning Cain’s parable of arbitrariness into a demonstration of
necessity required, however, more than a simple alteration of plot
mechanics. It meant creating a new structural framework in which to
define the actions of the characters, and consequently making the char¬
acters themselves different. In the film the lovers, Gino and Giovanna,
are both in different ways partial outcasts. They have an uneasy
relationship with established society. They are neither totally integrated
nor totally independent, and it is their inability either to be fitted in or
to break loose that leads to their destruction.
Giovanna has had a tough time in the past. Her euphemistic
phrase, ‘I used to get men to invite me to supper’, contains an innu¬
endo which is not difficult to grasp. Marriage, for her, to the
superficially amiable but gross and uncomprehending Signor Bragana,
was a last-ditch escape from a life of increasingly systematic prosti¬
tution; but it was an escape into slavery and mediocrity. Gino offers
her passion and liberation, but on his terms, which to her are unac¬
ceptable. He proposes twice that they should leave together, and each
time she hesitates. The first time, staggering ridiculously along the
road in high heels, in the dust and heat, she is haunted by a fear of
insecurity, and turns back. The second time, after the murder, it is not
just a negative fear of insecurity that seizes hold of her, but positive
ambition to enjoy, with Gino, a stability and comfort always denied to
her. Despite Gino’s pleas, she insists on staying on at the inn. She

20
rejects the only life that Gino can offer her, and wants the one which
society has always refused her and refuses her still. She even commits
murder for the sake of it - a desperate and unproductive gesture,
because from that moment she is a fugitive and an outcast. Only
courage screwed to the sticking place, like that of Lady Macbeth, can
keep her dreams alive.
Gino, for his part, has no such dreams of security and advance¬
ment. He is a wanderer, a passer-through, going from place to place
and job to job as his fancy takes him. If he can have a woman with him
on his travels, so much the better. He seduces the provocative Gio-
vanna in total unawareness of the consequences to which her ambition
will lead him. Although he loves her, he cannot change his way of life.
When Giovanna goes back to her husband, he prefers to continue
alone rather than return to a state of uneasy dependence at the inn. To
be tied to a woman, and to a job, is bad enough. Under circumstances
of permanent deceit, conducting a secret affair, it is intolerable.
After the murder, too, living openly with Giovanna in the gossipy
village, he is afflicted with the desire to keep on the move, to escape
from the inn, haunted for him by the memory of the dead husband,
from people, particularly the priest, from the police, even (though it
sounds a cliche) from himself. He comes to distrust even Giovanna,
and is horrified by her delight when she learns about the insurance.
He begins to be tormented by guilt and by a suspicion that he has been
used for purposes alien to his own. The afternoon spent with the
dancer, a relationship that is easy, human and, within self-imposed lim¬
its, satisfying and complete, is not only an act of spite against Giovanna
(as such it would be rather futile), but a release from guilt, and almost,
it seems, a return to nature and a cleansing purity.
The episodic figures, such as the dancer, are of key importance,
both in themselves and in the way they throw into relief the tormented
character of Gino and Giovanna’s liaison. The pattern of relationships
is almost geometric, with Giovanna at a kind of epicentre, surrounded
by but not connecting with the other characters. Psychologically, and
as a person, she clearly suffers from this isolation, estranged from her
husband and with Gino as her only lifeline to the world outside. But
it is doubtful ifVisconti intended attention to be focused, in a psycho¬
logical way, on her problems. In structural terms her isolation is to be
seen rather as a cordon sanitaire which Visconti has drawn round her
for his own purposes. Like Dante’s Circe with the wanderer Ulysses,
she entices Gino (significantly) by her singing:

21
Domestic life
 I turned Ulysses from his path, charmed by my song4

and having enticed him will not let him escape. Unlike Circe, she suc¬
ceeds in destroying him, even though at the very end, in a literal sense,
he destroys her.
Giovanna, then, is isolated. Gino, however, is not, and in his relations
with the other, episodic characters one finds portrayed the counter¬
image which Visconti puts forward to the guilty and destructive passion
in which the lovers are consumed. Apart from the dancer, whose role
has been discussed above, by far the most important of these is the
strange figure of the Spagnolo, or Spaniard, the solitary travelling show¬
man whom Gino meets on the train after leaving Giovanna, and who
more or less picks him up by an offer to pay the penniless Gino his fare.5
It is a gesture of implicit and intuitively recognised solidarity between
men and between wanderers, and contrasts sharply with Giovanna’s
trick to hold Gino back at the beginning of the film, when she sends her
husband after him on the false pretext that he has not paid for his meal.
Between Gino and the Spaniard, on the other hand, there is a mysteri¬
ous and spontaneous accord, and the scenes between them receive a
lyrical expansion which the scenes between Gino and Giovanna, with
the possible exception of the scene at the end when he learns that she is
pregnant, do not have. The only point of tension between the two men
comes when the Spaniard discovers that Gino’s suitcase is full of
women’s clothes, evidence of Gino’s betrayal both of true male com¬
radeship (the Spaniard is a homosexual) and of the wanderer’s basic
rule to form no attachments. But this is not enough to destroy their
friendship. That happens only towards the end, when the Spaniard
traces Gino back to the inn, after the murder, and tries to get him back.
Gino is obdurate. In a fit of anger he knocks the other man down. When
a detective who is shadowing the lovers latches on to the Spaniard, the
latter shrugs him off and goes his own way.
The Spaniard has so often been interpreted as a ‘positive hero’ that
it is worth making one or two points against this simplified interpret¬
ation. The first is that in the full version of the film there is an enigmatic
scene at the end when the Spaniard calls on the police and apparently
completes the cycle of betrayals by tipping them off against Gino. The
second is that one should not confuse a character with the role he is
called on to play in the structure of the work. In the nineteenth-
century novel, where the two are synonymous, or in the theatre of
Brecht, where the distinction is explicit and essential, this confusion

23

Gino with the Spaniard (opposite)

would not arise. But with Visconti it can and does, and should be clar¬
ified. As a character the Spaniard is ambiguous and not altogether
agreeable, and he is a law unto himself and consistent with himself.
Structurally he has two distinct and conflicting roles, independent of
his personality: to point to the existence of what, in Visconti’s eyes, is
a positive alternative to the destructive passion of Gino and Giovanna,
and to round off the cycle of betrayal. Neither action invalidates the
significance of the other.
The theme of betrayal is important. It recurs in various forms in
many of Visconti’s films, notably in Senso, which Ossessione most clearly
foreshadows. Like that of the roles performed by the characters, this
theme has a double significance. On the one hand, taken in isolation,
it emerges as a permanent item ofVisconti’s thematic concerns, a part
of his universe. But it also has a more specific function in the dynam¬
ics of the plot. In Ossessione each relationship is seen, at least by one of
the parties, as an exclusive commitment and as conferring obligations.
This is true not only of Bragana’s assumptions about marriage, but of
Giovanna’s feelings about her grand amour and the Spaniard’s attitudes
to comradeship and the life on the road. By this token Gino brings
about his own ruin. He ignores or despises the claims made on him by
Giovanna and the Spaniard and is fully himself only in the un¬
demanding relationship with Anita. In other words, he is incapable of
making a full commitment to a person or a way of life - a fact which
explains, though it does not cause, his inadaptation to society. But the
role of betrayals does not stop here, nor is it all the result of Gino’s
indifference. Apart from the Spaniard’s coup de grace there are also the
adultery and the murder, both of which are, in a wide sense, acts of
betrayal, and both of which Gino feels guilty about, not only because
murder is murder but because Bragana is, after all, a friend, even if the
friendship was mainly on the older man’s side.
The static pattern of Ossessione, then, is one in which easy love is
shown as preferable to guilty passion and male comradeship as an
alternative to either. Passion, particularly sexual, is a disorder which
draws the victim out of relation with a society which cannot accom¬
modate him, and then destroys him. Betrayal is a permanent threat,
part of the general instability of human relations. This is a pattern
which will recur again later and is here clearly announced for the first
time. But every bit as interesting as the static pattern is the way things
are actually worked out in context, the way for instance that
each relationship is formed by impulse or accident and then

24
terminated by an act of betrayal, or the way the narrative receives its
formal articulation.
The first striking thing about this formal articulation is how simple
it is, and how conventional. The form is that traditional to classical
theatre and opera, a series of scenes involving two or at most three
people at a time. This formal articulation reflects (or determines; the
two are inseparable) the structure and development of the relations
between characters, who form a series of couples. Leaving aside the
marginal couples - priest/husband, husband/Gino - the main develop¬
ment is expressed in the progression Bragana/Giovanna, Giovanna/
Gino, Spaniard/Gino, and Gino/Anita, or (more simply still) Bra-
gana-Giovanna-Gino-Anita.The movement is linear and progressive,
away from the stable world of marriage and village life towards a more
fluid existence. But it cannot be consummated. The forces of the past
and of society are too strong. Gmo is drawn back to Giovanna, and,
sweeping round in a wider circle to block all escape routes, the police
close in.
This linear pattern closed off with a couple of loops at the end is
much tidier than the rambling original. But it represents a very tenta¬
tive stage in Visconti’s development. His later films have a far tighter
construction which respects much more the complexity of social
bonds, and where the pattern remains linear, as in Rocco and His Broth¬
ers, it has a much more positive trajectory. Part of the explanation for
this lies in the adaptation from a genre, the thriller, whose postulates
Visconti does not share, and part in the form of social life described.
The significance of this can best be sought out by looking at the role
played by the police in Ossessione.
The police in Ossessione are an extrinsic force whose only role is to
give a conventional ending to the story. They represent an abstract
justice which has no reality within the concrete world of the film until
it suddenly imposes itself at the end. In Visconti’s later films where the
police and ‘justice’ have a role to play, this role is always more closely
integrated. In La terra trema the police are an oppressive presence right
from the start. In Senso the Austrian military justice into whose hands
Franz is betrayed by Livia is part of the political structure made explicit
throughout the film and an aspect of the code which Franz evades and
rebels against in his love for Livia. In Rocco and His Brothers, finally,
the handing over of Simone to the police by Ciro consummates a
movement away from the close self-contained world of the primitive
family to the world of bourgeois society and the State, and as such has

25
a relatively progressive function. In a film deliberately as loosely struc¬
tured as Ossessione these considerations cannot apply, while at the same
time the cops are not what they usually are in thrillers. As a result they
remain detached.
The detached role of the police is an element of a general cultural
dissociation in the world of Ossessione and the way it is described. Gino
passes through this world without settling and there is in any case not
much of a world to belong to. Bragana’s sentimental attachment to
army life and the images of the priest strapping shotgun and cartridges
round the soutane are added touches which help to establish the sense
of cultural dissociation. This again contrasts with Visconti’s later pref¬
erence for self-contained cultural environments such as families. It is
also crucial to an understanding of his attitude to realism and to the
neo-realist movement.
Stylistically, Ossessione is the most realistic ofVisconti’s films. At the
same time it cannot be called, without qualification, a work of neo-real-
ism. It is visually naturalistic in its use of natural locations, presented
with a minimum of expressive distortion. It is also rooted in a naturalis¬
tic conception of character, and places character in landscape in a way
which is generally unaffected but does not exclude certain sophisticated
expressive effects. One thinks notably of the scene of Bragana and the
lovers at the singing contest, which has a quite extraordinary similarity
to Flaubert’s description of the cornices agricoles in Madame Bovary.
Most importantly it excludes explicit moral and political judgments but
approaches its subject from the point of view of the participants in the
action. Like the other features observed, the general cultural dis¬
sociation is just a fact about the setting: it is not explicitly significant.
These realistic features were what most caught the attention of
critics when the film first appeared - fairly enough, since the version
most people saw had been shorn of those scenes, particularly the
episodes with the Spaniard which were most likely to contradict this
impression. The fact that, as we have seen, the interest of Ossessione is
by no means exhausted by the realism of its approach does not mean
that its stylistic realism is not significant - particularly in view of the
time it was made. But this is not enough to justify the enthusiastic
paean of Antonio Pietrangeli (who had, incidentally, worked on the
film and ought to have seen a bit deeper) to the effect that with the
first shot of Gino asleep on a lorry neo-realism was born: ‘Shall we
ourselves baptise Gino in Ossessione? We could call him, if you like,
Italian neo-realism.’b This is just sheer, indiscriminate mystification.

26
 One of the most interesting features of Ossessione is its lack of politi¬
cal and historical perspectives. This in itself is sufficient to mark it off
from almost all Visconti’s later films on the one hand and the bulk of
neo-realist production on the other. Historical judgment is an integral
part of Senso, Rocco and His Brothers, The Leopard, and Vaghe stelle del-
TOrsa, and the inclination to take up a political stance is obvious enough
in De Sica and early Rossellini, not to mention out and out political
directors like De Santis. What one must bear in mind here are the cir¬
cumstances in which the various directors worked and their films were
made. The political circumstances of the years 1943-50 allowed and
indeed called out for direct artistic treatment. Political content and
unequivocal commitment imposed themselves naturally, in the post¬
war situation, even on Rossellini, and without this impetus neo-realism
would not have acquired its specific character. In Rossellini’s case his
interest in the immediate realistic representation of actions and events
attached itself to a situation that was one hundred per cent political, in
which political action was immediate to an exceptional degree. But this
connection between realism and political commitment was contingent
on certain particular unrepeatable events. Rossellini has remained a
realist, but the focus of interest has changed with the movement of time.
Visconti too has changed, though in a different direction. Whereas
with Rossellini a realistic and immediate treatment of something for
which he feels a direct interest uneasily masks a set of fairly constant
moral imperatives, with Visconti there are no imperatives, realism
appears as incidental and direct interest expresses itself only in the form
of certain recurring themes and motifs.Their paths coincided very little:
first in the general concern of any artist for the truth of a situation, real
or imagined; and second in their brief association with a moment of
social realism in the Italian cinema. Even in this association the tangents
never quite touched, and their paths have since diverged a lot further -
Visconti to become more profoundly political but stylistically less of a
realist, and Rossellini to become an apparent political opportunist but
morally and aesthetically consistent with what he has always been.
There is no need to complicate the picture further by referring to the
careers of other directors who passed through the neo-realist experi¬
ence, but if one were to do so one would find a similar pattern of brief
convergence round a diffuse blob on the film-historical map.To charac¬
terise neo-realism is in fact extremely difficult, except as regards when it
happened. If a social and aesthetic definition were to be attempted, in
terms say of five qualities fairly generally accepted as characteristic -

27
realistic treatment, popular setting, social content, historical actuality,
and political commitment - one would not find many films which satisfy
all these conditions together. What one can point to, however, and for
our purposes it is sufficient, is the general convergence of a number of
Italian directors at a particular time round some at least of the qualities
proposed as the norm. Once the general area has been delimited the tra¬
jectory of each director becomes easier to plot.
The trajectory ofVisconti’s career sweeps in a wide arc round the
area generally known as neo-realism. Ossessione is pre-neo-realist; it
anticipates certain of the themes and styles that were to become the
stock-in-trade of the movement, but, for good historical reasons,
necessarily misses out on others. It is, one might say, realism without the
neo-.Then, for six years, he does not make another film, and when he
does, with La terra trema, it sets him moving on a new path, away from
neo-realism altogether.

Notes
1. See Gaston Bounoure in Premier Plan, numero special 22-23-24, May 1962;
Jean Renoir, edited by Bernard Chardere, pp. 293-4. [In fact Visconti’s role, if
any, on Les Bas-Fonds is unclear. Some other inaccuracies need to be corrected.
Visconti actually began to spend most of his time abroad in 1933 and had
known Chanel for some time before she introduced him to Renoir. And the
staging ofTraversi’s Carita mondana did not take place until after his return
from Paris; Visconti did, however, do some set decoration for a production of
Goldoni’s La moglie saggia in Milan in 1928 (2002).]
2. [GUF stood for Gruppo universitario fascista or Fascist university group. As
the name implies, the GUF were supposed to be Fascist Party institutions
within the universities, but by the end of the 1930s they were increasingly
hotbeds of dissident ideas (2002).]
3. For a more accurate version, see Marcel Martin, fiche on Ossessione, in Image
et Son no. 120, March 1959. [Ossessione did in fact receive a limited release in
1943. Its re-release after the war was held up by the fact that the producers had
not cleared the rights to Cain’s novel, which now belonged to MGM (2002).]
4. ‘Volsi Ulisse dal suo cammin, vago / A1 canto mio’, Dante, Purgatorio, xix, 22.
5. [The Spaniard is so called not because he is Spanish but because he has been
in Spain - i.e. as a volunteer in the 1936-9 Civil War (2002).]
6. ‘Allons-nous baptiser nous-meme le Gino d’Ossessione? Nous pouvons l’ap-
peler, voulez-vous, le neo-realisme italien.’ Antonio Pietrangeli, ‘Panoramique
du cinema italien’, La Revue du Cinema no. 13, May 1948.

28
2: La terra trema

One of the most remarkable features ofVisconti’s career, which marks

him off quite clearly from most of his neo-realist contemporaries and
which has not on the whole been fully appreciated by the critics, is his
apparent indifference to burning issues of actuality. The real heart of
the neo-realist movement was the Resistance film and the often
agonisingly direct contact it re-established between the spectator and
recent events, and the decline of the movement can be traced to
the moment when this genre lost its immediacy and became at best
reflective, at worst sentimental. Visconti’s only contribution to the vital
heart of the movement was the short episode he directed for the com¬
pilation film, Giorni di gloria, under the general direction of Mario
Serandrei, in 1945 (see Filmography). After that he does not mention
the Resistance, the war, or its aftermath directly for another twenty
years, when he returns to the subject in a distant and devious manner
in Vaghe stelle delVOrsa.1 This remoteness is characteristic. Visconti’s
career has many paradoxes, but it has a consistent base, a constant
reflective concern with certain fundamental problems related both to
his own personal situation and to the historical development of Italian
society as a whole. Not all the aspects of this concern emerged at once.
Some, such as his historical interests, developed later. Others, par¬
ticularly the more intimate, were stifled at a time when the prevailing
current in the Italian cinema was towards an almost documentary con¬
ception of cinematic realism. In this period the most striking influence
of Visconti’s personal situation on his work was the protection it
afforded him. Aristocratic, temperamentally aloof, conscious of the
advantages and anomalies of his privileged position, he remained unaf¬
fected by the general atmosphere of passionate outgoing concern for
immediate questions in which so many of his contemporaries were
caught up. His detachment from immediate concerns did not prevent
him from absorbing the serious content of the aesthetic-political agi¬
tation that was going on around him, but he drew his own lessons from
it and his Marxist commitment was different in kind from the diffuse
leftism of many of his colleagues. It had its source in a sense of history,

29
and of his personal situation in the historical process, rather than in
sentiment, and it expressed itself in historical reflection mediated by a
sense of artistic form, rather than in the more obvious forms of propa¬
ganda which provide the surface gloss of the neo-realist movement.
The chiselled beauty of its images, the simplicity and rigour of its
narrative, and its unbending concern with social realities have all
caused La terra trema to be hailed as a masterpiece of the propaganda
film. But this simplistic appreciation is belied both by the story of how
Visconti came to make it and by its lack of impact on an ill-prepared
public. La terra trema is not, either in intention or in effect, a work of
propaganda. It is a great film, but not a flawless masterpiece, and
the reasons for both its greatness and its limitations are far more com¬
plex than is usually made out. From the choice of subject matter to the
final presentation of the finished film, La terra trema is riddled with
complexities and difficulties. To endorse it or to reject it for its propa¬
gandist aspect alone is an evasion of almost all the issues raised by the
film.
The first difficulty lies in the choice of subject matter - the
Southern question - and in Visconti’s approach to it. The Southern
question is a permanent running sore in the body politic of Italy. All
the great social and political changes which have taken place in Italy
since unification have been generated and have had their effect largely
in the North. To these changes the South contributed very little, and
gained from them even less. No better served by Fascism than it had
been by any previous regime, the South did not even enjoy the
benefits of the Resistance in 1943-5. In the place of a spontaneous
political upsurge, the South experienced only invasion and the return
of banditry and the Mafia. The year 1945 found the South, and Sicily
in particular, in the same state of poverty, apathy, primitivism, and cor¬
ruption which had struck and horrified observers of the Southern
question at the time of unification eighty years before.
Apart from simple indifference and laissez-faire, two forms of
possible solution have been put forward to the problems of the South.
One is based on the idea of massive intervention by the central govern¬
ment to stamp out banditry and corruption, to reform the system of
land tenure and to introduce industry. The second, deriving from
Gramsci, envisages a radical transformation of Southern society from
within, connected with a mass political movement allying the Southern
peasants with the industrial workers from the North. The highly politi¬
cal atmosphere of Italy in the 1940s made it impossible for a film-maker

30
to approach the Southern question without some bias towards one or
other of these political solutions to the problem.
On the other hand, the concentration of political and cultural
activity in the North, which in 1947 was still the scene of reprisals and
reglements de comptes between ex-Fascists, Communists, and the rest,
meant that it was exceptional for the South to receive any attention at
all. Visconti was one of the first neo-realist directors to turn his attention
towards the South and to Sicily, the most Southern (or the most un-
Nor them) region of all. Another was Pietro Germi (In nome della legge,
1948). But whereas Germi started from a reformist standpoint and fur¬
ther compromised his intentions by coming (albeit under pressure) to
an arrangement with the Mafia,2 Visconti adopts from the outset a pos¬
ition of total revolutionary intransigence, and though forced to abandon
one of the political premises on which his original project was based,
remains intransigent to the end.This intransigence, aesthetic even more
than political, is what gives the film the elemental quality that has always
struck and sometimes dumbfounded critics. But it also serves as a mask
behind which the subtleties, complexities, and occasional inconsisten¬
cies of the film remain tucked away and hidden from view.
In 1947, Visconti went to Sicily, with a small amount of capital
advanced by the Communist Party, to make what was initially to have
been a short documentary. He stayed there for six months, and the
project gradually expanded in scale until what was proposed became
a mammoth epic on the conditions of the poor workers and peasants
and their struggle to liberate themselves from oppression. The film was
to consist of three interlinked episodes, dealing with the fishermen, the
peasants, and the workers in the sulphur-mines. As things turned out
only one episode, that on the fishermen, was ever finished, and that in
a form radically different from originally envisaged. It is this episode,
which still bears the sub-title Episodio del mare, that is known in Italy
and abroad under the general title of La terra trema.
Visconti brought to the project a great amount of revolutionary fer¬
vour, and an even greater ignorance of actual conditions. The whole
project can be fruitfully compared to Eisenstein’s equally grandiose
and even less successful Que viva Mexico!. Like Que viva Mexico!, La
terra trema suffered from being abstractly conceived and unrealisable
from the outset. Even (which was unlikely) if Visconti had received
full co-operation from his producers and financiers, he could never
have made the film as originally conceived. The contradiction was too
great between what he wanted and what was there for him to see. Like

31
Eisenstein, Visconti arrived on the scene as an outsider with the idea
of making a him that would be at the same time a document and a call
to arms. Convinced (apparently) that the hour of revolution had come,
he envisaged a dramatic expose of the conditions of perpetual humili¬
ation suffered by the exploited Sicilian masses, which would resolve
itself in a grand finale in which the solidarity of all the oppressed would
bring at least partial victory.
It is easy to be sarcastic at the expense ofVisconti’s political naivete,
but it is beside the point. The scenario for the first version, which was
published in Bianco e Nero some years later,3 represents only a very
early draft, which would in any case have been modified later as scen¬
arios always are. What is interesting here is not so much the political
as the aesthetic premises from which Visconti started out. If the func¬
tion of art is revolutionary (which, in a revolutionary period, is not an
absurd premise), and revolution was on the cards at any moment
(which, from a Northern point of view, it certainly seemed to be), then
a film on this pattern could fulfil its function by anticipating the cause
it set out to further. Unfortunately, even in the balmy perspectives of
1947, the project was beset by contradictions. In the first place, the
Sicilian proletariat was not going to rise, en bloc, against its oppressors,
and if it did it was going to fail. The forces of reaction were too
entrenched. An uprising would not develop into a revolution. The pol¬
itical premise was therefore false.
Given even that the political premise might have been true, there
would still be something odd about a man ofVisconti’s temperament
indulging in this sort of political wish-fulfilment were it not clear from
his later films that the initial formation of an abstract and often highly
politicised schema is an integral part of his method of work. His initial
scenarios have an ideological clarity and purity about them which is
then systematically betrayed in the final elaboration. This betrayal can
take various forms, some fruitful, some not. Here in La terra trema it
takes the form of abandoning a totally unworkable discipline and
reshaping the film in accordance with objective demands. The docu¬
mentary moment prevails over the ideological. Resisting the
temptation to turn the village of Aci Trezza into the location for an
imaginary revolution, which would have been a total violation of the
reality of a film conceived first and foremost as a document, Visconti
recast his story in a more pessimistic and ‘realistic’ form.
In the final version of La terra trema as realised and distributed
abroad the story is made to follow the basic outlines of the plot of

32
Verga’s I Malavoglia, the classic novel of Sicilian life and conditions
which provided part of the original inspiration for Visconti’s shift of
interest towards the South. This derivation is important. Even in their
periods of greatest originality Italian cultural forms have always been
consciously derivative, drawing alternately on models provided by the
native tradition and on the fruits of innovation elsewhere. Italian litera¬
ture in particular has also been characterised by a constant tension
between more classicising and rhetorical modes of expression and a
more realistic vein of inspiration. In so far as neo-realism, both in
literature and in the cinema, represented a reaction against the clas¬
sicistic and rhetorical stance adopted by artists in the Fascist period,
its models tended to be those of American realism of the 1930s and,
of course, Verga. It was the interaction of these models which, in the
early 1940s, helped to produce Elio Vittorini’s Conversazioni in Sicilia
and Ossessione, as well as a whole host of lesser books and films. But
the forms of naturalism and verismo, derived from Verga and Renoir,
which were fundamental to Ossessione, are absent from La terra trema.
Verga’s influence stops short at the level of an initial inspiration and a
convenient story, while Renoir seems to be forgotten entirely. The cine¬
matic models for La terra trema are Flaherty and Eisenstein.
The influence of the incongruous tandem of Flaherty and Eisen¬
stein is mainly stylistic and will be referred to later. The question of
Visconti’s debt to Verga is of more immediate relevance, because it
shows the same tensions at work as does the difference between
scenario and realisation.
Verga’s story concerns the struggle of a fishing family, led by its aged
and conservative grandfather, to eke out a sufficient living from a hostile
sea to enable them to keep their roots on land, symbolised by the old
family home. The world of the novel is one completely dominated by
necessity, in which society and social laws are a superstructure in a
hierarchy of oppression, underlain by the direr laws of inanimate nature.
The Malavoglia do not in any real sense revolt against this oppression.
Such hubris is hardly admitted even as a logical possibility, let alone a
reality. They suffer, and they survive. The unchanging laws which
govern their existence continue unchanged.
Needless to say, this pessimistic and fatalistic vision of things could
have no place in Visconti’s original schema for the film. Even in the
finished version, where Visconti reverts to Verga’s story, the underlying
vision is very different. La terra trema in its finished form offers the first
evidence of a creative and dialectical tension that is characteristic of

33
much ofVisconti’s work, between a deeply rooted pessimistic fatalism
and a more optimistic intellectual conception of the possibilities of
human action. In La terra trema it is the voluntaristic optimism that
dominates. But the other pole continues to exert an attraction, empha¬
sised by the reversion to the plot of I Malavoglia. If it was largely the
experience of objective conditions which forced Visconti to modify his
original plan, there was also a strong emotional undertow at work,
determining the direction in which the modifications were made.
In the film, as in the book, the fishermen are defeated. But the cir¬
cumstances and above all the consequences of their defeat are no
longer the same. Their enemy is not the sea, against which they pit
themselves in the miserable struggle for survival, but the exploitation
by other men which forces them to undertake the struggle in the first
place. Without the capital to own or equip the boats they go out in or
the organisation to market the meagre haul of fish they bring in each
morning, they are utterly dependent on the wholesalers who own the
boats and pay the fishermen a derisory price for their catch. The
Valastro, who are incidentally not one of the poorest families, for they
own their own house and can afford to take on day-labourers to help
work the boat they hire, try to escape from this oppression. They mort¬
gage their house and attempt to set up an independent business with
the proceeds. But the need to recoup their initial financial outlay forces
them to go out to sea at all times and in all weathers, and one night
they are caught in a storm and the boat is destroyed and with it their
entire livelihood. The mortgage is foreclosed and the Valastro are left
with nothing, except the possibility of working as day-labourers or
braccianti on other families’ boats.
For the Valastro defeat is total and irremediable. But the future of
the fishermen is not eternally fixed and crystallised in the failure of a
single family to overcome oppression alone. The film is centred round
two key episodes, each of which represents a stage in the development
of the consciousness of the young ’Ntoni Valastro. In the first, disgusted
at the miserable prices being offered for the night’s catch, ’Ntoni leads
a spontaneous revolt of the fishermen against their oppressors. The
wholesalers’ scales, symbol of exploitation, are thrown into the sea and
their owners after them. The police are called in and ‘order’ is restored.
’Ntoni is carted off to prison, but released amid general jubilation a
few days later. It is at this point that ’Ntoni realises that the source of
their oppression lies, not in the necessary world of nature, but in the
arbitrary world of social exploitation, and that he takes the decision

34
The harbour at Aci Trezza

’Ntoni throws the wholesalers’ scales into the sea

35
that, if nobody else will follow them, he and his family will go it alone.
The second comes after the defeat and immiseration of the Valastro,
when ’Ntoni is walking along the shore and comes across the wreck¬
age of his old boat being put together and recaulked for another family
to use. There is a small girl sitting by the boat and ’Ntoni talks to her.
Here, next to a relic of past disaster and talking to someone whose life
lies in the future, ’Ntoni articulates for the first time the lesson of his
defeat: the failure of any individual attempt to go it alone, and the need
for collective and concerted action if exploitation is to be brought to
an end and the future secured.
Basically what Visconti has done is to rewrite Verga in the light of
Marx. He has shifted the focus of interest from the old grandfather to
the young and active ’Ntoni, and from the house, to which, in the
novel, the family were sentimentally and conservatively attached, on to
the boat, on which the Valastro pin their hopes for the future, and he
has placed the emphasis on the family’s active attempts to throw off
social exploitation. This procedure was not without its dangers. It
could easily have meant, for example, the replacement of one abstract
schema (Verga’s quasi-scientific naturalism) with another more absent
still - a patina of vulgar-Marxist cliches and half-truths. There were
dangers also of slipping into miserabilism on the one hand and vague
affirmations of abstract humanism on the other. What saved him from
these dangers (but led him into others, as we shall see) was the way in
which his preconceived interpretative model fused and interpenetrated
with actual Sicilian experience during the making of the film. It is not
imposed on a recalcitrant reality but emerges from that reality in the
form of the consciousness that the fishermen acquire of their situation
through their own actions, while an idea of the sort of actions the fish¬
ermen would be likely to undertake was provided to Visconti by the
fishermen themselves. The essential mediation is to be found in the
character of ’Ntoni, who embodies the new consciousness and in
whom this consciousness grows as a result of a series of extremely con¬
crete determinations which are worth examining in some detail.
At the beginning of the film ’Ntoni is courting Nedda, the daugh¬
ter of a relatively well-to-do family in the village. But Nedda’s family
will not give her (and her dowry) away to a poor family like the Vala¬
stro. At the same time ’Ntoni is faced with heavy responsibilities at
home. His father is dead, a victim of the sea, and the grandfather is
too old to work and too worn down by years of oppression to do any¬
thing but shake his head at the thought of innovation and initiative.

36
’Ntoni is therefore precociously in the position of head of the family,
young, impetuous, and lacking guidance. Possibilities for advancement
spiral above his head. If he is to marry Nedda, his family must first
improve their economic and social position. But once he marries her
that new position will be secured. His marriage to Nedda becomes a
matter of his responsibility to his family, and buying the boat a
response not simply to a generalised awareness of exploitation but to
the particular claims of his own sexuality and his family’s needs.
Similar factors affect the family’s rise and slide into ruin. One of
’Ntoni’s sisters is being eyed by a young labourer. When the Valastro
become independent, he turns away from her, despite her protestations,
because he knows better than she that she is now unattainable to him.
When the family falls it is too late and he does not come back. The other
sister has flirted (innocently enough, by Northern standards) with a
stranger, a would-be Don Juan from the police station. So long as the
family are independent this is supportable, but after the disaster
traditional values reassert themselves. The family cannot stand the
humiliation implied by what she has done or allowed to happen, and she
is driven out. Meanwhile Grandfather is dead, and ’Ntoni’s brother
Cola, despairing of the future at home, has yielded to the blandishments
of a mysterious stranger and has emigrated to the North. This means
that by the time that ’Ntoni reaches his second prise de conscience the
family has disintegrated. Liberated from the responsibilities that led
him to take his first disastrous decision he is able to see beyond them
and to project himself into a world unfettered by traditional concerns.
It is in the choice of concrete and immediate determinations that
Visconti reveals most clearly his own artistic personality. No motives
in Visconti’s films are ever shown as unmixed, abstract, or ‘pure’; all
are mixed and many are confused. In the later films, as we shall see,
this takes the form of a constant association of sex with violence, of
violence with sadism, of love with possession, and marriage with
economics. Lucidity consists in unravelling the strands, and acting
consciously in the light of what you expect to be the consequences,
rather than blindly in response to a confused pressure. Very few ofVis-
conti’s characters attain this ideal. In La terra trema, where the idea of
confusion is more restricted (the element of sexual violence, for
example, is entirely absent), ’Ntoni wins through to understanding. He
and Don Fabrizio in The Leopard are in fact the only Visconti charac¬
ters to do so without losing their humanity. But in order for ’Ntoni to
reach this stage he must first lose everything, including the power to

37
The death of the grandfather

The Valastro confront the wholesalers under a slogan proclaiming that

Mussolini is always right
act. Pessimism reasserts itself. The owl of Minerva, in Hegel’s words,
begins its flight when the dusk is falling.
Visconti’s approach remains, therefore, ultimately reflective, and
inward rather than outward looking. At a certain point, which is when
’Ntoni becomes conscious but is impotent to act, the dialectic runs
out. No further advance is possible. ’Ntoni has gone as far as he can
go within the confines of the village. The way forward is not stated, but
it is tor Ntoni to follow his brother Cola and get out. This is to become
the starting-point for Rocco and His Brothers. But within the context
established by the film it is hardly an immediate possibility. What is
immediate and real is the world of the village of Aci Trezza, a world
isolated and caught up in itself, which holds Visconti’s imagination and
confines it as surely as it limits and confines ’Ntoni.
The isolation of the village is underlined by the fact that, for the
whole two and three-quarter hours that the film lasts, the camera never
leaves it for a moment. It never strays beyond the line of the hills and
the offshore rocks which mark the confines of the fishermen’s world.
When ’Ntoni is taken to prison, the camera records his arrest and his
arrival back in the village, but not the journey, the prison, or the trial.
It records the presence of strangers, like the mysterious character in
knee-breeches who comes to persuade some of the young men to emi¬
grate, or the grand lady who arrives to take part in a ceremony of
dedication for a new boat: but it does not say where they come from
or who they are. It shares the viewpoint of the fishermen, for whom all
visitors are strangers and, by implication, not merely strangers but
strange. The major institutions of society are also seen as alien - or else
are absent entirely. There are no political parties, no trade unions. The
police are marked off from the rest of the community by their uni¬
forms, their voices, their large size, and the imposing appearance of the
building from which they operate.There are churches and church bells
and priests, but they are a physical rather than a social presence. Only
when a storm whips up and the storm bell is rung and the women hud¬
dle on the steps does the church become real. But its reality is like that
of the rocks that guard the entrance to the harbour, a symbol of per¬
manence, but suggesting, unlike the rocks, permanent fear.
In some of the more purely pictorial images - the storm, the overcast
and sultry sky, the black-shawled women scurrying to and fro - and in
the shots of impassive weather-beaten faces, there is a straight emotional
charge that is reminiscent of Eisenstein. The cutting too is crisp and
rhythmic, though there is no systematic use of the associative montage

39

One of the Valastro girls courted by a young labourer (opposite)

characteristic of Eisenstein’s early films. The use of images and of the
cutting between them is in fact pictorial rather than narrative or concep¬
tual. The effect aimed at, and achieved, is a form of pictorial realism
which is occasionally at odds with the analytical tone of the exposition.
The source of the conflict lies in the problem of language. The
natural speech of the inhabitants of AciTrezza is not Italian but a dialect,
and moreover a dialect which, because of the isolated position of the vil¬
lage, is well-nigh incomprehensible not only to continental Italians but
to most other Sicilians as well. Partly through practical necessity (the
villagers could not be taught to speak their dialogues in standard Italian)
and partly for the sake of realism, the entire soundtrack of the film was
shot in dialect and then overlaid with an Italian commentary explaining
the events and what was being said. The pictorial style of the film was
matched to the dialogue to form an audiovisual whole, while the more
analytical content of the film was supplied by the commentary. This div¬
ision of the film into a conceptual element and an element of‘pure’ (i.e.
pictorio-musical) cinema was a necessary conclusion of Visconti’s
search for complete realism. But it was a conclusion that brought him
straight up against an impasse.
Considered simply as a technique the juxtaposition of the two levels
is not necessarily an aid to realism at all. It does nothing to solve the
problem of content, whether of the images or of the text, nor does it
prescribe any necessary relation between the two. In the only case I
know of where exactly the same technique was used - Josef von Stern¬
berg’s The Saga of Anatahan - the effect is one of total and intentional
irrealism.The problem is of course most obvious in documentary, but
it affects fiction films as well. It is posed most acutely in Chris Marker’s
Letter from Siberia, where the same images are made to bear three dif¬
ferent, and conflicting, commentaries. But it has also been faced by
Jean Rouch, in his attempts to integrate the anthropological observer
into the fabric of his accounts, and by Godard in Une femme mariee.
Each of these directors has found a different solution, but each has
been forced, in one way or another, to admit the impossibility of a
strictly objective form of realism unmediated by the intrusion of any
form of subjectivity. Visconti’s solution (or non-solution) is similar to
that of Flaherty. It is an anthropological cinema in which the anthro¬
pologist sets the scene and comments on its significance, but retires
from the picture when it is actually being taken so that his presence is
no longer felt. It ascribes to the director a role rather like that of the
Cartesian God who winds up the clock and then allows it to run.

40
 These logical difficulties are, however, largely indifferent to Vis¬
conti’s purpose. It is perfectly possible to accept the film, as it is usually
taken, as an effectively realistic account. But there is another parallel
worth considering, which, in view ofVisconti’s later development, is of
more immediate relevance, and that is the opera.4
In grand opera the words, and consequently much of the back¬
ground to the action, are, because of the way they are sung, generally
incomprehensible. What comes over from the stage are the elements of
the action, the style of the setting, the grandeur and subtlety of the
music. For a full understanding of what is going on, the spectator has
to turn to the material supplied in the programme. A further feature
of the genre, which has its origins in classicism but survived well into
the nineteenth century, is that the characters tend, for ease of recog¬
nition, to be stock types who owe their flesh and blood and their
individual differentiation to the music and to their presentation on
stage. Intentionally or not, La terra trema is an exact transposition of
these procedures into the film medium.
I do not myself think that this can have been Visconti’s original
intention. The result is certainly paradoxical, but it also represents an
extremely logical solution to the impasse in which Visconti found him¬
self, and one that is in perfect conformity with his temperament and
with his approach to the film, and the opera, as forms of spectacle. Not
only the overall structure, but the detailed construction of each
sequence is cast in an operatic mould. The action unfolds slowly, in a
series of tableaux, with its choruses, solos and duets. The total effect
is not realistic but lyrical. It is this need to present and to develop his
material within a framework which, like that of opera, allows little
weight to the dialogues and demands a completely different process of
understanding from the normal novelistic or theatrical modes of ex¬
position, that justifies the occasional longeurs and the faint aura of
aesthetic indulgence with which the film is beset.
There are, then, three moments in the elaboration of La terra trema.
The first, represented by the early scenario, is activist and would-be
revolutionary. The second, marked by the return to Verga, shows Vis¬
conti in partial retreat from his intransigent position and submitting to
a discipline of realism. In the third, having pushed this kind of realism to
the point where it exploded in contradiction, he attempts to transcend it
by imposing on the material a kind of lyrical exaltation through which
he would be able to escape from the particularity of the second moment
without falling back into the abstraction and tendentiousness of the

41

Waiting for the boats to return (overleaf)

first, and without doing violence to either the material or the ideological
content of the film. The attempt fails, because violence is done. Visconti
had got too enmeshed in the documentary morass to withdraw from it
so neatly. He had got the people of AciTrezza to speak their own parts in
their own way. He had accepted and even exploited the limitations of
their appreciation of their own situation. The method he chose to liber¬
ate himself from the impasse could not, however, transcend these
limitations, it could only deny them, and at the same time deny or obfus¬
cate the reality of the real lives with which he had involved himself.
The problem resolves itself as one of control. Visconti’s method of
presentation, which even in Ossessione is not entirely naturalistic and
becomes progressively more stylised as time goes on, requires either an
interaction between the actor creating the role and the director, or total
control by the director of his material, including the actors, and of the
effects to be drawn from it. In La terra trema this was impossible - or at
best an illusory and deceptive possibility.The material was given, inflex¬
ible, and could therefore not be moulded into new expressive forms.
This primacy of the material is often given as characteristic of the cin¬
ema as opposed to the theatre, and with La terra trema this is certainly
the case. After making the film Visconti went back to the theatre, where
he had already directed a number of productions ranging from Shake¬
speare to Cocteau and Tennessee Williams, and where, it seemed, he
could exercise the control necessary to his artistic approach. But the
dichotomy, as between cinema and theatre in the absolute, is unreal, and
when, three years later, Visconti returned to the cinema, it was to
demonstrate its unreality, producing a work which was a supreme
example of theatrical methods of control in making a film.

Notes
1. In an even more indirect way Senso, Visconti’s film about the Austrian occu¬
pation of Venice at the time of the Risorgimento, appears to allude, by analogy,
to the events of 1943-5. But the analogy is never explicit; see Chapter 5.
2. L’Ecran frangais, 7 June 1949, and Raymond Borde and Andre Bouissy, Le Neo-
realisme italien (Claire-fontaine Lausanne: Cinematheque Suisse, 1960).
3. Bianco e Nero II, March 1951.
4. For a review ofVisconti’s opera productions, see Opera Magazine, May 1958.
[For a list of his work on the stage and for the opera, see pp. 196-9 below
(2002).]

44
3: Bellissima

It is unfortunate that Visconti’s next film, Bellissima (1951), is not bet¬

ter known outside Italy, as it is a film which, in addition to its merits
as an antidote to La terra trema, confounds a number of stereotypes
that have been built up round Visconti’s work and artistic personality.
It is, in a vulgar sense, the most obviously ‘Italian’ of all his films, with
extremely rapid dialogues which are difficult to translate and a fortiori
almost impossible to sub-title without totally losing the flavour of the
original. But it is the most subtle and elusive thing of all, the element
of self-criticism and irony at the expense of its own ‘Italian’ quality,
which has most effectively prevented it from being assimilated and
appreciated by foreign audiences. For at its highest level it is a denial
of all stereotypes, about Visconti, about Italian films in general, about
neo-realism, and even about that sacred monster, Anna Magnani, who
is the star of the film.
The commonly held stereotypes about Visconti are that he is totally
humourless and incapable of self-irony, that his imagination is sensual
rather than intellectual, and that he is a crude social realist with a taste
for ‘positive heroes’, and an anti-feminist who neither likes nor under¬
stands his women characters. Bellissima could at a pinch, by a spectator
who shares these characteristics to a rather greater degree than Vis¬
conti does himself, be read in these terms. But it could equally well be
taken in exactly the opposite way. It is a comedy, highly verbal (not to
say verbose), with a very simple and almost spare visual style; and its
central character, presented and developed with great sympathy and
understanding, is not only a woman but a woman visualised as an
example of triumphant femininity. The only possible male candidate
for the role of positive hero, or critical consciousness - the husband -
is by contrast a colourless and insignificant figure. Social realism, as
commonly understood, is also relegated to a minor role, subsumed
under the general biting sarcasm with which Visconti tackles his back¬
ground subject - the world of Cinecitta.
There is a danger, however, of asserting too strongly the extent
to which Bellissima confounds the stereotypes. Take it too far, and a

45
picture could emerge which was closer to Jane Austen’s novels than to
Ossessione or Rocco and His Brothers, and a very long way from Visconti.
The trouble with the stereotypes is not that they are false, but that they
are wrongly formulated - and therefore irrelevant. Bellissima is part of
a highly coherent oeuvre, and reflects the same artistic personality as
the rest of Visconti’s work, but it brings forward certain latent aspects
of this personality and certain elements of a common structure of ideas
which are less visible in some of the better known films, such as Rocco
and His Brothers, and do tend to be overlooked. It is by overlooking
these aspects and elements that external stereotypes have been
imposed which bear little relation to the reality of Visconti’s films. A
close examination of Bellissima, and of the film of Visconti’s it most
resembles, II lavoro (his episode of Boccaccio ’70), may help to break
up some of the stereotypes and provide a more satisfactory impression
of both the diversity and the underlying unity of his work.
Bellissima opens with a piece of apparently gratuitous bravura - a
radio concert performance of a Donizetti opera. The camera prowls
among the sopranos of the chorus, middle-aged dowdy maidens and
matrons grotesquely miming the mood of an unseen romantic action.
This suggestive reverie is brusquely interrupted by the intercutting of
the brash voice of a radio announcer, giving details of a competition
for ‘la piu bella bambina di Roma’ - ‘the prettiest little girl in Rome’
- wanted for a star part in a new film. Given Visconti’s well-known love
of opera and the subsequent development of the satire on the world of
Cinecitta, the contrast is clearly double-edged but on balance
favourable to the old-fashioned world of the opera. As the unprepos¬
sessing ladies of the chorus mouth the word ‘bel-lis-si-ma’ the image
evoked is one of a misty ideal beauty, transcending the banal physical
circumstances in which the image is produced - a sharp contrast
between the product and the means of production which Visconti
maintains in relation to the cinema throughout the film. Even the idea,
however, of the ‘prettiest little girl in Rome’ exists only on the level of
the most extreme vulgarity. It is a symptom of what Visconti sees cat¬
egorically as a general cultural sickness of the contemporary Italian
scene. Its only merit (and this is asserted in relation to pop music in
White Nights and Vaghe stelle delVOrsa) is that it belongs unequivocally
to the present, whereas opera is a fading glory of a more aristocratic,
dying, tradition.
Much of the significance of this opening credits sequence is, how¬
ever, only latent. Its immediate function is simply to establish a tone

46
of gentle asperity, which is maintained, more or less evenly, through¬
out the film. The aspirant Shirley Temples and their mums swarm into
the studios, with Anna Magnani, struggling wildly in the middle, look¬
ing frantically for her mislaid daughter. The errant infant is discovered
playing quite happily by itself near an ornamental pool in the studio
grounds, and when her mother approaches her and begins to fuss over
her and scold her, there starts up a mad operatic duet between a
screaming and shouting Magnani and a tearful, bawling child who does
not understand in the least what any of the fuss is all about. Most of
the humour of the film is centred round the themes announced in this
episode, the different and conflicting forms of irrationality and non¬
rationality in the behaviour of the monstrous gaggle of middle-class
mums, of Magnani herself, and of the little girl, Maria.
Unlike the other mothers, Anna Magnani is a ‘donna del popolo’ -
a ‘woman of the people’. This ‘people’ is not actually an invention of
neo-realism as malicious critics have suggested. As a class, or non¬
class, comprehending broad strata of the population, it does exist,
though more in literature than in real life. Broadly speaking, it desig¬
nates everyone who is not rich, bourgeois or upper class, whether
shopkeepers, manual or white-collar workers, or nothing in particular.
Some elements of a partly fictitious class stereotype, probably due to
Zavattini, who wrote the script, have crept into the figuration of the
character played by Magnani in Bellissima, but basically, largely
because of Visconti’s attention to untypical detail, the representation
is autonomous and real and points a vivid but not implausible contrast
between Magnani’s character and that of the world to which the others
belong.
Her husband is an amiable, commonsensical man, with a steady
but ill-paid job and not many ambitions, least of all the extravagant
wish that his child should become a national figure. Ambition, coupled
with a slight naive snobbery, becomes her province, and it is chan¬
nelled through the child. With no particular illusions about her
competence she calls herself a nurse, which means that she picks up
money going round giving injections to hypochondriacs, of whom she
knows a good many. Her vision of the world is dominated by the
movies and by the ambitions she has for Maria. The role of the movies
in this vision is providential, almost supernatural. They are not only a
passion but a hope for miraculous advancement, either through for¬
tune (like the lottery in Naples) or skill (like football in Rio).
Magnani’s slavery to the cinema dream and her superstitious hope

47
have a background in popular life and help yet again to mark her off
from the other mothers whose attitudes display a calculating bour¬
geois rationality. Times are changing, and what they have done is to
transfer their ambitions from the middle-class world of theatre and
ballet, to which they belong, on to a world which has the simple
advantage of being quantitatively more lucrative, and which they mis¬
takenly assume to be a part of their birthright.
The contrast between Magnani and the rest is reflected in their chil¬
dren. All the other little girls are theatrically trained or have been to
ballet school and are precociously sophisticated and poised. In the end
Maria emerges triumphant, despite her mother’s last-minute attempts
to train her and sophisticate her, precisely because she is not like the
others. This is partly to be seen as a victory for working-class spon¬
taneity over bourgeois affectation (another probable contribution of
Zavattini), but it also reflects a fact about the cinema, and the neo¬
realist cinema in particular. The little sophisticates are no use in front
of the camera, where the child has only to look suitably childlike and
the director and editor are supposed to take care of the rest.
Visconti, it seems to me, does not quite share this simplistic notion
of screen acting which the story of Bellissima implies, either in theory

48

Giving injections to hypochondriacs: Anna Magnani as Maddalena Cecconi

or in practice. In fact, he is concerned to point to further areas of com¬
plication and contradiction beyond the question of spontaneity versus
artifice. An important stage in Magnani’s eventual disillusionment
with the movie world is provided by an encounter with a girl in the
cutting-room at the studio, herself a former star, chosen for a neo¬
realist film because she looked right for the part, and then dropped as
abruptly as she was taken up. Visconti’s criticism here does not stop
short at the commercial cinema, nor is it simply moral and humane.
Except in La terra trenia he himself has always used professional actors,
and, unlike for example Antonioni, he uses them for their profession¬
alism. There is no doubt that he at least implies an aesthetic objection
to the use of non-actors, and all the satire on irrelevant theatrical train¬
ing should not be allowed to conceal an equal distrust of naturalness
as an end in itself.
There is, therefore, a fairly explicit divergence between Visconti’s
attitudes and those of neo-realist populism. But the bulk of his satire
remains reserved for commercialism and the parasitic apparatus of the
movie industry, and for the contrast between Magnani’s image of the
cinema and the reality. This is a theme that has been treated by other
Italian directors - notably by Fellini in Lo sceicco bianco1 and by Anto¬
nioni in La signora senza camelie. But whereas Fellini and Antonioni
were mostly concerned with sentimental and sexual alienation, Vis¬
conti misses out on this aspect altogether. There is no question of
Magnani being corrupted by an ideal image of sentimental women’s-
magazine romance, to which she would in any case be safely immune.
The film which she and her husband watch in the open-air theatre in
the courtyard of their block of fiats is not a sentimental melodrama but
Howard Hawks’s Red River, and her excitement at watching and recog¬
nising Monty Clift is the ordinary delight of any normal movie
enthusiast. There is no particular significance either in the choice of
sequence (the driving of the cattle through the river) except perhaps
for a faint allegorical allusion to the herding of people which is a con¬
stant stylistic refrain in Bellissima itself.
What is criticised, therefore, is in the first place the heroine’s
uncritical and providential obsession with and belief in the cinema.
There is no harm specifically in the film as a product: it is only when
Magnani attempts to break into the process of production that she
begins to pay for her obsession. She encounters a plausible young con-
man who skins her for 50,000 lire on the grounds that he has
influence, and then pushes his luck a bit by proposing a sexual rather

49
50

Maddalena with the con man

than strictly commercial relationship. (The logic of this as simple pros¬
titution does not escape her for one moment, even when she is most
trusting and sympathetic to his advances.) Her next significant
encounter, with the former star from the cutting-room, leads to her
being admitted to the projection gallery when the results of her child’s
screen test are being shown. The test is an unmitigated disaster. The
child is wooden, intimidated, uncomprehending; she recites a poem in
a sing-song voice and then collapses into typical floods of tears. The
director’s aides burst out laughing, with the kind of uncontrollable,
inhuman laughter which recurs in many ofVisconti’s films. Only the
director, Alessandro Blasetti,2 played by Blasetti himself, remains,
godlike, above the general hysteria, in divine (and equally inhuman)
contrast to the bestiality of everyone else.
The final outcome is that Blasetti wants the child for the film, but
by then Magnani has had enough. The results of the ambition which
had first turned her head have now turned her stomach, and she
renounces the proffered contract, reconciled to her patient and long-
suffering husband and sanity restored.
It is difficult to take the ending entirely seriously. Neither the divine
Blasetti (perhaps unconsciously modelled on Visconti himself) nor the
ideally human Magnani, sentimentalised by Zavattini, nor even the
ideal husband, carry much conviction. But following the general tra¬
jectory of the preceding plot the ending has complete internal
coherence. That it does work, on its own level, is due partly to Vis¬
conti’s sense of form and the particular stylisation he has imposed on
characters and action, and partly to the conception of the central char¬
acter and the way Magnani realises this conception. The only
comparable example of this kind of imposed credibility, poising a vehe¬
ment naturalism and spontaneity against a perfect stylisation, also
involves Anna Magnani, and is Renoir’s The Golden Coach.
The aspects of stylisation and character conception are closely
linked. Most of the people in the film move around in herds, a crowd
of film people, of jabbering mothers, of women from the flats where
Magnani lives. Their movements are conventionalised and stylised,
almost those of slightly crazy automata, or of animals. Occasionally
people move out of the herd to play as individual foils to Magnani, in
the ‘duet’ pattern characteristic ofVisconti’s films. Except in relation
to her the stylisation allows of no element of conscious action or
thought on the part of the characters. They ‘behave’ rather than act.
Magnani also ‘behaves’. Her traditional star acting depends on a rapid

51
exhibition of exaggerated behavioural responses. But underneath this
surface exhibition she also thinks. She registers subliminally, summing
up and suspecting the young man even when going along with him,
preparing in advance for failure even when being most buoyant and
aggressive. Her understanding and, following her understanding, her
renunciation mature slowly. Her intuition is always a step ahead, and
her decision-making a step behind, her surface responses. Her com¬
pleteness as a character emerges, not naturalistically, but through a
kind of dialectical tension between naturalism and stylisation.
It is because of this method of presentation of her as a person that
the humour extracted from her antics is never malicious. Nor is the
humour surrounding the child. If Magnani is occasionally childlike in
her apparent naivete, the child in its turn is a miniature version of its
mother, with occasional diabolical flashes of precocious wisdom. The
child is a victim, but complaisant and impregnable. There is one par¬
ticularly brilliant scene when Magnani leaves the child at the
hairdresser’s to be prepared for the competition. The job is entrusted
to a diminutive girl apprentice, hardly much older than Maria herself.
Instructed to trim Maria’s plaits, she takes up the scissors tentatively,
and then cuts off the plaits squarely near the top. Aghast, she turns for
reassurance back into the shop; but the only eye she catches is that of
Maria herself, who looks as if she is about to burst into one of her usual
floods of tears, but then checks herself into a half-smile of complicity
and delight.
In general the more a character emerges as an individual, the more
sympathy is accorded them. Even the episodic figures like the absurd,
parasitic, out-of-work actress who battens on Magnani and persuades
her to let her give Maria some lessons in acting are not seen as entirely
grotesque. Comic hostility is reserved for the undifferentiated herd,
particularly the mums. Real hostility, and not even comic, occurs only
in the scenes involving the tycoons and parasites of the industry. It
is here that a latent sense of violence and cruelty in Visconti’s approach
comes, rather uneasily, to light, together with a curious attitude
to laughter as a manifestation, not of amusement, but of aggressive
isolation.
Bernard Shaw once made an observation to the effect that extreme
happiness produces tears, and extreme unhappiness laughter. With
Visconti, tears are the product of extreme human emotion, and often,
specifically, of deeply felt solidarity with someone else or of pity. Just
once, with Natalia in White Nights, it is not pity but self-pity which

52
 53

Maria’s haircut
provides the cause. Laughter, which occurs frequently in his films (the
most quoted example is the laughter of Tancredi and Angelica at the
dinner-table in The Leopard), is by contrast aggressive, always an
expression of isolation, often of fear or hate. In Ossessione Gino laughs
at Giovanna in the street to assert his independence from her and to
cover up his own fears for himself. Franz, in Senso, does the same to
Livia, while in La terra trema the wholesalers laugh at ’Ntoni in order
further to humiliate him and so to gain their revenge for his insolence.
Nadia in Rocco and His Brothers laughs desperately at Simone, Romy
Schneider hysterically at Tomas Milian in II lavoro. Angelica’s laughter
in The Leopard covers up for a mixture of emotions - hate, jealousy,
defensiveness, and a desire to shock. In Bellissima the laughter is pure
cruelty. It has nothing to do with the gentle art of comedy, nor even
with bitter sarcasm. It is the only moment in the film in which brutal¬
ity breaks through to the surface.
Visconti would appear to have mixed feelings towards the phenom¬
enon of hostile laughter. He uses it consistently, and to effect, but not
always with a predetermined intention. The length and intensity of
Angelica’s and Tancredi’s laughter appears to have been unforeseen
before the actual shooting. He clearly regards it as a valid response,

54

Maddalena watches as Maria is taken in hand by the acting teacher

but also as indicative of suppressed hysterical violence in his charac¬
ters, which ideally ought not to be there. Significantly, in Bellissima
Blasetti does not laugh, but remains icy and calm. This may represent
Visconti’s picture of Blasetti, but I suspect that it contains at least
elements ofVisconti’s picture ofVisconti and that, to use a Freudian
image, Blasetti is playing super-ego to the id of producers and
technicians.
Either way we are faced once again with what seems like a false
idealisation, but which can be justified. The morality of the artistic
process is not that of life, and the cinema is an extreme case of this.
There is a particular irony here. The brutal dropping of the girl in the
cutting-room and the ignoring of Magnani by Blasetti are fair enough
by one set of rules - those of artistic creation - but cruel by another.
Visconti points this out, but to do so, in a film, he has himself been
guilty of the same charge that he makes against the cinema in general
because of the use he makes of the little girl Maria. There is then a
second-degree moral attached to the main theme of the film. On the
one hand he wishes to denounce; on the other he must himself carry
through the very process that he condemns. Hence, if there is a touch
of self-portrait in his presentation of Blasetti, that touch is critical, not
only of Blasetti but of himself as well.
This point is, however, subsidiary to the main theme, which is a
straightforward criticism of the cinema as an industrial and social
process. The idealisation of the husband is essential here. Whereas in
Ossessione and Senso there is a dynamic leading from husband to wife
to lover to mistress, in Bellissima the lines of force lead in the opposite
direction back to the husband, the only person with no connection
with the movie world. Unlike Antonioni, whose films are fluid and
open-ended, Visconti always relies on a rigid and self-contained struc¬
ture. In La signora senza camelie the heroine at the end is left
suspended, facing an uncertain but probably depressing future. Such
an ending in Visconti’s terms is inconceivable. Every story, which is a
self-contained fiction, must have a determinate end. Bellissima is there¬
fore constructed round a fixed point, which is the position of the
husband. Both theme and structure require the figure to be overdrawn
and to stand out clearly in the role, as for example the Spaniard did in
Ossessione. The husband in this interpretation is neither a naturalistic
figure nor a detached and abstract positive hero, but a concrete pole
of attraction, holding the film together and allowing the clearest and
most economical treatment of the central theme.

55
Notes
1. Lo sceicco bianco is not strictly about the cinema, but about the far less glam¬
orous world of the fumetti, photographic comic strips which are, however,
because of their photographic realism, closer to the cinema than to comic strips
proper.
2. Alessandro Blasetti, him critic and director, whose him 1860, made in 1934,
has been claimed as a forerunner of neo-realism. [Blasetti began his career as
a radical Fascist, with an express admiration for Soviet silent cinema. But he
was never particularly trusted by the regime and after making the gentle com¬
edy 4 passi fra le nuvole (‘A walk in the clouds’) in 1942 he was comfortably
placed to rehabilitate himself after the fall of Fascism. 1860, however, cannot
really be described as a forerunner of neo-realism except by one of the stretches
of the imagination that were quite common in the immediate post-war years
(2002).]

56
4: II lavoro

Up to this date Visconti’s only other excursion into the field of screen
comedy - or even semi-comedy - has been the sketch he directed for
the episode film Boccaccio ’70 produced by Carlo Ponti and Antonio
Cervi in 1962. As a film Boccaccio ’70 is ridiculous, but no more so
than others of the genre. Intended, absurdly, as a kind of updated
Decameron, it originally consisted of four sketches, each one hour long,
by Fellini, De Sica, Visconti, and Mario Monicelli. But a four-hour film
has to be a total blockbuster or it is nothing, and when it became clear
that Boccaccio ’70 was not going to succeed on that level, Monicelli’s
sketch was removed from the commercially distributed version, leav¬
ing only the sketches by the three ‘great names’. What survives is not
so much a film as an anthology of mannerisms. The first episode, Le
tentazioni del Dottor Antonio, shows Fellini at his most masochistic; in
the last, La riffa (The Raffle), we have De Sica plumbing the lowest
depths of synthetic populism; only the central episode, II lavoro,
directed by Visconti, manages at all to avoid easy self-parody and to
preserve some semblance of style and originality of content, and even
there critics have had misgivings.1
What Visconti does in II lavoro is to explore, with an uncharacter¬
istically light touch, one or two variations on his favourite theme of
class and sexual relations. A marriage is breaking up - for the very good
reason that it never really existed. He is a young, charming, and indo¬
lent Italian aristocrat who keeps pedigree Afghans and lives on the
partly revived nostalgia of his bachelor days. She is the daughter of a
wealthy German capitalist. She wears clothes by Chanel and her room
is full of mewling white kittens. Their separate apartments in the
palazzo are marked by contrasting decor. Her rooms are an island of
opulent and sensuous femininity in the middle of an enormous build¬
ing whose basic style was dictated by the classical and patriarchal taste
of her husband’s ancestors. Against this traditional but at the same
time mildly bizarre setting they prepare to negotiate the future of their
relationship. He surrounds himself with parasitic lawyers, and she takes
advice over the phone from her father in Frankfurt. The result of these

57
negotiations, conducted on both sides with great apparent seriousness,
is a financial settlement. She decides that she can only preserve or
acquire independence by taking a job. Lacking any skill or qualifica¬
tion other than sex, the only job she reckons she can do is prostitute
herself. If he does not want her to do this actually on the streets or at
the end of a telephone, then he must employ her himself, as he used
to employ other women before and maybe still does. But the arrange¬
ment is to be back-dated, and he must start by paying her arrears for
every time the couple have made love since they got married.
Most of the comedy of the film arises from the grotesque seriousness
of the negotiations. Both the couple and their advisers act with an
inhuman and humourless solemnity throughout. The proceedings
acquire the air of a horrific, but plausible fantasy. But the seriousness of
the protagonists should itself be taken seriously. They are not playing a
logic game a la Lewis Carroll. It is not words but the frame of reference
of their own actions that dictates the apparently absurd solution. With
the aid of money and property she has physically constructed round her
a world that is an extension of her as a person. She is living, childishly, in
a private playground of her own creation. When she threatens to pack it
all in for the sake of active independence in the world outside, she soon
realises that her projected independence is in fact illusory. She is no
longer insulated but is stripped down until she can be sure of nothing
but her own physical existence not as subject but as an object of use. She
will exist only as a thing. The fact that her husband at that moment
desires her physically as he might desire a prostitute makes the position
desperately clear - but it also provides a way of escape. If sex is a com¬
modity which men require and women can provide, she can at least
impress on him her value as an object by demanding payment for her
services. But since it is also clear that he married her partly for her
father’s money, which is not forthcoming, the roles are now reversed, to
her advantage. Having first bought him, she is now charging him an
economic rent as well.
The general critical reaction to II lavoro, at any rate in England, was
that it was considerably less appalling than either the Fellini or the De
Sica episodes of Boccaccio ’70, and that it was Viscontian at least in style,
even if the content was a bit thin and the Boccaccian joke rather long
and drawn out.The thematic connection withVisconti’s other films was
on the whole neglected. But it is certainly there, and the relative success
of the sketch is due to the fact that Visconti in II lavoro was drawing on
themes and ideas common to many of his films and developing them in

58

Tomas Milian with Romy Schneider (opposite)

Schneider’s bedroom

Visconti directing Schneider in II lavoro

a concentrated and original way, without falling back, as the others had
done, on self-parody and repetition.
In II Zamora Visconti takes up position against both his protagonists -
against his insouciance and her petulance and vanity. But his main con¬
cern seems to be not to explore character but to demonstrate something
about the situation. Sexual relations in Visconti’s films do not ever exist
in a pure state. They are always contaminated by other factors, such as
violence, possessiveness, or (most frequently) money. Marriage is a par¬
ticularly venal contract, but other forms of sexual relations are affected
as well. Pure friendship can exist, but not a pure, sexually based love.
Sexual relationships are by nature asymmetrical. Lovers have conflict¬
ing demands, very few of which are concerned with anything so simple
as love or even sexual enjoyment. Generally speaking, men wish to use
and women to possess. In bourgeois society (and all ofVisconti’s films,
except La terra trema, are explicitly concerned with bourgeois society in
one form or another) the desire to use or to possess is inextricably con¬
nected with the power of money. In the absence of genuine and
straightforward mutual love between equally matched partners, all
forms of sexual relations can be reduced to two basic types: possession
and prostitution. This reduction is expressed most clearly in Ossessione
and in Senso, particularly the former, but it underlies even those films,
like Rocco and His Brothers, which present sexual conflicts in a more
complex form. In Ossessione, besides the relatively pure and uncontam¬
inated friendship of Gino and the Spaniard, there are three main
relationships: the marriage between the wealthy Bragana and the former
semi-prostitute Giovanna; the possessive love of Giovanna for Gino;
and Gino’s casual liaison with Anita. Of these three it is only the last
which is not in any way mercenary. Although the impression is fostered
that Anita lives by exploiting such casual encounters, she gives herself
freely to Gino. By a perverse and deliberate irony, what looks like a scene
in which a man picks up a girl who seems willing to prostitute herself
turns out to be the only one in which money is not involved. In Senso,
however, the irony is suppressed. Clara, there, is bought by Franz, and
the relationship is one of prostitution, with the marginal grace that the
contract is at least open and straightforward and not hypocritical.
Class is a further complication. In La terra trema, where the
relations between class, marriage and property are set out with anthro¬
pological precision, not only is ’Ntoni’s love for Nedda externally
conditioned by their respective class situations, but it is psychologically
inseparable from his other ambitions. There is, however, no question

60
with Visconti of this being a peculiar sociological fact about ‘primitive’
people which can be denied, in accordance with conventional schemas,
when dealing with a more sophisticated society. In modern bourgeois
society as well social pressures exist, and people are capable of intern¬
alising them in the same way. The specific difference is that in the
primitive world of La terra trema, and also with the traditional aristoc¬
racy of The Leopard, sex and marriage are still seen as a form of cement,
holding together the social fabric, whereas in the modern bourgeois
environment they have been clearly reduced to commodities, both in
fact and in the vision that people have of their own actions. Where a
Visconti film introduces an aspect of class conflict in personal
relations, it is always in conjunction with sex. Behind any individual
complexities of character (and Visconti can hardly be accused of ignor¬
ing these complexities) the tensions created have their base in
conflicting forms of sexual exploitation.
In this perspective the solution at the end of II lavoro is anything
but absurd. The marriage of aristocrat and bourgeoise, without love or
social necessity to support it, has simply revealed itself as an archetype
of the two features - possession and prostitution - which Visconti sees
as underlying sexual relations of any kind. In a sense a trick has been
played on the audience to force them to see the situation in these
terms.The situation at the beginning seems innocent enough, in every¬
day terms. A society couple is seen facing the usual problems of the
break-up of their marriage, reaching a final settlement and trying to
keep as much as possible out of the papers. All perfectly normal and
unexceptionable - an inside view of an event, details of which could
be read between the lines of a newspaper gossip column any day. Then
the picture changes. From the all too normal, expressed in the plati¬
tudinous surface naturalism of conventional marital drama, we move
on to a different plane, that of the universal mechanism as Visconti
understands it. The difference between II lavoro and Visconti’s other
films lies mainly in the fact that it is a comedy, and within the comic
convention the mechanism, as a mechanism, can be more easily and
even blatantly exposed.
This concern with laying bare the mechanism is unusual in Vis¬
conti’s work. However clear an intellectual and structural vision he may
have at the beginning of making a film, his involvement with his material
and his recognition of human complexity often lead him by the end to
render the vision opaque and even confused. Particularly in IIlavoro, but
also in Bellissima, he seems to be making an unaccustomed effort to

61
ensure that the mechanical structure remains absolutely transparent
and unambiguous. This is partly due to the fact that a spirit of comic
detachment and even of active hostility to his protagonists prevents any
confusing and passionate involvement with the characters. At the same
time, though, the mechanism is essential to the idea of comedy as prac¬
tised by Visconti in his stage productions, and its appearance in the films
is a direct reflection of his work in the theatre.
The film comedies occupy a position midway between the dramatic
films and the classic comedies, from Shakespeare to Goldoni and
Beaumarchais, which Visconti has directed for the stage. The pro¬
cedure adopted by Visconti in theatre direction is, by all accounts, the
inverse of that practised in the film comedies.2 While the film comedies
show a deliberate attempt to preserve clarity of texture, in the plays
Visconti aims to give density and solidity to his re-creation of the text
by the use of physical detail. The characters, often insubstantial as they
step off the page, acquire consistency through their relationship with
objects and background. The mechanism of the plays is brought down
to earth and incarnated in physical reality.
These different procedures, applied to different material, in the end
yield the same result. The style of presentation of the film comedies is
extremely theatrical. II lavoro in particular is closer to a classic nine¬
teenth-century French one-acter than to anything else Visconti has
attempted in the movies - or than to Boccaccio for that matter. The
action takes place in a confined set, while the privileged eye of the cam¬
era can explore with rather more freedom than can the spectator in the
stalls. The meaning of the film is contained very largely in the dialogue,
with only minimal help from action and gesture. The same is true, to a
lesser extent, of Bellissima, where, even though much of the action takes
place in the open air, there is still the same atmosphere of set pieces the¬
atrically presented and a similar virtuoso use of dialogue. Theatricality
and comedy are presented as inseparable, both of them a kind of demi-
reality amenable to detached and corrosive judgment from outside.

Notes
1. [The reference to the Fellini episode should perhaps be changed to ‘playfully
masochistic’. For more on the Fellini episode see the entry ‘Anita’ in Sam
Rohdie, Fellini Lexicon (London: British Film Institute, 2002) (2002).]
2. See Roland Barthes, ‘Visconti et le realisme au theatre’, in Theatre Populaire 20,
September 1956.

62
5: Senso

After Bellissima, with its happy matrimonial ending, Visconti turned his
attention to the problem of divorce, a particularly contentious subject
in Italy, where State law is the same as that of the Church - minus the
casuistic loopholes. The Italian cinema has always been a focal point
of controversy about the subject: witness the famous scandals of
Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman and more recently Sophia
Loren and Carlo Ponti. But it has always been more victim than
aggressor. It has received publicity, most of it hostile, centred round
the fact that Italian film people live according to a relatively permis¬
sive international ethos but are subject to repressive national laws. But
it has never yet managed to go over on to the counter-attack and make
its own propaganda by artistic means. Partly this is because its moral
position is suspect - right-thinking opinion would never accept that a
campaign in favour of divorce was suitably disinterested; partly,
though, the reasons are political, as Visconti soon found out.
In the last few years one or two films have been made around the
theme of Italy’s archaic marriage laws.1 None of the films is very
serious. A gentle satire of the worst absurdities of the situation (as in
Germi’s Divorzio alVitaliana) has proved a safe method of evading the
vigilantes. In the early 1950s, however, the vigilantes of Church and
State were on the attack. The project on which Visconti had been work¬
ing was turned down by the nebulous but none the less effective
preventive censorship, and the film was never made.
Frustrated in his contemporary concerns, Visconti, with the active
encouragement of his producers, turned his attention towards history.
The producers’ brief was for a ‘spectacle, but [szc] of a high artistic
level’2 and the precise story chosen by Visconti was a novella by
Camillo Boito, entitled Senso. Like Ossessione, Senso was started as a
result of the rejection of a more blatantly contentious subject, and, like
Ossessione, it soon encountered censorship difficulties of its own. But
again, even more perhaps than with Ossessione, we must avoid falling
into the trap of seeing second choice as second best, resorted to exclu¬
sively as a result of censorship and production difficulties. Whatever

63
the contingent factors affecting Visconti’s decision, there is no doubt
that his choice of a general subject — the Italian Risorgimento - and
even of that particular story of Boito had more than accidental sig¬
nificance. Even if the choice were partly an accident, the accident itself
was both significant and lucky. For Senso is beyond question one of the
greatest, and also the most Viscontian, of all Visconti’s films.
The choice of Boito’s novella is, at first sight, surprising. The tone
of the story is cool, neo-classic, and detached. The character of the
Countess as revealed by the interior monologue is inconsistent and
lacking in depth - possibly as a result of the moralism inherent in the
tone. The observation of the background is superficial and uninterest¬
ing - again a result of Boito’s uncertain attitude to his subject. But
Visconti has usually preferred (Bellissima is an exception) to work from
a literary original, however mediocre and apparently uncongenial. This
procedure has the advantage of providing a firm point of departure,
but he always claimed the right to maximum freedom in working
towards the point of arrival. It is only recently, with The Leopard and
now Lo straniero, that he has accepted the discipline of literal and
respectful adaptation of a major literary text.
By his own account3 what first attracted Visconti to Boito’s novella
was the potential contained in the extreme situation of the story, rather
than its actual content. The elaboration of the film went through several
stages, each of which diverged further from the original and developed
suggestions latent there but whose significance Boito had either not
seen or interpreted differently. In the story the Countess, now middle-
aged, is seen looking back over a youthful aberration.The film shows her
as already no longer young when the events took place and (in what little
remains of the rhetorical monologue) as still quite close to the events as
she describes them. In the place of the frigid distancing of the story, Vis¬
conti makes it more immediate - and more anguished. But he adds a
distancing of his own, partly by a stylistic trick at the beginning, relating
his story to that of an opera, and partly by taking the story away from the
Countess and setting it firmly in the external historical world.
The opening sequence, which is in itself a quite amazing tour de
force, makes both of these points clearly. The titles come up against
shots of a performance taking place at the La FeniceTheatre in Venice.
After the final credit there is a title which reads, ‘Venice, spring 1866.
The last months of the Austrian occupation of the Veneto. The Italian
government has made a pact of alliance with Prussia, and the war of
liberation is imminent.’ As this title disappears Manrico launches into

64
 65

Visconti directing Alida Valli in the opening sequence of Senso

his famous aria ‘Di quella pira’ and as that ends the camera pans to
reveal the audience, first the Austrian officers in the stalls, then the
crowds above and behind. There is a cut to the stage again, and then,
as the chorus begins ‘All’armi, al’armi’ (‘To arms, to arms’), a cut back
to the audience: one or two patriots moving to and fro; the furtive pass¬
ing of objects from hand to hand. The music comes to an end. There
is applause, formal from the military, enthusiastic from everyone else.
Then a girl shouts out ‘Foreigners out of Venice!’ and suddenly the
theatre is full of rosettes and streamers in the Italian national colours.
The colour effects are stupendous: the rich romantic browns of the
stage set, the brightly coloured crowd in the balcony contrasting with
the black evening dress of the bourgeois and the white uniforms of the
officers in the stalls and boxes; then, finally, the red, white, and green
streamers everywhere. In the uproar that ensues one hears shouts of
‘Viva La Marmora’ (leader of the national army) and ‘Viva Verdi!’ (by
coincidence the letters of the composer’s name also spelt out the ini¬
tials of ‘Vittorio Emmanuele, Re d’ltalia’).4 The performance is
suspended and gradually order is restored. The uproar dies down and
the white uniforms and clipped Teutonic accents take over command.
It is against this background, which combines profusion and dens¬
ity of detail with extreme historical precision and clarity, that the
personal drama is set off. In the general uproar that follows the demon¬
stration an Austrian officer makes an insulting remark, and is instantly
challenged to a duel by an Italian patriot. The patriot is the Marquis
Roberto Ussoni, and the officer Lieutenant Franz Mahler. Ussoni’s
cousin, Countess Livia Serpieri, is watching the scene from the box
where she is sitting with her husband and his friends, members of the
Austrian High Command. In an effort partly to save Ussoni’s life,
partly to prevent him from exposing his identity (as an Underground
leader he ought not to have allowed himself to be provoked and come
out into the open), she asks to see Mahler. By this stage order is
restored and the music has started again. Leonora’s aria can be heard
in the background. Livia is disarmed by Mahler’s manner, a mixture
of cynicism and military orthodoxy. But she manages, nervously and
obliquely, to make her point, that the place for melodrama is the stage,
not real life. Mahler is not to accept the challenge.
But this distinction between opera and real life is not intended to be
maintained in a simple and rigid form. Already a parallelism has been
established between the world of the audience and that of the stage.The
style of the film is itself operatic, a pictorio-musical re-creation of a

66
human drama. It differs from the opera in that the reduction to essen¬
tials is less complete. It is less ‘pure'.The drama that is to be played out
between Livia and Franz is a degenerate melodrama. In the true melo¬
drama uncomfortable contingencies can be swept away; characters can
become ideal. In the film, despite the lyrical exaltation, contingency and
confusion of motive retain an essential role. Franz and Livia are being
judged by the purer artistic standard of Leonora and Manrico as well as
by the standards of every day. It is more important to observe, from that
standpoint, how far they fall short, than it is to niggle, from the stand¬
point of petty-bourgeois realism, at the way they seem unreally exalted
above the social and psychological norm.
Franz does not fight a duel with Ussoni. Instead he denounces him -
in conformity with his character and with military ethics. His conduct is
not purely melodramatic. It is realistic, or degenerately melodramatic,
according to the way you look at it. Livia meets him again, when Ussoni is
being sent off into exile, and he follows her home, a white shadow (the
word is his own) tracking her through the irreal Venetian streets along the
canals. It is an accident - tripping over the body of a murdered soldier -
that at the same time restores a sense of real historical context to the
scene and brings Franz and Livia uneasily together. Later, when they fall
in love, the differences in their situations and characters brought out in
this short scene by the canals seem for a while to be submerged. But love
conquers nothing.The contradictions are only exacerbated, and explode
with greater violence for having been suppressed.
Livia and Franz make assignations at a boarding-house, and spend
time together, fulfilling their respective dreams. Then Franz goes away.
Livia waits for his return and one day, just as the Serpieris are planning to
leave for their villa in the country, a message arrives with an address.
Livia rushes out, pursued by her husband. He catches up with her out¬
side the rendezvous, and she has just begun to confess when the door
opens. But it is not Franz who had sent the message but Ussoni, who has
secretly returned to Venice to raise money for the Partisans. Livia’s con¬
sternation at not finding Franz is made worse by her guilt at having
forgotten her loyalty to Ussoni and the Partisan cause, and by the embar¬
rassment of her unnecessary confession. Fortunately Serpieri prefers
not to believe her. His main concern is to make friends with his cousin
Ussoni, whom previously he had repudiated. The political tide has
turned against Austria, and the Count is swimming along with the tide.
The next episode brings Livia’s conflicts to crisis point. Franz
breaks into their country villa and she shelters him. She cradles his

67
head in her arms as he sleeps, and her face seems to grow younger and
fresher as the night goes on.5 She wants him desperately, all the more
so since she has become alienated from the Partisan cause. He wants
her - but also what he can get from her, if necessary without her, which
is money to corrupt a doctor to declare him unfit for service. He is not
so much insincere as inconsistent, and a victim of external logic.
Because he loves her and needed to see her he will be absent without
leave. He could go one further and desert, but in that case will be shot
if caught. With a medical certificate he will be in the clear, but will have
to stay away from Livia and near his regiment in Verona.
Livia, partly out of fear for his safety, partly because she still hopes
to hold him, gives him the money - out of the Partisan funds. Her
betrayal is now total; but so is her sacrifice. The significance of her
action is underscored heavily by the music and by long camera tracks
along corridors; then more reflectively by the voice off: ‘I was now
bound to him indissolubly. For him I had forgotten, betrayed, all those
who in that moment were fighting, striving to realise dreams for which
they had suffered so long.’ The scene is, to say the least, overwrought.
What saves it from being, in the bad sense, melodrama, is the tragic
futility of her gesture. The spectator is in a position of privilege. He is
not invited to share her illusions, but to identify with the voice that
comes, after the event, from behind the illusion, anticipating the end.
Against Franz’s instructions, Livia follows him to Verona, and finds
him, a drunken and guilt-ridden but lucid wreck, entertaining a pros¬
titute. He drives Livia out, and she takes a final brutal revenge by
denouncing him as a deserter. The Austrian general to whom she
denounces him urges her to think again, rigidly loyal to the officer
code. If denounced, Franz will have to be shot, but morally denunci¬
ation is the worse infamy. But Livia is not an officer and gentleman.
The code is even more alien to her than it was at the beginning when
she was trying to save Ussoni. Franz goes to the firing-squad, and the
last shot of Livia shows her creeping away through the streets, calling
his name, surrounded by drunken soldiers celebrating a victory. It is
almost as if she no longer existed. The indication in the script says ‘per¬
haps she has gone mad’.6 The story is left in suspense, and never
reconnected with the hypothetical present tense of the voice off. Pre¬
sumably Livia survives. But what she survives to or for is as irrelevant
as the survival, after the tragedy, of Oedipus or Lear.
The personal drama, then, is self-contained. It ends with the death
of Franz and the annihilation of Livia. But they are casualties of a wider
process which does not end with their disappearance from the scene.
At the end of the film the Austrians have just won at the Battle of
Custoza, but on the world scale they are in retreat. They have already
lost most of Northern Italy. They have lost to Prussia at Sadowa; and
in the international political game this means that they will soon lose
the Veneto as well. As the Austrian Empire declines, its place in the
scheme of things is being taken by nascent bourgeois nationalism. The
Italians, though defeated in battle, are in full self-assertion. ‘Sono una
vera Italiana’, Livia says proudly at the beginning, but at the end,
having cut herself off from the nationalist current, she withdraws to
the neutral and geographical ‘sono Veneta’. Her destiny and that of
Franz are not quite comparable. He is quite clearly seen as the repre¬
sentative of a dying class. She represents nothing so simple. Her
character is all her own, and the conflicting external determinations
that work on her are not sufficient to fix her in any mould. At least she
has a freedom to abuse, which Franz never has.
At the same time, like Franz, she has her place in the wider picture.
Married young, to an older man whom she does not love and whose
interests she does not share, she takes up a position from the start
against his cowardly time-serving. She becomes a nationalist, a political

69

Livia discovers Franz entertaining a prostitute (opposite)

option which is also a move away from her husband towards her cousin,
Roberto Ussoni. Her devotion to the cause is personal, and she betrays
it because sexual passion has more power over her than devoted admi¬
ration and friendship. But her attraction to Franz has its own social
motivation. Through it she realises a nostalgic longing for the lover to
whom as a member of her class she was entitled, but never had. Against
this, patriotism has nothing to offer. In its first moment the Risorgi-
mento is too ideal. Later, as she comes to realise, it is not even that, but
is the resurgence, under different colours, of craven bourgeois like her
husband. It is not a cause which can fully satisfy her aspirations or
appease her regrets.
Possibly the bitterest aspect of the background struggle is this resur¬
gence of Serpieri, and its counterpart, the eclipse of Roberto. This is a
theme whose significance, both historical and contemporary, could not
fail to be clear to the aware Italian spectator, from the moment in which
the scene is set by the historical title at the end of the credits. There is
an implicit parallel between the events of 1866 and those of 1943-5.
In each case, by a mysterious process of trasformismo,7 the Italy which
emerged from the upheaval was not substantially different from what
it had been before. One elite replaced another, and the new elite began
to look suspiciously similar to the old as the loyalists of the former
regime came to reassume their positions under the new. More than a
parallel, however, there is, here in Senso, a search for causes. The ques¬
tion that Visconti, as a Marxist, is asking himself is double. Did the
revolution that might have happened in 1943—7 fail in the same way
and for the same reasons as that of 1860-70? Or did it not also fail
because the first one had failed, because the ruling class was allowed to
establish a tradition of continuity, and trasformismo was allowed from
the start to mask the conflicts that, objectively, seem to demand a rev¬
olutionary response?
Visconti does not produce a clear-cut answer. Nor does he force
the parallel further than it can go. The lines along which he was think¬
ing are suggested in a scene which unfortunately never saw the light of
day but was cut out, so he claims, at the special request of the Min¬
istry of the Armed Forces. In this scene Roberto, who is trying to bring
in the irregular Partisan forces he has organised to outflank the Aus¬
trians at Custoza, is curtly informed by the Italian command that their
services are not required. The army will win, or lose, alone. Roberto’s
reply is to the effect that if this is the victory, or defeat, the Italians
want they can keep it. The substance of this scene is perfectly histori¬
cal. The Venetian Partisans, like Garibaldi himself, were a political
embarrassment to the Italian government, and like Garibaldi they were
got out of the way. The final victory was therefore doubly remote from
popular revolution. Not only did the Italian authorities reject the par¬
ticipation of the people, they didn’t even score a victory for their own,
limited cause. That was done for them by the Prussians at Sadowa.8
Visconti’s attitude to the myth of the Risorgimento is therefore
straightforwardly critical, and at times polemical. But the polemic does
not interfere with the main burden of his analysis, which is concerned
with the relationship of personal and class attitudes, rather than with
political forces external to the main drama. If, for the purpose of analy¬
sis, one abstracts from the wider historical situation, the formal pattern
which emerges is curiously similar to that of Ossessione. There is the
same dynamic running through, from husband to wife to lover to mis¬
tress. Serpieri, Livia, Franz, and the prostitute Clara are doubles of
Bragana, Giovanna, Gino, and Anita.There is also the same opposition
between guilty passion and easy love as in the earlier film, and a similar
pattern of impulse and betrayal. But behind these similarities there are
also profound differences of form and content which reveal both a
greater technical mastery and a vastly enriched vision of the world.

71

Livia with her cousin Roberto, the partisan leader (opposite)

 On the technical side there is, first of all, the use of colour. Visconti
used three different cinematographers for Senso.9 Each of these had a
different approach to his work. It has been suggested, for example,10
that if Aldo and not Krasker had shot the opening sequences in the
Fenice Theatre the effect would have been very different. This is prob¬
ably true, but it does not alter the fact that Krask er’s lighting and
shooting of the Fenice Theatre harmonises perfectly with Aldo’s and
Rotunno’s work in other scenes. I would go further and say that
Krasker’s diffuse lighting gives absolutely the effect that Visconti
needed for his opening sequence. Indeed, the use of different lighting
effects, due to different cinematographers but co-ordinated by Vis¬
conti himself, is essential to the formal articulation of the film.
Particular sequences and locations each have a tonality of their own,
inspired often by different styles and genres of nineteenth-century
painting. Venice by day is pastel and insubstantial, like a watercolour,
except for the Serpieri palazzo with its sombre academic interior. By
night it has a tonality which is prevailingly blue. This might be an
accident, due to the difficulties in rendering the colour, but the
same tonality is present in the shots ofVerona at the end when Franz
is shot, and the association of that final scene with the scene by the
canals is surely deliberate. The move from the palazzo in Venice to the
country villa is marked, naturalistically enough, but expressively as
well by a sudden brightness with lots of brilliant green, and the same
deceptively simple effect is continued for the battle scene.The soldiers
seem at first like the figures in old military prints, then the picture
darkens, almost to Goya. The ideal image gives way to gruesome
reality.
Besides giving an expressive tonality to particular scenes the colour
also serves to delineate the formal components of the film: the places
-Venice, Verona, the country retreat; people - Livia’s fleshy sensuality
and the superficial picture of Franz as a ‘chevalier sans peur et sans
reproche’; groupings, even emotions. Senso has a formal clarity which
Ossessione, for all its apparent simplicity, does not achieve. This is due
to the contrasts, at every level - form as well as content - between its
various interrelated parts. The private and public dramas interlock.
The characters move, at first blindly, with the general historical
momentum or according to traditional paths, and are then shocked
into consciousness when they find that the two conflict, either with
each other or with some other half-conscious choice. The tension and
the tragedy arise from their realisation that they are, or have become,
something that the world does not allow them to be.
The world which the characters inhabit is dense, orderly, and on
the verge of collapse. Besides the pictorial and temporal construction
already analysed, it has a complex and tightly knit social structure,
whose elements are first displayed in the opening sequence at the
theatre. Each pictorial block brings to the fore a particular element or
grouping, and Livia’s progress is charted in terms of the structure,
which underlies and limits her freedom of action. She rebels against
its limits, but cannot break them. She starts from a position at the
centre, comfortably but insecurely related to all groups in the action -
to the Austrian command, the collaborators, the patriots. Then, as her
affair with Franz first gains and then loses its momentum, she grad¬
ually moves away towards total isolation, estranged from her husband,
evasive to the patriots, in conflict with every code, including finally
that of Franz himself. The only contact she preserves until near the
end is Laura, her maid and confidante, who has the role of mediator
between her extravagances and the ordered world outside. But Laura’s
protection and complicity in hiding her affair from her husband give
her a false sense of security. They just make it easier for her not to be
fully aware of where she stands.

73

The battle of Custoza (opposite)

 Although it is Livia who occupies the centre of the stage, in social
and historical terms it is Franz who is the more interesting character.
It is Franz whom Visconti locates most precisely in his situation, and
having defined the situation creates, almost from nothing, out of the
faceless cipher Remigio Ruz of Boito’s original, the most fascinating
individual figuration in all his work. Franz is a romantic of the second
generation. His favourite poet is Heine, but a Heine whose irony has
been transmuted into something approaching total cynicism. Not that
Franz himself is exclusively cynical. But his romantic dreams of love
and of a world without nationalism and national frontiers are too
remote from the role in which he has been cast. Not only are they
unsustainable in real life, but they contain all too obvious elements of
self-deceit. A tirade against nationalism comes hypocritically from the
lips of an agent of imperialist repression. Franz believes in what he
says; but his belief is a mixture of irrelevant idealism and distaste for
his job. He chose to be a soldier because he thought it was a game -
an extension of childhood with drink and women thrown in as extras.
The reality of war horrifies him. Hence both his horror of nationalism
and his wish to desert. His feelings about romantic love are strictly
analogous to his feelings about soldiering and war, except that he
affronts the prospect of being a great lover with slightly less naivete and
rather more enthusiasm. But even here he is torn between conflicting
ideals. Livia destroys him, involuntarily, long before the moment when
she betrays him to the authorities, by occupying his area of freedom.
She makes demands on him which he cannot satisfy, and the time
comes when he finds himself trapped. He is no longer an adequate sol¬
dier and a competent Don Juan, but a potential deserter and a miscast
and unwilling Romeo. Given what, in Livia’s eyes, would be a straight
choice between the army and her, he hesitates. Unlike her he has no
desire to sacrifice anybody or anything, least of all himself. He plays to
have it both ways: sees her, takes the money, and escapes. But whereas
she remains buoyed up by a romantic illusion, or rather by a knowl¬
edge that she has made her choices and can stick by them, he is
completely broken. Despite his lack of patriotic idealism his life was
totally bound to the army and the army code. Having deserted - in
fact if not in law - not only does he feel guilt at what he has done, but
he finds himself an outcast. The whole fabric of his life collapses
around him. The army had told him who he was and prescribed
limits for him - times when he could make love or get drunk, thoughts
he could think and things he could or couldn’t do.

74

Period costume and architecture (opposite)

 The final blow to his freedom and self-respect is that he has been
deprived of his masculine right of initiative. He has become a kept
man. The role of money in sexual relations is a favourite theme of Vis¬
conti’s, whether it is the custom of the dowry (as in La terra trema) or
the clash between aristocratic and bourgeois ideals (as in II lavoro).
There is a close parallel between Franz and Gino in Ossessione. It is
when Gino learns about the insurance, and realises that from now on
he will be tied to Giovanna’s petty-bourgeois apron-strings, that he
feels the hand at his throat and makes his half-hearted gesture of
defiance. Franz is less half-hearted. Quite consciously he elects to keep
Clara on the money given him by Livia, and also to conduct his
relationship with her in such a way as to make it quite clear, this time,
when nothing else is left, who is in command. But it is only when Livia
rushes in, unwanted and unannounced, that these ideas are forced to
the surface. He uses them with the express purpose of avenging him¬
self on Livia, and it doesn’t really matter to know how explicitly
conscious he was of what he was doing before she arrives. With the
submissive and innocent Clara he had found some peace and com¬
pensation for his other losses, and Livia’s arrival is not only an
embarrassment: it is a brutal reminder of all his shame and guilt.
Stirred into consciousness, he sets about purposefully humiliating her,
taunting her with her age and ugliness as well as with corruption and
cowardice.
But there is more to Franz’s tirade than a cruel and disabused
denunciation of their love affair. Motivating his apparent disgust there
is a clear and far less moralistic awareness of belonging to a dying race.
The Austrian victory at Custoza is meaningless. Austria is in decline,
and with the Austrian Empire a whole class and a whole world will dis¬
appear- that to which Franz belongs, and so does Livia. Hence Franz’s
bitter pride in having denounced Ussoni, whom he sees as represent¬
ing the new world to which he will never belong.
Franz dies lucidly, but not passively. He does not allow himself the
stoic luxury of a dignified death, but shouts and struggles right to the
moment when he is shoved up against a wall and shot. His life was all
he had, and like Heine he revolts against the idea of death - ‘O Gott,
wie hasslich bitter ist das Sterben.’ To the last he remains consistent,
an embittered romantic of a generation on which Byronism had turned
sour. To be precise he is, in the full sense of the word, a decadent; and
it is as a study of decadence that Senso carries its most complete and
perfect conviction.

76
 Although in terms of structure and plot Franz is like a reincarna¬
tion or perhaps a prior incarnation of the Gino of Ossessione, the
themes which he introduces are new, a sign of Visconti’s liberation
from the ’progressist’ schemas of neo-realism. In his lucid self-con¬
sciousness he had a forerunner, of a kind, in the figure of ’Ntom in La
terra trema, but unlike ’Ntoni’s his consciousness is completely nega¬
tive and backward-looking. In all ofVisconti’s films, including the first,
the past is seen as a burden, but while in Ossessione and La terra trema
the characters can at least see the burden as outside themselves, some¬
thing that can and must be shaken off, from Senso onwards the burden
is more like a hump, something ingrown from which there can be no
release. Only the progressive but pallid Ciro, in Rocco and His Broth¬
ers, seems capable like ’Ntoni of rejecting the past. The other
characters are forced to bear with it, complacently or despairingly, to
the end. The much-abused label of ‘decadent’ which has been
attached not only to the characters but to Visconti himself is mean¬
ingful only in these terms. Visconti’s approach is not indulgent: even
in his treatment of the incest theme in Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa there is
little of the morbid fascination of full-blown D’Annunzian decaden-
tism. Nor is it moralistic. The moral degeneration and moral
incapacity, which are features of the world described by Visconti’s
films from Senso to Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa, are to be understood first of
all historically, as products of a response to a historical and class situ¬
ation in which the individual feels himself bound by the past and
unable to adapt to the present.
On the other hand I would not wish to maintain that Visconti’s
approach is totally analytic and detached. He is involved with his
material, and has a personal stake in what he is saying. As an aristocrat
who has thrown in his lot with a cause which ultimately implies his own
destruction and that of his class, his focus of interest is quite naturally
(though not inevitably) the points at which the theoretical analysis
which he accepts encounters his own personal situation. In Senso this
focus is in fact double - the ‘decadence’ of Franz and the stumbling and
erratic ‘progress’ of the world around. It is this antithesis of progress and
decadence which has been particularly misunderstood and fetishised by
Visconti’s critics. We shall return to it later. At this stage it seems best to
carry the narrative forward to The Leopard, a film in which the historical
themes of Senso are taken up again and treated, perhaps with less bril¬
liance, but with a subtler awareness of the issues; in which, also, the
double focus of Senso is fused into one.

77
Notes
1. [Divorce was finally legalised in Italy in the late 1970s. Visconti’s project was
entitled Marcia nuziale ‘Wedding march’ and a treatment for the proposed film
was published in Cinema nuovo in 1953: see Bibliography (2002).]
2. Quoted in Senso, edited by Gianbattista Cavallaro (Bologna: Cappelli, 1954).
3. Ibid.
4. [Actually, no one shouts ‘Viva Verdi’ in the film. Pity (2002).]
5. Characteristically, the ghouls of naturalism find this scene particularly offen¬
sive and ridiculous, as they would doubtless find the obvious parallel with the
Michelangelo Pieta in St Peter’s, in which the Virgin is shown as actually
younger than the Christ whose body she is holding in her arms.
6. ‘Forse e impazzita’, Senso, p. 198.
7. Trasformismo, in Italian history, is the name given to the process whereby seem¬
ingly dangerous elements were ‘transformed’ into stable parts of the system. As
a political tactic it is particularly associated with Giolitti, Prime Minister
around the beginning of the century.
8. [To rub in the political point, Visconti originally proposed a scene in which
Ussoni was killed by the Austrian with the collusion of Serpieri, but this was
vetoed by the censorship (2002).]
9. G. R. Aldo, Robert Krasker, and Giuseppe Rotunno. [G. R Aldo (real name
Aldo Graziati) was Visconti’s chosen cinematographer (see the article ‘Lei sara
il mio operatore’ - ‘You will be my cinematographer’ - in Cinema Nuovo, 15
December 1953), but he died in a car crash before the film was completed.
According to the published screenplay (pp. 211-12), Aldo shot all the scenes
in and around the Villa Valmarana, the battle and the retreat. Krasker was then
brought in and shot most of the rest, including the opening scene at La Fenice,
most of the Venice exteriors, the interiors of Franz’s lodgings, Livia’s house,
Ussoni’s house and the home of the Austrian general in Venice. Rotunno, who
had been the camera operator throughout, then finished the film, shooting the
execution of Franz (filmed at the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome) and a few bibs
and bobs that remained to be done after principal photography was over
(2002).]
10. Senso, p. 212. [Apparently Aldo wanted to shoot the La Fenice sequence ‘realis¬
tically’, simulating the effect of a theatre illuminated solely by candles and
torches as would have been the case in the 1860s. This could well not have been
possible, or would have been vetoed by the Technicolor consultants on the pro¬
duction. Krasker in fact adopted a more cautious procedure, with a much more
even illumination (2002).]

78
6: The Leopard

Franz’s vision of events at the end of Senso had one blind spot. He
identified as his enemy Ussoni, the man to whom Livia could have a
pure loyalty and who was an incarnation of the new order. But objec¬
tively Ussoni failed. An aristocrat who had freely crossed the barrier to
the other side, he was to learn that the new order was in fact the prop¬
erty of the abject Serpieri. The new order was to be just like the old,
without the glamour and the graces and with the bourgeoisie playing
a more autonomous role. Part of Franz’s bitterness was therefore mis¬
placed.
In The Leopard the romantic extremes of Risorgimento idealism
and post-Byronic cynicism, represented in Senso by Ussoni and by
Franz, are replaced by a far less dramatic conception. Trasformismo1 is
the order of the day. The bourgeoisie marry into the aristocracy and
the Byronic aristocrat sinks gently into bien-pensant mediocrity as the
revolutionary storm subsides. The pessimism of The Leopard is no less
absolute for being less extreme than that of Senso. It is subtler, more
delicately shaded, but its final effect is even more gloomy. There is no
contradiction of forces, just a gradual decline of old and new alike,
supervised by an ageing and melancholy patriarch.
Visconti’s interest in the central theme of Lampedusa’s novel - the
gradual submergence and transformation of an aristocratic Sicilian
family at the time of the Risorgimento - was in a sense predictable.
But that he should be prepared to make the film, in association with
20th Century-Fox, as a multi-million-dollar spectacle was disquieting,
both to the proprietorial lovers of the original novel and to the nostal-
gics of neo-realism. Their fears were not entirely baseless, but not quite
for the reasons they put forward. If The Leopard, as finally realised, is
not altogether a satisfactory film it is not because it crudifies, in trans¬
lation on to the large screen, the intimate novelistic concerns of
Lampedusa. Visconti was not fool enough to attempt such a transla¬
tion. He re-created the story in his own terms, taking full advantage of
all the possibilities of modern techniques. He made no attempt to ren¬
der certain subtleties which were peculiar to Lampedusa’s narrative

79
style, but this does not mean that his own conception was crude. He
rejected intimacy as both technically and ideologically inappropriate
but used the large Technirama screen and the latest Technicolor
process to give a profusion and richness of detail which the small
screen and black and white could never achieve.
Unfortunately, despite his many previous chastening experiences
with Italian producers, Visconti did not reckon with the extraordinary
philistinism of 20th Century-Fox. They, for reasons entirely of their
own, decided to distribute The Leopard in Britain and America only in a
mangled and pathetic version. It was scaled down from 70mm to
35mm, printed on inferior colour stock, and shorn of some of the most
important scenes.2 As if this were not enough, it was then post-synchro¬
nised with an insensitivity which it is often hard to credit, particularly if
one bears in mind the relative skill with which low-budget spectaculars
by Freda and Cottafavi are dubbed for the English market. Visconti
himself had no control whatever over the dubbing, which was super¬
vised by Burt Lancaster. Possibly, however, listening to Lancaster
speaking his lines in English on the set, he may have had some vague
premonition of what the English version was going to be like. In that ver¬
sion Lancaster dubs himself, sounding for all the world more like a gruff
Western patriarch than a Sicilian prince. The final ballroom sequence,
with the continental actors dubbed into a variety of mid- and transat¬
lantic accents, is an indefinable mixture of the ball in The Big Country
and a fancy-dress party in a small town in the Mid-West.The dialogues
too have suffered from translation. In the finale in particular they have
acquired an utterly inapposite vulgarity and flatness which, if nothing
else, is in blatant contradiction with the suggestivity and carefully
created period atmosphere of the original script and of the sets. It is
small wonder therefore that Visconti has repudiated the English version
of The Leopard and accepts no responsibility for it at all.
All this makes it very hard, for someone who has not seen the
original, to reach a balanced assessment of the film which Visconti
intended and actually realised. Not having seen it myself I shall limit
my comments to those aspects of the film which do emerge success¬
fully from the American version, correlated by references to the
original script,3 hazarding the occasional guess about those other
aspects which were presumably intended to emerge but unfortunately
do not.
Lampedusa’s novel was an almost mystical account of the unchan¬
ging essence of Sicily and what was for him its most representative

80
class, the landowning aristocracy. It was a story of lethargy and iner¬
tia, seen as natural products of the sun and the earth, mysteriously
preventing change. At the same time it was an elegy for human mor¬
tality. Sicily seems to inspire mystical reflection of this kind, even in its
realists. There is a trace of it in the fatalism of Verga, and more than a
trace in writers who, like D. H. Lawrence, came to the island from the
outside. Shorn of its mystifying elements, the basic image is quite close
to reality. For two hundred years or more Sicily has been stagnant eco¬
nomically, the despair of well-meaning politicians, festering in isolation
under the wasteful exploitation of its natural resources. It is at the same
time extremely beautiful.
As La terra trema showed, Visconti’s attitude is far less indulgent
than that of literary tradition towards the ‘poetry’ of the island. While
Lawrence could use Sicily as a staging-post on his spiritual pilgrimage
towards the deeper mysteries of Mexico, Visconti (like Eisenstein in
Mexico) is only partly responsive to the mysterious character of Sicil¬
ian history and life. Where Visconti keeps most closely to the picture
created by Lampedusa is in his reliance on sensual evocation and his
interest in the central theme of the novel, the self-interrogation of an
aristocrat obsessed with the need to account for his own survival. But

81

The Salina family grouped as a ‘Conversation piece’

the film differs from the novel in the explanations it puts forward of
why the Sicilian aristocracy (of which Lampedusa was a member) sur¬
vived. Visconti’s explanations are to be found in history, which appears,
not, as in the novel, in the form of the rumblings of a distant storm,
but as a protagonist. The House of Salina, in the film, is directly
involved in the process of transformation. It is political and economic
cunning which enables it to survive, not a magic spell cast on the island
to protect it from change.
Compared with Senso, perhaps, Visconti’s Leopard does appear to
make concessions towards the viewpoint of the text from which it is
adapted. But it would be more accurate to describe them not as con¬
cessions to Lampedusa, but as changes in Visconti’s own approach.
Even more than in Senso he is concerned with the process whereby
revolution became transformation and transformation trasformismo.
The private dramas are not allowed to run, as they did in Senso, in
contrary directions: they are subordinated to the main development.
At the opening of the film the world is polarised into Borbonici and
Garibaldini. The House of Salina is threatened with expropriation.
Tancredi, the Prince’s nephew, to the consternation of all his family
except his uncle, goes off to join the revolutionaries - thus associating
the family conveniently with the winning side. Gradually the revol¬
utionary elan of the Garibaldini gets swallowed up. Tancredi becomes
an officer in the Piedmontese army. Gradually too the Salina house¬
hold comes to terms with the new order and vice versa. The Prince
votes in the plebiscite for unification with the North. Tancredi marries
the daughter of a bourgeois and she and her father are drawn inex¬
orably into the old world. In the ball at the end of the film, given by
another of the surviving aristocratic families, a boring old colonel
repeats until even the Prince is nauseated by it the story of how he
saved the new monarchy by shooting Garibaldi at Aspramonte. The
forces of the new reaction are now solidly entrenched.
In the process, however, the Prince has grown old. Though he has
done his utmost to protect his family from destruction and to adapt to
changes in the order of things, he sees no role for himself in the new
scheme. He rejects a request, brought by a Piedmontese emissary, that
he should take a seat in the new Senate. If there is to be a new order,
he maintains, it should be new, and he cannot take part in it. He has
resigned himself to events, but cannot desire them or look on them
with satisfaction. Even in regard to his family he has failed. The price
of protection for his daughters has been decadence. These nervous

82
The Prince dancing with Angelica

The Prince and Maria Stella

83
84

The reawakening of desire: Angelica kisses the Prince

immature maidens, brought up in the close atmosphere of an isolated
aristocratic household, are incapable of taking their place in the world
outside. ForTancredi the price of adaptation has been betrayal. He is
not decadent: he is all too accommodating. After his first impulsive
decision to join the Garibaldini, which is a betrayal of most of what his
family stands for but is also a positive revolutionary commitment, he
then retreats step by step, abandons the red shirt of the Garibaldini for
the blue uniform of a career officer with the Piedmontese, and grad¬
ually assumes a more and more conservative stance which reflects itself
not only in his ideas but in his manner, his clothes, even in his face.
Tancredi’s increasing sobriety in everything else is balanced by a
growing possessiveness towards Angelica. Her family is bourgeois, her
father, Don Calogero Sedara, is shown as an uncouth plebeian snob,
rising rapidly on the historical tide, while being subjected to a defen¬
sive and uneasy ridicule by the aristocratic ‘Leopards’. She herself, as
played by Claudia Cardinale, has an earthy, if frigid, beauty and a
physical vigour which is carefully contrasted with the anaemic inbred
appearance of Tancredi’s cousin Concetta. Tancredi’s preference for
Angelica over his cousin has, therefore, both class and sexual bases
which are inseparable from each other. The old aristocracy has reached
the end of the line. Angelica’s beauty and vitality are class character¬
istics as well as individual, and by following his natural sexual
inclinations Tancredi is also challenging the social order - more rad¬
ically perhaps than he did by opting for Garibaldi against the
Bourbons. For a moment, indeed, it looks as if this will happen. Con-
cetta’s ill-masked distress, Sedara’s gaucheness, Angelica’s violent and
ill-judged laughter at a faintly risque joke of Tancredi’s greeted with
stony silence by the rest of the company, all threaten a complete rup¬
ture of family relations. It also seems, particularly in the scenes where
the lovers wander together round the echoing attics of the palace of
Donnafugata, as if Tancredi’s love for Angelica will take him not only
away from his family but out of himself, that passion will be stronger
than social pressure. But the kind of conflict which most often exalts
and then destroys characters like Gino, Livia, Simone, or even Gianni4
never fully develops. The forces are unequally matched. The House of
Salina adapts and absorbs the couple, and leaves them the prospect,
which they happily accept, of easy conformity in the context of a very
typical marriage.
The final ballroom sequences, which seemed to the American
financiers of no narrative significance and therefore open to drastic

85
reduction and mutilation, bring together the mind and memory of the
Prince. The importance of this subjective aspect appears to have been
lost on the producers and their technical henchmen, and the scene, in
the English version, has lost all its internal coherence. Visconti’s inten¬
tion was to reproduce cinematically and pictorially the content of what
in the novel was a long interior monologue by the Prince, his reflec¬
tions on change and recurrence, and on life and death. The Prince
wanders from room to room, watching the scene, and participating in
it fully at one moment only, when he is prevailed upon to dance a waltz
with Angelica. As he walks round he sees things which reminded him
of his past life and of the fact that he is now old. Women who have been
his mistresses are now aged and stately dowagers. A new generation
has succeeded his, that of Tancredi and Angelica on the one hand and
his own daughters on the other. When he accepts to dance with Angel¬
ica there is a double poignancy in his response to her request. Her
naive flattery serves as yet another reminder of the difference in age
between them. But at the same time there is something provocative
about her insistence which makes him realise that he is still young
enough to desire her, even acutely.
This episode follows directly, and by subtle contrast, a morbid
scene in which his eye is caught by a monstrous academic painting of
a death scene, and he shocks Tancredi by the vivid realism of his obser¬
vation about the cleanness of the sheets. There is no interior
monologue, and the dialogues are brief, sardonic, and allusive. The
meaning is conveyed, not just by the words but by a permanent
relationship which is set up between the Prince and what he sees
around him. The misty colour effects, the choice of detail, the cutting
and camera movement5 gradually and unobtrusively build up a kind
of dialogue between the man and his surroundings. There is no visual
or rhetorical expressionism. Everything is real, but seen in a particu¬
lar way, refracted through the consciousness of the Prince. Stylistically,
it is the perfect cinematic equivalent of Flaubert’s style indirect libre.
A lot of what should be present is lost in the English version, as a
result of cuts, dubbing, and shoddy printing, but enough remains for
Visconti’s stylistic mastery to assert itself in the most resounding and
unequivocal fashion. Where doubts arise is not over this achievement
but over the actual matter of what Visconti is saying. Not for the first
time, he seems to have let himself be seduced by an aspect of his sub¬
ject which revealed itself during the elaboration and shooting of the
film and to have developed that aspect at the expense of others. The

86

Exploring the country house ... and each other: Tancredi and Angelica (opposite)
obvious parallel is with Rocco and His Brothers (see below, Chapter 9).
In The Leopard the pomp and splendour of the aristocratic ball and the
patriarchal figure of Burt Lancaster as the Prince appear almost to have
taken precedence over the themes developed earlier in the film, and
gradually edged them out to allow for the virtual transfiguration of the
Sicilian aristocracy in the tremendous finale. Not only has the episode
grown in physical size, so that contrary to original indications it now
lasts, in its complete form, for well over an hour. It has also acquired
a character of unquestioning nostalgia. Where the film had previously
taken a critical attitude to the events described, it now slides gently
into sharing the point of view of one of the protagonists. Given the
manner in which the Prince has been idealised as a figure right from
the beginning, the move into indirect libre can be interpreted only in
one way, as identification by Visconti with the central figure.
The closing images of the film, however, are ambiguous. The Prince
takes leave of the company to walk home alone. The streets are very
quiet in the clear autumnal dawn. The silence is broken by a clatter¬
ing of bells as a priest walks past with two young acolytes on his way
to early Mass. An organ-grinder strikes up. The Prince walks away and
in the restored silence stops to mutter a semi-religious invocation to
88

The hunting scene

the morning star. Then the silence is broken again, abruptly, by a brief
volley of gunfire. Some rebels are being shot. The sound of the guns
re-echoes through the streets, as the rest of the family return to their
coach. The Prince goes on walking towards the sea.
To a certain extent the ending retrieves the film from the aura of
uncritical nostalgia into which it had been immersed. It takes it out of the
close atmosphere of the palazzo, away from the splendour and solidarity
of the gathering of aristocratic clans. Death is a solitary thing, whether
for the Prince or for the rebels.The Prince does not articulate his feelings
when he hears the shots, and the juxtaposition has to speak for itself. But
besides the general reflection on mortality there is also present a harsher,
more critical comment - on the price of survival.The Prince can afford to
choose the moment when he feels he wants to die. Not so the rebels.The
transformation of the House of Salina is the rebels’ defeat.
But even attributing this significance to the closing moments of The
Leopard does not resolve the ambiguities with which the film is beset.
In the two Risorgimento films and in La terra trema, Visconti has given
three accounts in all of the failure of attempted revolution and the con¬
tinued dominance of the old order. In the first, La terra trema, he takes
the point of view of the exploited fishermen, and his explanations are
straightforwardly economic and political. The fishermen neither have
the political organisation and economic power to overthrow their
oppressors; nor, being attached to private property as a means of
advancement, do they understand the need for collective action and
organisation. They fail, and Visconti’s heart is with them in their defeat.
In Senso, however, the division of the world into oppressors and
oppressed is less clearly marked. The categories are political and ideo¬
logical rather than economic, and the action takes place between
groups and individuals whose functions are not determined exclusively
by economic factors. The way the forces are aligned and the way in
which individuals become representative not only of groups but of
ideas shows clear traces of the influence of the sophisticated theories
of Gramsci on Visconti’s previous rather crude conception of the class
struggle. The artistic structure of the film removes it still further from
the level of a historiographical textbook. The forces in play are basic¬
ally those of progress (Ussoni), decadence (Franz), and conformity
and trasformismo (Serpieri), and the motor of the action on both indi¬
vidual and social planes is betrayal. Visconti’s own position is detached.
The film is seen through the eyes of Livia, who chooses, betrays her
choice, and is herself betrayed, but it does not identify itself with her.

89

The siege of Palermo (overleaf)

 In The Leopard, finally, the causes of failure are seen as absorption
and adaptation. As an explanation this is as valid as the others, but the
way in which it is put forward is distinctly ambiguous. Whereas in Senso
Visconti retains a position of detachment above a central character
who is directly involved in the action, in The Leopard Visconti’s pos¬
ition is apparently one of identification with a central character who is
himself as detached as is humanly possible from the events that are
taking place. The Prince’s great passion is astronomy, and his view of
life is accordingly distant and macrocosmic. At no point does he par¬
ticipate directly in the action, except briefly when he accepts to dance
with Angelica. Everything is seen sub specie aeternitatis. Even the dance
is only an enactment on human scale of the eternal gyration of the
stars. Identification with such a superhuman viewpoint effectively
denies any involvement at all.6
The problem with the Prince is that although he is subjectively
above the action and is symbolically represented as having that role,
he remains a member of a particular class: his consciousness is class-
bound consciousness, and his actions form part of the class action of
the aristocracy to which he belongs. ‘We are the Leopards,’ he says at
one point, ‘and the others will always envy us.’This remark, like others
in which this patriarchal figure comments on things related to his fam¬
ily, is particularly ambiguous, because it poses the problem of
detachment and identification at so many different levels.
We can perhaps resolve these difficulties most simply in this way.
The position which Visconti takes up in The Leopard in the face of his¬
torical change is equivocal. He rejects both the simple ‘leftist’ solution
of seeing it from the point of view of the Garibaldini and their suc¬
cessors, and the liberal compromise of balancing abstractly two points
of view. At the same time he stops short of complete identification with
the old order. He is telling the history of the aristocracy from the inside
through one of its representatives, but he dissociates himself from the
story in two ways. In the first place the character who concretely per¬
sonifies the historical movement is himself detached, and Visconti
identifies with him in his detachment. But because he is also class-
bound, through his involvement with his family, a further act of
withdrawal is necessary at the very end. The shooting of the rebels,
heard not only by the Prince but also by his family, gives the film a pol¬
itical perspective it seemed to have lost. But it is a summary gesture,
a homage to the revolutionary causes in which Visconti believes but is
not involved.

92
Notes
1. See previous chapter, note 7.
2. [The Leopard was in fact shot inTechnirama, not 70mm. For details see Brenda
Davis, ‘Can the leopard?’, Sight and Sound, Spring 1964 (2002).]
3. II film II Gattopardo e la regia di Luchino Visconti, edited by Suso Cecchi D’Am¬
ico (Bologna: Cappelli, 1963). [The full-length Italian version of the film is now
generally available. Having seen it three times I find there is very little in what
I wrote in 1967 that 1 would need to change. The most important differences
between the versions are that the final ball sequence in the original is both more
splendid and sadder than in the cut version, and that the whole film is just far,
far more beautiful to look at. Also - by a delightful irony - the effect of Vis¬
conti’s Marxist interpretation of Lampedusa is more marked in the Fox version,
since the scenes cut out are mostly those with the least ‘action’ and closest to
the elegiac tone of the original (2002).]
4. In Ossessione, Senso, Rocco and His Brothers, and Vaghe stelle delTOrsa respect¬
ively.
5. One of the most fascinating things about the whole sequence is the way in
which the fourteen rooms of the palace are used as a single set. The use of pil¬
lars, walls, and doorways to block out or open up the scenes means that a single
camera movement can have the syntactic effect of a series of cuts.
6. The superhuman figure of the Prince has one parallel in Visconti’s work, and
that is the representation of Blasetti in Bellissima. Detached figures, whether
above, beneath, or on the margins of the action, exist in most of his films, but
most often they appear, like Blasetti, only in one scene. One whose presence is
felt throughout a large part of the action is Pietro, the young doctor in Vaghe
stelle delTOrsa. Pietro, by class and by temperament an outsider, is an outsider
to the main action, but he observes and, unlike the naive Andrew, understands
from a distance. The Leopard is the only film in which one character remains
permanently above the action and critical of it, and at the same time appears
to receive endorsement from the author.

93
7: White Nights

When White Nights first came out it encountered a hostile reception

almost everywhere. Particularly in Italy it was seen, and still occasion¬
ally is, as evidence that Visconti had now finally abandoned
neo-realism and indeed realism of any kind. Ergo he was no longer a
serious director. At ten years’ distance these accusations have lost most
of their force. Two years after White Nights, Visconti reaffirmed his ser¬
iousness by making Rocco and His Brothers. His subsequent
development and a reassessment of his early work have shown that his
relationship with realism has always been ambiguous. At the same time
realism has ceased to seem the unqualified aesthetic good that it was
felt to be in the 1940s and 1950s. White Nights has come to be seen,
in these terms, no longer as a betrayal but as an exquisite interlude in
Visconti’s career, charming but insignificant.
This new state of critical affairs is, if anything, worse than the first.
The argument that White Nights was a betrayal of neo-realism was at
least grounded in a solid aesthetic theory, and corresponded to fact.
White Nights, with its deliberate irrealism, comes at the end of a steady
development, through Bellissima and Senso, away from the naturalistic
and realistic approaches of Ossessione and La terra trema. The new
empiricism, on the other hand, is based on no theory at all, but on one
or two unsystematic factual observations used to reinforce subjective
feelings of like and dislike.
With a director as important and as complex as Visconti it is
extremely unsafe to make pronouncements, based on external criteria,
about what is major and what is minor in his work. One’s criteria can
only be the structures revealed in each film and the way these can be
related to each other in the total context of the author’s work. In this
perspective there can be no major and minor, distinguished by subject,
‘truth to reality’, ‘profundity of insight’, or any such atomistically
determined characteristic. The most one can say is that, after close
analysis, a particular film seems to add little to one’s understanding,
but even that can be deceptive. Repetition is itself significant, and the
recurrence of motifs often reveals more about a director’s work than

94
the introduction of ideas which are new and potentially distracting.
This is obviously not the only way in which films can be judged. It has
self-imposed limitations and would not do, for example, for a study of
films in which there is no connecting thread of distinct authorship. But
where one is concerned with an author whose work does show some
form of internal coherence, however slight, it is at the very least a
necessary preliminary to judgment.
To rescue White Nights from the limbo of partial damnation into
which it has been cast, an argument must be put forward which relates
it to two basic co-ordinates, chronological and structural. This entails,
in the first place, emphasising the continuity of Visconti’s work and the
place of White Nights in the continuous process of his artistic develop¬
ment. But it is also necessary to break down the film into its constituent
elements and show both how these elements are formed, within the
film, into an autonomous and equilibrated whole, and, furthermore,
how they relate to and occasionally oppose the corresponding elements
in Visconti’s other films.
The story of White Nights is basically the same as that of the Dos¬
toyevsky story from which it is adapted. A lonely man (Dostoyevsky,
with what seems undue literary hyperbole, presents him as having no
friends or acquaintances at all) meets a lonely girl. He is lonely for
social reasons; he is a stranger and a newcomer. She is lonely because
she has always lived in isolation, even in the heart of the city, and her
loneliness is intensified voluntarily because she is in love with a man
whom she does not expect ever to return to her but who continues to
occupy her life to the exclusion of any other possible relationship.
Incredibly, at the end of the film, the lover does return. She is vindi¬
cated, and the man who had befriended her and had hoped for her love
is left behind, more isolated than before.
In the general history of film White Nights is mainly interesting for
helping to launch the inimitable Marcello Mastroianni on his success¬
ful career as an unsuccessful lover, and for its influence on the New
French Cinema, particularly Resnais, after 1958. Within Visconti’s
oeuvre, however, it occupies an absolutely central position. It looks
forward to The Leopard in its rendering of subjectivity by visual style,
and to Vaghe stelle delTOrsa in its use of a complex metaphorical struc¬
ture. But it also stands at the end of a line, and after making White
Nights Visconti enters on a period of involution, doubling back on him¬
self and recapitulating themes and motifs first developed earlier in his
career.

95
 The almost linear process which finishes with White Nights can best
be characterised by focusing on a single aspect: Visconti’s movement
away from natural surroundings to artificial. The setting is always a
prime determinant, and the characters have the kind of reality that is
established for them by their surroundings, by the physical background
and the social scene. Only in Ossessione are the surroundings entirely
natural, real places presented with a minimum of expressive distortion,
people fulfilling natural and unforced social roles. In this sense
Visconti’s abandonment of realism begins with his use of semi¬
expressionist techniques in La terra trema. In the creation and manipu¬
lation of a bizarre social world in Bellissima and still more in the
operatic and idealising style of Senso, Visconti is steadily moving
towards the position of White Nights.
This position is extreme. Natural locations are entirely eliminated,
and the whole film was shot on a carefully constructed studio set,
whose only concession to realism was that it is modelled on Livorno
and not St Petersburg. Whereas in Senso the settings were real but man¬
aged accidentally to look artificial, because of the lighting and the
disjunction of character and background, here the setting both is arti¬
ficial and is clearly intended to be seen as such. This is partly due to
the photography and lighting, which produce an unexpectedly grainy
look, dreamy in its effect, with unusually soft definition and carefully
graduated contrasts reminiscent of the realisme poetique of Carne. But
it is also due to the presentation of the characters in relation to their
surroundings.
We have already noticed how in Visconti’s films, right from the
start, people other than the direct protagonists tend to be grouped
together as a sort of chorus, occupying a middle ground between the
foreground personalities and the physical background. In White Nights
the division is somewhat different. There is no clearly articulated social
structure to which either the main or the episodic figures can be
related. The episodic figures are part of the background, props of the
physical setting, which occasionally burst into life in moments of ten¬
sion between the main characters. The absence of a proper middle
ground puts the protagonists into direct relation with the background,
and although they are also defined socially, if only in a rudimentary
and summary fashion, the primary definition is offered by the phys¬
ical setting. White Nights is a classic illustration of Andre Bazin’s
dictum that, in the cinema, ‘toute la realite est sur le meme plan’.1 The
characters move through the background and within the space set out

96

The lodger takes Natalia and her grandmother to the theatre (opposite)
for them by the camera’s visual field, and are established for what they
are by the general sense of irreality which pervades the initial pictorial
presentation.
Bazin’s statement, however, was intended also as a norm, which
enabled him to criticise not only montage effects a la Eisenstein but also
the cinematic presentation of Moliere with Comedie-Franyaise actors
performing and reciting an artificial text in an inappropriate naturalistic
setting. In a case like that, he went on to argue, theatre should be per¬
formed as theatre. But it is precisely one of the major differences
between theatre and cinema that in the former all of reality is not on the
same level, and the characters are not and cannot be perfectly congru¬
ent with their setting.The presentation of White Nights is also theatrical.
The characters emerge from the background and play out their roles
against it.They are figures on a stage as well as figures in a landscape.
In Dostoyevsky’s story the sense of irreality was produced by liter¬
ary means, a first-person interior monologue whose fixed point is the
state of mind of the speaker as he writes down his memories and which
moves off into a realm of distant reverie. Visconti rejects the literary
device of interior monologue, though he had used it in Senso, and relies
for his effect on the cinematic and theatrical effects studied above. The

W^wvvvrv“ - W V1rorra
result, as one French critic has noted,2 is ‘plus de reve et moins de
reverie’. It is also rather more complex, since it lacks the temporal and
psychological fixed point of the moment of memory. Except for a
couple of brief scenes in flashback which respect Dostoyevsky’s strict
subordination of the girl’s own memories to the basic narrative, there
is a free continuum between an ‘objective’ camera’s-eye view and the
contrasting subjective visions of the two characters. What there is, how¬
ever, to distinguish the viewpoints and to act as a point of reference
for the narrative, equivalent to Dostoyevsky’s literary fixed point, is a
specifically cinematic device: a complex spatial metaphor, which gives
a key to the construction of the film.
This central spatial metaphor is provided by a canal which divides
the set into two distinct worlds and the bridge over the canal which
links the two halves together. The division is suggestive rather than cat¬
egorical, metaphor rather than allegory. On one side of the bridge is
the world in which Natalia lives with her blind grandmother; on the
other side is the vital life of the city. This spatial division does more
than isolate the girl geographically. It is the symbol for a whole series
of contrasts - between memory and actuality, public and private, illu¬
sion and reality. The girl’s world is peopled only by herself, her
grandmother, the old lady’s companion and helper, and the mysteri¬
ous lodger whom the girl loves. It is a world of personal and private
relationships existing partly in reality, partly in the memory, and partly
in imagination. By being drawn across the bridge and towards the girl,
the man is forced to partake of the fairy-tale atmosphere of this pri¬
vate world, to share its illusions and mix them with his own. But he
never fully enters into it, and it preserved a fantasy quality even for
him. He knows of it through her, that is through her imagination, and
his picture of it is compounded of imaginative elements, partly from
her fantasy, partly from his own.
If he is to succeed in winning her for himself and away from the
memory of her lost lover, he has to draw her back across the bridge,
into the flesh and blood actuality of the world outside. Behind the
dynamic subjective contrast of the illusion of two wills - the girl’s that
her lover will come back, the man’s that he can draw her away from
herself and her private isolation - stand the static and objective con¬
trasts, many of which echo antinomies basic to Visconti’s other films.
Thus, while the girl’s private world is also one of timeless past and
future, historically continuous, the world on the other side of the
bridge is specifically modern and actual. It is a world of bright lights,

98

Mario and Natalia (opposite)

 ^0
Rock’ n’ roll comes to Italy

Natalia reunited with the lodger

juke boxes, and neon signs, full of mundane self-assertion, in sharp
contrast to the house that the girl inhabits, filled with worn-out Ori¬
ental carpets being laboriously restored.
Various of the antinomies which Visconti establishes in his other
films - between guilty passion and easy love, permanence and tran¬
sience, past and present, traditional and pop culture - find specific
expression in the two worlds of White Nights. A simple example will
suffice to demonstrate the part that these static contrasts play in the
construction of the film. The lodger invites the girl and her grand¬
mother to the opera to hear Rossini’s Barber of Seville, much to the old
lady’s delight, since she remembers the opera from her childhood and
even manages, in a cracked voice, to sing snatches from one of the
arias. They all go along together, a cosy family group immersing itself
in an artistic experience which represents a permanent cultural con¬
tinuity. When Mastroianni takes her out, on the other hand, it is the
cinema he first thinks of. They do not in fact go, because it is too late.
But the following evening, when they have time to spare, they go to a
cafe, and finish up dancing, in a clumsy but frenetic fashion, to a record
of Bill Haley and His Comets. In impersonal surroundings, separated
from each other by the movements of the other dancers, they manage
with difficulty to establish some kind of personal contact. The scene is
vivid enough, and brilliantly staged, but it is curiously unreal. It has
actuality, but of a transient kind. It is dated by the music, quite emphat¬
ically: 1957. By contrasting it with the opera sequence Visconti is not
just telling us something about his taste in music. He is both illumin¬
ating the dynamic contrasts between the protagonists and providing a
framework of understanding. The opera/pop contrast is neither
isolated nor incidental, it is an essential part of a symbolic structure
informing the film.
What the structure is becomes clearer if one looks at the working out
of the plot. Natalia’s world is effectively timeless. Her lover has promised
to return within the year, thus intruding an element of temporality into
the affair, after which the continuity will be restored.The year is up, and
she goes every evening patiently to wait for him on one of the bridges
over the canal, at the point of junction with the outside world. It is here
that the young man, Mario, finds her, weeping because another evening
has gone by and her lover has not returned. On the grounds that she has
been pestered by some youths on a motorcycle, he insists on taking her
home. Reluctantly, because it looks like a pick-up, she allows him to
accompany her, but not beyond the door. She arranges to meet him

100
again the following evening, but at the last minute changes her mind.
She tries to avoid him, and when he corners her gives him a line about
not wanting to appear frivolous by accepting appointments with
strangers.They sit on the canal bank and she tells him about her life, the
narrative merging into images of the scene she is describing. He objects
to the story, which he finds implaus-ible, and particularly to her
assumption that it is all perfectly ordinary. All the time she is trying to
force her version on to him. She talks compulsively about herself and
alternates between excitement and despair, and between holding off
and encouraging the unfortunate Mario. He protests ineffectually. His
perception of her is clouded by his illusion that he can prise her away
from the world of her imagination. He is enough of a dreamer to submit
to this illusion and to allow himself to be attracted to her and to her
world. But at the same time he belongs on the other side. To her he can
never mean anything. She is as blind to the ordinary world as he is to the
power of her fantasy. When he persuades her that, if she knows where her
lover is, she should write to him, telling him that she is waiting, she
appears to let herself be guided by him; then, when they have completed
a draft together, she produces a fair copy, already written, of the same
letter, which she asks him to post. She has, in fact, imposed her vision
completely. He responds irrationally to the situation. When she has left,
he destroys the letter as if by doing so he could shatter her vision and
replace it with his own. Just before he does this a prostitute saunters by
and smiles at him. His determination reinforced, he tears up the letter
and drops the pieces into the canal.
The third evening, in contrast to the last, is dominated by Mario,
his initiative and images of the world. The figure of the prostitute
occurs again, and this time Mario nearly succumbs to the alternative
she offers. She is almost a permanent feature of the landscape, mov¬
ing to and fro between the bridge and a nearby cafe, and tantalising
Mario with the promise of something more tangible, if more tempor¬
ary, than his fairy-tale romance. Nor is she the only erotic distraction
that offers itself. As Mario stands looking in the window of a cafe an
attractive blonde inscribes a large ‘Ciao’ in the condensation on the
glass. He seems to be considering picking her up when Natalia appears,
accusing him in a neurotic way of trying to avoid her, which he in fact
is. Once again he allows himself to be encouraged. He takes her to the
cafe and starts telling her about himself. She isn’t listening: so he asks
her to dance. The scene that follows is a set piece of amazing virtuos¬
ity. Not only does it contain one of the best stagings of a rock number

101

Mario tempted by the prostitute (overleaf)

ever produced in the cinema; it also manages to convey the different
relationships of the characters to each other and to the world. Mario,
despite his stuffy remarks about growing old, is relaxed and happy and
even succeeds in monopolising the floor for a Jerry Lewis-type send-
up of the star dance. Natalia, meanwhile, grows more and more
hysterical. The music stops, and she begins to calm down. Then, sud¬
denly, hearing that it is past ten o’clock, the hour of her nightly
appointment, she rushes out to look for her lover on the bridge.
In reaction to this act of desertion, Mario lets himself be picked up
by the prostitute, but draws back at the last minute. He is still a victim of
his dream. When the woman starts screaming at him for taking advan¬
tage of her, figures emerge from all round and start beating him up -
despite her immediate reversal of attitude and pleas that they leave him
alone. She has a code and a sense of honour which Natalia lacks, but in
other respects there is a marked similarity between the figurations. Both
are prone to sudden reversals of feeling and to outbursts of near¬
hysteria; both represent a snare in which the man allows himself to be
caught. But the prostitute is more straightforward in her demands, freer
with what she has to give, and ultimately more generous.
Formally, the scene with the prostitute repeats the pattern of the
scene with the girl behind the plate-glass window a few minutes earlier,
and the rest of the pattern then repeats itself as well. Natalia reappears,
not having found her lover. Once again Mario falls under her spell;
once again he manages to persuade himself that he is making progress;
and once again he is cruelly deluded, this time definitively.
On her return Natalia gives the impression of being a pure mytho-
maniac. She is now overcome by despair, and has refashioned her image
of her lover completely. She sees herself as having been deceived, and is
perversely pleased when Mario confesses to having destroyed the letter.
She interprets the world according to her preconceived notions of what
she wants it to be, and is capable of swinging violently from one extreme
to another. In her new mood she is utterly compliant to Mario’s pro¬
posal. He takes her out in a boat, to a place along the canal where lovers
go to be alone. But the place is occupied - not by lovers, but by home¬
less families sheltering from the cold. It begins to snow. She is ecstatic:
all the time she regards the weather as something that exists to do her
bidding, and now she expects the people on the bank to share her delight
in the spectacle of the falling snowflakes. They get out of the boat and go
for a walk, with Mario reflecting on how the snow seems to fall like a
bridal veil on his new beloved. His illusion is now as complete as he took

104
hers to be. They start walking back. Below them on a bridge over the
canal stands a muffled figure in a hat and heavy coat. He calls out,
quietly and imperiously, ‘Natalia! ’ Her trust has been finally vindicated,
and against a setting where the snow has obliterated the details of the
landscape and contingency and actuality have been abolished, where
everything is fairy-tale, she runs down the hill to meet him, leaving
Mario alone, befriending the same stray dog that he had encountered
and befriended at the very beginning of the film.
Throughout the film we are faced by the opposition of two levels
of reality, the actual and the ideal. The actual is characterised by tran¬
sience, modernity, social dissociation: by pop music, the youths on
motorbikes, the prostitute and her clients, the passers-by. The ideal, by
its nature, is less readily concretised in particular images. It is the prod¬
uct of the transforming power of the imagination. The same contrast
as is expressed in the spatial division of the film exists within the char¬
acters themselves. On the level of actuality Natalia is a hysterical little
bitch. In her imagination she is the ideal faithful beloved and her lover
will return to her because she believes in her love. The extraordinary
thing about the film is that she is allowed to triumph, that the ideal
becomes reality. White Nights is not a sentimental film. On the level of
observation it is lucid and even realistic. Little details like the grand¬
mother’s taste for particularly gruesome murder stories, as well as the
unsparing characterisation of the heroine, give even the old world on
the far side of the bridge a firm base in realistic observation. But the
film is marked throughout by a voluntary idealisation of the subject.
Stylistically this comes out in the exaggeration of visual and psycho¬
logical details, and in the extreme formality of the spatial and temporal
composition. In thematic terms it is expressed in the constant tension
and dialectical contrasts between the characters and their conflicting
visions of the world and themselves.
If this is so, then Visconti’s anti-realism goes deeper than is gener¬
ally realised. White Nights is perhaps an extreme example of this
tendency. Its spiritual descendants are to be found in the works of
Jacques Demy.

Notes
1. ‘All of reality is on the same plane’. Andre Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinema? vol. 1.
Ontologie etlangage (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1958), p. 160.
2. Philippe Demonsablon in Cahiers du cinema no. 84, June 1958, p. 47.

105
8: Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa

The importance of White Nights in Visconti’s development, so often

misconstrued by his critics, really becomes clear with the appearance
of Vaghe stelle delVOrsa, to be released in Britain and the USA in 1966.
In the intervening period he made Rocco and His Brothers, which we
shall examine later, II lavoro, and The Leopard. In discussing White
Nights, I described this period as one of involution, in which Visconti
returns to subjects and stylistic motifs first treated in his earlier films
and now redeveloped in a new and often more complex fashion. With
Rocco and His Brothers, most conspicuously, Visconti seems to be mak¬
ing almost an abrupt about-turn, away from theatrical artifice, mem¬
ory, and the past, and back to a contemporary and realistic study of
the social problems which first engaged his attention in La terra trema.
In this perspective White Nights looked very much like a dead end, an
aesthetic diversion from which Visconti was at pains to extricate him¬
self and which left little or no mark on the subsequent progress of his
career. If Vaghe stelle delVOrsa has helped us to revise our estimate of
White Nights and to rescue it from critical cold storage, it is also true,
however, as a necessary corollary that the later film cannot be situated
without reference to the earlier.
Like White Nights, Vaghe stelle delVOrsa has a complicated structure
which is not simply that of the plot. In White Nights the plot is very
simple. What action there is depends for its significance entirely on
things outside it. The film is based on the contrast of two subjective
visions, one of which is finally vindicated. But the last-minute vindica¬
tion of the girl’s faith does not annul the rest. The enigma remains, and
with it the structural contrasts thrown up by the plot and made concrete
in a central metaphor, that of the bridge connecting the two worlds.
In Vaghe stelle delVOrsa the plot is more intricate, but as in White
Nights it is motivated from the outside - by two events which may or
may not have happened in the past: incest by an adolescent couple of
sister and brother, and the betrayal of their Jewish father to the Nazis
by their mother and her lover. Unlike White Nights, however, the
enigma is never resolved. Again, the action in Vaghe stelle delVOrsa is

106
bounded by an extended metaphor, in this case linking past, present,
and future.
The film starts with a brief pre-credit scene in Geneva, where San¬
dra and her American husband are giving a party. The smart inter¬
national guests mill around, talking in English and French. A pianist
starts playing Cesar Franck’s Prelude, a tense piece of music whose
romantic turbulence is kept in check by an iron vest of classical form.
For Sandra, however, the symbolism of the music is more specific. She
looks distraught, but says nothing to her husband about the cause,
which we learn later is the association of the music with her mother, a
former concert pianist now in a mental home.
The next day Sandra and Andrew leave for Italy.The car speeds away
from Geneva, across the barrier of the Alps, swallowing up distance,
with an unexpected zoom shot on to a flock of white birds round a
meadow; thence along the motorways of Northern Italy. Outside Flor¬
ence it slows down and plunges into a narrow country lane, flanked by
hedges, dark and shadowy. Eventually they reach Volterra, a decaying
town on the edge of a crumbling volcanic precipice. Only the
omnipresent Coca-Cola advertisements reflect the presence of the
twentieth century.
The journey from Geneva is a journey backwards in time, away
from modernity into history. It is also, for Sandra, a journey into her
own past. She and Andrew are going to attend a ceremony in which
the garden of her home is to be turned into a public park, dedicated
to the memory of her father, who died in Auschwitz. The dedication is
to be both an act of homage and an exorcism, a laying of family ghosts.
But the ghosts refuse to be laid. There seems to be a kind of curse
on the family at Volterra. Other members of the family refuse to attend
the ceremony. One who does turn up is Gianni, Sandra’s brother.
Andrew attempts to discover the cause of family rifts and tensions and
to settle them in a sensible way. But he only succeeds in exacerbating
the conflicts and in forcing on himself a horrifying discovery - that of
supposed incest between Sandra and Gianni. Andrew leaves for New
York, hoping that Sandra will follow him. Gianni threatens suicide in
a desperate attempt to win Sandra and dies. At the end of the film San¬
dra, her own ghosts exorcised, stands at the ceremony next to her
heavily sedated mother, preparing to complete her journey into a safe
future with Andrew.
The initial spatio-temporal metaphor is a key without which the
film is incomprehensible. For Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa is not an easy film,

107
Sandra

Gianni
partly because its construction is so complex and so enigmatic and
partly because its melodramatic surface discourages attempts at deeper
analysis. As is usual with Visconti, the melodramatics are not inciden¬
tal but essential. There are, however, a number of red herrings drawn
across the path by, among others, the author himself which need to be
disposed of before the him can be properly understood.
A major stumbling-block to appreciation is the result of what can
only be seen as a gross error of casting - Claudia Cardinale’s per¬
formance as the heroine. What Visconti wanted apparently was some¬
one whose enigmatic beauty could express Sandra’s crisis of identity
and the destructive power of someone who in a personal sense is non¬
existent.1 It is not an easy part to play and Cardinale nowhere near
gets the measure of it. Bad acting or non-acting can often be turned
to advantage in the cinema, where the actor’s function is not neces¬
sarily that of interpreter. The enigmatic character of Sandra required
a face that respected the enigma and did not attempt to solve it by
irrelevant subtleties of expression. But Cardinale is not really enig¬
matic. Her attempts to ‘fill in’ a part which precisely demanded to be
left empty produce a character for Sandra which is fundamentally at
odds with the rest of the film. In the place of an enigma we have an
ambiguity.
A second barrier to understanding lies in the literary references and
echoes with which the film is beset. The title ‘Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa’
comes from a poem of Leopardi, Le Ricordanze, which is extensively
quoted in the film by the brother, Gianni. It is also the title which Gianni
is proposing to give to the semi-autobiographical novel he has just com¬
pleted. The reference to Leopardi, the young romantic poet, isolated,
despairing, dominated first by the reality then by the memory of his
oppressive provincial family, is important, and would be recognised as
such by an Italian audience, though more for what Visconti is telling us
about Gianni than for what it says about Visconti’s own cultural
interests. On an English audience the point is entirely lost - particularly
since the British release title of Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa is ‘Of a Thousand
Delights’, which bears no relation whatever to the original.2
The English title does, however, introduce literary overtones of its
own. Whether by accident or design, it echoes phrases from a Jacobean
drama, Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, which Visconti produced in Paris
in 1961. The play has a certain similarity with the film. Incest between
brother and sister is a main theme in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and is also
a theme of Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa. A scene in the film where Gianni

109

The secret rendezvous between Gianni and Sandra (opposite)

removes Sandra’s ring echoes an incident in Ford’s play.5 But unlike
the Leopardi reference, the Ford references are not intended to say
anything to the spectator. They point to a continuity between Visconti’s
original work in the cinema and his interpretative work in the theatre,
but are much less significant for the film than, say, the references to
Verdi in Senso. If treated as important they can only mislead, by sug¬
gesting, for example, that Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa is a film about incest —
an idea which might appeal in the X-film trade but is not Visconti’s.4
The role of incest in Vaghe stelle delVOrsa has also sparked off
another risky comparison, this time with the Orestes myth, a com¬
parison which so entranced one critic5 that he substituted the names
of the Greek heroes for those of the characters throughout his review.
The problem here is different again. The parallel, once pointed out, is
obvious, but it cannot be stressed too strongly that Vaghe stelle delVOrsa
is not a modern version of the Oresteia after the manner of Jules
Dassin’s updated Phaedra. The connection is allusive - between the
situation of the film and the myth: not between Visconti’s and Aeschy¬
lus’ literary telling of the story. There is no imitation of detail, no
bloody axe, no footprints in the sand. There may not even have been
a murder. What Visconti has done is to abstract certain elements of the
saga, not necessarily the most important in the original structure, and
to place them in a new structure which is entirely his own. Though the
myth is important, because it provides a pattern of classic symmetry
within the film, it should not be allowed to obscure the extent to which
the actual working out of the pattern takes place in terms which are
strictly Viscontian, and certainly not Aeschylus.
The central feature of the myth which is contained in Vaghe stelle
delVOrsa is the idea of the transmission of the family curse from the
one generation to the next. The curse is not real in the sense of being
objectified in the form of a decree of the gods. But it is felt. The mother
sees her children by her first husband as being tainted by their Jew¬
ishness. The children, particularly Sandra, see their actions as a
response to the betrayal of their father by their mother and stepfather.
Within the film this provides a symmetrical pattern and a starting-
point for the action. The assumption by the children of their parents’
crime forces them together in a way which is itself interpreted by the
stepfather as criminal, and the pattern of structural interaction is pres¬
ent whether or not crimes as such actually took place.
The situation, which the action of the film disrupts, is one of uneasy
equilibrium. The family is split up. Sandra has gone to Geneva, initially

110

Andrew with Gilardini (opposite)

to pursue an inquiry into her father’s death. Subsequently she has mar¬
ried and, by her marriage, has withdrawn her connections with past
guilt. The mother has gone mad. Gilardini, the stepfather, is content
to let sleeping dogs lie and allows Gianni occasionally to plunder the
family property of which Gilardini is trustee. What starts the action
going in the first instance is Sandra’s obsession with her father’s mem¬
ory and a structural asymmetry between her and Gianni’s position and
that of the others.
The two couples, Gianni and Sandra and Gilardini and the mother,
are in an analogous position. Gilardini and the mother are presumed
guilty of an abnormal and indecent complicity in conniving at or even
engineering the father’s denunciation. Sandra and Gianni are sus¬
pected of complicity in their hostility to their parents and their pos¬
sible incest. This complicity involves a number of real or imagined acts
of betrayal - sexual, familial, and even racial. The mother has betrayed
the father by taking Gilardini as a lover; Sandra betrays Andrew by her
attachment to Gianni, which she has never admitted. By denouncing
the father and disowning the children the mother has also betrayed the
family, and her action is reciprocated by Sandra, who denounces her
for what she has done. Sandra also wishes to deny the existence of any

i
love between her and Gianni and sees her relationship as racial soli¬
darity, brought about by the racial denunciation of the father. This in
turn gives rise to counter-accusations between Gianni and Sandra. He
feels she has betrayed him and their childhood; she feels he has
betrayed their race.
This pattern of accusation and counter-accusation contains one
asymmetrical factor, which is temporal.The mother’s crime is past, and
can neither be repaired nor renewed. Even her disowning of the children
is no longer important, now that they have grown up. Any personal
responsibility she might have is annulled by her withdrawal, possibly as
a consequence of guilt, into madness. Sandra’s withdrawal, again con¬
ditioned by the past, is less complete. Her hatred of her mother is still
alive and potentially destructive, and her withdrawal to Geneva has left
her own problems unresolved. Gianni’s appearance at Volterra is suffi¬
cient both to trouble her relationship with Andrew and to reactivate the
past, either directly or in the suspicious mind of Gilardini.
A further danger to the equilibrium lies in the mutual distrust that
grows up between Gianni and Andrew, the brother and husband.
Andrew is puzzled by the situation: the vast, echoing house, the locked
doors guarding the mother’s former apartment, the depth of affection
between brother and sister, and the evidence of hostility in the refusal
of other members of the family to attend the ceremony. Gianni is
straightforwardly jealous of the man who has separated him from his
sister; he is also anxious that Andrew should not discover too much,
at least not immediately. He shows Andrew round Volterra, and par¬
ries his questions with devious replies. Andrew wants to know about
Sandra’s past, in order to understand her as she is now. Gianni con¬
tests the relevance of the past, and argues that what a person was has
no bearing on what that person is and is loved for in the present. All
the time he is playing a game with Andrew, tantalising him with cryp¬
tic remarks and finally distracting his attention to Pietro, the son of the
estate factor and now a doctor treating the mother. Later, when they
meet Pietro in a cafe, Andrew turns his back on him. He is now
extremely confused. His suspicions have been distracted but not
allayed, and he turns his hostility on to the unfortunate Pietro, with¬
out evidence and without conviction, aware that something is amiss
and that Pietro is somehow connected with it.
Yet more suspicions are aroused in Andrew’s mind during a scene
in the town hall where the documents have been signed handing over
the garden to the municipality. Sandra has arrived late, flustered and

112
distraught, having just returned from seeing her mother. Gilardini
obviously resents her intervention in what he feels is his business. He
is convinced that Sandra’s only intention is to cause trouble, and he
stalks away after the signing calling out that if Sandra wants to stir it
up for him, the truth will come out and will not be to her advantage.
Later Andrew' hears the story about Pietro again, this time from San¬
dra. Little things, like his insistence on being able to take movie shots
of Sandra in the house when they arrive, have established both his
insensitivity and his role as an intruder. His curiosity, still fairly inno¬
cent, remains obstinate and unflagging. Reluctantly Sandra shows him
round the house the next day, pointing out the places where, she
claims, Pietro used to leave messages for her. Niched in a statue of
Cupid and Psyche in her mother’s apartment is a note from Gianni,
which Sandra claims, absurdly, to be an old note from Pietro. Andrew
appears to accept this, but it is no longer possible for him to be put
off. As in a Hitchcock film, from being an innocent outsider he now
becomes the pivot of the action. He is determined to know the facts,
at whatever cost, but still preserves his naive belief, now verging on
the disingenuous, that he is acting in the common interest and that
uncovering the truth will serve to heal the rifts and bring the family
together.
To this end, when Sandra goes to her assignation with Gianni,
Andrew sets out to find Gilardini. What Gilardini tells him we are not
told. Whatever it was, Andrew’s appreciation of the situation is not
much altered. He determines to invite both Gilardini and Pietro to
dinner, to bring about a general reconciliation. Gianni is tactful and
urbane, and so at the outset is Gilardini. But a vicious remark from
Sandra stings Gilardini to retaliate. He openly accuses the brother and
sister of past incest. Andrew asks Gianni to deny it, which Gianni, in
honesty to his present feelings and interpretation of the past, refuses
to do. Andrew’s response is horror, which explodes in violence. He
sets about beating up Gianni to force a denial, still refusing ostensibly
to believe that Gilardini’s accusation is true, but at the same time con¬
vinced that there is no other explanation for what he has heard and
seen. When Sandra also fails to deny it, he leaves for New York, leav¬
ing a note for Sandra that all is forgotten and asking her to join him.
His search for the truth has brought him up against something which,
true or not, is unacceptable, and rather than face it he is prepared to
renounce his inquiry and declare that, after all, the past is not import¬
ant. His reversal of his former position is surprising, particularly since

113
he had taken part, with Sandra, in an inquiry into the Auschwitz mas¬
sacres. His concern to discover the truth about her family began there.
But he has no proper understanding of the meaning of the past, and
his public and private attitudes contradict each other. When the past
threatens him directly, he turns and runs.
The ambiguity of Andrew’s situation is that he enters the film as an
outsider, with no past guilt behind him. He has done nothing and has
nothing to conceal. But it is his clumsy probings which precipitate the
confrontation between Gianni and Gilardini, and he more than anyone
is responsible for the final tragedy. As a character he is both unimagina¬
tive and self-deceiving. In some ways, despite Michael Craig’s very
British playing of the role, he is a caricature of the Ugly American, ratio¬
nalistic and uncomprehending, and liable to resort to bludgeoning
violence when his superficial rationality fails him. He sees himself in a
role similar to that of a management consultant sorting out the prob¬
lems of a disintegrating family business. Morally his error lies in not
appreciating the extent of his own involvement. He is part of the family
structure and has motivations of his own as well. His psychology and his
understanding of his own situation are, however, relatively insignificant,
compared with his objective role. Utterly taken by surprise by events
which are beyond his comprehension, he nevertheless fulfils the func¬
tion allotted to him. He liberates Sandra from dependence on her
family, but only at the cost of destroying the family itself.
In contrast to Andrew, Pietro plays an entirely passive role. He is
used by Gianni and Sandra as a diversion, both in the past and dur¬
ing the film. He is perfectly aware of being used. Infatuated with San¬
dra as a boy, he was forced to see himself as an outsider both by his
social class and by the exclusive relationship of the brother and sister.
Now, as a doctor attached to the local sanatorium, he is in a position
to observe the mother’s madness and her relationship with her ‘viper-
ish’ children. He has no active role forced on him by his position, and
is too intelligent, and probably knows too much, to wish to interfere
of his own accord. He is not so much above as below the action, the
hapless victim of Sandra and Gianni’s complicity, Andrew’s jealousy,
Gilardini’s mistrust, and the mother’s rages. His role is in fact the exact
obverse of Andrew’s. Pietro withdraws where Andrew rushes in. Where
Andrew has power without understanding, Pietro has understanding
but no power.
A further mirror to Pietro is provided by Fosca, the old family maid.
She, like Laura, Livia’s maid in Senso, is both knowledgeable and an

114
accomplice. But being an accomplice and having no social role inde¬
pendent of the family she serves, she is even more powerless than
Pietro. Apart from his affection for Sandra, nothing binds Pietro to the
family. He can observe its destruction, if not with indifference, with
equanimity softened by pity. According to Gianni, Pietro studied to
become a doctor because of his love for Sandra. By doing so he made
himself her equal, but his position relative to the family is still subor¬
dinate, in that he is employed by Gilardini to look after the mother.
Unlike Fosca, he stands to gain by waiting upon events. As an observer,
with understanding but without power, he resembles ’Ntoni in La terra
trema and the Prince in The Leopard. But whereas ’Ntoni is powerless
because defeated and the Prince is losing power because he has been
overtaken by events, Pietro in the same historical perspective is a rep¬
resentative, like Ciro in Rocco and His Brothers, of a new emergent class
which will take over when the long agony of the aristocracy comes to
an end.
Class questions apart, Pietro provides an implicit corrective to the
distorted visions and conflicting rationalisations of the protagonists
proper. Having no stake in the internal convolutions in which the fam¬
ily are tied up, he can view the whole affair without partipris. For mem¬
bers of the family themselves, however, things are not so simple. The
mother has withdrawn into madness, thumping out the Cesar Franck
Prelude and Fugue on the piano and nursing among her private
wounds an especial hatred for her daughter. Gilardini, whose cautious
manner suggests a man with something to hide, is concerned, osten¬
sibly, to protect her from her children and the family as a whole from
the world outside. Neither Gianni nor Sandra can accept his version
of affairs, but for different reasons. To Sandra he is the man who
replaced, and possibly denounced, her father. To Gianni he is rather
the ravisher of his mother. The conflict between generations is com¬
plicated by differences of attitude, which are to have far-reaching con¬
sequences, between the children.
The Freudian basis of the different vision of events held by the
brother and the sister is obvious. It is also one of the few direct points
of contact with the Orestes myth. Significantly, the first meeting of
Gianni and Sandra takes place in the garden which is about to be dedi¬
cated to their father’s memory. Sandra is silently embracing the veiled
bust of her father. When Gianni enters, she turns away, and he
embraces her. It looks more like the meeting of lovers than of siblings,
however close the family bonds. Andrew, who supervenes looking for

115
Sandra, is visibly embarrassed, and the surprise is heightened for the
spectator by Gianni’s dramatic appearance behind the iron grille of the
gate leading to the garden. The important thing, however, is not the
shock but the way the action portrays the relationships: Andrew’s pos¬
ition as outsider, Sandra’s obsessional cult of her father, and Gianni’s
love for Sandra.
The pattern of relationships revealed in this scene is further
reflected in the different accounts that Gianni and Sandra give of their
childhood and of the links that bind them together. Gianni has just
found out that he is in love with his sister, whom he had tried to for¬
get. It is her marriage which has made him realise that he is not capable
of forgetting her, and at the time of the wedding (as Sandra discovers
from Fosca) he returned secretly to his childhood home, while pre¬
tending to be in London. His discovery, as an adult, of his feelings
towards his sister and their apparent continuity from his early adoles¬
cence makes him project his present feelings back on to the past. He
has just completed a novel, based on their childhood together, which
represents the relationship as explicitly incestuous, hoping thereby to
objectify and so exorcise the guilt he feels about the past and the pres¬
ent passion which absorbs him. Publishing the novel will liberate him
both from Sandra and from the family home by giving him for the first
time emotional and financial independence.
Gianni shows Sandra the manuscript. She is horrified, and in her
horror he sees the possibility of a different bargain altogether. If she
refuses him permission to publish, he will offer to destroy it, on con¬
dition that she stays with him in Volterra admitting their complicity.
But he has miscalculated her reaction. Her articulated response to the
book is incredibly superficial. She is afraid of the gossip that will ensue,
of the image that will be formed of her in other people’s minds. But
this does not mean that she will be prepared to stay with him if the
book is suppressed. People would talk even then. Besides, these are not
her real reasons. What Gianni took to be the shock of recognition and
a fear of the secret truth being revealed outside was nothing of the kind.
To Sandra, rationalising the events she lived through together with
Gianni many years before, all the complicity, the exclusive isolation,
the secret games, even the embraces, were tokens, not of reciprocated
passion but of racial solidarity. Sandra’s real love is for her father, not
her brother; and she hates her mother as much as she hates Gilardini.
To her it is the fact of Jewishness, inherited from the father, that binds
her and Gianni together, in defence of the father’s memory and as a
permanent gesture of defiance against the couple who betrayed him.
Sandra’s version of events is as shocking to Gianni as his was to
her. He does not deny his Jewish heritage, and he wears the Star of
David just as she does. But to him this is not the important factor.
What horrifies Gianni is Sandra’s indifference, and worse, to their
mother, whom he still loves. In the scene in the town hall he showed
himself worried at the possible consequences of Sandra’s precipitate
visit to the mother. This visit, shown in flashback from the point of
view of Sandra, gives the impression of stubborn incomprehension
and implacable hatred on both sides. Later, in discussion with Sandra,
Gianni openly accuses her of driving the mother mad. But he still has
not got the measure of her potential for destruction. He does not
realise, for example, that it could be turned against him as well.
Sandra’s problem is essentially one of lack of identity. Unable to
find within herself an explanation of who she is and why, she uses
other people as a mirror in which to look at herself. But the image she
finds reflected there offers no assurance. Only Andrew, the outsider
with no knowledge of her past, allows her to feel at home in herself.
Her racial self-assertion is one aspect of her crisis; another, more
serious, is her determination to stamp out, during her visit to Volterra,

117

The mother (opposite)

all versions of who she is which differ from her own. She demands to
be vindicated, even at the cost of destroying whoever opposes her
design.
Gianni no longer has this problem. He has managed, or thinks he
has, through his novel, to objectify the past and at the same time to
take responsibility for it. His story satisfies him, whether or not it is
objectively correct. Sandra, however, is unable to lay her hands on the
past and to say unequivocally: ‘That is what I was and this is what I
am.’ Her Jewishness is a kind of totem which gives only a formal and
petrified explanation of her to the world and to herself. Once again, as
so often in Visconti’s films, we are faced with the problem of a past
which is inescapable and denies any possibility of advance. Only here,
unlike elsewhere, it is the characters’ inability to understand and
assume responsibility, rather than the past history itself, which creates
the barrier.
As with Natalia in White Nights, the existential problem facing San¬
dra has psychological or even psycho-pathological manifestations.
After the confrontation at dinner Gianni burns his manuscript, partly
as a gesture confessing failure - the past is not entirely exorcised -
partly as a final attempt to persuade Sandra to stay. When she comes
to see him, in order to explain that she cannot stay with him, he accuses
her of perverse mortification of the flesh - a charge which, though
slanted and personally motivated, is accurate. The next scene shows
her performing the cleansing ritual of taking a bath and shrouding her¬
self in the purity of white in preparation for the ceremony. She winds
a white veil round her head, and draws it tight over her face like a
Carmelite nun as she stares into the mirror. Her choice of white
appears both as an unconscious response to Gianni’s charge, and as
an assertion of purity and a denial of responsibility. In more objective
terms, cutting out the psychological factor and relating the scene more
directly to the structure, the choice of colour is even more significant.
It vindicates Gianni’s perception of her, and it announces the reso¬
lution of her problems.
There is a terrible irony in her denial of responsibility at this point.
The ceremony takes place in the morning. After leaving Gianni’s room
in the evening she has sat up for a while as if undecided, with a letter
from Andrew in front of her and the knowledge in the back of her mind
that Gianni has threatened to kill himself, before she makes the choice
it was always determined that she should make. Gianni has attempted
suicide before, but mainly as a threat, relying on being discovered by

118
Sandra or his parents before it was too late. This time Sandra elects to
ignore the threat, though she must have known what it meant. As she
sits writing her reply to Andrew, Gianni is writhing on the floor in his
mother’s bedroom struggling desperately to avert a death he never
really intended to bring upon himself.
It is Pietro’s intuition that leads Fosca to discover Gianni’s body in
the mother’s apartment. As Pietro rushes down to the garden to bring
the news, the ceremony has already started. The dignitaries have col¬
lected. Sandra and her mother, the survivors, are standing side by side,
staring fixedly forward, while a rabbi intones phrases in Hebrew about
resurrection and the eternal life. The scene is bitterly ironic. Gianni is
now dead, and the rabbi’s words, after the scene of Gianni’s agony, have
a hollow ring about them. And not only is Gianni dead, but the father,
in the midst of this apotheosis of his memory, is undergoing a second
death in Sandra’s consciousness. Sandra, like her mother, has achieved
a kind of dubious liberation. The family, as such, no longer exists.
The film ends here.There is no further scene to parallel the opening
sequence in Geneva. As I suggested in connection with Senso, the
drama, once it has acquired its momentum, works towards its own reso¬
lution and is self-contained. But the structure of the film is sufficiently
transparent, and its outside references sufficiently explicit, to enable
certain conclusions to be drawn which exceed the narrowly defined lim¬
its of the family tragedy. The family has destroyed itself from inside, but
only when it had long lost its cohesiveness and its function. Since the
death of the father, a scientist, and the madness of the mother, a concert
pianist, it has nothing to give to the world. Gilardini, whose main job is
to hold together the estate, is a mere administrator. His intrusion into
the hereditary group forces the children unnaturally together. Gianni is
a romantic, whose ideal self-image is deceived by reality: he supple¬
ments an inadequate income as a gossip columnist by periodic raids on
the property. Sandra’s choice of a job in Geneva was dictated by piety to
her father’s memory. Her only hope now lies in breaking with the past.
Andrew, the American, is the means through which she can do this. Her
survival is not so much trasformismo as submergence. She can take
nothing with her into the new world except what she has to offer to
Andrew.
Pietro and Andrew are the inheritors: Andrew because he can
absorb Sandra, Pietro because the destruction of the family is the end
of a world in which his only place was as a subordinate. This brings us
back to the metaphor at the beginning of the film. The journey into

119
the past must be interpreted macrocosmically. It is not only the fam¬
ily past but an entire past world that Andrew and Sandra are visiting
in Volterra. When Gianni is showing Andrew round the town, they sit
on the edge of one of the baize, a steep eroding cliff overlooking a vol¬
canic landscape. Erosion has begun to eat into the town. The Camal-
dolese friars have been forced to abandon their monastery. Volterra,
like the family, is slowly crumbling away.
Erosion of a different kind threatens the town from a different
direction. Isolated though it is, Volterra shows all the usual signs of the
advance of modern civilisation - Coca-Cola advertisements stuck on
the wall of a house by the road, a juke box in a cafe blaring out the pop
message, albeit in a half-hearted Italian form, into the streets. When
Gianni and Andrew return to the house on the first evening, the music
follows them. ‘Io che non vivo senza te,’ the singer mourns, almost too
pointedly - ‘I who cannot live without you’ - as the camera cuts from
Gianni to Andrew to Sandra asleep in their beds.6 The cine-camera
which Andrew brings with him is another emblem of the new world,
not so much in its role as a technical toy, but because, in Andrew’s
handling of it, it is a denial of history. ‘Truth twenty-four times a sec¬
ond,’ in Godard’s phrase,7 is unhistorical and unanalytical truth, which
is one possible reason for Sandra’s resentment at being photographed.
It is significant therefore that the camera belongs to Andrew, the only
character who is prepared to believe that history is bunk and who rep¬
resents, on a personal plane, the cultural levelling process by which
Volterra is being overtaken.
Enough has been said about the symbolic structure of Vaghe stelle
dell’Orsa to indicate the extent to which the film transcends the banal¬
ity of what seem at first sight to be its themes. It remains only to con¬
sider the parallel question of style and the relationship to the structure
of the melodramatic presentation of the action.
One or two basic observations should be made first. The print of the
film which has circulated in Britain has acquired a muddy texture in the
process of duping and copying. The clarity and high contrasts apparently
intended by Visconti have therefore been lost. The contrasts of black and
white are very important in the film, both for sensory effect (the action
takes place in high summer) and symbolically. The symbolism is not that
of the traditional moral opposition between the forces of light and the
forces of darkness. It can best be described as a kind of visual extrem¬
ism which counterpoints the nuance in assessing the scene.8
The camera work too is emphatic. The camera is unusually mobile

120
for a Visconti film, and there are a number of zoom shots. (Visconti’s
normal preference is for slow tracks and the maximum of movement
within the frame.) The effect, particularly of the zooms, is a kind of
forced animation, very unlike the rest of his work. In White Nights there
is a similar occasional forcing of the pace, but it is not produced by the
camera. Here, in Vaghe stelle delVOrsa, camera and cutting techniques
are used to attract attention. Some of the effects are amazingly crude,
but they are never out of place. The obtrusive camera work is part of
the mode of presentation. Like the use of heavy chiaroscuro in the light¬
ing it can best be described, not in any pejorative sense, as Baroque.
The art-historical analogy with the painting of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries helps to explain the question of the so-called
‘melodramatic’ quality of Vaghe stelle delVOrsa. The problems facing the
Mannerist and Baroque painters were complex and unparalleled. But
in one respect at least their experience is relevant and illuminating.The
painters of Raphael’s generation had perfected the art of composition
and of representation of the human figure. They had divinised the
human and humanised the divine. One of the problems facing their
successors was that of expressing a more tortured and dramatic con¬
ception of human/divine relations without falling back on earlier rep¬
resentational techniques. The Madonna and the Saints could now be
perfectly and naturalistically represented as superhuman people. But
they were not just individuals who could be idealised. Their roles in
the Catholic system exceeded their simple human individuality, and
the means of their presentation had to express them in their transcend¬
ent role, with all the tensions and dramatisations that this entailed.
The parallel with Visconti is obvious. We have met the problem
before in relation to the conflict of ideality and reality in Senso and
White Nights. Within Vaghe stelle delVOrsa we have already seen how
Pietro, though insignificant as an individual, nevertheless has a histori¬
cal role of great importance. We have also seen how the pathology of
Gianni’s incestuous feeling and Sandra’s suspected masochism relates
upwards and inwards to problems of a different order, not transcen¬
dent as in Catholic Baroque, but historical and existential. The
Baroque and the melodrama are not intended to magnify the patho¬
logical aspects to the exclusion of the rest, but to transform them. A
psychological study of incest is precisely what Vaghe stelle delVOrsa is
not. Had the style of the film been naturalistic it would have been rea¬
sonable to have understood the film in that way. But with the stylistic
implications what they are, the error is inexcusable.

121
Notes
1. See Luchino Visconti: Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa, edited by Pietro Bianchi (Bologna:
Cappelli, 1965) and also review by Gordon Gow in Films and Filming, Decem¬
ber 1965. [I have to say that I no longer agree with the negative judgment of
Cardinale’s acting. Indeed I am a bit embarrassed to have made it in the first
place. It now seems to me that Cardinale, while not entirely at ease in the role,
in fact interprets the part (with the director’s help) very well (2002).]
2. [The US title is Sandra (2002).]
3. FLO Rio: Where’s the ring
That which your mother in her will bequeathed.
And charged you on her blessing not to give it
To any but your husband? Send back that.
anabella: I have it not.
floRio: Ha! have it not; where is it?
anabella: My brother in the morning took it from me,
Said he would wear it today. (Act 2, Sc. vi.)
4. Gow, Films and Filming, cited above.
5. Richard Roud, in Sight and Sound, Winter 1965-6.
6. It is perhaps worth pointing out that the words of this song in Italian are a great
deal more mournful and sentimental than those of the Dusty Springfield’s cover
version ‘You don’t have to say you love me’. The fact that the tune is the same
can easily mislead English spectators into reading in an irony which is not in
fact present in the film.
7. Put into the mouth of Bruno in Le Petit Soldat, but representative of Godard’s
position then if not now. [No: ironic, even then (2002).]
8. A technical feature of a different kind worth drawing attention to here is the
difference in acting style between the representatives of the two generations. As
Gilardini and the mother, Renzo Ricci and Marie Bell, both of whom have
mainly theatrical training and experience, act much more than Cardinale and
Jean Sorel.

122
9: Rocco and His Brothers

There is a strange, rather unrealistic scene in La terra trema where a

man arrives in the village, wanders around talking to people, and then
leaves in a boat taking with him a group of young men, destination
uncertain. Among these young men is Cola Valastro. Before leaving he
has a conversation with his brother ’Ntoni which, according to Vis¬
conti, was improvised on the spot, and in which the narrow geo¬
graphical frontiers of the fisherman’s world are clearly affirmed. Cola
is embarking for the North, ‘al continente’, symbolised by Naples, the
Ultima Thule of the fishermen’s vision. This scene, though it fits
uneasily into the tight structure of La terra trema, was soon vindicated
historically. In the boom years of the 1950s and early 1960s ever-
increasing numbers of men and families began to emigrate from stag¬
nant rural areas in the South towards the expanding industrial centres
of Northern Italy. Despised (as savages) and distrusted (as black
labour) by the Northerners, ignorant of the world of the golden cities
for which they were heading, they ended up for the most part as an
insecure, disillusioned, ghetto-living sub-proletariat on the fringes of
the great industrial complexes. It is their problem, and that of the
society to which they have to adapt, that provides the starting-point for
Rocco and His Brothers.
Rocco and His Brothers was made in 1959,1 immediately after the
radical aesthetic experiment of White Nights, and is a deliberate step
backwards, the first stage of Visconti’s moment of involution. It is, in
a sense, a sequel to La terra trema and a substitute for those episodes
of that film which Visconti still regrets never having been able to make.
But in the years that elapsed between the two films Visconti, like Italy
itself, had moved on. The subject proposed for the new film was too
unwieldy for it to be possible to combine a compact narrative with
documentary (or anthropological) treatment. No one would have
backed such a project if it had been put forward. In any case Visconti
had no intention of being caught again in the trap of documentarism.
From the moment of the film’s inception, the complexity of its subject
was reflected in a complexity of treatment unparalleled in Visconti’s

123
work. In addition to Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Visconti’s regular and con¬
stant collaborator on all his films since Bellissima, a number of other
scriptwriters were called in during the many stages of the elaboration
of the narrative. Though the nucleus of the story was original, the final
script incorporated moments of literary inspiration ranging from Dos¬
toyevsky and Thomas Mann through Verga to the Milanese stories of
Giovanni Testori. The building up of the story was contributed to by
various hands, but the ultimate control at every stage rested with Vis¬
conti himself, and the final shape of the film reflects the sum of his
artistic experience up to that date - not only La terra trema but Osses-
sione and Bellissima and, above all, Senso.
The lessons inherent in Visconti’s experience make themselves felt
in two ways: in the construction of a human drama out of a historical
situation, and in his choice of actors. Although its subject sounds like
a return to La terra trema (perhaps as ‘Episodio della Citta’), in style
and in ideological content Rocco and His Brothers is much more a con¬
tinuation of Senso. Visconti has described his form of cinema as
‘anthropomorphic’.2 Essentially what this means is that the totality of
a historical situation, both its static form and the process of its evo¬
lution, is crystallised in certain human figurations and in the develop¬
ment of a human drama. (If this sounds just a complicated way of
stating a truism, one has only to look at all the directors with whom
this is not the case.) In La terra trema this anthropomorphism is sup¬
pressed by the view that Visconti is obliged to take of his subject - a
geographical location - and the way this view is expressed from the
ground up by the film’s protagonists - the natural inhabitants of Aci
Trezza. In La terra trema the characterisation of ’Ntoni is unique. He
is the only character whose responses are adequate to extend the film
on to the level of a historical consciousness and who provides an
anthropomorphic figuration of the kind Visconti was aiming at. For the
rest the film remains fundamentally a documentary study of a place
which is taken to contain within its frontiers an example of a univer¬
sal form of social exploitation, and its characters do not emerge from
their particular and passive roles as elements of the social and eco¬
nomic system. Rocco and His Brothers, like Senso, aims to go beyond the
limits imposed by a sociological viewpoint of this type. It is a con¬
densed and dramatic highlighting of a particular moment in history.
Its geographical and social boundaries (Milan in the 1950s; an immi¬
grant family) are the result of a tremendous effort of historical con¬
centration. The private events which it narrates mirror the tensions of

124
a wider historical situation, but only indirectly, through the con¬
sciousness of the participants. The drama which then explodes within
the family and the subsequent tragedy is brought about by the par¬
ticipants themselves, and is an active expression of the contradictions
inherent in their condition.
Visconti’s choice of actors to express his theme was at first sight
disconcerting: the mother of the Parondi3 family to be played by
Katina Paxinou, who is Greek; Renato Salvatori, Alain Delon, Spiros
Focas, and Max Cartier as four of her sons; plus Claudia Cardinale
and Annie Girardot as fiancees and mistresses. This distribution
reflects to a certain extent no doubt the producer’s insistence on a star
line-up. But many of the choices were clearly Visconti’s, notably Delon
in the part of Rocco, and show him continuing the pattern set in Bel-
lissima and Senso of using actors for their persona as well as for their
professional skill. Renato Salvatori, for example, besides being a very
good and incidentally very subtle actor, has exactly the physique and
facial characteristics to convey the charm and gradual disintegration
of Simone, the second brother. On any grounds, naturalistic or other,
he was an obvious choice. But Delon as Rocco was less obvious. Quite
apart from the fact that, like Paxinou and Girardot, he is not Italian,
which meant that the film would have to be post-synchronised,4 Delon
is far too fragile physically to be credible as either a peasant (which is
what he starts as) or a professional boxer (which is what he becomes).
Visconti’s judgment can, I think, be vindicated, in terms of the
requirements of his anthropomorphic ideal. He chooses actors to fit
into a role, not to conform to a type or merge into an environment.
Whereas the neo-realist requirement was for someone ideally repre¬
sentative of a type of character drawn from their observation and was
best filled in many cases by someone who actually was what they were
supposed to represent, Visconti’s demand is for a more complex figur¬
ation. In the first place his characters are not typical members of a
class, but individuals. These individuals, in their relations with other
characters in the film, then represent something that goes beyond their
simple individuality. What is required of the actor is to incarnate the
idea of the character, in both its individual and supra-individual
aspects, and to project it. If a professional technique is needed to inter¬
pret a role which is not simply drawn from life, from the director’s
point of view the actor’s physical appearance is equally important for
the use he can make of it independent of any effort of psychological
interpretation on the actor’s part. The choice of Delon is a case in

125
point. He is meant to look fragile, and it is essential to our under¬
standing of Rocco that we should realise this. It is not so much Delon
who is miscast in the role, as Rocco who is miscast in his environment.
Both as a person and for what he represents, Rocco is ill-adapted to
the world in which he lives and incapable of carrying the burden he
assumes upon himself.
The argument about casting has further implications. To say that
the actor incarnates the idea of a character raises the problem of the
relation of the sign to the signified over the film as a whole. In a film,
where the units of language cannot be isolated and given specific and
unambiguous meanings or functions, there is always a possibility that
the translation into images will obscure some intended meanings and
create others not originally intended. Intentional and actual do not
always coincide. The danger is particularly acute in Visconti’s case
because of a peculiarity in his method of work which we first noticed
in connection with La terra trema. In Rocco and His Brothers, as in La
terra trema, he started with a clear intellectual conception of what he
wanted to say, and then saw this conception gradually modify itself in
response to suggestions that came to him as he worked. In La terra
trema the result was almost a new film. In Rocco and His Brothers the
effect is partly of enrichment and partly of confusion. Alterations were
made to the script right up to the last minute. Then, during the shoot¬
ing, scenes which had been restrained in intention were developed in
a way which belies the original indications in the script. As a result
changes have taken place in the structure of the film which Visconti
perhaps did not fully foresee and which he would not necessarily
recognise as having taken place.5
The general direction in which these changes work is to alter the bal¬
ance between positive and negative characters. Those who gain in
stature from the changes at the expense of the others are Rocco and the
mother. Both of them in theory represent a backward form of con¬
sciousness of which the film set out to be a critique. But in their different
ways they both of them achieve in practice a grandeur and a tragic qual¬
ity which is denied to the others. Ciro, in particular, the next brother
after Rocco, is overshadowed. His role, originally intended to be positive
and important, is correspondingly reduced, and he appears as a shad¬
owy and insignificant character whose main function seems to be to
clear up the mess caused by the titanic struggle of the major figures.
Just how this shift in the balance came about is not easy to analyse.
Partly it seems to be due to the acting, and to a potential discovered

126

Vincenzo with his wife Ginetta and family (opposite)

in the figurations when the film was under way. The imperious power
and enormous egotism conveyed in Katina Paxinou’s performance
exceed any indications of the mother’s character given in the script. In
one sequence in particular, early on in the film, when she is trying to
pack her sons off to work shovelling snow off the streets in the early
morning, Visconti allows her total histrionic domination of the scene.
Her possessiveness and ambition come across as a tremendous, loving,
and all-embracing dynamism sweeping the family onwards towards the
justice and success that are its rightful due. That her possessiveness is
selfish and tyrannical and her ambitions pernicious and misplaced
emerges as a mere abstract reflection by comparison with the sym¬
pathetic power of the performance.
Partly, however, even here, the shift can be seen as a necessary con¬
sequence of the translation of an intellectual conception into concrete
images. At an immediate level, on the screen, there is no positive and
negative, only real and unreal. The true significance of the mother’s
tyrannical behaviour has to be deciphered from a set of loose indi¬
cations scattered throughout the film.There is no doubting her reality,
but intuition (or prejudice) alone is not enough to enable one to see,
from behind the performance, just what the mother is doing. For that

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iJMm
Mm .r
*1
one needs a grasp of the structure, and a structure which is pellucid
enough in print may not be so when the script is turned into film. What
particularly unbalances the contrast between Rocco and Ciro, in these
terms, is that Rocco’s role is defined in action throughout the film, and
Ciro’s mainly by a long speech which he delivers at the end. However
evenly matched they might be on paper, translation into images was
bound to disturb the balance.
The scaling down of the positive figure of Ciro had, however, begun
earlier, during the elaboration of the final script. Visconti originally
envisaged him as a trade-union militant, and clearly representative,
from a Socialist viewpoint, of positive class consciousness. In the final
script, as in the finished film, he is a more ordinary figure altogether - a
lad who goes to night school and studies to get technical qualifications
and to integrate himself as a skilled mechanic in the industrial world.
One last change should be mentioned in order to complete the pic¬
ture, and that is the removal during the editing of an opening sequence
dedicated to the mother and set in Lucania in Southern Italy before the
family’s journey to Milan. In the literary structure this had a clear func¬
tion, which was to situate the mother very emphatically in her peasant
environment and to establish a point of reference against which her
behaviour in Milan could be understood and eventually criticised.
In the film as it stands the point is not entirely lost, but there is no doubt
that dropping this scene means that the socially determined motivations
in the figure of the mother are less clearly brought out than they would
have been. Helped by Paxinou’s performance she becomes more
autonomous as a person. Anthropomorphism takes over from soci¬
ology, and in the process the film becomes much more ambivalent than
a reading of the script would suggest.
This ambivalence is deeply rooted in the structure of the film, and
has led to Rocco and His Brothers being interpreted in two apparently
contradictory fashions, as a psychological drama and as a political
tract. That it is not, even in intention and still less as finally realised, a
simple political tract can be demonstrated from the changes that Vis¬
conti made in the film as it proceeded. But the other interpretation is
equally fallacious. The political element derived from the scenario sur¬
vives into the film. It does not act as the motor of the action, but pro¬
vides a critical perspective necessary to judgment of the drama.
The story of Rocco and His Brothers unfolds as a series of episodes,
merging into each other, in which each of Rosaria Parondi’s five sons
moves in turn to occupy the centre of the stage. Each brother in a crude

128
sense represents a certain kind of solution to the problems facing a
Southern immigrant in a Northern urban environment. These solu¬
tions are not abstractly conceived, but evolve dialectically, each in
response to the contradictions and inadequacies discovered in the last.
The film opens with the bewildered arrival of Rosaria and four of her
sons, Simone, Rocco, Ciro and Luca, at the Stazione Centrale in
Milan. The eldest son, Vincenzo, is already settled in the North and is
engaged to the daughter of another immigrant family. It is in her house
that the Parondi find Vincenzo, and their arrival instantly sparks off a
row between the two clans, with Vincenzo uneasily trapped between
his loyalty and submission to his family on the one hand, and his love
for Ginetta and his determination to keep his independence on the
other. Vincenzo has opted for an easy compromise: a steady if un¬
demanding job and a wife from his own community to assist his inte¬
gration. But Rosaria admits of no compromise where the family is
concerned. She loses him his job and drives a wedge between him and
the sophisticated, petty-bourgeois Ginetta, by imposing on him her
conception of sexual relations in which the man, her son, should take
himself a woman, if necessary by force. In an attempt to get Ginetta
back, Vincenzo articulates these ideas to her and is smartly slapped in
the face as a result. It is a long time before he and Ginetta and their
respective families are again reconciled.
Vincenzo’s mediocrity and confusion of loyalties does not escape
Simone. His solution is more radical, but again it is limited by his roots,
both moral and material, in the immigrant world. He asserts his inde¬
pendence of family ties, though he is prepared to profit from them
whenever convenient. He becomes a boxer, which is a classic mode of
advancement for ambitious members of exploited but emergent ethnic
groups. He also starts going out with Nadia, a good-time girl who stands
in the same relation to him as Ginetta does to Vincenzo. Also of immi¬
grant descent, and also more emancipated intellectually than her man,
her pursuit of the good life has led her to become a prostitute. Simone
too sells his body for financial gain, both by becoming a boxer and also
(an even more pointed parallel) by using his sexual attractiveness to
seduce a middle-aged woman in order to steal her jewels.6
The trouble that Simone gets into rebounds on to Rocco. Faced with
Simone’s excesses and gradual degeneration into criminality, Rocco,
who after Simone was his mother’s favourite, sees it as his responsibility
to hold the family together, and sacrifices himself body and soul not
only to Simone and the family but to the system that subjugates them.

129
Simone and Nadia

A confrontation between Simone and Nadia

During his military service he encounters Nadia, just released from a
spell inside, in one of those Italian provincial towns that seem to exist
only for the sake of their barracks and their prison. He and Nadia fall in
love. Simone is both jealous and offended. As the elder brother he claims
proprietary right to Nadia, as his woman. He finds out that Rocco and
Nadia are together, and rapes her while two of his friends hold on to
Rocco and force him to be a passive and humiliated spectator of what is
going on. Simone then turns against Rocco, who hardly defends him¬
self, and beats him up.
When he has recovered, Rocco finds Nadia again and tells her that
he can’t be with her any more and that she should go back to Simone.
This perverse act of self-sacrifice, which Rocco makes as they stand
together on the pinnacled roof of Milan Cathedral, leads also to
Nadia’s destruction. Simone is heavily in debt, and to rescue him
Rocco sells himself to the boxing promoter on a long-term contract.
Rocco is fundamentally incapable of hatred, either towards his brother
or towards his opponents. For his brother’s sake he learns to be a boxer
and to overcome his natural gentleness in the ring. At the same time,
however, Simone’s violence to Nadia has penetrated below the
defences of Rocco’s ideological non-violence. Though he still refuses
to hate his brother openly or to admit the ambivalence of his feelings,
there is an element of repressed hatred for Simone, as well as of self-
sacrifice, that now drives him on in the ring.
One evening, when Rocco is fighting, Simone finds Nadia, whom
he had brought to live with him in his mother’s flat, and who had left
after a row with Rosaria, and he takes her out into the country. The
barrier of communication between them is total. In a final attempt to
break through to her, he assaults her, then desists in horror at his own
violence. She is ice-cold and resigned. She wants nothing from him
except an end to the misery he has caused her. When he advances
towards her with a knife, she lifts her arms from her sides in a gesture
of crucifixion. He stabs her once without emotion, then paroxysmically
again and again.' Meanwhile, in parallel montage, Rocco is shown
fighting for his life against a stronger and fiercer opponent. With his
guard wide open and blood on his face he seems to be going under,
then appears to remember himself and what he is supposed to be doing
there. With a last effort he summons up all the savagery he is capable
of feeling and pursues his opponent round the ring and knocks him
down. While Simone walks away, alone, from Nadia’s body, family and
friends crowd jubilantly round Rocco in celebration of his success.

131

Ciro with the youngest brother, Luca (opposite)

 The contrasts contained in the montage between Simone’s murder
of Nadia and Rocco’s symbolic slaughter of his opponent are of vari¬
ous kinds. At the most basic and generalised level there is the coun¬
terpointing of two forms of violence. In terms of the relationship
between the brothers there is a reference to Rocco’s sacrifice of him¬
self to Simone, and the fruitless and indeed catastrophic result of this
sacrifice. Within Rocco’s own psychological development there is the
fact that he has learnt to hate. There is also in Rocco’s determination
an implied contrast with Simone’s own career as a boxer. Simone was
very good at demolishing weaker opponents, but easily collapsed under
pressure. His response to his predicament with Nadia is in a sense
predicated in his career as a boxer, both in the fact that it was in the
ring that he acquired the habit of violence, and in his bafflement when
faced with a situation which he cannot easily dominate. Finally, there
is in the scene a purely rhythmic parallelism between the two events,
the two acts of revenge - Simone’s against Nadia and Rocco’s against
his destiny of sacrifice - which are both equally tragic and absurd, and
which achieve their climax at the same time.
The tragic destinies of Simone and Rocco effectively end here,
with this sequence, which is the dramatic high-point of the film. The
next phase belongs to Ciro. Simone appears, bloodstained, at the fam¬
ily party where Rocco’s victory is being celebrated. Rocco and the
mother, for Simone’s sake and that of the family, take him in and pre¬
pare to shield him. But Ciro escapes from the party and denounces
Simone to the police. For a long time he has watched with dismay the
narrow loyalties and extreme solidarity of the family group. Now the
time has come when he finds himself obliged to act, and does so ruth¬
lessly, opening up the family sanctum to the cold winds of external
justice.
In a final sequence Ciro explains to Luca, the youngest brother,
what he has done and why he did it. Luca is still a child, and his hori¬
zons are bounded by the family. Unlike the others he remembers the
South only vaguely, but he has the idea that he would like some day to
go back, to renew contact with the world of his origins. Ciro has no
such nostalgia. He has fought hard to liberate himself from the burden
of being a Southerner, and has no intention of sacrificing his hard-won
gains: his Milanese girlfriend, his skilled job at Alfa Romeo. By betray¬
ing his family he has broken the last remaining tie with the past. Luca,
who is so much younger, will be able to enjoy the luxury of rediscov¬
ering his roots; Ciro cannot.

132
 The final dialogue completes the process whereby the initiative is
passed from one brother to the next and we are given an insight into the
problem facing each one and the way each reacts against the last and
carries on from where his elder brother left off. But by the time we reach
the end the procedure has become summary and intellectualised. Ciro
and Luca, compared with Simone and Rocco, are mere symbols. They
articulate (Luca childishly, Ciro in a more adult fashion) their own con¬
sciousness of who they are and what they have to do. The story ends with
them, as a formality: the drama has already ended.
It would be truer to say, however, that the continuity from Simone
to Rocco to Ciro to Luca is a hangover from the literary structure with
which Visconti started. The significance of the changes in the shape of
the film which we analysed above lies here, in the qualitative difference
they created between Rosaria, Simone, and Rocco on the one hand,
and Ciro and Luca on the other. The tragedy of destruction involves
the first three only. Ciro and Luca are not participants, and they sur¬
vive to assimilate the lesson of the past and carry on into the future.
Luca is a pure symbol, representing the future, and comparable, in
Visconti’s work, to the child that ’Ntoni talks to at the end of La terra
trema. Ciro is more complex. Like Pietro in Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa, he is
an inheritor. What gives him his freedom is the destruction of the fam¬
ily. But unlike Pietro he is also a member of the family and is
responsible for consummating its destruction when he denounces
Simone to the police. Up to that moment, however, his role in the
drama had been insignificant, and even the act of denunciation falls
outside the family drama proper. He is also unlike the other members
of the family in that from the outset he manages to go his own way.
He is determined to carve himself out a future in his new environ¬
ment, and involves himself as little as possible in family affairs.
Whereas Rocco takes up the burden of Simone’s sins on the family’s
behalf, Ciro feels no such obligations. All he gets from the family is a
roof over his head and a knowledge of what not to be, and how to
avoid the disaster that is in store.
In relation to the family, therefore, Ciro’s role is that of a detached
consciousness. The life he participates in is elsewhere, in the outside
world. His denunciation of Simone brings the two worlds together.
Over and above his role in the family structure he represents a new
social type altogether. He is the first of the brothers to integrate suc¬
cessfully into Northern society. His conceptions are those of a North¬
ern industrial worker and no longer those inherited from his peasant

133
family. It is in accordance with these conceptions that he is able to
denounce his brother, and in so doing save the family from itself.
For what destroys the family is not Ciro’s action but its own extra¬
ordinary internal loyalties and the contradiction between these and the
society in which it finds itself. Rosaria, Rocco and Simone are all vic¬
tims of a conception of the family which has no relevance whatever to
life in an industrial society. To Rosaria, Simone’s murder of Nadia is a
delitto d’onore, a just vengeance for her ‘infidelity’. Like the Austrian
general in Senso who finds Livia’s denunciation of Franz more repre¬
hensible than Franz’s desertion, Rosaria has a moral code in terms of
which Ciro is guilty of a gross betrayal, in comparison with which
Simone’s crime is of no significance. Rocco’s appreciation of the situ¬
ation is similar to his mother’s, but is couched in more individualist
and religious terms. His feeling towards Simone is of personal as well
as family loyalty. If he gives up Nadia to Simone partly because Simone
has a right to her decreed by custom, it is also because his whole ideol¬
ogy is one of sacrifice. He loves Simone and will do anything for him.
He refuses to denounce him to ‘the justice of men’, and his own con¬
ception of justice involves taking upon himself, Christ-like, the burden
of the sins of the world. As Ciro points out, Rocco is a saint, and his
saintliness is as irrelevant and as disastrous as Rosaria’s belief in the
family and Simone’s criminality.
The criminal Simone is in many ways the most interesting charac¬
ter of all. He has two assets to help him escape his sub-proletarian des¬
tiny, his sexual charm and his strength, and he uses them to the full.
When they run out he has nothing else to rely on. He tries to have
things all ways, to enjoy Nadia for what she is and to possess her as of
right in accordance with his primitive masculinist ideas. What he lacks
is a knowledge of his own limits, and the capacity to gauge the extent
of his corruption and the precarious nature of his conquests. Ciro’s
judgment of him, as a source of corruption poisoning the whole rest
of the family, is unduly harsh. Simone is corrupted by society more
than he himself corrupts. He is permanently childlike. He is accus¬
tomed to getting all he can have, and in a world where there is so much
more to be got he wants all that as well.
The source of corruption, in so far as it can be made particular, is
Nadia. She has a much clearer idea than does Simone of the limits of
what she can expect, and unlike Simone she is completely emancipated
from traditional conceptions of sexual morality. To her Simone is a
man of a certain type, with whom she can have a certain kind of

134

Rocco in the gym with Cecchi (opposite)

relationship, and Rocco is another. To Simone, however, Nadia can
only be a prostitute or a wife. When she refuses to be either he breaks
down completely. Until it is too late she miscalculates the strength of
his passion and the extent to which he holds her responsible for his
failure. With Rocco she hopes to find a man who makes no claims for
possession and to whom she does not prostitute herself either, and
again she miscalculates, not because of anything in Rocco as a person
but because of his relationship with Simone. Neither man is in a pos¬
ition to supply what she is looking for.

Rocco and His Brothers is not an entirely satisfactory film. It is really

two films in one, an epic and a drama. The epic concerns the journey
of the Parondi family to the North of Italy, its gradual conquest of a
future in its new environment, and the liberation of Ciro from Rosaria.
The drama is the story of the triangle Simone-Nadia-Rocco, of
Rocco’s self-sacrifice and Simone’s murder of Nadia. As heroes, Rocco
and Ciro are in no way comparable. They stand for the two different
ways in which the film has been interpreted, the drama and the tract.
Rocco’s crises, his suffering and sacrifice, make him a tragic and dra¬
matic figure who engages our sympathies at an emotional level. But
once the drama has run its course the more intellectual vision reasserts
itself. Ciro, who as a character is insignificant but whose historical role
is far more important, emerges to put Rocco’s tragedy into perspec¬
tive. The two do not contradict each other. Rocco’s tragedy is no less
real for being forced on him by a conception of the world which is sub¬
sequently criticised. But nor does it annul the criticism.
To a certain extent, as we have seen, this central ambiguity is
allowed for in the construction of the film. The epic and the drama
overlap and are deliberately counterpointed. The individual and the
historical are set up in conflict with each other, and the outcome of the
conflict is that the individual is defeated. But it is not possible to see
either the conflict or its resolution as directly or exclusively represen¬
tative of Visconti’s conscious intentions. The ambiguity does not lie
simply in the problem that is posed, and left unanswered, in Rocco and
His Brothers. It strikes deeper and reflects a constant tension in Vis¬
conti’s work between an intellectual belief in the cause of progress and
an emotional nostalgia for the past world that is being destroyed. A
comparison between the finished films and their original scenarios, not
only in the case of Rocco and His Brothers, shows up the dichotomy
clearly. On the level of intentions all Visconti’s historical films - La terra
trema, Senso, Rocco and His Brothers, The Leopard, and Vaghe stelle del-
TOrsa - can be read as an illustration of a conception of history in
which change is both welcome and inevitable. But in the final realisa¬
tion nostalgia prevails over progress. The individual - Franz, Rocco,
the Prince, Gianni - rises to confront history and to be tragically
defeated. Only in two films is this pattern contradicted. In La terra
trema the defeated individual, ’Ntoni, is also the representative of
progress and historical advance. In White Nights nostalgia, in the per¬
son of Natalia, comes out triumphant. These two films are limiting
cases of a conception of the world which is consistent in its opposition
of two conflicting ideals, one rooted emotionally in the past, and the
other projected intellectually into the future. If we have chosen to fin¬
ish on a study of Rocco and His Brothers, it is because it is here that this
particular conflict, which is the problematic centre of all Visconti’s
work, is most explicitly expressed.
The sources of the conflict could be, and indeed have been,8 traced
to the anomaly of Visconti’s position as both an aristocrat, living off a
past heritage, and a Marxist and a Communist, committed to a belief
in the Socialist future. But the question is not one of giving an explan¬
ation, in any case inadequate, of why the conflict should exist. It is

136
more important to trace, within the films, the way the conflict is
expressed and, if possible, resolved. As I have tried to show, the struc¬
ture ofVisconti’s films is complex and often equivocal. Above all, the
films are works of art. They reveal the world in a particular guise: not,
perhaps, how it is in an objective sense; nor, for that matter, neces¬
sarily how we would like it to be; but how it can be perceived and
experienced by a particular individual at a particular time.

Notes
1. [Shooting did not actually get under way until February 1960. For information
on the film, its making and the public response to it, see Sam Rohdie’s excel¬
lent monograph Rocco and His Brothers (1992) in the BFI Film Classics series
(2002).]
2. Originally as far back as 1943 (‘Cinema antropomorfico’, in Cinema, first series,
no. 173-4, September-October 1943; English translation in David Overbey
(ed.), Springtime in Italy:A Reader on Neo-Realism, London: Talisman, 1978).
3. [In the 1967 edition of this book I referred to the family as Pafundi. This is
what they were originally to have been called and still are in the published
script. But a family called Pafundi objected and the name was changed to
Parondi while the film was being shot (2002).]
4. Post-synchronising is normal practice in Italy even when the actors are native
Italian speakers, and the technique has been developed to a fine art.
5. Visconti’s own explanation of the changes that take place during the making of
a film is by an analogy, borrowed from Renoir, between cinema and ceramics
(see his introduction to the script of Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa, Bologna: Cappelli,
1965).
6. [Simone also prostitutes himself, literally, to the promoter Morini early in his
career as a boxer (2002).]
7. The repeated stabbing has been cut by the British censor, with the perverse
result that the murder is more horrible than in the original, because it looks
premeditated and cold-blooded, which in reality it is not.
8. For an interpretation of Visconti which revolves largely round this anomaly of
his personal position see Yves Guillaume, Visconti (Paris: Editions Universi-
taires, 1966).

137
10: Lo straniero

After Vaghe stelle delTOrsaVisconti was contracted to make an episode

for Le streghe, a Dino De Laurentiis production starring the still incom¬
parable Silvana Mangano. It was an insignificant moment in his
career,1 and was to be followed by an even worse one - his film adap¬
tation of Camus’s L’Etranger. It was depressingly evident, as soon as
the project was announced, that as an adaptation the film was unlikely
to be a success: the only hope was that Visconti, by a suitably arrogant
disregard for the letter of the text, might yet succeed in creating a film,
loosely inspired by the events recounted by Camus, that could stand
on its own without need for reference to the original. Any such hopes
were soon disappointed. Lo straniero, to give the film its Italian title, is
a literal and even pedantic adaptation, and a film which it would be
better to be able to forget were it not for the fact that its failure is symp¬
tomatic of the involution of its author’s concern.
The crucial and irredeemable weakness of the film lies in its sub¬
servience to a quite fictitious notion of ‘great’ literature, important
because it is great and worthy of obeisance rather than because it has
certain specific (and specifically literary) qualities. With age Visconti’s
subservience to the monuments of literary culture has steadily
increased, first of all in his theatrical and operatic work and now in his
films. A brief survey of his career serves to show how the process has
gradually intensified over the years. In his early work there is almost
always a pre-existing literary text somewhere in the background, but
it serves as a starting-point and not as a point of arrival. Thus Osses-
sione is derived from James Cain’s thriller, The Postman Always Rings
Twice; La terra trema adopts a plot structure based on that ofVerga’s /
Malavoglia; Senso comes from a novella of the same title by Camillo
Boito and White Nights from Dostoyevsky. But in none of these works
is the film put forward as in any way the equivalent of the novel. In
Ossessione the setting is changed and the action simplified. In La terra
trema Verga’s style indirect litre is replaced by a deliberate effect of dis-
tanciation, the action is updated and the political lesson reversed, so
that Verga’s metaphysical fatalism is repudiated both in the style and

138
in the ostensive political content. In Senso the modifications take one
even further from the character of the original text. Not only is the
narrative filled out with all sorts of new detail, but the mode of nar¬
ration is changed so that nothing survives to link the novella and the
film except a basic situation and the outline of a plot.2 White Nights,
which follows, is perhaps closer to its original than any of the previous
films, but even there it is clear that the function of the adaptation has
been to produce a new work which uses the literary original as a sug¬
gestive source of ideas and structures. As for the supposed derivation
of Rocco and His Brothers from Thomas Mann’s monumental Joseph
and His Brethren, this is little more than an act of homage expressed in
the similarity of the titles, while the adaptation of part of the narrative
fromTestori’s II ponte della Ghisolfa, though less fictitious, is still insig¬
nificant.
In the 1960s, however, the pattern changes. Of Visconti’s next five
films after Rocco, two are made from what at first look like original
scripts and three are literal adaptations of literary classics. Of the ori¬
ginal scripts that of Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa can claim a vague literary
antecedent in Aeschylus’ Oresteia and that of The Damned can lay an
equally tenuous claim to a Shakespearean origin, basically Macbeth,
but with a little Hamlet thrown in, together with a bit from Visconti’s
great culture heroes, Dostoyevsky and Mann. What has in fact hap¬
pened is that these generic cultural derivations have taken the place
previously occupied by a particular novel or short story. They pin the
film to something already existing - in the world of culture if not in
the world that is the eventual subject of the film - but theoretically at
least they leave the author of the film free to develop his material styl¬
istically in an original way. In practice, however, the extended
metaphors which they invoke act as a surrogate for original develop¬
ment according to the inner necessity of the material. Far more than
in the early loose adaptations the film threatens to become a discourse
on culture and on the permanence of myth rather than an authentic
representation of actual events. In La terra trema the Verga text
remains in the background. It makes an interesting point of compari¬
son for evaluating the significance of the film, but it is not part of the
intended meaning. In The Damned, on the other hand, and even, to a
lesser extent, in Vaghe stelle, there is no text, absent or present, to
which one is referred, but there is a myth, and the myth remains
forcibly in the foreground because of the way it is overlaid on the
events.

139
 With the other three films it is not just a myth or a series of cul¬
tural references which assume this foreground presence but the text
itself. In each case the adaptation is literal in intention and the work
adapted is one which enjoys a reputation as a classic - Tomasi di
Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Camus’s L’Etranger and Mann’s Death in
Venice. The texts are not chosen in order to be subsequently forgotten
once they have served their purpose of providing material for the
movie, but on the contrary in order to be remembered. Though the
films can be read naively, without reference to the literary originals,
this is clearly not the author’s intention, which is rather to produce,
for the cinema, an instant equivalent of a literary classic. The film is
‘the film of the book’ and it arrogates to itself the merit of the book
as one of the reasons for seeing it. Not only that, but it is intrinsic to
the meaning of the film that it be seen as referring to a known orig¬
inal, situating it and adding its own meaning in the form of
interpretation. Thus, with The Leopard Visconti is presenting not so
much a story from the history of the Risorgimento as Lampedusa’s
reflections on the Risorgimento further reflected on and corrected by
Luchino Visconti.

140

Marcello Mastroianni as Meursault in existential pose

 Now there is an essential difference between the adaptation of The
Leopard and the other two, which is that in the former case Visconti
can refer behind the text to a history of real events of which his
representation and Lampedusa’s can be seen as alternative and equally
valid transcriptions. Lampedusa’s novel belongs in the tradition of real¬
istic literature which refers to and reflects, in the form of an action, a
content of real characters or real events seen as prior to and distinct
from their literary elaboration. But because, in realistic art generally
and in the historical novel in particular, the reality referred to possesses
this ontological priority over the representation subsequently made of
it, it follows that the author of a particular representation has no exclu¬
sive monopoly on the events shown. It is quite possible for the author
to be inaccurate or ‘wrong’ in attributing certain thoughts or actions
to his characters and for another author, faced with the same real
material, to produce a representation which is ‘better’ or more accur¬
ate, based on a superior historical interpretation of the content of the
events. This is the procedure adopted by Visconti in The Leopard. The
two works, novel and film, differ, not only by being in different media,
but in offering different and alternative versions of the same reality.
Thus, if in the Visconti the story is more public, more obviously linked
to the macroscopic events of world history, this is not so much a prod¬
uct of the intrinsic objectivity of the film medium as a specifically dif¬
ferent interpretation, by Visconti, of events which Lampedusa chose to
describe in a more personalistic and microscopic way.
For this to be possible two conditions are necessary. First it applies
only to avowedly realist works, and secondly it implies a theory of real¬
ism which puts forward the referential character of the work as in fact
paramount. This naive conception of realism is, however, implausible,
to put it mildly. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, for example, is held up as
a model of realism, but it is clear that in relation to the novel one can¬
not separate a real Yonville l’Abbaye or a real Emma Bovary from the
specific representation of them which is contained in Flaubert’s style
and there alone. It is significant that the most famous film adaptations
of Madame Bovary, by Renoir and by Minnelli, are both films d’auteur
in which the representation is in no way reducible to a common con¬
tent but is in the first instance characteristic of the two very different
directors who have chosen the novel as a starting-point for their films.
But if this is already the case with realist works themselves, it is so even
more for those works, particularly twentieth-century, where the refer¬
ential element is minimal and the character of the work is defined

141
entirely by the mode of representation - or, to put it more strongly,
where events only exist in so far as they are the object of representation
on the part of the author.lt is hard to think of a more extreme case of
this than Camus’s recit (it is not even a novel) L’Etranger. A man, a pied
noir living in Algiers, hears the news of his mother’s death in a home
out in the country; he goes to her funeral; on his return he makes it
with a girl he has met on the beach; while visiting a friend he points a
revolver at and shoots dead an Arab who in a vague way is threatening
his friend; he is arrested and condemned to death for murder. This
action does not cohere as a plot but merely as a possible succession of
events, and the significance of the events, in so far as they are signifi¬
cant, lies in their discontinuity, and, to a lesser extent, in the attempt
by the court trying the case to impose a continuity upon them and find
ordered motivation where none exists. But while the writing hints at
various possibilities of interpretation - psychological, sociological or
whatever - it does so only to deny them and to withdraw instantly into
a perfect narrative neutrality. Not for nothing did Roland Barthes in
Le Degre zero de I’ecriture define Camus’s style in L’Etranger as repre¬
senting not a presence but an absence - ‘la fagon d’exister d’un
silence’.3
There are various ways in which this silence could be treated in a
film. One would be to respect it, after the fashion, say, of Peter Brook’s
film of Moderato Cantabile, and to develop a kind of cinematic ‘ecri-
ture blanche’ equivalent to that of the book. Another would be to dis¬
regard it entirely and construct the film not around Camus’s style but
around the content which the style fleetingly suggests. Alternatively the
book could be torn apart and the emptiness at the centre which is both
its charm and its limit shown up as an ideological flight from the reality
of the colonial world. Visconti is hardly the most plausible director for
the first of these options, since his style is anything but silent and could
indeed be summed up as essentially noisy. As between the other two
he appears, on a charitable hypothesis, to have chosen a compromise.
There is some evidence4 that he at least flirted with the third option
and that the gross realism of much of Lo straniero derives from an
attempt to realise materially, through the film, the structure of relation¬
ships of which the consciousness of the hero, Meursault, provides a
distorted reflection. Certainly since the Algerian revolution it has
become commonplace to subject Camus’s work to a political critique
on broadly Fanonist lines, bringing out the impossibility for a colo¬
nialist writer (which Camus was, though he was other things besides)

142

Meursault in the Arab quarter (opposite)

Anna Karina as Marie

The trial
of coping actively and in a non-mystified way with the reality of the
colonial situation. To do this in a film would be extremely difficult,
since it would involve extricating the different roles of the author,
Camus, and of Meursault as both narrator and protagonist, and then
relating these dialectically to the various aspects of the reality of colo¬
nial Algiers. In the last analysis all that Visconti succeeds in doing,
apart from presenting the text as in some mysterious way important,
is to use the camera to ‘realise’ the events to which the text makes ref¬
erence and to crowd out the silence with a host of unnecessary and
obtrusive presences. The film becomes a murder story in which there
is no enigma beyond that of a sad man (played in most typical fashion
by Marcello Mastroianni) who commits a meaningless crime in a
moment of bewilderment and confusion and is then pursued by all the
panoply of bourgeois justice. The generic realism to which the narra¬
tive is subjected is enriched in certain scenes, such as those in the
courtroom, by the use of flashy melodramatic emphases, and the film
ends with the formerly pathetic central character metamorphosed into
titanic hero as he proudly refuses the ministrations of the Church and
prepares to go to his death alone.
Against this travesty of the original, which in fact neither respects
the original nor seriously criticises it, there are to be set a number of
moments which have a distinctive and surprising quality of their own,
owing nothing to Camus. The scenes with the old people from the
home and in particular one sequence of shots of an old man following
the coffin have a directness and an authenticity at the simplest level of
constructive observation which is the more remarkable since they have
no parallel in Visconti’s own work since Ossessione, a quarter of a cen¬
tury earlier - almost as if the characters from the earlier film had been
brought out of retirement for the purpose. It also occasionally hap¬
pens, though it is not clear whether by accident or design, that at
moments the text is prised away from Camus and from the portentous
narration of its ‘existential’ hero and achieves effects of a brute physi-
cality of existence which are, ironically, closer to the sense of the
original than all the attempts to follow the verbal form of the recit. At
these moments the film actually begins to make sense, because the
spectator is made aware of the gap between the existentialist con¬
sciousness and the world it aspires but fails to comprehend. But they
are few and far between, and in any case contradict the approach of
the rest of the film, which is to fill in the gaps with ‘realistic’ tittle-
tattle.

144
Notes
1. [Up to a point. The film itself is not great, but the encounter with Silvana
Mangano was to prove very productive, as her performances in Death in Venice
and Conversation Piece show. Helmut Berger also makes a bit-part appearance
in the film (2002).]
2. Not only is Senso by common consent regarded as one ofVisconti’s greatest
films: it is also his most successful and creative adaptation. A sustained com¬
parison between the film and Boito’s novella is made in a research thesis by
Ruth Kraitzman, Rapporti trafihn e narrativa nel cinema italiano (Liverpool Uni¬
versity, 1972, unpublished).
3. Written in 1953: p. 68 of Gonthier edition. Also, on p. 67: ‘Cette parole trans-
parente, inauguree par L’Etranger de Camus, accomplit un style de l’absence
qui est presque une absence ideale du style; l’ecriture se reduit alors a une sorte
de mode negatif dans lequel les caracteres sociaux ou mythiques d’un langage
s’abolissent au profit d’un etat de la forme.’ (‘This transparent speech, inaug¬
urated by Camus’s L’Etranger, achieves a style of absence which is almost an
ideal absence of style; writing is thus reduced to a sort of negative mode in
which the social or mythical characteristics of a language are abolished in favour
of a pure state of form.’)
4. Referred to by Lino Micciche in his introduction to the script of Death in Venice
(‘Morte a Venezia’di Luchino Visconti, Bologna: Cappelli, 1971).

145
11: The Damned

With The Damned we re-enter familiar Visconti territory. It is a story,

like Vaghe stelle and La terra trema, of the decline and decomposition
of a family, but, as in Senso and The Leopard, the fortunes of individ¬
uals are linked to wider developments at a climactic moment of his¬
tory. Like the House of Salina in The Leopard, the Essenbeck family
are, willingly or not, historical protagonists. As one of the ‘grandes
families’ of pre-war German capitalism, their private destinies cannot
be separated from those of the State, and the rise of Nazism involves
them both in political accommodations and in personal disintegration.
The plot is complex. The head of the family, Joachim, is due to
retire. His eventual heir is his grandson Martin, but he has two pos¬
sible immediate inheritors: Herbert, who is a liberal and an anti-
Fascist, and Konstantin, a Nazi fanatic and member of the SA. His
temperamental choice, Herbert, has to be sacrificed, but, to control the
possible excesses of Konstantin, an outsider to the family, Friedrich
Bruckmann, is made managing director of the steelworks. Friedrich is
also the lover of Sophie, mother of the decadent Martin who is gener¬
ally judged unsuitable but will in any case formally inherit when he
comes of age. Friedrich is backed by Aschenbach, a cousin of the fam¬
ily who is in the SS and has his own reasons for opposing Konstantin.
In the end Friedrich comes within an ace of getting what he wants,
marriage to Sophie and control of the firm, but meanwhile the SS have
switched their allegiance and with their help Martin is able to outman¬
oeuvre Friedrich and force him and Sophie to commit suicide on the
very day of their marriage.
Such is the background to the plot. The foreground action is con¬
centrated in a few key sequences, of which the most important are
those of Joachim’s birthday party and retirement, which coincides with
the burning of the Reichstag; the elimination of Konstantin during the
Night of the Long Knives; and the marriage and death of Sophie and
Friedrich, which also represents the total Nazification of the surviving
Essenbeck house. Of these sequences that of the Night of the Long
Knives is most often cited as a tour de force, which it indeed is. What

146
is more interesting, though, than the overlong and overdecorative
staging of the SA orgy is the way Visconti represents the relationship
between the Nazism of the SA and that of the SS. Rejecting the Brecht-
ian analogy of two gangs of hoods fighting a private war for control of
the rackets, he makes a sharp distinction between the mob fascism of
the SA squads and the efficient militarism of the SS, identified with
the New Order and with the Nazi state itself. The Brown Shirts,
favoured instruments of counter-revolutionary violence during the rise
of Fascism and expression of reactionary populism up to the time of
the seizure of power, have served their purpose. Unattractive though
they are, even in their moments of Kameradschaft and relaxation, there
is something pathetic about their elimination by the disciplined and
well-armed agents of state power. As they lounge around and drink
their beer and sing their Teutonic songs, the lake on whose shore they
have held their rally is gradually surrounded by motorised units of SS.
In the ensuing massacre Friedrich personally dispatches the coarse and
cretinous Konstantin, but there is more to it than that. Populist
Fascism has been destroyed, and the new state order, fusing Party,
Capital and military High Command, is firmly established.
Less emphatic, but more subtle, are the scenes at the beginning of
the film, again involving both a major political turning-point and
another murder committed by the ambitious Friedrich. Whereas in the
Long Knives sequence the relationship between the private and poli¬
tical is represented only by the somewhat arbitrary presence of
Friedrich at the massacre, a presence motivated only by a suggestion
from the SS man Aschenbach that Friedrich should give concrete proof
of his loyalty, here the threads are more closely intertwined. Friedrich
murders Joachim, at the same time persuading the anti-Fascist Herbert
to escape the country, thus making his political flight seem like a con¬
fession to the murder. Meanwhile Joachim’s party has been the setting
in which other complexities of family divisions have been presented, and
a rather cheap bit of montage connects a revelation of Martin’s pen¬
chant for little girls with the murder of the old man. As Martin makes his
advance to one of the younger children there is a scream, which is not
her cry of shock but the opening of the next sequence with the discovery
of Joachim’s body.1
Paedophilia is not the only pathological tendency to which Martin
inclines. While in the entertainment for Joachim his cousin Gunther
treats the company to a spot of unaccompanied Bach on the cello and
the younger children under the direction of their French governess

147

Populist Nazism: SA cadres at play, unaware of their approaching fate (overleaf)

 fmm I *

, *'

usssnsi&i

ill
JL\ 1
* 41
recite a poem in Italian, Martin’s contribution to the proceedings is a
cabaret song in drag, ‘Einen Mann, einen richtigen Mann’ (‘A man, a
real man’), expressing in passing a typically Viscontian contrast
between traditional ‘culture’ and modern ‘barbarism’. More import¬
ant, Martin is in love with his mother. She trades on this, encouraging
his erotic dependence as far as possible, but at a crucial moment she
goes too far. Wishing to gain his consent for her marriage to Friedrich
she starts to seduce him, but the seduction turns into a rape of the
mother by the son, leaving Martin triumphant and Sophie humiliated
and on the verge of madness. It is this act, combined with Sophie’s
failure to hold together the alliance of Friedrich and Aschenbach,
which leads to her and Friedrich’s isolation and death. The defection
of Konstantin’s son Gunther from Bach-playing intellectual and
sympathiser with Herbert to fully-fledged Nazi is all that is needed to
consummate the process.
Stylistically the film is, for the most part, classically Viscontian,
notably in its operative articulation into scenes between the protagon¬
ists and scenes with chorus. Particularly fine, because realised with a
surprising economy of means, is the ‘duet’ in the state files between
Sophie and Aschenbach which provides the first intimations of
Friedrich’s impending fall. Here the absence of sumptuous or splen¬
did decors is more expressive than their presence would have been, for
the anonymous bureaucratism of the setting counterpoints the heroics
of the characters and exposes their limitations. All too often in the film,
however, the rather stagy settings threaten to take control of the action
which is being played out in front of them. In Senso and in Vaghe stelle
the two elements were held in dynamic equilibrium. Here the
dynamism begins to fade and it is as if the set were threatening to cave
in and swamp the characters in its ruin. This is particularly noticeable
at the end, when the plot has, so to speak, run out. Heightened natur¬
alism shades into expressionism. The characters, having lost their
autonomy, become masks, and what began as tragedy ends as
grotesque.2
In general, then, The Damned is a confident, if not entirely suc¬
cessful, return to the operatic-melodramatic mode which first appears
with La terra trema and carries on through to Vaghe stelle. But there are
differences. On the one hand there are scenes in which the melodra¬
matic elements are dropped in favour of a simpler form of iconic real¬
ism, lucid and easy to read but dense with symbolic overtones. Such,
for example, is the scene of Joachim’s funeral, with the procession

150

‘Einen Mann, einen richtigen Mann’: Martin in drag

winding its way slowly through dingy streets past the Essenbeck steel¬
works. Here the symbolism is associative, pointing directly to a
material reality of socio-economic relations without passing through
the mediation of character and drama. It is not a scene which either in
its conception or in its detail could have come from the camera of a
Minnelli or a Sirk and is a reminder ofVisconti’s past links with neo¬
realism and the realist tradition in general. But there are on the other
hand also scenes in which the movement away from the self-contained
universe of melodrama takes an opposing direction, and one which is
not at all easy to define.
The stylistic indicator of this change of direction is given by the
descent into expressionism most apparent at the end of the film. Vis¬
conti’s melodrama most often has the form of anthropomorphic his-
toricism, that is to say the movement of social forces is reflected in the
actions and passions of individuals expressed through the represen¬
tation of character. The Damned, like Senso, or The Leopard, is a char¬
acter drama, but character is not inexhaustible as a source of artistic
representation. The political criticism levelled against The Damned that
the history of Nazism is after all not the same as the history of Ger¬
man capitalism, let alone one capitalist family, is irrelevant in general,

fm-
since The Damned does not aspire to be a history of Nazism. But it is
correct in one particular, which is that the Nazi phenomenon exceeds
in horror what any one family can do to itself. In The Damned the fam¬
ily is self-destroyed, under the pressure of Nazism. But what has hap¬
pened to Germany is worse, and cannot be represented, except
obliquely. Of course things can be referred to, and we learn, for
example, that Herbert’s wife, Elisabeth, has died in Dachau. But, at a
level of direct representation, Martin’s assumption of SS uniform and
the chilly mask-like face of Sophie at the moment of her marriage and
forced suicide are as symbols both extreme and yet inadequate. The
characters, as characters, have become irrelevant, but their value as
emblems of social forces has been undermined and the film ends on a
void, expressionism with nothing to express.
It is instructive to compare the closing sequence of The Damned
with that of Vaghe stelle, both for the recurrence of the same image -
the mother transfixed in quasi-catatonic madness - and for the sense
of an ending on to total emptiness. But whereas in Vaghe stelle, which
is a true melodrama, the emptiness marks the completion of a cycle of
events according to the pattern of a unitary myth, that of the Oresteia,
in the case of The Damned there is no proper conclusion on any level.
Historically the moment chosen is not important; in terms of psycho¬
logical drama Friedrich, though outmanoeuvred, has not been intern¬
ally destroyed, while the underlying mythic structure has not been
strong enough to impose the ending as a formal necessity. All the time
the film has operated, covertly, on the three levels of history, drama
and myth. The end comes when these three threads are arbitrarily
snapped.
The simplest explanation of what has happened would be to say
that Visconti has bitten off more than he could chew, and that the film
suffers, as did Rocco and His Brothers, basically from an excess of ambi¬
tion. This is true up to a point, but it is interesting only if one can spe¬
cify the precise way in which the film fails, in the last analysis, to
achieve its ends. The key factor here is the introduction of the mythic
element, which in Rocco is hardly present and appears for the first time
in Visconti’s work, very successfully, in Vaghe stelle. In The Damned,
however, unlike in Vaghe stelle, the myth element is neither unitary nor
fully integrated into the structure of the narrative. It seems to have two
functions, one as an external referent, and the second as an expedient
designed to stop the film from falling apart. At the second level it is
simply a failure. Friedrich and Sophie in the roles of Macbeth and

152

Martin supervises the marriage and impending death of Sophie and Friedrich
(opposite)
Joachim’s birthday party ...

... and his funeral

Lady Macbeth would make sense on its own, as would the triangle
Martin-Sophie-Friedrich as Hamlet-Gertrude-Claudius. But taken
together they are merely a further source of confusion. While in the
Oresteia the motives of political ambition and sexual jealousy are per¬
fectly fused in one linear narrative, the Shakespearean sources are dis¬
tinct. They suffer the possibility of an association ambition-barbarism
(.Macbeth) and of another jealousy-corruption {Hamlet), both of which
Visconti uses to the full, but no formal means to relate the two.
This leads us back to the notion of myth as external referent.
Though formally ineffective, the myths are an important part of the
content of the film. Over and above what is directly stated in the film
itself, they imply a whole series of further statements about the per¬
manence of certain driving forces in history and the trans-historical
ineluctability of the tragic mechanism. As such they are not merely an
expedient but a falsification, and it is not surprising if history, having
found its first form of representation in tragedy, finds its repetition in
grotesque. Not just Shakespeare but also Wagner (the original title of
the film was Gotterdammerung, echoed in the Italian La caduta degli
Dei) is invoked to add overtones of monumentality to the story, though
to no purpose. In the last analysis the Essenbecks are only the Essen-
becks, more interesting to the world, perhaps, than the average family,
because of the power of their capital; but their fall (only to rise again,
without a doubt, in 1945) is neither the end of civilisation or its res¬
toration.
And yet, for the film, the Essenbecks are important. Not just as
individuals, nor even for the economic force they represent, but pre¬
cisely as civilisation. Just as the House of Salina represented Sicily, so
they represent Germany. The peculiar philo-aristocratic aberration of
the ‘Marxist’ Visconti is reinforced in The Damned by the influence in
tandem of the honest bourgeois Thomas Mann and of the honest
broker of Marxism and the bourgeois tradition, Gyorgy Lukacs. There
is nothing surprising in this, since in the 1950s (e.g. in Senso) Visconti
was already using Lukacsian schemas of interpretation and applying
them as a leftist camouflage to his own concern with decadentism,
while his interest in Mann first emerges about the same time with the
scenario of a ballet derived from the novella Marius and the Magician
(1956).
It is not until The Damned, however, that this interest emerges as a
kind of autonomous substitute for the Marxism to which Visconti for¬
mally subscribes. Strictly speaking Visconti has never (except perhaps at

154
the time of La terra trema) been a Marxist director in the full sense of
applying historical materialism and the materialist dialectic consistently
throughout his film-making practice. Rather he has been a realist, but
one who has used a Marxist-inspired view of history as an element in his
films. This element is overlaid on the basic structure, in the form of an
internal invitation, usually issued by one of the characters, to ‘read’ the
structure in Marxist terms. But the style remains basically that of
nineteenth-century realism, in its melodramatic variant, so that the
Marxist reading has the role of a correction and a critique of the basic
material. Senso, for example, manages to be both a historical drama and
a Marxist (or rather Lukacsian) interpretation of it rolled into one. So
too is The Leopard, where the process is made more transparent by the
fact that the film is an adaptation, in a Marxist or marxisant key, of an
originally non-Marxist text. The would-be Marxist critic has only to
follow Visconti’s discourse, at the anthropomorphic level and at that of
the overlay (or implicit critique), in order to reach what can pass as a
historical materialist interpretation of the content of the film. In The
Damned, however, the overlay is Marxist only in the most perfunctory
way,3 and the reading which is integral to the film is one provided not by
historical materialism but by a restatement of the values of European
humanism. By a pardonable but nevertheless disturbing sleight of hand,
these values are passed off, as they often are in Lukacs, as providing the
substance of a critique.
As a state of affairs there is nothing remarkable in this. Of what
great directors in the realist tradition in the western cinema can it be
said that their representation of the world involves a historical materi¬
alist perspective which is openly and explicitly theirs rather than some¬
thing used by a critic to explain the significance of what they are
saying? Losey, perhaps, but Stroheim, Renoir, Preminger? What is
interesting in Visconti’s case is the process by which the critical con¬
tent of his films has become progressively attenuated on a director who
operates in a predominantly Marxist cultural context and who would
still, I imagine, see himself as actively contributing to that culture. The
key to the process, in my opinion, lies in the ambiguity of the Lukac¬
sian concept of critical realism when used, not as part of a schema of
interpretation but as a model for practice. The essence of critical real¬
ism lies in the possibility of putting into action a dual critique, first on
the part of the author and then, subsequently, on the part of the critic
proper. The author views bourgeois society from the inside, but with¬
out identification. He is both of it and not of it. While he shares the

155
situation of his subject matter his consciousness acts freely and critic¬
ally in relation to it so that his writing offers a criticism as well as a
reflection of the material presented to him. At a second stage, however,
the true significance of the author’s relationship with his material, the
extent to which he comprehended the movement of which he was a
part and the structural limitations to which he was subject as part of
that movement, require in their turn to be analysed, and the function
of Marxist historicist criticism is to provide such a retrospective analy¬
sis. The problem which arises for the Marxist artist who sees himself
as operating in the critical realist mode is simply this. Given the neces¬
sity of a Marxist critique of the work, can he himself double up in the
role of critic? The answer, unfortunately, is that he can not.4
It is a feature of Italian cultural life that it is often demanded of an
artist that he should possess, as it were, a Marxian super-ego and that
he should be able to justify himself and his activity in terms of what is,
all said and done, a very inadequate theory of artistic practice, the
theory of critical realism. Visconti’s subterfuge consists in passing off
his concern with culture in the guise of a critique, instead of con¬
fronting it for what it is: the raw material out of which he can fashion
his own art. One of the great merits of Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa is that it
treats its own cultural problematic as primary artistic material. It is a
realistic film only in so far as this problematic is real - real for the film’s
protagonists, for Visconti and for us as spectators. Because it has no
pretensions to realism in the vulgar sense it also does not need (and
certainly doesn’t have) the kind of phoney ‘critical’ super-ego approved
by the ‘left’ establishment. Partly as a consequence of this happy
deficiency it did not receive a very favourable critical reception. All the
pressure on Visconti was to return to procedures whose interest he had
long since exhausted. The result, after the fiasco of Lo straniero, was
The Damned.
The failure of Lo straniero, compared with the relative success of
The Damned, points, however, to another contradiction. It seems that
Visconti’s focus of interest in recent years has shifted from history as
such, in the sense of a set of given events of which people are the
agents, to culture in the sense of the objects which people have pro¬
duced, in history, to represent or to form part of the world they experi¬
ence. But the essence of culture is that it exists in the form of patterns
of signification, and the reproduction, on film or elsewhere, of a cul¬
tural problematic such as seems to be Visconti’s main present interest
implies a concern with the problem of signification and discourse

156
which is incompatible with any form of realist aesthetic. As I suggested
above, when talking about L’Etratiger, a film of the book cannot be a
film of the things which the book appears to be about. It has to con¬
front the book as an item of discourse, or, in simpler terms, as style.
The same applies to Thomas Mann. To like Mann and to sympathise
with what he stands for is one thing. To hope to reproduce this sym¬
pathy through a transposition into one’s own work of Mannian values
or of aspects of the Mannian thematic is another. The trick which
makes this transposition appear feasible is a belief in realism and in
Mann’s status as a realist writer. Thus the representation in The
Damned of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois family as a cultural force
draws heavily on a similar representation in Mann’s Buddenbrooks. In
terms of real history the claims made on behalf of an actually existing
bourgeoisie are, doubtless, extremely mystifying, but aesthetically the
transposition can be made (and, even better, can pass unadverted)
because both The Damned and Buddenbrooks can claim, in their way,
to be realist works. But any further dependence on Mann runs up
against the fact that Mann stands for what he does by virtue of the
kind of discourse he produces not only in the form of a cultural object
(a book) but also as a discourse on culture itself. The kind of problems
which Mann is dealing with clearly fascinate Visconti. Whether he is
equipped, in view of his aesthetic inheritance, to restate these prob¬
lems on film is quite another question.

Notes
1. This may be the result of a cut in the English-language version.
2. See review of the film by Rosalind Delmar in Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1970.
3. For example when Herbert, the liberal (or ‘good’) capitalist, acts as a mouth¬
piece for the view (shared by Visconti?) that the German bourgeoisie created
Fascism as a kind of monster of Frankenstein in their efforts to avert the (lesser)
danger of Social Democracy.
4. Senso might seem a partial refutation of this claim, as might one or two works
of twentieth-century literature (Heinrich Mann, perhaps, if not Thomas). But
in general I would argue (also for a hundred and one other reasons not gone
into in this book) that the Marxist artist, to be consistent, has to remove him¬
self at some distance from the sphere of realism, however ‘critical’, in order to
establish and to clarify his relationship with reality. Brecht would be an obvi¬
ous example, as would Mayakovsky.

157
 12: Death in Venice

The argument so far is, to say the least, extremely prejudicial towards
Death inVenice, the film in which Visconti reaches the culminating point
of his identification with the Hegelian Geist. But Death inVenice, like all
Visconti’s films, is highly contradictory, and it is only fair to suspend
judgment on the aspect of ‘Kultur’ and to start by examining other
aspects of the film which co-exist uneasily with its cultural or culturalist
pretensions. For there is a sense in which Luchino Visconti’s Morte a
Venezia can be read without reference to Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in
Venedig of which it is an adaptation and on which it provides a sort of
commentary. It is such a reading which we will now attempt, if only to
see how far it takes us.
It should be said at the outset that this is in no sense intended as a
naive reading of the film. It is not an attempted reading of the whole film
such as might be made by someone who had never heard of Thomas
Mann and did not know that the film was an adaptation of a pre¬
existing literary work. Such a reading could only be subjectivist and
quite profoundly false, for reasons which should become clear.1 What I
have in mind is a partial reading, which deliberately abstracts as far as
possible from the cultural overtones with which the film is beset and
which concerns itself (again as far as possible) solely with the internal
correlation of the immediate signifying attributes of the film as con¬
tained in the images, the dialogues and the soundtrack, without
reference to external cultural determinants. For the purpose of this
reading Venice is just a place, Gustav von Aschenbach is just a character,
Mahler is just a composer, a look is just a look. Whatever further
meanings these names or events may have had for Mann, or forVisconti,
or for the spectator moyen cultive, or for me for that matter, is a question
to be integrated into the argument later. It is not a question of preferring
a ‘cinematic’ reading to a ‘literary’ one, but a deliberate effort of abstrac¬
tion in order to determine the precise place of cultural and quasi-literary
discourse within the overall structure of the film.
The essential components of the film, on this reading, are a present
time and a past time. In the present time there is seascape and

158
townscape, a successful arrival and an abortive departure. There is a
hotel with an international clientele, at a short distance from the town.
There are relationships between the guests, and there are words
exchanged between the particular guest whose arrival we have watched
and various people wThose job it is to serve him. There is also an
exchange of glances between this guest, a middle-aged man, and a
fourteen-year-old boy who is also staying at the hotel. At the end of
the film we see the middle-aged man die on the beach outside the
hotel, facing out towards the sea across which he first arrived. In the
past time, represented by a series of flashbacks, we see the same man,
younger, in a variety of situations. We learn that he is a successful com¬
poser, that he has had a family life, that he has certain ideals both for
his life and for his art. There is one seemingly casual link between the
two time registers: the name of the prostitute whom he encounters in
one of the flashbacks is Esmeralda, which is also the name of the boat
on which he arrives in Venice in the main narrative.
It is clear that the scenes from past time are intended to illuminate
and explain the significance of the events of the present. Certainly
without the key that they provide the events in present time are sin¬
gularly lacking in depth. But before using this key in order to open up
the film and reveal whatever depth may lie behind the surface, it is
worth analysing more closely the surface represented in the present-
tense narrative.
In the course of the film the guest, Gustav von Aschenbach, is
involved in a series of encounters. On the boat he is accosted by a
strange drunken old man with a made-up face. Between the landing
stage and the hotel he travels by gondola. The dialogue with the gon¬
dolier consists of an argument as to whether the gondolier should take
him to the Lido or only to the steamboat landing. In the English-
language version of the film this dialogue takes place in English. Mean¬
while the gondolier is muttering to himself incomprehensibly in
dialect. (One may take it that the English, and no doubt the German
versions of the film are as authentic as the Italian, in which the same
contrast exists, but is less marked.) On arrival at the hotel the guest is
received with much bowing and scraping by the maitre d’hotel. Lie is
treated as a rich and distinguished personage but does not seem to be
much trusted or liked. Almost all the dialogues in which the guest is
involved throughout the present-tense narrative of the film follow the
pattern established in the opening scenes. He never speaks with his fel¬
low guests, but only with people who are structurally in the position

159
Happier days: Gustav von Aschenbach with his wife in one of the flashback scenes

Aschenbach and the musicians

160
of servants or cast in a role of service and even servility. But the form
of a master/slave relationship does not mean that the master controls
the servants: on the contrary they control him. The gondolier takes him
after all to the hotel, not just to the steamboat landing. The maitre
d’hotel guides his movements and attempts to deceive him about the
presence of plague in the city. An English clerk in Cook’s tells him the
truth, but in a way that seems more calculated to demonstrate the
clerk’s own erudition and the power of his fantasy than to impart use¬
ful advice. The barber who cuts Aschenbach’s hair, shaves him, trims
his moustache and finally dyes his hair and covers his face with a layer
of make-up does so on the basis of no instructions from his client. The
constant use of alien languages (at no time does Aschenbach exchange
any words in German with fellow German speakers) and the alterna¬
tion of servility and manipulation in which he is subjected establish a
very sharp separation between Aschenbach and the world around him.
The separation between Aschenbach and his human and social
context, it should be stressed, implies no metaphysics of alienation. It
is specific to Aschenbach and has no echoes in the life around him,
which is crowded and gregarious. It also seems to characterise the pres¬
ent only, and not the past. Aschenbach comes to Venice alone and he
dies there alone, but the sense of the event is given not by the empti¬
ness but rather by the fullness of what surrounds him. The emptiness
is between himself and the world, not in the world itself.
Besides separateness, or non-relatedness, another theme attached
to the figure of Aschenbach is age, or rather the problem of ageing and
agelessness. As well as the drunken old man who appears at the begin¬
ning there is another similar made-up figure in the film. This time it is
(significantly) a musician, the leader of a band of strolling players who
entertain the guests on the terrace outside the hotel. After he has fin¬
ished playing and collected his money the musician retreats, facing the
guests, singing a song whose vocal line consists entirely of raucous and
mocking laughter. Later Aschenbach himself emerges from the bar¬
ber’s similarly made up and artificially rejuvenated. On his way home
he collapses by a fountain and laughs gently to himself while the mask
begins to peel and the make-up begins to run on his cheeks. Though
the sense of this scene clearly has something to do with his feeling of
failure as an artist, its main motif seems to be the incongruity of being
both prematurely aged and disguised to look young, particularly in the
light of his passion for Tadzio, the boy with whom, or with whose
image, he has fallen in love.

161
 Aschenbach’s passion for the Polish boy Tadzio is the core of the
film, and, in the way it is portrayed, is clearly inseparable from the rep¬
resentation of Aschenbach’s separateness and from the theme of age
and youth. Tadzio is on the verge of puberty; Aschenbach’s condition
can be not unfairly described as menopausal. The age gap which sepa¬
rates them is that of the entire time-span of adolescent and adult
sexuality. But this difference in age is, if you like, merely a given fact. It
establishes certain a priori limits to the kind of relationship possible
between the characters, pedagogic or pederastic or whatever, according
to taste. It is hardly an absolute barrier to the development of some sort
of contact. What is not given a priori but emerges through the unfolding
of the narrative is the perpetuation of Aschenbach’s solitude. The same
mechanisms which show Aschenbach’s separateness from the ordinary
world of the Venetians going about their business operate in intensified
form in relationship to Tadzio. The boy is shown constantly surrounded
by his family - mother, governess and sisters - or by friends of his own
age. Aschenbach listens and observes. But his pleasure is constantly
frustrated when, for example, from speaking French with the governess
the family revert to incomprehensible Polish, or when from being the
inviolate object of Aschenbach’s contemplation Tadzio becomes a
participant in a game from which the longing observer is excluded.
When this happens Aschenbach can only avert his eyes.
The essence of Aschenbach’s attitude to Tadzio is that it is
voyeuristic. Whatever other frustrated desires may be present in the
mind of the voyeur, the relationship he sets up with the object of his
desire is in the first place one of seeing - of seeing and not being seen
to see. Tadzio as the object of contemplation is also the object of a fan¬
tasy possession on the part of the older man. But the voyeur can
possess his object only in fantasy and only as an object. When Jasciu,
Tadzio’s slightly older companion, puts his arm round Tadzio’s shoul¬
der and Tadzio walks off with him, or when Tadzio returns
Aschenbach’s gaze with a look of equal intensity, the voyeur’s spell is
broken and he is brought face to face with the absurd logic of his own
position. He wishes but he wishes he did not wish. However much he
may make believe that his contemplation of Tadzio is that of the aes¬
thete before a statue the fact is that he desires the statue to spring to
life, that he desires this and yet cannot face the consequences of this
happening. He cannot face the sight of Tadzio being the object of
active affection for somebody else, nor the idea that Tadzio might
return this affection. Nor can he bear any of the possible implications

162

The death of Aschenbach (opposite)

Tadzio (Bjorn Andresen) and Jasciu (Sergio Garfagnoli)

Stalker: Aschenbach watches Tadzio and his family

ofTadzio’s smile directed towards himself. In short his desire is by
definition impossible.
There remains, however, one possible way in which the conflict can
be reconciled, and that is for Aschenbach to representTadzio to himself
as a symbol. In this light Tadzio can represent for Aschenbach a child,
and in particular the child he himself is shown in the flashback as having
had but who died while still very young. Equally Tadzio can represent
youth, basically Aschenbach’s own lost youth, but also the state of tran¬
sition from innocence to corruption. The presence of the plague, and of
the scirocco blowing hot sultry air along the plague routes, contrasted
with the implied Nordic purity of Tadzio (and of Aschenbach’s past
world), suggests a further, more objective symbolism. For Aschenbach
Tadzio is the embodiment of certain ideas and possesses this symbolic
value independently of his status as the object of voyeuristic fantasy.
But, but, but. In the film there is in fact a total disjunction between
the possible levels of interpretation. If the present-tense narrative alone
is taken into consideration, then there is only the voyeuristic relation¬
ship. Integration of the flashback suggests further possibilities of
explanation for Aschenbach’s obsession. Maybe he is not just a voyeur.
Maybe there is some complicated process of sublimation at work.
Maybe this tetchy old man has a mental and fantasy life richer and more
intelligible than can be deduced from merely watching him lech after a
pubescent boy in a provocative bathing costume. The problem is that
the symbolic meanings which can be extracted from the interrelation of
the two time levels do not succeed in making sense of the crypto-sexual
relationship between old man and young boy, which remains, at best,
merely pathetic. Nor, conversely, does the phenomen-ology of
voyeurism as displayed in the present-tense narrative function as an
illustration of any of the problems touched on in the flashback. The
scenes from the past indicate various things about Aschenbach, for
example that he is a puritan, that his artistic ideal is a music whose
sources of inspiration are somehow spiritual and non-sensual and that
the successful pursuit of this supposed ideal has left him dissatisfied. It
is also suggested, fleetingly, thatTadzio, whom he appears to fantasise as
an image of purity, also represents to him the dangers of sensuality,
which, whether because of moral scruple or mere incapacity, he feels
obliged to run away from. (This, at least, would appear to be the sense
to be extracted from the cut fromTadzio picking out Beethoven’s ‘Fur
Elise’ on the piano to the same tune being played by the prostitute
Esmeralda in the flashback.) Clearly there are connections of a kind
between Tadzio, as symbol or as reality, and Aschenbach’s past life, just
as there is a connection of a kind between his crisis as a musician and the
parody of himself that he encounters in the form of the strolling player.
But there is no way of construing these connections except specula¬
tively, for a very simple reason. None of the themes raised in the film
receives any coherent treatment except by reference to the conscious¬
ness of Aschenbach, which is their only possible focus. But most of the
time the themes are not focused. The style of representation is for the
most part objective. The point of view is undiscriminating between the
events and does not establish a privil-eged position for a narrator or
even, except rarely, for the central character himself. The symbolic
potential of the film is in consequence unrealised.The spectator is made
aware that there could be meanings in the events and in the narration,
but can never be quite clear what meanings or where to locate them.The
film is obviously Art, and the central character is an Artist, so some¬
where there must be Thought. But there isn’t. There is, admittedly,
pathos. But that is another matter entirely.
It says a lot for Mann’s novella that the pathetic pastiche that Vis¬
conti has made of it is still capable of reproducing at least a few echoes
of its original subtle discourse. For Visconti’s Morte a Venezia is not

165

Exchange of glances between Aschenbach and Tadzio (opposite)

merely an empty film but a pretentious film - pretentious and above
all parasitic. The existence, alongside the film, of that minor miracle of
discursive-narrative prose which is Der Tod in Venedig seems to have dis¬
pensed Visconti from any attempt to produce a discourse of his own.
In the event (frequent) of a void in the symbolic structure of the film,
the spectator can mentally interpolate elements of the original novella.
Failing knowledge of the novella there is at least the reassurance con¬
tained in the fact that it exists. The enormous ‘art-deco’ construction
into which Visconti has inserted the washed-out figure of Gustav von
Aschenbach, composer, evokes the world of a kind of decadentist
literature which invests the whole enterprise with the Values of Cul¬
ture. Little matter that these values are not really present.
Let us, however, turn to the novella and note some of its features.
First Aschenbach is a writer, not a musician, and moreover a writer
who has idealised and come to represent publicly certain models of
culture and cultivated, restrained behaviour. Secondly the narrative
structure allows for a constant interflow between Aschenbach’s interior
discourse, so obviously at odds with his infatuation with Tadzio, and
the Mannian discourse which situates it and makes its significance
explicit at a more general level. Thirdly Tadzio is very obviously the
object of a projection on the part of Aschenbach. He represents almost
before he exists. Aschenbach’s story is, in the novella, the story of a
cultural crisis, or, more accurately, of a crisis in ideology. The voyeuris¬
tic aspect of his attitude to Tadzio is an almost accidental by-product
of the narrative technique, while the repressed pederastic element, so
far from being the content of which voyeurism is the form, is merely
the means through which Aschenbach becomes conscious of his own
ideological limits and of the failure of his life-work. Right to the end
of the story, however, Aschenbach remains a prisoner of Culture, of
the same Culture of which he was a leading representative and which
he himself had set up as a systematic defence against the real. Even the
dream which reveals to him the erotic basis of his infatuation with the
figure of Tadzio is cast in cultural terms, as a conflict between the Apol¬
lonian and the Dionysiac as modes of representation.
This imprisonment within a cultural, or culturalist, ideological
problematic is typical of a number of Mann’s characters, and can
indeed be seen as characteristic of Mann himself. But the author is
always that bit wiser than the characters he has created. It is not in the
nature of his art to create characters who precisely express his own con¬
sciousness. Rather he poses problems (which are his own problems)

166
through the creation of characters who express some or other aspect of
the general problematic.These characters are constantly grappling with
phantoms which are the consequence of their own ideological mode of
representing reality to themselves. But they are not phantoms which
can be easily exorcised, and Mann is no exorcist. His great strength as a
writer lies in his awareness of the power of these phantoms, which col¬
lectively constitute the ideological universe of bourgeois society, and in
his ability to manipulate them in a way which demonstrates both the
coherence and the contradictions of the entity which we call culture.
Basically Mann, unlike Musil,2 is an idealist, who sees culture as an
essence and who aspires to explain the world through its realisations in
the realm of the Idea rather than to challenge the genesis of ideas in
terms of their contradictions. At the same time, however, he does see
that the contradictions exist. As an artist who writes about art he both
criticises ideology and constantly reconstitutes it at a higher level. The
Mannian character is unable to live his existence except soulfully and in
the end is either paralysed or actually destroyed by the soul he has him¬
self created for himself. The author presents this act of self-destruction
sympathetically and yet ironically, proposing as a remedy to the mysti¬
fied self-consciousness of the character only a higher degree of
consciousness of his own limitations within the given cultural frame¬
work, not a dissolution of the mystified cultural consciousness itself.
Of all this, needless to say, barely a whiff in Visconti’s rendering of the
story. Culture is present, particularly in the flashback (which inciden¬
tally leans heavily on Mann’s treatment of a musician hero in his Dr
Faustus), but it is not seen problematically, only as a passively assimi¬
lated ‘value’. By abolishing the structured discourse of the novella, with
its twin foci in the mind of Aschenbach and in Mann’s commentary on
his cultural and sexual dilemma, Visconti has in a sense brought the
story out of the clouds and down to earth and exposed the material, or
rather the pseudo-ontological, content of Aschenbach’s obsession. But
this vulgar-materialist reduction of discourse to a level of landscape
with figures does not demystify. It merely demonstrates incomprehen¬
sion. To give but one example of the crassness of the adaptation, in the
book the account of the spread of the plague is not given in direct speech
but is part of the commentary. The clerk’s words are rephrased, in a typi¬
cal Mannian way, so as to express not only what has been said but also
the possible overtones of cultural significance which the particular lis¬
tener, in this case the writer Aschenbach, or some other cultured person
might attribute to them. They are also, very definitely, Mann’s words.

167
 west er
important
Please examine your change
before leaving the Box Office
cannot afterwards be rectifi*
cannot I
ar
the.

168

Visconti with Bjorn Andresen and Silvana Mangano at the London premiere
of Death in Venice
They represent an intervention of the author in his material, uniting
what has been said and heard into the cultural discourse which the
author wishes to share with his readers. In the film, pronounced by the
clerk in the Cook’s office, the words lack these resonances.They sound
like a private culture-trip which frightens Aschenbach because of its
strangeness and lack of relation to his own concerns. The words are
there, but they might as well not be since destroying their original con¬
text has deprived them of their original meaning without creating an
alternative, except at the most trivial level. Homage is paid to the liter¬
ary genius ofThomas Mann, and, in its self-negating way, the scene is
quite effective, but the reason why Mann’s discourse as opposed to that
of some other writer should be important and worth reproducing is
totally and irrevocably lost. The film trades upon, and helps to perpetu¬
ate, respect for the values of Art while offering no reason why this Art
should be taken even remotely seriously.

I am very conscious, as I write, that a few years ago I would not have
expressed myself in this way about any Visconti film. If he had pro¬
duced Death in Venice at the time when I was writing the first edition
of this book I would undoubtedly have treated it more indulgently. I
would probably have stressed Visconti’s continuing technical mastery
of the medium and the recurrence of auteur features familiar from the
earlier films, the use of laughter, for example, or the assertion of the
values of high culture against those of popular entertainment. But I no
longer feel that technical and imaginative control (obtained, often
enough, by the use of good actors and a good lighting-cameraman) or
even authorship are values to be sought for in themselves. Recognised,
yes: but not necessarily defended. Far more important, it seems to me,
is the question of what meanings, and what order of meanings, can be
conveyed in a work of art, and what basic choices an artist can make
in relation to the linguistic material at his disposal. Questions of this
order have been raised in the past five or six years with a frequency
unprecedented in the history of the cinema. They have not been raised
by Visconti. What Visconti has done has been to wander, blindfold, into
areas being actively explored by other, maybe lesser, directors with
their eyes open. Historically, Visconti’s place in the cinema pantheon
seems to me secure, though I would not define it quite in the same way
as I did five years ago. But his reputation, I suspect, will continue to
depend on his first four films and hopefully also on the last film to be
included in the first edition of this book, Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa, which I

169
am more and more convinced is his greatest single work. As for his
latest work, it would be worse than unjust to regard it as the product
of senile decline. Rather it represents an involution, brought about by
an inability to resolve theoretical questions of what the film is supposed
to do at a time when his imaginative ability to achieve certain prac¬
tical effect is in no way impaired. Death in Venice is no product of bab¬
bling amateurism. It is, at times and in its own way, quite a brilliant
movie. Unfortunately this brilliance is suspended on a void. Much of
the abuse to which it is treated in the foregoing pages is due to the fact
that it is brilliant and not to be lightly dismissed. If, instead, it has been
heavily demolished, this is in part at least a sign of respect. The Fall of
the Gods is not easily accomplished.

Notes
1. The simplest way of summarising the case is to say that what matters first is
what is in the film, not what A, B or C gets out of it. We all bring our own cul¬
tural background to the interpretation of a film, and we all react differently. But
what the film means is not the sum, or the mean, of all these subjective read¬
ings. This is not to deny people a right to their own opinion; just to assert that
the critic’s job is something other than acting as a mediator between the film
and all the various opinions that may be formed of it. If the critic succeeds in
showing that the film of Death in Venice is incomprehensible without reference
to the book, this is, needless to say, a criticism of the film, not of the unpre¬
pared spectator.
2. The extraordinary thing about Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, a
book which can justifiably be compared with Mann’s more ponderous oeuvre,
is that it moves exclusively and one might almost say shamelessly within the
realm of ideology, without the slightest pretence that this world of ideology is
expressive of any historical essence. This lucid materialist position earns for it
the spluttering ire of Lukacs (The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, London:
Merlin Press, 1963, p. 31).

170
 13: Ludwig

The above was written in 1973, and the judgments expressed in it, par¬
ticularly in relation to Death in Venice, now seem to me narrow-minded.
I still think that the film of Death in Venice, as an adaptation of Thomas
Mann’s celebrated novella, is a deeply misguided enterprise. But to
have concentrated so exclusively on that aspect of the film and the cul¬
tural politics underlying it was wrong, even at the time. The film has
many other properties besides the negative one of being a rotten adap¬
tation. It is not necessarily unjust to criticise film adaptations of liter¬
ary works in the name of the work being adapted. When a film makes
claims for itself on the basis of its distinguished literary origins those
claims need to be deflated. In this case, however, concern for this
aspect of Death in Venice blinded me to qualities in the film that were
perfectly apparent, if I had wished to see them. These are qualities of
mise en scene which the film possesses quite independently of its ori¬
gins in Mann’s novella, but there is a sense in which they reattach it to
the original and might even be held to constitute a critique - or per¬
haps a metacritique - of Mann’s subject matter.
In this reading, Death in Venice is exactly what its title claims it to be:
a film about Venice and a film about death. There are two deaths in the
film, that of Aschenbach, crumbling away under his mask, and that of
Venice itself, crumbling into the lagoon. Aschenbach has come to Venice
in search of something life-enhancing and beautiful; instead he finds
only decay. He reaches out hopelessly towards Tadzio before it is all too
late, not only for him but for the entire collapsing world around him.
The burden of expressing Aschenbach’s dream and the contrast it has
with surrounding reality is borne by Dirk Bogarde, whose performance
in the central role is quite astounding - all the more so in that the decline
of the character is portrayed with the actor barely uttering a single word
on screen.1 The representation of the surroundings depends greatly on
the contribution of the cinematog-rapher, Pasqualino De Santis, and
the art director, Ferdinando Scarfiotti, who together have managed to
create a powerfully realistic impression of a city in decay. But the co¬
ordination of these contributions is of course the director’s. That the

171
decay is real, and that what we are seeing is not just the fading of Aschen-
bach’s illusion but the collapse of the entire ground on which such
illusions are founded is Visconti’s great achievement in the film and a
vindication of a working method that he deploys not just here but
throughout his work.
Tadzio, it could be argued, plays the same role in Visconti’s Death
inVenice as the young girl Gradiva in the story by Wilhelm Jensen which
Freud analyses in Delusion and Dream.2 Mann, like Jensen, places the
unattainable object of desire in Italy, and Italy - or so Visconti seems
to be saying - is not or is no longer the place onto which these fan¬
tasies by northern Europeans should be projected. In this sense Death
in Venice is not so much a decadent film as a film about decadence, lov¬
ing and denunciatory at the same time, in which Visconti takes leave
of cherished illusions bequeathed to him by his immersion in Euro¬
pean culture.
Death in Venice has another importance, not predictable at the time.
It is the first of a series of films more meditative in tone than his earlier
work and centred to varying degrees on a new set of themes: death,
solitude, impossible desire. The emergence of this new set of themes,
all of which can be construed as in varying degrees autobiographical,
is announced unequivocally in Ludwig and carried through in Conver¬
sation Piece. With qualifications the same themes can be found in L’in-
nocente, which was to be the director’s last film before his death.

Ludwig (1973) is one of the small minority of Visconti films which do

not have a literary original, even in the background. (The others are
Bellissima, The Damned and Conversation Pieced) The preparations for
its making began immediately after the completion of Death in Venice.
The chief scriptwriter, alongside the director himself, was Enrico
Medioli, who had started working for Visconti at the time of Rocco and
His Brothers and had become his closest collaborator. A completed
screenplay was delivered in the middle of 1971 and handed over to
William Weaver for translation into English, the language in which the
film was to be shot. Shooting of the first location sequences in Austria
began on 31 January 1972. The crew then moved to Germany and
location shooting was completed on 14 April.4 Visconti and his team
then retreated to Rome for studio work and post-production. When the
editing started it soon became clear that the film was going to be long,
probably too long. Visconti and his editor, Ruggero Mastroianni, were
in the process of dealing with its complicated structure when,

172
 173

Visconti with Romy Schneider and Helmut Berger on location during the
making of Ludwig
suddenly, on 27 July, Visconti suffered a severe stroke. He was back at
work two months later but he had had a premonition of his mortality
and his health was permanently impaired.
The Ludwig of the film’s title is Ludwig II, King of Bavaria, some¬
times known as the Mad King and sometimes as the Virgin King, and
the film tells the story of his life from his reluctant accession to the
throne in 1864 to his deposition and death some twenty years later.
The story is told basically in chronological order but it is interspersed
with shots set in 1886, the year of the King’s deposition, in which vari¬
ous witnesses testify to the King’s increasingly eccentric behaviour
during his reign. The testimony given by the witnesses confirms the
Council of Ministers in its decision to depose the King. The film ends
with Ludwig imprisoned in one of his castles but managing to evade
his guards and drowning in mysterious circumstances in a lake in the
castle grounds.
This planned structure makes for a film approximately four hours
long - longer than any other ofVisconti’s films, even The Leopard. When
the producers discovered that this was the length the film was going to
be, they panicked and demanded cuts of nearly an hour. During the
period when he was recovering from his stroke Visconti was forced to
stand by and offer reluctant advice while Mastroianni struggled to make
cuts which would not destroy the film utterly. By the time the film was
ready for release early in 1973 it had been cut to approximately three
hours, but the materials from which a longer version could be recon¬
structed had not been thrown away.The three-hour version was released
in Italy and France in March 1973 and also ran for a short while in New
York, which is where I first saw it. It received respectful but not rave
reviews. It was the only version of the film shown commercially in
Visconti’s lifetime.
Things got worse before they got better. It was not until 1978 that
Ludwig was released in Britain, and then in a version which had suf¬
fered a similar fate to Max Ophuls’s masterpiece Lola Montes two
decades earlier. The film was cut to 137 minutes and to do this, as with
Lola Montes, the framing story was removed and the flashbacks strung
together to make a more or less comprehensible linear narrative.
Meanwhile the film’s distributor, Panta Cinematografica, had gone
bankrupt and this gave the opportunity to Visconti’s friends to buy
back the rights and surviving materials and restore the film to its ori¬
ginal length. Restored versions were shown at the Venice Film Festival
in September 1980 and on Italian television in February 1981 and

174
released in Paris and London in 1983. Finally, in 1994, a further res¬
toration was undertaken, supervised by Armando Nannuzzi, the film’s
cinematographer, aimed at creating viewing copies in accordance with
his and Visconti’s original intention.5
In what can be regarded as the definitive version, the film opens with
a scene of the young Ludwig at the confessional before his coronation.
There is then a jump forward in time, to a frontal close-up of one of his
ministers. Count von Holnstein, talking about the possibility of depos¬
ing him. Similar close-ups, against a dark or neutral background and
sometimes involving a forward zoom which makes them look anachron-
istically like TV footage, will occur from time to time as the film
proceeds.The main narrative resumes and, in a sumptuous scene giving
full play to Visconti’s love of theatrical splendour, Ludwig is crowned
and a sense of his character is allowed to emerge, albeit elusively. His
stiff demeanour and peremptory call for a glass of champagne which he
swallows abruptly suggest someone ill at ease with himself and his situ¬
ation. Another flash-forward presents Treasury Minister Pfistermeister
who describes to an unseen audience Ludwig’s extravagant passion for
Wagner and his music. The same minister, now younger, is then shown
striking a deal with Ludwig. The King can bring Wagner to Munich and
even use money from the Treasury to pay off the composer’s debts, pro¬
vided he does his royal duty and goes to the resort town of Bad Ischl
where various of the crowned heads of Europe will be gathering for a
winter holiday and discussion of dynastic affairs.
At Bad Ischl, Ludwig meets his much-loved older cousin Elisabeth,
Empress of Austria. The two go riding together and she quizzes him
about his reputed virginity and lack of ease with women. He replies by
comparing himself to the Siegfried of the Nibelungenlied: ‘I’ve never
thought of myself as Siegfried until tonight. Do you know the only time
Siegfried was afraid? When he saw a woman for the first time.’6 While
Ludwig lingers at Bad Ischl, Wagner installs himself in Munich, await¬
ing his return. With Wagner are his mistress Cosima, her husband the
conductor Hans von Biilow, and their children. Still Ludwig lingers,
eager to extend the period of his intimacy with his cousin, who, how¬
ever, has other plans for him: to ensure his marriage. Attentive to what
she suspects about his sexuality as much as to dynastic considerations,
her choice for him is her younger sister Sophie rather than the daugh¬
ter of the Tsar of Russia as favoured by the court.
By the time Ludwig returns to Munich we are nearly three-quarters
of an hour into the film and there still has been very little action of a

175

Trevor Howard as Richard Wagner (overleaf)

narrative kind. The flash-forwards have indicated that Ludwig’s reign
will not be an easy one, and the nature of the initial problem - his
temperamental reluctance to assume the responsibilities of kingship -
has been hinted at, as much through descriptive detail as through nar¬
rative. For his part, Ludwig has become aware that he is being pointed
in the direction of Sophie and has demonstrated an obvious unease and
a possible sense of betrayal in the face of this awareness. But more
important than anything that has happened are the things that are
pointed to obliquely. Ludwig is a problem. He is a problem for his min¬
isters, who have to manage his eccentricities, and a problem for his
family (which also concerns his ministers) in that someone has to be
found for him to marry. The pace of action will heat up a bit later when
the scandal of the Wagner menage forces Ludwig to expel the composer
from Munich, and even more when Bavaria gets involved in the war with
Prussia, but the most striking thing about the narrative both here and
later is that it is constantly being blocked and pushed into detours. The
film is more about actions that are not undertaken than about any that
are. Ludwig is King but he makes no effort to govern, and certainly
doesn’t lead his country to war. He is supposed to marry, and a lot of
effort is put into finding him a bride, but this effort is stymied by his
incapacity for heterosexual love. Even his homosexuality, suspected by
Elisabeth at the start of the film but for a long time hidden from Ludwig
himself, will never find a satisfactory outlet, at least not in a form
expressed in the narrative.The film weaves together two or three distinct
narrative strands - to do with Ludwig’s sexuality, the state of his king¬
dom, and his love of art - and the moments of tension occur when
something either happens or fails to happen in two of them simul¬
taneously. It also proceeds by enigma, as various possibilities are opened
up, only to be frustrated.
For the time being, however, the nature of the narrative to come
has not been revealed. Two questions have been posed, one concern¬
ing Ludwig’s ability to survive as King and the other (more delicately
hinted at) concerning his sexuality, but whether these will provide the
substance of the story is not yet clear. Meanwhile a narrative strand is
developed over the activities ofWagner. It emerges that not only does
the Bavarian government maintain intelligence about the composer’s
movements, but the Austrian secret service is also briefing Elisabeth
about events in Munich. A complex of points of view is presented. Wag¬
ner himself complains about his treatment. A minister, in another
flash-forward, complains about the costs of the staging of Tristan and

178
Isolde. Elisabeth alerts Ludwig to the complaints that have come to her
notice. Cosima, as go-between, expresses concern to Ludwig about
Wagner’s financial situation and accumulated debts. Then, in a scene
which reveals the extraordinary mixture of emotionality and self-
serving calculation at the heart of his character, the King is forced to
confront the facts about Wagner’s irregular liaison and the combination
of deception and self-deception that had enabled them to be hidden
from him for so long. His pride stung and his survival at stake, he
instructs Minister von Lutz to expel the Wagners from Munich.
At this point in the story Ludwig, while eccentric, is perfectly sane.
His brutality in despatching the Wagners is proof of his ability to pro¬
tect his own interests and those of the kingdom - at least on the occa¬
sions where the two coincide. But by the following year the ministers
are expressing concern for his sanity. It is 1866, the year of Prussia’s
assault on Austria and its Bavarian ally. (This is also the year in which
Senso is set, and the same war, which also opposed Austria to Italy, fig¬
ures in both films.) Ludwig refuses to take part in the war. His younger
brother Otto, a mere boy, is sent to the front to represent the mon¬
archy, and returns shattered and disbelieving. When Otto tries to tell

179

The young King Ludwig pays his respects to the Queen Mother and to his fiancee
the Princess Sophie
his brother about his experience, Ludwig interrupts him. ‘I never
wanted this war,’ he declares, ‘and I want everyone to know it.’ And
later: ‘As far as I am concerned, this war does not exist.’ Otto will
become a victim of what fifty years later was called shell-shock and
nowadays post-traumatic stress. Ludwig seems more the victim of
infantile delusions of omnipotence.
Immediately after the scene with Otto, the film cuts to a lakeshore
where a young man is seen running naked into the water. Unknown to
the man, a royal equerry, he is being observed by the King, who con¬
fronts him angrily, then seems to relent and lends him his cloak to keep
warm. This is the moment in the film when its major themes are crys¬
tallised. A close-up of Ludwig exclaiming, ‘Help me!’ is followed by a
cut back to the world of politics. Colonel Durckheim, a loyal servant
of the King, brings news of Bavaria’s defeat by the Prussians. When
Ludwig, in despair, hints that he will abdicate, Durckheim upbraids
him. In a speech directed as much to the audience as to Ludwig him¬
self, Durckheim denounces the Nietzschean aspect of Ludwig’s behav¬
iour, counterposing to it the virtues of humility and duty which alone
justify the monarchical institution.
With the sexual and political themes of the film now firmly stated,
Ludwig decides to ask for Sophie’s hand in marriage, thereby cement¬
ing the alliance with Austria and, he hopes, protecting him from the
consequences of his forbidden desires. It is, however, a futile gesture.
Austria has little to offer Bavaria and Sophie has even less to offer Lud¬
wig. She attributes his lack of tenderness towards her to his secret love
for Elisabeth, but the bitter truth, which Elisabeth is forced to admit
to her sister, is that he is incapable of loving any woman (and certainly
not one who sings, as Sophie does, so hideously out of tune). In a scene
cut from the shorter versions of the film, an attempt is made to induct
Ludwig into (hetero) sex with an actress, which fails. Shortly after¬
wards, Ludwig breaks off the engagement.
Ludwig’s inability to carry out his dynastic responsibilities is a
serious blow to the royal house of Wittelsbach and the monarchical
cause in general. In the next flash-forward, the witness is one Richard
Hornig, who had taken the place of the young equerry caught skinny-
dipping by the King and subsequently dismissed. Hornig denies any
impropriety in his relations with the King and the evidence presented
by the film is indeed inconclusive. Following the shot of Hornig giv¬
ing his testimony there is a scene with a significant exchange of looks
between Hornig and Ludwig; and shortly afterwards, when the King

180
is at confession, there are two rapid inserts, one showing Hornig reclin¬
ing on a bed and the other a kiss between him and Ludwig. These
inserts are clearly subjective in the sense of representing something
that is in Ludwig’s mind, and their purpose is to indicate that he is
lying to Father Hoffmann, his confessor. But are they memories of
events which actually took place or just of illicit but unacted on desires
(which he would be equally bound to confess)? Since there are no other
shots in the him which represent fantasies rather than actual events
one is inclined to assume that what we are seeing is real, but the him
gives no further evidence of an affair between Hornig and the King,
nor is Hornig ever accused of lying when protesting that their relation¬
ship was always perfectly proper. Hornig does, however, become the
King’s conhdant and, although this is never entirely clear, the audience
seems to be left to assume that he is also the King’s lover. The logic
would appear to be that if the relationship was clandestine at the time
it might as well remain so for the audience.
Whatever interpretation one makes of the two little inserts, the
King’s sexual proclivities are now clearly in the open. But they worry
his ministers and his family and friends and even his father confessor
rather less than his neglect of affairs of state. Ludwig has now been on
the throne for six years. Prussia (though this is not made explicit in the
film) has continued its inexorable advance, defeating the French army
at Sedan and advancing on Paris. Otto has never recovered from the
shock of war and is now a total wreck. The Queen Mother, formerly a
nominal Protestant, has converted to a fervent Catholicism. Count von
Holnstein has assumed more and more power and has gone to Ver¬
sailles to negotiate for Bavaria’s survival. Back from Versailles,
Holnstein makes Ludwig put his name to a document which saves the
monarchical principle but makes Bavaria effectively a vassal of Prus¬
sia. By signing this piece of paper Ludwig effectively recognises that he
has lost any form of political power, either in his own country or as his
country’s representative in the world of European politics.
Once again the film is at a turning-point. The monarchy is now a
sham. Even if Ludwig were to perpetuate it through reproduction
(which it is now clear that he won’t), his successor will not have much
of a kingdom to reign over. Ludwig is now free - if that is the word -
to indulge himself. Wagner has returned to Munich. His liaison with
Cosima has been regularised and he is shown presiding benignly over
a performance of his latest composition, the famous ‘Idyll’ from
Siegfried, offered as a birthday present to his new wife. Bits of Wagner

181
The royal favourite, Richard Hornig, interviewed about the King’s
habits

Wagner with his wife Cosima at his birthday party

have been played as background on the soundtrack; this is the first time
his music is performed on camera and identified as such to enable the
audience to understand how this overbearing, self-aggrandising para¬
site (brilliantly portrayed by Trevor Howard) also wrote beautiful
music and might be a worthy recipient of the King’s largesse.
By now, however, Wagner is not the King’s only extravagance. He
continues to patronise Wagner and reference is made to the opening of
the Bayreuth festival theatre in 1876. But Ludwig feels that Wagner has
betrayed him. He begins to spend his, or the Treasury’s, money on the
construction of his famous castles. An actor, Joseph Kainz, is sum¬
moned to one of these castles, Linderhof, to perform some of the
King’s favourite roles for him, such as Shakespeare’s Romeo or Didier,
the hero of Victor Hugo’s poetic tragedy Marion de Lorme. Hornig
warns Kainz that the King requires him not just to perform but to be
these heroes, but the warning comes too late and the wretched Kainz
is dragged around the kingdom by Ludwig, declaiming poetry until he
collapses with exhaustion. Eventually Kainz rebels against this
exploitation and reference is made later to his selling letters that Lud¬
wig had written to him.
A copy of one of the reports compiled by the King’s ministers is
sent to the Empress Elisabeth, and she sets out to track him down in
his Alpine hide-out. At Linderhof the piano has been wreathed in black
since the death of Wagner and the swan grotto is deserted but the
strains of Lohengrin remain audible as background music. Elisabeth
pursues him to his most fantastic construction of all, Neuschwanstein,
but he refuses to see her. In another of the close-ups used to represent
the building up of testimony, a valet says that the King broke down
and cried when she turned around and left.
By now Ludwig’s only company is his entourage of valets and
grooms.They drink beer together and engage in mildly orgiastic homo¬
sexual games to the accompaniment of zithers and accordions. Finally
the film reveals the nature of the investigation being conducted into
the King. Count von Holnstein is the instigator and Crown Prince
Luitpold is being asked to take over as Regent. The loyal Durckheim
is summoned to the inquiry and, in a speech similar in tone to the one
he made earlier to the King, he denounces the ministers for indulging
Ludwig’s weaknesses so as to weaken him further. An alienist, Profes¬
sor Gudden, is then asked for his conclusion and declares, using what
in the 1880s was the latest psychiatric jargon, that the King is in a state
of advanced paranoia. A decision is taken to arrange for the King’s

183

Ludwig with the actor Joseph Kainz in the Swan Grotto (opposite)
deposition but word reaches Holnstein that the King has been warned
of the plot against him. The conspirators set out in the rain to
Neuschwanstein, where the King promptly has them arrested. Diirck-
heim tries to persuade the King to return to Munich and rally the army
and people, but Ludwig refuses. Diirckheim, claiming to do so on the
King’s authority, then releases the conspirators and having done so
resigns from the service of the monarchy. Ludwig’s reign is over.
In a coda to the film, the deposed King is taken to Berg castle, to
be kept under observation. To Professor Gudden he says, ‘I am an
enigma and want to remain an enigma ... to others and to myself.’ He
persuades Gudden to let him walk for a bit by his favourite lakeshore.
Gudden goes with him. When they do not return, Holnstein orders a
search of the grounds. Two shots are heard and then the bodies of Gud¬
den and Ludwig are found. Holnstein announces: ‘Our King has com¬
mitted suicide and in order to do so has had to kill Professor Gudden.’

Ludwig belongs to the group of Visconti’s films which I call dynastic.7

These are films which trace the vicissitudes of a named family - the
Valastro in La terra trema, the ‘casa Salina’ in The Leopard, the Essen-
becks in The Damned, etc. - culminating usually in the family’s dissol¬
ution. Visconti applied this narrative model across the entire social
spectrum, though its classical place of application, as in the nineteenth-
century novels which he loved so much, is families with property and
a reputation to defend. Here in Ludwig he moves away from the world
of peasants, proletarians, bourgeoisie or provincial aristocracy to tackle
a grander dynastic theme, the collapse of a royal house. And the flawed
individual who is at the centre of the film is not someone with the usual
blend of strengths and weaknesses such as one might find sitting next
to one on the bus, but a king, the bearer of a unique calling, brought
up from infancy to believe that he occupies a place apart.
Kingship in the sense in which it is presented in Ludwig is not a
major modern concern. By the early years of the twentieth century
most of the surviving European monarchies had become largely cere¬
monial institutions, with little effective power over the lives of their cit¬
izen-subjects. Not surprisingly, then, there are few interesting film
monarchs and those there are are often more interesting for their
foibles (as in The Madness of King George or Mrs Brown) than for their
exercise of power. Monarchical power, too, if presented at all, is often
a metaphor for power in general, or, in the case of Eisenstein’s Ivan the
Terrible, for dictatorship. Nor are monarchy as an institution and the

184
individual notion of kingship particularly themes of the novel. They
are, however, major themes of classical tragedy and it is in that direc¬
tion that Visconti seems to have turned in creating the ideological tem¬
plate for Ludwig.
The obvious model for Visconti to have had in mind for Ludwig is
Shakespeare’s Richard II. Although this is not a play he ever staged, it
is one he almost certainly knew and he probably also knew Marlowe’s
Edward II, which treats a similar theme and has a strong homosexual
motif. Like Ludwig, Shakespeare’s Richard starts as a legitimate
monarch and remains painfully conscious of this fact even as he
becomes aware of the way power is being stripped from him. Like Lud¬
wig, too, Richard is an aesthete, who enjoys the notion of kingship in
a self-regarding way but neglects the ordinary responsibilities of pol¬
itical life. Finally, both Richard and Edward are depicted, with vary¬
ing degrees of explicitness, as neglectful of their conjugal duty and the
protection of their line.
What is suggestive here is not the narrative coincidences, which on
closer inspection are not all that great, but the assumption shared
between Visconti and Shakespeare that legitimacy is important but can
also be a burden. Everything about Ludwig is different because he is
a king. He is not just a temperamental loner whose tastes get in the
way of his doing his job. Furthermore the burden that is thrust on him
is intrinsically conflictual. If on the one hand it allows him the free¬
dom to patronise Wagner, on the other hand it makes his sexual desires
all the more unlawful.
Whatever Visconti’s debt to Shakespeare, however, their political
and historical contexts are very different. Shakespeare was a sixteenth-
century royalist and apologist of the Tudor monarchy. Visconti was a
twentieth-century Marxist and republican. The story of Ludwig II, last
King of Bavaria, appealed to him against the grain of his political con¬
victions. As so often in Visconti, there seem to be two stories going on.
One is the story of an impersonal social and political process whereby an
outdated institution is cast aside in favour of less arbitrary forms of rule.
And the other is a more elegiac tale of individuals threatened with the
loss of the lifeworld which sustains them. In earlier films such as Rocco
and His Brothers (1960) or The Leopard (1963) the two stories are kept
in balance. Although the films end badly {Rocco) or ambiguously {The
Leopard) for the protagonists, the process of which they are victims is at
least some kind of progress. Already in The Damned (1969), however,
what replaces the old patriarchal world of the Essenbecks is not progress

185
at all but the cataclysmic disaster of Nazism. And here in Ludwig there is
no sense that the world inaugurated by the ministers with their black
umbrellas, top hats and frock-coats is in any way preferable to the
colourful world of courts and dynasts that it replaces. In a battle
between conflicting forms of legitimacy one might have expected the
modernisers to represent some notion of the popular will, but the
people of Bavaria are strangely absent. (They are not even shown
acclaiming the King at his coronation.) When Diirckheim tells the King
that his hope lies in an appeal to the people, the film implies that such an
appeal has a good chance of success, if only Ludwig had the will to make
it. The modernisers represent realism, calculation, negotiation, coun¬
tering rival modernisers such as Bismarck by playing a similar game.
They do not represent any force for the better. It is significant that the
most positive character in the film, the one with whom the audience is
most encouraged to align itself, is Durckheim, the King’s most altruis¬
tic and loyal servant.8 Durckheim is the film’s appointed speech maker,
in the same way as Ciro is in Rocco and His Brothers. But whereas Ciro’s
speech at the end of Rocco is progressive and forward-looking, Diirck-
heim’s two speeches are defences of idealised and anachronistic
monarchical values. If only Ludwig acted like a true king rather than a
spoilt brat, if only the ministers would allow the King to govern rather
than indulging his childishness for their own devious purposes.This is a
perfectly acceptable lesson, but it marks a clear shift of position from
Visconti’s earlier work in which a dialectic of progress is always present,
even if not affirmed with conviction. Here in Ludwig the only solitary
thing that could possibly count as an element of progress is Wagner’s
music.

Ludzvig is a vast film. Not only is it very long, but it is visually and
aurally rich, and covers a range of themes. Like the great nineteenth-
century novels which provide its narrative models, it is open to a var¬
iety of readings, depending on which theme is chosen as the central
one. One such theme, for many spectators, is the ‘coming out’ motif
and the story of Ludwig’s largely ineffective attempts to come to terms
with his sexuality. Another is the historical, the lament for the passing
of the old political order. But the film only works as well as it does by
allowing its various themes a certain free rein while at the same time
holding them together. In my reading of the film, what holds the whole
thing together - the dominant, as Eisenstein would have put it - is king-
ship and the destructive pairing of this with Ludwig’s homosexuality.

186
Each in a sense makes him a man apart and each would be bearable
without the other. But, in an order which is, literally, patriarchal, Lud¬
wig’s position as failed dynast is untenable and a tragic ending is the
only one possible.
The other things that make the film work well are properties of the
rnise en scene. In the majority of his films (White Nights and Conversation
Piece are conspicuous exceptions),Visconti shows a rigorous dedication
to the principle and practice of location filming. Locations may be
dressed in various ways, but Visconti’s starting-point is a place where the
action would, or could, have taken place. As in Death in Venice, Visconti
and his team have used the locations to create an atmosphere that
breathes authenticity and where nothing looks studio because nothing
is studio. This insistence on authenticity is a characteristic Visconti
trademark but it works differently in different films. In general the
earlier (and black and white) films are sparser than the later (colour)
ones. This is partly a function of context, as Visconti moves his attention
up the social scale from the proletarian environments of Ossessione, La
terra trema and Bellissima to the faded haut-bourgeois and aristocratic
opulence of Senso and The Leopard. But there is also, in the later films,
an interest in the decorative in its own right and in the potential of
colour film to render visual surfaces in different ways. In Ludwig, unlike
Death in Venice, the colour is mostly naturalistic. In so far as the film
attempts to draw the audience into a strange world, this strangeness is
objective. It reflects what Ludwig is, rather than, as in Death in Venice,
what Aschenbach feels. If Death in Venice is all about illusion, Ludwig,
even at its most extravagant, is about reality. While in Death in Venice we
are led into Aschenbach’s illusions and watch them crumble with him,
in Ludwig the view is unsparing, inviting pity and terror none the less.

Notes
1. There are words in the flashbacks and at the beginning of the film Aschenbach
has a brief altercation with the gondolier who takes him to his hotel but there¬
after he hardly says a word throughout the Venice sequences.
2. ‘Gradiva: a Pompeian fantasy’ (1903).Translated by Helen M. Downey, 1917.
Reprinted as an appendix to Sigmund Freud, Delusion and Dream [1906]
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1956).
3. For the record it is worth listing the literary originals ofVisconti’s other films:
Ossessione is based on James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice; La terra
trema on Giovanni Verga’s I Malavoglia; Senso on the story of the same name
by Camillo Boito; White Nights on Dostoyevsky; Rocco and His Brothers (loosely)

187
 on Giovanni Testori’s II ponte della Ghisolfa; II lavoro (again loosely) on a Mau¬
passant story ‘Au bord du lit’] The Leopard on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s
novel of that title; Vaghe stelle delTOrsa (loosely) on the Oresteia with borrow¬
ings from John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore; Lo straniero on Albert Camus’s
L’Etranger; Death in Venice on Thomas Mann; and L’innocente on D’Annunzio.
The Damned’s, dependence on Macbeth and (possibly) Hamlet is too loose for
either play to count seriously as a source, any more than Richard II (see below)
can be called an actual source for Ludwig. The origin of Conversation Piece in a
novel by Mario Praz mentioned in some sources is specious. Praz’s book Scene
di conversazione is a work of art history, not a novel.
4. A shooting diary of the film is included in the published script (Ludwig, edited
by Giorgio Ferrara, Bologna: Cappelli, 1973).
5. This is the best summary I have been able to make of a very complicated situ¬
ation. Information on the restoration comes from the catalogue produced by
the Cineteca Nazionale; that on the different versions is derived from various
sources, including Elaine Mancini’s invaluable Luchino Visconti: A Guide to Ref¬
erences and Resources (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986).
6. All dialogue quotations are my translation from the Italian version, the English
version of the film (the best) being sadly unavailable.
7. See Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘Tra famiglia e dinastia’, in David Bruni and
Veronica Pravadelli (eds), Studi viscontiani (Venice: Marsilio, 1997).
8. I have derived the notion of‘alignment’ as a position for the audience to take
up from Murray Smith’s book, Engaging Characters (Oxford: OUP, 1995). As
Smith points out, it is far too easy to talk about members of the audience ‘ident¬
ifying’ with characters when they do no such thing. In Ludwig the audience is
invited to feel sympathy with Ludwig, but from a point of view similar to that
of Diirckheim, with whom they are, so to speak, ‘in alignment’.

188
 14: Conversation Piece

By the time Ludwig was released Visconti’s health had improved suffi¬
ciently for him to contemplate new projects. In May 1973 he staged
Harold Pinter’s Old Times in Rome and Puccini’s Manon Lescaut at the
Two Worlds Festival in Spoleto. But his great plan to make a film of
Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, for which he and Suso Cecchi
D’Amico had written a script and for which they had even gone
location scouting in Normandy with art director Mario Garbuglia, had
now definitively escaped his grasp. It had been due to go into produc¬
tion in August 1971 but the producer was still waiting to finalise the
funding and Visconti had turned aside to make Ludwig instead. Now
the producer, Nicole Stephane, had lost patience and had turned to
Joseph Losey instead. To make matters more complicated, Losey’s
script was by Harold Pinter, and Pinter and Visconti were at logger-
heads over the production of Old Times which Visconti had tarted up
with some sex scenes that the writer considered tacky and demeaning.
Visconti was, however, still in a position to make things difficult for
Losey and Pinter by refusing to give up his remaining claims to the
adaptation, and duly did so. As a result Losey and Pinter didn’t get to
make their film either.1
Meanwhile, Visconti’s state of health remained precarious and a big
location project such as the Proust would have been out of the ques¬
tion. At the suggestion of Enrico Medioli, he decided on something
altogether more modest, a chamber work to be filmed entirely in stu¬
dio interiors. The title of the film, in Italian, was to be Gruppo di
famiglia in un interno (‘Family group in an interior’) and in English (the
language in which the film would be shot) Conversation Piece. Funding
for the film was found from a right-wing publisher Edilio Rusconi, but
the film as made is not right wing at all, far from it.
A conversation piece, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,
is ‘a type of genre painting involving a portrait group posed in a land¬
scape or domestic setting’, and it is an example of this genre which sets
off the narrative of the film. The central character, a middle-aged
American known throughout the film simply as ‘the Professor’, lives

189
alone in an apartment in the centre of Rome inherited from his Ital¬
ian mother. The apartment is full of books and objets d’art and he is
thinking of adding to his art collection by buying an attractive eight¬
eenth-century conversation piece when his privacy is suddenly and
brutally disturbed by the arrival on the scene of an aristocratic woman
and her strange family. Unexpectedly, and alarmingly to him, his apart¬
ment becomes an interior that houses a family group and a place where
strange conversations are held. The film unfolds in the form of a con¬
trast between the idyllic but unreal world of the Professor’s art collec¬
tion and the unpleasant reality introduced by the invaders.
The opening credits of the film come up initially against a black
background. As the credits unfold the black gives way to a curl of pink
paper with a faint line inscribed on it representing the results of an
electrocardiogram. The camera tilts upwards to reveal the source of the
cardiogram but before it reaches its destination there is a cut and we
see the Professor (Burt Lancaster) inspecting a painting with a mag¬
nifying glass. What the cardiogram was doing there during the credits
will be revealed at the end of the film.
Present at the scene when the Professor examines his painting are
two art dealers and a woman who has marched in as if she owned the
place (which in fact is about to be the case, more or less).The woman
(played by Silvana Mangano) is the Marchesa Bianca Brumonti and
she is shortly joined by three other people, who turn out to be her
teenage daughter Lietta, the daughter’s boyfriend Stefano, and a young
man called Konrad who is the Marchesa’s lover. Later the Marchesa
will refer to Konrad as her kept man (mantenuto). The modern word
for this is toy boy but the part is played by Helmut Berger and Hel¬
mut Berger is definitely not a toy.
Bianca’s intention is to rent the apartment above the Professor’s,
which belongs to him but which he prefers to leave empty, and she sets
out to achieve this aim by a mixture of bullying and cajolery, aided and
abetted by Lietta and Stefano. Only the mysterious Konrad stands
slightly aloof from the campaign. Noting that the Professor was hesi¬
tating over the conversation piece because of its price, Bianca arranges
for Lietta and Stefano to buy it for him as an inducement. The pres¬
sure pays off and the Professor agrees to having his lawyer draw up a
contract. Without waiting for the contract to be signed, Bianca com¬
missions building works which cause damage to the Professor’s col¬
lection. When he goes upstairs to find out the cause he finds Konrad
sleeping there. At first Konrad is suspicious and aggressive, but when

190

Konrad (opposite)
‘Conversation piece’: the Professor with his surrogate family

The Professor discovers Lietta and the others dancing in the

apartment
he sees the extent of the damage he changes tack, seizes the Profes¬
sor’s phone and insults Bianca in lurid language which shocks both the
Professor and his equally demure maid Erminia.
Somewhat to the Professor’s surprise, it turns out that Konrad is
an art lover and had begun to study art history before being seduced
away from his studies by the siren-call of left-wing politics in 1968. He
further endears himself to the Professor by liking Mozart. He is also
keen to establish a distance between himself and Bianca and her fam¬
ily and finds staying over in the upstairs apartment ideal for this pur¬
pose. The ‘family’ then goes away for a few weeks and returns bringing
a mynah bird as a present, or rather a further source of disturbance,
to the Professor.2 Prowling round the Professor’s apartment, Konrad
discovers a secret room, which the Professor says was created by his
mother, who used it to hide partisans and Jews during the war. This
insight into recent history strikes no chord with the young intruders.
That night the noise upstairs disturbs the Professor who comes out
onto the landing just in time to see two shadowy figures run down the
staircase. Going upstairs he finds that Konrad has been badly beaten
up and he takes him in. A day or so later, he surprises Konrad in the
shower, but the sight of a naked man does not affect him in the way it
affected Ludwig, or might have affected Aschenbach. The Professor’s
affection for Konrad is in fact remarkably chaste. In so far as there is
an erotic undercurrent in the relationship it is not expressed in the film.
The Professor hides Konrad in the secret room until he recovers.
The following night, however, the Professor gets another unpleas¬
ant shock. Awakened by the sound of pop music, he goes to investi¬
gate and finds Konrad, Stefano and Lietta dancing together naked
while sharing a joint. The golden light which bathes this scene makes
it seem a hallucination, but it is all too real.The threesome put on their
clothes and leave.
The story of the film now becomes increasingly murky and at the
same time reveals its political purpose. There are all sorts of things
going on behind the scenes, but the Professor would prefer not to know
about them, and since the film shares the Professor’s point of view, the
audience does not get to know about them either. It does emerge, how¬
ever, that Bianca’s husband (or ex-husband) has Fascist connections.
Konrad also knows who his attackers were, but refuses to let on, so
whether they were petty drug dealers who beat him up because he
reneged on a deal or Fascist thugs sent by Bianca’s husband to put the
frighteners on him is left obscure. It also seems likely that Konrad has

192
been talking to one branch of the police while avoiding the branch
which would be interested in his drug dealing. Conversely, Bianca’s
husband, a shadowy figure who does not appear in the film, almost cer¬
tainly enjoys political protection at a high level. These sorts of under¬
current would have been instantly recognisable to Italian audiences at
the time the film was released but they would have been expected to
be obscure and in leaving them like that the film only reflects the reality
of the period. Significantly, during the making of the film a neo-
Fascist atrocity occurred in Brescia in Northern Italy for which the
perpetrators - unsurprisingly - were never brought to book.
What is illuminated by the emergence of the political sub-plot is
the contrast between the Professor and his visitors. Rather than go to
a party upstairs to celebrate the inauguration of the revamped apart¬
ment, the Professor invites the group to dinner. Bianca arrives late,
having just taken her husband to the airport. Since his destination was
Madrid and the year 1974 his likely aim was to help combat the crisis
caused to the far Right by the illness of Franco. On the way to the air¬
port, Bianca says, he abruptly instructed her to get rid of Konrad. This
leads Konrad to compare his own position to that of a pet dog, but
before he can quite say he is a lap dog of the bourgeoisie Stefano does
it for him, accusing him of being an infantile leftist living parasitically
off the well-to-do. But when Stefano claims that corrupt bourgeois
capitalist society is a thing of the past the Professor interrupts him.
This bourgeois capitalist society, he says, not only still exists but is
more dangerous then ever, because its operations are camouflaged.
And, when asked about his beliefs, he says, ‘Intellectuals of my gener¬
ation searched hard for an equilibrium between politics and morality
- a search for the impossible.’3 To which Stefano retorts that at least
people of the Professor’s generation remain committed, whereas Kon¬
rad has no morality or commitment at all.
The film is now approaching its denouement. Pressed further about
his attitude to life, the Professor refers to a story by a favourite writer
of his in which a man lies in bed listening to the sound of footsteps.
Only gradually does he realise that these are the steps of death getting
closer and closer. Thanking the strange family for having woken him
from a deep sleep, he sends them away. Erminia brings him a letter
pushed under the door. It is from Konrad, and reads: ‘I may be wrong,
but I don’t think we shall see each other again. Your son, Konrad.’
Erminia goes upstairs, followed by the Professor. An explosion is
heard. Konrad is lying on the ground near the gas oven. Cradling him

193

The Professor in his library (overleaf)

in his arms the Professor attempts to take the young man to safety, but
it is too late. The electrocardiogram returns. The Professor is lying in
bed, having suffered a heart attack. The family pay him a final visit.
Bianca refers to Konrad’s death as suicide. Lietta is convinced it was
murder. They leave. As the Professor lies in bed the steps upstairs are
heard for the last time.

Like many ofVisconti’s films, Conversation Piece is a film about families.

But unlike La terra trema, say, or Rocco or The Leopard, which are about
a single, strongly cohesive family, Conversation Piece is about two famil¬
ies, both of them fragmentary. There is the family group that invades the
Professor’s privacy to devastating effect, and there is the Professor’s own
family, lightly recalled in a few flashbacks. The key to the film lies in the
links to be made between the two.The flashbacks in the film occur when
the Professor is lying in bed and he has brief memories of his mother
(played by Dominique Sanda) from when he was a little boy, and of his
wife (played by Claudia Cardinale).4 Brief though the flashbacks are,
they are quite rich in meaning. It emerges from them that the Professor
feels that he has been a disappointment to the women in his life. He has
not been a good child, failing to comfort his grandfather’s loneliness -
or failing to recognise that his grandfather was lonely. And in a way that
is undefined in the film, he has failed his wife. He refers (in the present-
tense part of the film) to a marriage which went badly (‘e andato male’).
In the flashback she says to him, despairingly, ‘Only you can help me.’
What exactly she means by this is not made clear, but in a context where
such matters are referred to only indirectly the meaning surely must be
sexual.The marriage is probably unconsummated; certainly it does not
last and no children stem from it.
It is interesting to compare Conversation Piece in this light with
Death in Venice. Aschenbach too has been married, and had a child,
though it died in infancy. And in Venice what Aschenbach encounters,
like in Conversation Piece, is a family - a mother, her three children and
their governess. In each case, too, the desired object in the family group
that is singled out is male, a boy in Death in Venice, a young man in Con¬
versation Piece. But whereas the critical attention devoted to Death in
Venice focuses on the erotic, not to say paedophilic, aspect of Aschen-
bach’s attraction to Tadzio, in Conversation Piece, as already noted, the
erotic aspect is underplayed. Berger is shown naked almost so that the
audience can see that the Professor does not react as if sexually smit¬
ten in any way. By contrast the aspect that is played up is filial. At one
point in the film Lietta teasingly suggests she could bear the Profes¬
sor’s baby. When he politely declines and says he would only want a
child who was already grown up, she says why not adopt Konrad. And
in the final message that Konrad leaves the Professor before his death
he describes himself as ‘your son, Konrad’.
Is there then a difference between the two films, with one being
about an erotic obsession and the other about paternity? Not really.
Both aspects are present in each film, but in different proportions. In
each film the central character, Aschenbach or the Professor, is in need
of something which will break his solitude and each has a nostalgia for
a family that once was and in which they were disappointed. In Death
in Venice the ethereal figure of Silvana Mangano in her veil and hat is
as much an object of desire as Tadzio. The desire, so to speak, to be
Tadzio, to be a member of a family group with Silvana Mangano as its
head, is as strong as the desire for Tadzio, but being less disruptive is
less remarked on. If the majority ofVisconti’s films show families being
destroyed, Death in Venice and Conversation Piece can be seen as films
about their wished for recomposition.
Conversation Piece seems to me one of the most deeply felt of all
Visconti’s films. This does not mean to say that it is in a literal sense

197

Marchesa Bianca Brumonti (opposite)

autobiographical or that the Professor is in some straightforward way
a projection of the director. In her biography of the director, Laurence
Schifano quotes Burt Lancaster as saying: ‘I knew the old man I was
playing was him. In fact he told me so. “It’s my life. I’m a very lonely
man. I was never capable of love, I never had a family.”’5 Medioli, on
the other hand, whose idea the film was and who wrote most of the
script, is emphatic that the Professor and Visconti are not the same
character, if only because Visconti’s life was never solitary and secluded
like the Professor’s but was in fact highly social, with people around
him all the time.6 This is a bit specious: it is perfectly possible to be a
lonely person in the midst of a crowd and both Schifano and another
biographer, Gaia Servadio, suggest that this was true of Visconti.
Meanwhile, as Visconti’s long-term scriptwriter (alongside Suso Cec-
chi D’Amico), Medioli was only going to come up with ideas that the
director could make his own. The story does not have to be literally
about Visconti for it to become infused with his feelings towards the
subject matter. From the moment he selected Lancaster for the role,
if not earlier, Visconti would have begun the process of transforming
the character sketched out in the script into the character actually seen
in the film. As the Prince in The Leopard, Lancaster had already been
used by Visconti as the bearer of a point of view hard to distinguish
from Visconti’s own. Here in Conversation Piece the sense that the Pro¬
fessor speaks for the director is hard to avoid. When the Professor
affirms that capitalist society has not changed, but only become more
opaque, this is a political position certainly close to that of Visconti -
or indeed many Marxists at the time. And when he also expresses
incomprehension of the younger generation whose politics were
formed, not in the Resistance, as Visconti’s were, but in the carnival of
1968, this again is Visconti speaking. At a conscious level and where
public themes are involved the existence of correspondences is appar¬
ent and quite overt.
When one goes to the level of more private concerns and their artis¬
tic working out, the situation is, necessarily, more complex and decis¬
ive judgments are less easy. Generally in Visconti’s films there is a social
order, which is basically rational and can be the object of political and
moral discourse; and there is a disruptive element, which may be sex
or it may be family feeling, which is altogether less amenable to reason
or judgment. Visconti’s decision to introduce a homosexual thematic
into his work, first in Death in Venice, then in Ludwig, and then more
lightly here in Conversation Piece, was clearly a conscious one, made

198
possible by the more liberal atmosphere of the late 1960s. But he does
not do it in a libertarian or even liberal mode, in the spirit of the sex¬
ual politics of the period. Love for someone of your own sex in these
films is a passion and an affliction. It has its compensations, or can
have, if it is reciprocated, but it is an affliction none the less. It is fur¬
thermore an affliction whose accompaniment is solitude and isolation.
Aschenbach, Ludwig and the Professor are lonely and unhappy char¬
acters and their sexual and erotic longings are shot through with
ambivalence. Of the three, Ludwig is the only one who is explicitly
homosexual and his problem mainly concerns his relations with the
outside world. In different circumstances and without the unique bur¬
den of kingship his sexuality would no doubt be easier for him to live
with. Aschenbach, the eminently respectable and ascetic Aschenbach,
is destroyed by the impossibility of his desire, from which there is no
escape. Only the Professor seems to have the resources of sublimation
to enable him to love Konrad without becoming victim of a desire
which must remain unappeasable. And even he dies, though not
unhappily, immediately after the loss of the object of his love.
There is a great difference between what Conversation Piece has to
say about politics - political politics, so to speak - and what it has to
say about sexuality. Its public politics are simple and declarative and
the film has a political position which is articulated for it by the Pro¬
fessor. The Professor has sought to reconcile ethics and politics but
failed and withdrawn into quietism. His failure is honourable but a fail¬
ure none the less and one that can be learnt from. In sexual matters,
however, Conversation Piece offers no lesson, and nor do Death in Venice
or Ludwig. Sexuality in Visconti’s films is treated with cautious respect
and sexual behaviour is not judged in itself but only for its conse¬
quences. (Martin in The Damned and possibly Simone in Rocco are the
only characters whose sexual indulgences are presented as evil.) If
there is a difference between the later films and the earlier ones it is
that the melodrama of grand passion gives way to a more internalised
and meditative approach, based on the director’s own feelings. While
Medioli is right that Conversation Piece is not literally autobiograph¬
ical, it is nevertheless a film in which Visconti not only says his piece
about politics but also explores aspects of his own experience about
which he has not got anything to ‘say’ but plenty to make the audience
feel. The Professor’s loneliness, like Aschenbach’s and like Ludwig’s,
is in transmuted form Visconti’s own loneliness, which in Visconti’s
own case was all the more acute for being felt in the middle of a crowd.

199
But while Visconti clearly connects this loneliness with sexuality it is
not so as to form a judgment on his own sexuality or anyone else’s.
Indeed it is precisely because the connections were personal and
deeply felt that they are not susceptible of generalisation. When Con¬
versation Piece came out it was felt to be a very conservative film. The
platonic yearnings of an old man left behind by history seemed out of
place in the brave new world of student radicalism and sexual liber¬
ation. They doubtless were, but to make judgments on this basis is to
miss the point of a very beautiful and heartfelt film.

Notes
1. Both the Cecchi D’Amico/Visconti and the Pinter/Losey scripts have since been
published. The film that did get made instead of either of these was Volker
Schlondorff’s altogether less interesting Swann in Love (1983).
2. According to the published script the bird only says one thing, which is ‘Good¬
night, old man’ (in English), but in the film its screech is indecipherable.
3. As with Ludwig any quotations from the dialogue are my translations from the
Italian version, since the English version is unavailable.
4. These star cameos are uncredited on the film itself.
5. Laurence Schifano, Luchino Visconti: The Flames of Passion (London: Collins,
1990), p. 404.
6. In an introduction to the published script of the film, Gruppo difamiglia in un
interno, edited by Giorgio Treves (Bologna: Cappelli, 1975), p. 14.

200
15: Uinnocente

Visconti’s last film, L’innocente (released in Britain as The Intruder and

in the USA as The Innocent), begins with a flourish. A old book, a faded
paperback from the end of the nineteenth century, lies on a bed of red
fabric, front cover upwards. The cover reads: ‘Gabriele D’Annunzio,
L’innocente, with illustration by G. A. Sartorio’. A hand, yellowing like
the pages of the book, enters the frame and begins turning the leaves
while the credits roll in front of it. The hand pauses for a moment in
front of an exquisitely decadent picture of a man crucified, then con¬
tinues into the text. Whether or not the hand, as rumoured, was Vis¬
conti’s own, an initial statement is being made: the past is about to be
revisited, and we are about to enter the world of the novel, which is
possibly also the past of the author of the film.
In point of fact, although the world we are entering is that of D’An¬
nunzio, the story we shall witness is not exactly that of the novel, which
has been considerably rewritten. This is specified in the credits: ‘Free
adaptation from the novel of the same title.’ And the world is actually
one slightly earlier than the one in which Visconti grew up. The story
takes place among the social class to which Visconti belonged, but in
the 1890s, ten years or so before he was born. Any past he might be
revisiting is not quite his own.
The film tells the story ofTullio Hermil (Giancarlo Giannini), a
man whose pose is at odds with the society in which he lives. He is a
self-declared atheist and his adulteries are public knowledge (only his
mother, who lives in the country, would appear not to be in the know).
His marriage to the neurasthenic Giuliana (Laura Antonelli) is child¬
less and the couple no longer have sexual relations. His current mis¬
tress is the Countess Teresa Raffo (Jennifer O’Neill), who to some
extent shares his indifference to social norms and whom he regards as
a kindred spirit. His favourite sport is fencing, a sport whose contained
and ritualised aggression is a perfect metaphor for his attitude to his
fellow males. One dayTullio’s brother Federico introduces Giuliana to
a famous writer, Filippo D’Arborio. Giuliana falls in love with Filippo
and after a while discovers that her all too brief liaison with him has

201
The Countess Teresa Raffo (Jennifer O’Neill) confronts Giuliana
(Laura Antonelli) in the presence of the Princess (Marie Dubois)

Giancarlo Giannini as Tullio Hermil

left her pregnant. Tullio’s mother, unaware of the facts of the child’s
paternity, cannot resist telling Tullio about the pregnancy, although
Giuliana has begged her not to. Insulted by the thought of his wife
having a child by another man, Tullio tries to persuade Giuliana to have
an abortion, which as a pious Catholic she finds abhorrent. Tullio’s
determination to prevent the birth of the child is such that he even
hints to the doctor that in the event of complications the child should
be sacrificed to save the mother. When the child, a boy, is born, he
refuses to attend its baptism. A month or so later, while the rest of the
family are at Mass on Christmas Eve, Tullio takes the baby from its cot
and exposes it to the cold night air. The family return to find it dead.
Tullio leaves his wife to resume relations with Teresa, to whom he con¬
fesses his crime. She is unimpressed. Realising that a second woman
has now rejected him, Tullio shoots himself in the heart. The last shot
is a freeze-frame of Teresa leaving Tullio’s villa in Rome where his
corpse lies stretched out on the veranda.
The story is a powerful one. Although it seems the very stuff of
melodrama, it is not told melodramatically but with great (and for Vis¬
conti untypical) restraint. It also has a psychological plausibility miss¬
ing from the novel. Visconti and his scriptwriters (Suso Cecchi
D’Amico and Enrico Medioli) worked hard on the screenplay to
remove from the character of Tullio the strident quality that D’An¬
nunzio gives to his ‘superman’ heroes. Aided by a really excellent per¬
formance from Giannini they situate Tullio so that he comes over as
perfectly believable, in a way sympathetic - and morally quite abhor¬
rent. In the novel, which is told in the first person, Tullio presents him¬
self as basically unrepentant. He knows that he has committed a crime.
He knows that even before that his treatment of his wife was callous,
sometimes extremely so. But he revels, in a pseudo-Nietzschean way,
in the sense of superiority this gives him over other men, let alone
women. The idea that a sexual double standard is in operation, offer¬
ing one model of conduct for men and another for women, does not
really enter Tullio’s - or D’Annunzio’s - head as a matter for concern.
By objectifying Tullio and depriving him of his portentous first-person
narration, the film inserts a distance not only between the audience
and the central character but between the film’s makers and D’An¬
nunzio, whose ideology is being implicitly criticised.
The novel starts with Tullio in full rhetorical flow, imagining the
sort of things he would say to the judge if he were on trial for his crime
and then pausing to reflect that in fact he wouldn’t, because, he

203

Tullio fencing with Federico (opposite)

declares: ‘The justice of men does not touch me. No tribunal on earth
would be able to judge me.’ In the film, these sentiments are reserved
for the end, and are pronounced soberly, when he tries unsuccessfully
to articulate to Teresa his reasons for acting as he did. Although the
words come across as proud, they are also the words of someone who
has been defeated. His rivals, Teresa observes, are beyond his scope of
revenge because they are both dead; meanwhile he has lost Giuliana
and is about to lose her, Teresa, as well. The superman has been well
and truly brought down to earth.
An example of the gain in plausibility achieved by the adaptation is
the elimination of Giuliana’s two daughters from earlier in the mar¬
riage. By making the new baby Giuliana’s first child, power is added
to the scene when Tullio’s mother excitedly gives news of her daugh¬
ter’s pregnancy. Giannini’s face as he absorbs this unwelcome news
while desperately trying to look pleased seems to register a range of
emotions while remaining basically still. That it can seem so expres¬
sive while doing so little is a tribute both to the actor (not usually
renowned for his subtlety) and to the director and writers who have
devised the scene. Meanwhile the character of Giuliana herself has
been refined to make her a little less saintly, less given to the vapours,
and less the passive victim of Tullio’s sadism: in short, more of a
woman.
As much as a film about particular characters, however, L’innocente
is a film about a social and physical environment, and it is at this level
that it succeeds most conspicuously. It is above all a triumph of co-ordi¬
nated design. It was shot partly on location and partly in the same studio
as was used for Conversation Piece, the DEAR studio in Rome. It has the
same art director, Mario Garbuglia, and the same cinematographer,
Pasqualino De Santis, as the earlier film. Other members of the team,
such as the costume designer Piero Tosi and the composer-conductor
Franco Mannino, had worked withVisconti many times before and were
trusted by him to produce the effects he required. Particularly in the
first part of the film, an atmosphere is created of a world utterly confi¬
dent of its opulence and splendour. The harmony of the costumes with
the decors is a symbol of the characters’ conformity with social norms.
It is as if the characters had created for themselves the ideal puppet
theatre in which they themselves would be the puppets.That the world
of this puppet theatre can also be narrow-minded, hypocritical and
cruel is something that is allowed, subtly, to emerge through the cracks.
What is also suggested by the film is that this world is, in fact, dis¬
continuous with the present. In Visconti’s films there is usually an
inheritor, someone who survives at the end of the drama and provides
a link between the drama and the present world of the audience. This
inheritor may be an adult, like Pietro in Vaghe stelle delTOrsa, or it may
be a child, as in La terra trema and Rocco and His Brothers. Here in L’in-
nocente a child is indeed procreated, but only to be killed off, and its
death is not just a personal tragedy for Giuliana but a dividing line
marked between the world of the film and the world of today. With the
baby’s death, it might be said, a whole world dies. And because this
world is discontinuous with ours, it is not something for which we have
any responsibility. In Visconti’s historical films the audience is made
aware that the world of the film is one which has contributed to mak¬
ing us the way we are: we are inheritors of the compromises of the
Risorgimento, of the triumphs of the bourgeoisie and capitalism, of the
corruption of Nazism. But the world of L’innocente is distant and
unreal, possessed only of an extraordinary corroded beauty and a sense
of might-have-been.

In its beauty, Linnocente is a heartless film. As a re-creation of a par¬

ticular historical environment it has no parallel. It is in a totally differ¬
ent category from traditional costume films or from the ‘heritage films’
which emerged in the 1980s. If, as is sometimes claimed, Martin
Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence is a tribute to Visconti, then the tribute
must be reckoned a pale shadow of the original. In terms of a feeling

205

Giuliana and Tullio in her garden in Tuscany (opposite)

Teresa with the dead body ofTullio

Tullio attempts to seduce Giuliana

206
for the world of European high society at the turn of the twentieth cen¬
tury, both its charm and its cruelty, the only comparison possible is
with the late films of Max Ophuls such as Letter from an Unknown
Woman (1948), La Ronde (1950) or, most pertinent of all, Madame
de ... (1953). But Ophuls’s vision is never cold, nor did he make films
so lacking in hooks for audience alignment or identification. In this
respect a completely different analogy suggests itself - with Dreyer’s
Gertrud (1964). In this masterly work, also by an old man (Dreyer was
over seventy when he made it), a woman is observed in her environ¬
ment as she goes through the process of deciding between two men,
her husband and her lover, and choosing neither of them. Dreyer’s
approach to his characters - to the heroine herself as much as to the
demonstrably inadequate men she rejects - is so ruthless that in the
end it inspires pity in spite of itself. In comparison, the coldness of L’in-
nocente seems more a failure of nerve, as ifVisconti, having scaled down
Tullio from the heights of self-regarding grandeur to which D’Annun¬
zio had exalted him, lost interest in his creation and was unable to
bring it properly to life.
Failure of nerve, or failure of energy? It has to be remembered that
Visconti was very ill during the shooting. Although he had successfully
overseen the creation of the setting for the action, relying on the skills
of his team and their implicit understanding of his needs, it could well
be that the vital surges of energy on which he depended in order to
vitalise the grand dramatic moments of, say, Senso, Rocco and His
Brothers, or Vaghe stelle delVOrsa were simply not at his disposal. Even
the scene when Tullio, having learnt about Giuliana’s pregnancy, seems
ready to rape her, while richly sensual, lacks the transformative vio¬
lence of comparable scenes earlier in Visconti’s work.1
The lack of a vital heart to the film makes the whole project hard
to come to terms with. Did the film start as an attempt to redo Lo
straniero and to achieve what the earlier film failed to do by way of
taking a character who originally exists in the form of a first-person
narration and objectifying him? Is the film really, as Lino Micciche and
other critics have assumed,2 a critique of D’Annunzio? If so, why
bother? The remodelling of Camus, although a failure, was at least an
operation worth performing. L’Etranger is a much admired and widely
read canonical text which can gain from being prised away from its
‘existentialist’ self-presentation and resituated in an environment. But
D’Annunzio and his supermen belong to a universe far more remote
than Camus and existentialism. In so far as the film L’innocente acts as

207
a corrective to the novel (and I agree with Micciche that to some extent
it does) it seems more like an exorcism than a critique. Here, frozen
into film form, is the world of Gabriele D’Annunzio and his heroes.
Requiescant in pace. Requiescat, also, the world which gave birth to
Luchino Visconti not many years later.

Notes
1. Curiously, this scene is more explicit in the novel (1891) than in the film. The
first-person narration makes it quite clear that Tullio, in the grip of sexual jeal¬
ousy, decides to force himself on Giuliana and that she succumbs, though how
voluntarily the narrator does not bother to say.
2. Lino Micciche, Luchino Visconti: un profilo critico (Venice: Marsilio, 1996, rev.
edn. 2002), pp. 73-4 of 2002 edition.

208
 16: Retrospect (2002)

Visconti died on 17 March 1976, a few months short of his seventieth

birthday. He had been able to oversee the editing of L’innocente but the
dubbing and sound-mixing had yet to be done. The film was premiered
posthumously at Cannes on 15 May. In spite of increasingly poor
health Visconti had succeeded since his stroke in July 1972 in com¬
pleting one unquestioned masterpiece, Ludwig; in directing a contro¬
versial play and a highly acclaimed opera; and in making two further
films. But these last two films were curious, and puzzled his admirers
as much as his detractors. They were not in the cinematic mainstream
of the time; they were also not ‘Visconti’. That is to say, although they
were clearly the work of the man, Luchino Visconti, they did not seem
fully to belong in the Visconti oeuvre, whether in style or in content.
They were not realistic and they were not melodramatic and they
steered well clear of the grand themes which had animated his earlier
work. As such, they posed a challenge to the kind of author criticism
in vogue at the time, of which the first two-thirds of this book are an
example.
Visconti’s death was also the end of an era. Of the other giants of
post-war Italian cinema, De Sica had died the previous year and
Rossellini was to die in the year following. Zavattini, De Santis and
Lattuada were to survive a bit longer, though others who had worked
alongside them - Rosi, Zeffirelli, Fellini - were to continue active for
some years to come. Of that generation Visconti was probably the most
consistently successful. Most of his films did well at the box office or
with the critics, or both, which was not the case with either Rossellini
or De Sica. La terra trema was a box-office flop in Italy, but widely
admired internationally. Rocco and His Brothers was a huge popular hit,
particularly with working-class audiences, though the critics were div¬
ided.1 The Leopard was an unqualified success, though whether 20th
Century-Fox or Titanus actually made money out of it is uncertain.
Only Lo straniero, which did mediocrely at the box office, was gener¬
ally disliked by the critics, and in the end repudiated by Visconti him¬
self, can be counted a failure.

209
 After his death Visconti continued to be held in high esteem by
people who knew him and his work, particularly in Italy. But in the
outer world he became less and less known. The usual process set in
of films disappearing from commercial distribution and then, as prints
wore out, from the 16mm circuit as well. (The 16mm prints of Senso
circulating in Britain and North America in the 1970s and early 1980s
were so scratched and faded that they probably should have been with¬
drawn earlier than they were.) On the brighter side, Ludwig (as men¬
tioned earlier) was restored to its intended length and shown at Venice
in 1980. And in 1983 Fox finally allowed a full-length Italian-language
version of The Leopard to be shown in English-speaking countries.
Rocco and His Brothers was re-released in Britain in 1992 and was the
subject of a BFI Film Classic monograph by Sam Rohdie.2 But the
other films languished, rarely seen and little written about. With the
exception ofYoussef Ishaghpour’s Luchino Visconti: le sens et Timage in
1984,3 the literature about Visconti outside Italy in the decade follow¬
ing his death is scant and undistinguished.
The poverty of the writing about Visconti reflects a genuine uncer¬
tainty felt at the time about what sort of film director he was. Broadly,
his work seemed to fall into three periods.There was an early period, up
to and including Bellissima (1951), in which he was clearly identified
with Italian neo-realism, even though, on closer analysis, it was equally
clear that he stood somewhat outside the neo-realist movement as such.
Then, for a second period, up to and including The Damned (1969), it
seemed as if his interest had shifted from contemporary society to its
roots in recent or recentish history, while his style had become increas¬
ingly that of the melodrama. And finally, in his last four films from Death
in Venice (1971) onwards, he seemed to have immured himself quite
firmly in the past, and in a nostalgic rather than a critical way. Although
these impressions were in many ways quite superficial and the divisions
between periods not by any means hard and fast, there had been enough
of a change for admirers of one phase of his work to have turned away
from him during the next one. By the late 1970s there weren’t many
people left who still bemoaned his abandonment of neo-realism, but the
involution that began with Death in Venice had lost him supporters who
up to then had seen him as (with reservations) basically progressive. If
there was to be a renewed interest in his work it was going to have to
come from people who had no hang-ups about whether this once great
director had abandoned realism for melodrama or progressism for
decadence. Unfortunately such people did not materialise.

210
 To some extent, too, Visconti paid the posthumous price for the fact
that the type of cinema he was identified with, international art cin¬
ema, was beginning to lose the central position it had a decade or so
earlier, whether with critics, financiers or the public at large. European
art cinema had profited from the weakness of the Hollywood industry
in the 1960s not only to regain audiences at home but to attract large
amounts of American capital, without which ‘quality’ productions on
the scale of The Damned or Death in Venice (both backed by Warner
Bros.) would not have been possible. But not all the European films
into which Fox, Warners or United Artists poured their money proved
successful at the box office and investment began to dry up. By con¬
trast Hollywood was beginning in the early 1970s to stage a revival. A
new generation of American directors, steeped in European cinema,
was taking over. Visconti’s influence can be clearly felt in films like
Francis Coppola’s The Godfather and it can be argued that the real
inheritance of the European art cinema of the 1960s is to be found in
the USA, with Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Woody Allen and
(more recently) Jim Jarmusch, rather than in Europe itself. Among the
present generation of Italian film-makers the only one able to carry on
Visconti’s inheritance in the sense of being able to command a sub¬
stantial budget and a large international audience for a serious film is
Bernardo Bertolucci (whose cousin Giovanni, incidentally, was Vis¬
conti’s producer on Conversation Piece and Uinnocente).
The fact that a genre is in decline is not, or should not be, a reason
to neglect existing examples of it, and Visconti’s reputation further suf¬
fered from a misguided avant-gardism which took rather literally
Godard’s attacks on Hollywood-Mosfilm and Pinewood-Cinecitta as
fabricators of expensive and useless illusions. The well-crafted, real-
seeming surfaces of Visconti’s films appeared to many people (myself
for a while included) emblematic of a kind of cinema which was essen¬
tially non-critical, one which was content to make pretty pictures of
reality, and which, to the extent that it did engage with the world, failed
to examine the way it did so. For all their concern with class and with
history they seemed too confirmatory of the way the world was,
whether personally or politically. It was only over the matter of his
homosexuality that Visconti seemed to bring something new and rad¬
ical to the question of how the world was and how it should be rep¬
resented.
For this to happen it was first necessary for his homosexuality to
cease to be a matter merely of (fairly widespread) gossip and begin to

211
be spoken of openly as something that might have a bearing on his cin¬
ema and theatrical work. This did not happen overnight. As late as
1979 a biography of the director could be published which made no
mention of any of his love affairs apart from his youthful interest in a
young Austrian woman whom he briefly considered marrying: neither
his formative relationship with the German photographer Horst nor
his later affairs such as the notoriously stormy one with Helmut Berger
is even referred to.4 Subsequent biographies, first that by Gaia Serva-
dio and then that by Laurence Schifano,5 eventually put the record
straight, making it easier to make connections between Visconti’s work
and his life.
In fact it was not necessary to wait for detailed confirmation from
the biographers in order for Visconti to be claimed - or acclaimed - as
a ‘gay director’.The first person to look closely and sympathetically at
the presence of a distinct homosexual strain in Visconti’s work was the
maverick gay critic Parker Tyler, whose Screening the Sexes: Homosexu¬
ality in the Movies dates from 1972. But Tyler only deals with two films,
The Damned and Death in Venice, in which the theme is explicit, rather
than at the work as a whole. In fact homosexual themes are present in
Visconti’s work as early as Ossessione (made under Fascism, where he
could probably rely on such things passing unnoticed) and it does not
require a special antenna to recognise the director’s erotic investment
in the performance of certain actors - Farley Granger in Senso, Alain
Delon in Rocco, and of course Helmut Berger. The problem is that
while the themes are there they tend to be treated rather negatively.
The Spaniard in Ossessione turns out to be spiteful and treacherous;
Simone’s prostitution of himself to Morini in Rocco and His Brothers is
squalid; in The Damned a generalised homosexuality is attributed to
the brutal beer-swilling SA, while in the same film Martin is made into
a repository of all forms of perversion; meanwhile, as discussed earlier,
in the late films - Death in Venice, Ludwig and Conversation Piece -
homosexual love is seen as an affliction and inseparable from the death
wish. Critics in the 1970s who saw Visconti as being, or having been,
a progressive film-maker and who hoped he would be equally pro¬
gressive in his attitudes to sexuality tended to be disappointed by what
they found.
There are two distinct levels at which homosexuality is present in
Visconti’s films: overt and covert. At the overt level there are the char¬
acters and actions labelled as homosexual by the plot; but at a more
covert level there are a number of moments, spread across his work,

212
when an unexpected vision asserts itself, cutting through the surface
of the narrative, or doubling the narrative with a separate more erotic¬
ally charged spectacle. Already in Ossessione there is a focus on the body
of Gino (Massimo Girotti) which seems excessive in relation to the
narrative, though not to a degree where it positively impedes the
process of storytelling. But in Senso Franz (Farley Granger) is framed
and posed in ways which actually run counter to the main sense of the
narrative. It is as if Granger was both actor and model. As actor he per¬
forms the role of the man Livia falls in love with; as model he is there
for the delectation of the camera; and the modelling function is suffi¬
ciently obtrusive to cast a shadow of doubt over his status as Livia’s
lover, not to mention the nature of her object-choice.6 Then, famously,
in Rocco and His Brothers the climactic scene when Simone (Renato
Salvatori) admits to Rocco (Delon) that he has murdered the woman
they both love is played almost as a love duet between the two broth¬
ers. Here the scene is not merely excessive (excessiveness comes mainly
from Katina Paxinou as the mother emoting in the background) but
narratively perverse. The Mediterranean family may be an intensely
closed institution, but this level of incestuousness is, in the context of
a him that is broadly realistic, unreal.
There is, clearly, some form of textual subversion at work in the
examples I have quoted, and there is also, below that, a sub-text formed
by the recurrence of certain favoured actors and by the iconic one-off
appearance of Jean Marais, the lover of Jean Cocteau, in White Nights.
It is not possible, as the older generation of Italian critics did, simply
to turn a blind eye to them. At the very least there is something hap¬
pening in the Visconti text, consciously willed or not, which it is
impossible to ignore. The question is, how much, and how important
is it?
In a way, it’s not the presence of homosexual themes and motifs in
Visconti’s work that is significant so much as the way they were for so
long systematically ignored - not, it would seem, out of respect for his
or his family’s privacy but because they constituted an offence against
the image of an artist who had become totemic in so many different
cultural and political circles. Given the nature of the surrounding cul¬
ture it was distinctly courageous ofVisconti himself, who was quite a
private person, to decide to confront overtly homosexual themes and
motifs in his later films, particularly since the way he did it was likely
to lose him old friends in the official culture without picking up new
ones in the emerging gay counter-culture. Since it was Visconti

213
himself who was calling attention to the subject, it was hard for critics
to deny the connection. The earlier films are a different matter. Here
the homosexual sub-text that occasionally pushes through the surface
in one form or another is very much something in the eye of the
beholder, to which some spectators are going to be more alert than
others. There is no doubt that it is, in a way, disruptive, if only because
it incites a reading of the films in a non-naturalistic key. It shifts the
focus from the character’s actions onto the body of the actor or (in the
case of Rocco) onto a release of pure emotionality which is so dispro¬
portionate as to call much of the rest of the film into question. But
whether it functions as a deeply corrosive critique of the ideology for¬
mally espoused by Visconti in his public persona as Marxist artist
seems to me questionable.'
Visconti’s homosexuality does, however, throw light on one central
feature of his work. In one way or another, all his films are about fam¬
ilies. Broadly speaking the films fall into two groups: those which are
about large families, with two or more generations present; and those
which are about a family nucleus, such as a couple. To the former cat¬
egory belong La terra trema, Rocco and His Brothers, The Leopard, Vaghe
stelle dell’Orsa, The Damned and Ludwig. All these, except Vaghe stelle,
are long films, novelistic and even saga-like in structure, and often
derived from novels. The other films tend to be shorter, more subject¬
ive in focus, and derived in many cases from novellas or recits. A char¬
acteristic pattern in the former group is that the family, as an
institution, is destroyed or at best dispersed. In the latter group couples
break up or fail to form. There is only one film in Visconti’s whole out¬
put which shows a family group surviving, strengthened, at the end,
and that is Bellissima. Every other case is an instance of family failure
or disappointed love. Some of the films can be read as critiques of the
family. In Rocco, for example, it is Rosaria’s insistence on putting the
family first that leads to its downfall. But almost all the films, and the
later ones most particularly, are suffused with a nostalgia for the fam¬
ily as an institution. As I have argued above, both Death in Venice and
Conversation Piece evoke this nostalgia powerfully. Each of them has the
same dual focus: an older man’s love for a boy or younger man, and a
wish not so much to possess as to be that young man or boy, immersed
in some sort of family relation, however dysfunctional. What Burt Lan¬
caster told Laurence Schifano about Visconti identifying with the Pro¬
fessor in Conversation Piece in his childlessness seems to me to represent
the last truth about Visconti in his declining years if not in his youth.8

214

Family group in an interior, as nostalgically viewed by Aschenbach in

Death in Venice (opposite)
It also illuminates the fascination the aristocratic Visconti felt for Lud¬
wig, the sad young king whose destiny was to cut himself off from the
world of dynastic succession and to be rebelled against by his family
and court.
If the immediate locus of Visconti’s films is the family, their main
theme is history. His films of the neo-realist period mainly take place
in the present, but as time goes on he immerses himself more and
more in the past. White Nights and Vaghe stelle delTOrsa, although nom¬
inally set in the present as evidenced by the pop music chosen for the
soundtrack, both portray worlds which are a survival of a past state of
things. Senso, The Leopard and Ludwig are all set in the 1860s; Death
in Venice and L’innocente are turn-of-the-century; The Damned is in the
1930s. Even those films set in the present often contain references to
the past. Both Vaghe stelle and Conversation Piece refer back to the Sec¬
ond World War and the Resistance and the references are far from
incidental. The Resistance and aftermath of war were formative
experiences for Visconti. They turned him into a revolutionary, but a
revolutionary who had neither the ability nor the desire to shake off
the legacy of the past. The battle between progress and nostalgia is
fought out in his films again and again - increasingly, as time goes on,
to the benefit of the latter. But there is great precision in the way the
battle is located. Two periods interest Visconti in particular. One is the
formation of modern Europe with German and Italian unification,
and the other is the cataclysm in which this Europe was caught up
with Nazism and Fascism. Although the way he presents the history is
personal and coloured by his increasing scepticism about the value of
progress, his thinking on the subject is rigorous and profound and
derived from an intensive reading of Marxism, not so much of Marx
himself as of his great twentieth-century interpreters, notably Gram-
sci and Lukacs.
It is in the quality of his meditation on history that Visconti distin¬
guishes himself from all other film-makers, past or present. There have
been great film-makers who have occasionally delved into the past for
one reason or another - Eisenstein with Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible,
Dreyer with The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath, Renoir with
La Marseillaise and French Cancan. But none of these, not even Eisen¬
stein, applies to his re-creation of the past a serious and thought-
through theory of history. John Ford has a view of history, powerfully
expressed, but it is hardly a theory.9 Even Mizoguchi, perhaps the
greatest ever maker of historical films, is not an original thinker in the
way Visconti is. Perhaps it is because we no longer expect movie¬
makers to be profound thinkers that Visconti’s greatness is no longer
appreciated as it should be. It is therefore worth saying a bit more
about Visconti’s debt to Marxism.
As argued earlier in this book, Visconti’s interpretation of European
history and Italian history in particular is basically Gramscian. In Vis¬
conti’s version, there are general historical trends with which it is pos¬
sible for individuals to reach honourable or dishonourable
compromises. Count Serpieri in Senso and the Essenbecks in The
Damned represent the dishonourable, the Prince in The Leopard repre¬
sents the honourable.The deluded, stiff-necked Ludwig does not com¬
promise and suffers accordingly. Visconti also borrows from Gramsci
(who in turn borrowed it from the French writer Romain Rolland) the
slogan ‘pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will’, meaning
that things will not necessarily turn out for the better but there is a bet¬
ter and it is worth believing in and fighting for it. Where he then devi¬
ates from the model is when he begins to have doubts about whether
the thing to be fought for really is better or whether what is better for
the world is what he would really want for himself. This dilemma is
most forcefully expressed through the two characters played by Burt

216
Lancaster, the Prince in The Leopard and the Professor in Conversation
Piece. But while the Prince transcends the dilemma, the Professor is
heart-broken by it.
If Gramsci provides Visconti with a schema for interpreting history
as a process which remains external to men even when they are
involved in it, it is the German-Hungarian philosopher and critic
Lukacs to whom he turns for a sense of the place of subjectivity within
this process. Gramsci could point to the place in history of characters
like the Prince of Salina but he offered no indication of what it could
be like to be such a character and certainly no indication how one
could both be such a character and see beyond him. It is here that
Lukacs enters the picture. It was through Lukacs that Visconti was
able to reconcile Marxist politics with his own belief in the values of
western high culture and in the importance of the artist as interpreter
of the world. Already in his article ‘Anthropomorphic cinema’, which
dates from 1943, long before he had read either Gramsci or Lukacs,
Visconti was staking out claims for a cinema of which Man (capital
M) would be the measure. His ability to make good this claim was to
depend on the reading he made of Lukacs in the mid-1950s.
What Visconti got from Lukacs was in the first instance theoretical
backing for his sense of European culture as something uniquely pre¬
cious which by rights belonged to the forces of progress rather than
reaction. As Lukacs saw it, the most profound critique that could be
made of bourgeois society was that produced by its artists, especially
novelists. Bourgeois society had spawned the realist novel and this
form of art proved uniquely capable of laying bare from the inside the
contradictions of that same society. Realism, as opposed to mere nat¬
uralism, was not a passive reflection of the world it surveyed but a way
of entering into its very heart. Visconti’s project in the cinema can be
seen as an attempt to translate the values of European realism, in
Lukacs’s interpretation of them, into a cinematic form appropriate to
the second half of the twentieth century. It was not a pedantic attempt
and was not carried out to the exclusion of other interests. Visconti was
much more tolerant of decadent literature than his mentor ever was
(or was allowed to be). What he got from Lukacs and what differenti¬
ated him from most of his Italian contemporaries was a sense of real¬
ism as a critical enterprise. Visconti’s realism is not naturalism and
does not merely take the form of exact reproduction of the surface of
reality, though God knows he does that pretty well. He also sets out to
interpret, to find a point of view, inside or outside the literary or film

217
text, which will elucidate what is happening and define the limits
within which the characters are operating.
This concern with interpretation also explains his preference for
working with pre-existing literary texts. Sometimes the literary text is
little more than a starting-point and the fact that it was used is little
more than a curiosity. But in a number of cases - The Leopard, Lo
straniero, Death in Venice, L’innocente, possibly Senso — the film operates
on two levels. On the first level it tells a story which is the same as one
already told by a writer in a book, but on the second it offers a com¬
mentary on the text it is reproducing. There is a simultaneous pres¬
ence of the fictional universe created in prose by Lampedusa, Camus,
Mann or D’Annunzio and of one in film created by Visconti. Also pres¬
ent is a third term, which is the real (past) world in which the stories
are set and (to the extent that they are all realist texts) on which they
are based. In Death in Venice the distance between the point of view of
the book and that of the film is subtle and barely perceptible. In The
Leopard it is considerable but does not detract from the evident sym¬
pathy felt by Visconti for Lampedusa and his world. But in both Lo
straniero and L’innocente it is of a kind which sets up the film as a cor¬
rective to the novel, the correction being applied by the relative object¬
ivity of the image compared with the first-person narration employed
in the book. I stress the word relative because Visconti’s point of view
is never detached. What he is doing is taking the story away from the
narrator and making the narrator - Meursault,Tullio Hermil - a char¬
acter like any other. But characters have ways of making their presence
felt and Meursault andTullio are still the affective focus of their films.
But enough distancing is applied for questions to emerge which the
original text might inspire in an attentive reader but certainly does not
foreground. The original author’s vision is both affirmed and cor¬
rected.
This form of duality, where this is an original text and an interpret¬
ation of it, is characteristic of the theatre, and Visconti was a theatre
director as much as film-maker. (In the course of his career he directed
over forty plays and nearly twenty operas, as against fourteen feature
films.) But whereas the theatre audience goes to see the author’s play
and the director’s interpretation, film audiences generally go just for
the film. Only a minute proportion of the audiences for Rocco and His
Brothers can have gone to see it to find out what Visconti did toTestori’s
stories, though far more people would have gone to Death in Venice or
Lo straniero knowing that these were adaptations and quite a number

218
would have already read the book. It can therefore be observed that
not only did Visconti make two types of film - those that are visibly
based on a literary text and those that are not - but he also addressed
at least two different types of audience: on the one side a sophisticated
audience, well read in European literature and sensitive to the nuances
of his Gramscian and Lukacsian approach to history and culture; and
on the other side a mass audience, interested only in the film itself.
What is the point, it might be argued, of a theoretical sophistication
that is perceptible only to the ‘happy few’?
The answer to this, I think, is: so what? Audiences are always strat¬
ified and it crudities the situation to suggest that there are only two of
them, a ‘mass’ and an ‘elite’. Many film spectators (not to mention
readers of books or visitors to art galleries) do not fall into either cat¬
egory and would find insulting the suggestion that they did. All works
of art are going to address different people differently and Visconti’s
films are no exception. The real question is: does an ignorance of where
Visconti gets his ideas from seriously impair one’s understanding of his
films? Or, the other way about: does a knowledge of his cultural sources
enrich or contradict a more naive reading of the films? And the answer
to this must be that Visconti put a lot of thought and a wide range of
cultural reference into his films and the more one knows about it the
better. (That, after all, is the reason why books such as this one exist.)
But knowledge of what is behind the films is not esoteric and pos¬
session of it does not give access to a realm in which more ordinary
readings are invalidated. Indeed it is a huge strength ofVisconti’s films
that, almost without exception, they have appealed to a wide public
and the understanding of them by the majority of the audience is not
significantly different from that of his more intelligent critics. But, and
this is important, as one ascends or descends the ladder leading from
the film to the thinking that informs it, something else takes shape and
a sense emerges of a text that is multi-dimensional and is so because
the author has made it so.

At this point it seems appropriate to attempt a conclusion, not only in

respect of Visconti and his films but in terms of what the idea of author¬
ship means when applied to a film-maker such as he was. Authorship
theory as formulated in the 1960s put forward a number of assertions,
some of which have proved more durable than others. One such durable
assertion is the claim that film directors did not need to have total con¬
trol over their work in order to qualify as authors. This helped create a

219
common level of understanding for American films, where the director
might have very little control over anything other than the actual mise en
scene, and European films, where he or she was likely to have far more
control over script, casting and final edit. Another is that an author’s
work taken as a whole illuminates the single films that form its parts.
Taken together these assertions make it far easier to appreciate the
greatness of a director like Nicholas Ray, whose films are often com¬
promised by production constraints but whose genius shows through
even in the most compromised. A film like Savage Innocents, for
example, would be hard to take seriously if one could not see in it some¬
thing of the titanic spirit of Rebel without a Cause or BitterVictory. It is still
not a great film - in fact it’s pretty risible - but knowledge of the rest of
Ray’s work at least offers an angle on the film from which more sense can
be made of it than if it was seen purely on its own.
But authorship theory only works with certain authors, and even
then it works differentially. There are plenty of films, good and bad
alike, which are not illuminated at all by knowing who directed them
and plenty of directors who are not authors in any meaningful sense
of the word. The principle of the whole illuminating the parts also
needs to be qualified. It arose to deal with particular cases, Ray being
perhaps the most blatant, where information about the rest of the work
had to be supplied in order to make sense of a particular film. But at
a certain point the principle underwent a subtle shift. From being
based on the assumption that the director knew what he was doing but
somehow didn’t manage to achieve an intended effect, it moved to the
proposition that effects were often not consciously intended and that
the coherence of an author’s work could be located at a level of which
the author himself was probably not aware. This is the position adopted
(with reservations) in the Introduction to this book. It is a position
which has a lot to recommend it, if only because there clearly are
authors whose work shows a high level of consistency around certain
themes but who - as enthusiastic interviewers have found out to their
chagrin - seem unable to account for it themselves. But a difficulty
arises when one moves from the observation that there are things that
the director is not aware of to the claim that they are things of which
he or she is, in a positive sense, unconscious. In what way unconscious?
In the way one is unconscious of simple motor activity such as breath¬
ing? or unconscious of the rules of language? or unconscious in the
Freudian sense of unconscious of the nature of one’s desire? All texts
contain unconscious elements in a generic sense, but the extent to

220
which they contain elements of a Freudian unconscious is very vari¬
able. In so far as such an unconscious does make itself felt in the work
of an author, moreover, it is more likely to be in the form of a repeat¬
ing symptom than of a principle of coherence.
In Visconti’s case it seems to me now that reading between the lines
or below the surface of his work is far more revealing about the cul¬
ture to which he belonged than of him as an individual artist and that
the unconscious elements in his work are very few. There are errors of
judgment in his films, which sometimes coincide with an erotic over¬
investment in the spectacle. But the kind of unconsciousness which
unbalances his work is not the kind of unconsciousness that can be
appealed to as a way of putting it back together again. At heart, Vis¬
conti was an artist who knew what he was doing and had more con¬
sciousness than most of the risks of doing what he did. He was also, I
think, quite aware of the levels of analysis that could be applied to his
work and not afraid of any of them. He was, if you like, an author who
had no need of auteurism in order to explain himself.
In the years since the first edition of this book was published ideas
about film authorship have ebbed and flowed. On the one hand the
idea that directors are the authors of their films has spread to the pub¬
licity departments of major studios so that films are now advertised as
being ‘by the director of’ whatever the last film was that that person
happened to direct. On the other hand ‘auteurist’ has become a term
of abuse among some practitioners of film studies to whom it seems
positively indecent that an individual should be thought of as the in¬
spirational power behind a work of art. Homing in on the director as
author is seen as a dangerous short cut which stops critics from giving
proper attention to other factors which make a film what it is - its stars,
the genre it belongs to, its circumstances of production. This can
indeed be a danger and I have found in preparing the new edition of
this book that I am now far more interested in the contribution made
by the scriptwriter, art director or cinematographer to the films
directed by Visconti than I was in 1967. But the fact is that the kind
of film-making in which Visconti was engaged throughout his career,
as much in 1942 as in 1976, was a kind which put the director at the
centre.The director chose the scriptwriter, the actors, the leading tech¬
nicians, the editor. The director even chose the producer. There might
then be clashes between the director and the producer or between
director and producer on the one side and the money men at the top
on the other. But Visconti’s films were all his in a way which other

221
directors, not only in Hollywood but also in Italy, could only envy.
Under these circumstances, auteurism and anti-auteurism become
irrelevant categories. There is no way his status as author of his films
can be denied. He also does not need the support that even an artist
as great as Howard Hawks could profit from of having auteur critics
come along to explain the hidden connections between different parts
of his work. It is not true that everything in Visconti is all there on the
surface. Quite a lot is hidden. But it’s there because he put it there and
hidden because he hid it. The rich cultural dialectic that informs his
films is implicit rather than explicit as it is, for example, in Godard.
Imagine a dystopic future, like that portrayed in Ray Bradbury’s
novel Fahrenheit 451 or Truffaut’s film. All the books in the world have
been destroyed. But somehow, by an oversight on the part of the auth¬
orities, the world’s film archives have been allowed to survive. Where
would a curious person living in the twenty-first century go in order
to discover not only the twentieth century but also the nineteenth and
the rich culture that was rumoured to have existed in those far-off
days? If only a single port of call was allowed the films of Luchino
Visconti would surely be it.

Notes
1. Sam Rohdie, Rocco and His Brothers (London: BFI, 1992), p. 54. For some of
the less favourable reactions to the film, including accusations that it was dis¬
paraging of Southerners, see John Foot, ‘Cinema and the city: Milan and
Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies vol.
4 no. 2, 1999.
2. See note 1 above.
3. Youssef Ishaghpour, Luchino Visconti: le sens et Vintage (Paris: Editions de la Dif¬
ference, 1984). This book is a substantial reworking of the same author’s earlier
Visconti, published in 1966 under the pseudonym Yves Guillaume (Paris:
Editions Universitaires).
4. Monica Stirling, A Screen of Time: A Study of Luchino Visconti (New York: Har-
court Brace Jovanovich, 1979).The woman’s name was Irma Windisch-Graetz
and it is possible that traces of her, or of Visconti’s feelings for her, are present
in the characters played by Romy Schneider in II lavoro and Ludwig. As for
Horst, he is mentioned in Stirling’s biography, but only as a friend of Coco
Chanel’s and is incorrectly described as an American.
5. Gaia Servadio, Luchino Visconti: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicol-
son, 1981); Laurence Schifano, Luchino Visconti: The Flames of Passion (London:
Collins, 1990).

222
6. Jean Domarchi, writing in Arts in 1961, is characteristically perceptive, noting
that in Senso there is a kind of role reversal, with Livia as the ‘masculine’ char¬
acter and Franz the ‘feminine’. This was long before anybody showed any
interest in the sexual politics ofVisconti’s films.
7. See, for example, William Van Watson, ‘II sottoproletario come oggetto di
desiderio’ [The sub-proletariat as object of desire], in David Bruni and Veron¬
ica Pravadelli (eds) Studi viscontiani (Venice: Marsilio, 1997), pp. 81-106.
8. Schifano, Flames of Passion, p. 404. See above, p. 000.
9. I can hear the objections: Marxism is a theory of history, Eisenstein was a Marx¬
ist; ergo Eisenstein had a theory of history. He may have done, but it is not pres¬
ent in either of his historical films. As for Ford, I stick to the view that he is the
mouthpiece of a contradiction-ridden reactionary populism which speaks him
as much as he speaks it. This doesn’t stop him from being a great film-maker,
but his best films are those in which the contradictions force themselves to the
surface in spite of all efforts to suppress them. The exception to this rule is The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance which was written by Willis Goldback and James
Warner Bellah as an idealised ‘Ford’ film.

223
Select Bibliography

The literature on Visconti is very voluminous. To list it all would require a

book on its own, and indeed such a book exists, Elaine Mancini’s invaluable
Luchino Visconti: A Guide to References and Resources (1986). Not surpris¬
ingly, most of the material on Visconti is in Italian, but quite a lot of
important writing is in French. There have also been critical studies of his
work in German, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Hungarian, Russian and
other languages. The literature on his work in English is scant and, with a
few exceptions, undistinguished. Listed below are major writings by or
about Visconti in English and a handful of essential works in Italian or
French. The works are divided into categories - screenplays, interviews,
critical studies, etc. Within each category the order of listing is generally
chronological. Specially recommended texts are indicated with an asterisk.

§1. Bibliographies and Filmographies

Aldo Bernardini, ‘Appendice: filmografia, teatrografia, bibliografia’.
Bianco e Nero vol. 37 nos. 9-12, September-December 1976 (Special
number: La controversiaVisconti, edited by Fernaldo Di Giammatteo)
*Elaine Mancini, Luchino Visconti:A Guide to References and Resources,
Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986
Antonella Montesi (with Leonardo De Franceschi), biblioVisconti vol. 1,
Rome: Fondazione Scuola Nazionale del Cinema/Fondazione Istituto
Gramsci, 2001

All the above include details of Visconti’s theatre and opera stagings. The
booklet edited by Sergio Toffetti, Retrospettiva Visconti (Rome: Scuola
Nazionale del Cinema/Cineteca Nazionale, 2000), provides a detailed film¬
ography including information on restored prints of Visconti’s films.

§2. Screenplays
a) In Italian
Ossessione, edited by Enzo Ungari and Gianbattista Cavallaro, 1977
La terra trema, edited by Enzo Ungari, 1977
Bellissima, edited by Enzo Ungari, 1977

224
Senso, edited by Gianbattista Cavallaro, 1954
Le notti bianche di Luchino Visconti [White Nights], edited by Renzo
Renzi, 1957
Rocco e i suoifratelli, edited by Guido Aristarco and Gaetano Carancini, 1960
II lavoro, in Boccaccio ’70, edited by Carlo di Carlo and Gaio Fratini, 1962
IIfilm II Gattopardo e la regia diLuchinoVisconti [The Leopard], edited by
Suso Cecchi D’Amico, 1963
Vaghe stelle delTOrsa, edited by Pietro Bianchi, 1965
La caduta degli dei [The Damned], edited by Stefano Roncoroni, 1969
‘Morte a Venezia’ di Luchino Visconti [Death in Venice], edited by Lino
Micciche, 1971
Ludwig, edited by Giorgio Ferrara, 1973
Gruppo difamiglia in un interno [Conversation Piece], edited by Giorgio
Treves, 1975

All the above are published by Cappelli Editore, Bologna, in the series ‘Dal
soggetto al film’ and contain a variety of materials such as interviews, crit¬
ical essays, information about cuts and changes, etc., besides the basic
screenplay. There are no published scripts of Lo straniero or L’innocente.

b) In English
Two Screenplays: La terra trema and Senso, translated by Judith Green, New
York: Orion Press, 1970
Three Screenplays'. White Nights, Rocco and His Brothers, The Job, translated
by Judith Green, New York: Orion, 1970

c) Unrealised projects
Marcia nuziale (treatment), in Cinema nuovo nos. 10-12, May-June 1953
(reprinted in Guido Aristarco (ed.) Antologia di Cinema Nuovo,
Rimini/Florence: Guaraldi, 1975)
Alla ricerca del tempo perduto (with Suso Cecchi D’Amico), Milan:
Mondadori, 1986 (also in French:/! la recherche du temps perdu, Paris:
Editions Persona, 1984)

§3. Main Writings by Visconti

a) In Italian
‘Cadaveri’, Cinema no. 119, 10 June 1941
‘Tradizione e invenzione’. Stile italiano nel cinema vol. 8, Milan:
D. Guarnati, 1941
‘Cinema antropomorfico’. Cinema nos. 173-4, 25 September-
25 October 1943

225
‘Sul modo di mettere in scena una commedia di Shakespeare’, Rinascita,
December 1948
‘In difesa del cinema italiano’, Rinascita, 3 March 1949
‘Lei sara il mio operatore’, Cinema Nuovo no. 25, 15 December 1953
‘Dichiarazioni sul neorealismo’, Rivista del cinema italiano vol. 3 no. 3,
March 1954
‘Regia cinematografica e regia teatrale’, Lo spettatore critico vol. 3 no. 1,
January-February 1957

There is a selection of his critical writings in Giuliana Callegari and Nuccio

Lodato (eds), Leggere Visconti (Pavia: Amministrazione Provinciale di Pavia,
1976), and as an appendix to Lino Micciche, Luchino Visconti: un profilo
critico (Venice: Marsilio, 1996). His writings on theatre are collected in
Luchino Visconti: il mio teatro, edited by Caterina D’Amico de Carvalho and
Renzo Renzi (Bologna: Cappelli, 1979).

Visconti also wrote a youthful novel, published posthumously:

Angelo, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1993

b) In French
‘Je raconte des histoires comme je raconterais un requiem’, LAvant-scene
du cinema no. 159, June 1975
Le Roman dAngelo, translated by Rene de Ceccatty, Paris: Gallimard, 1993

c) In English
‘Anthropomorphic cinema’ and ‘In defence of the Italian cinema’, in
David Overbey (ed.), Springtime in Italy:A Reader on Neo-Realism.,
London: Talisman, 1978
‘The miracle that gave man crumbs’ [on Rocco], Films & Filming,
January 1961
‘Heads must roll!’ [on Fox’s re-editing of The Leopard], Sunday Times,
27 October 1963

§4. Interviews in Film Journals

Fausto Montesanti, ‘Un film di amore (o di odio)’, Cinema no. 136,
25 June 1954 [on Senso]
Cecilia Mangini, ‘I confini valicabili’. Cinema Nuovo no. 114-5, 15
September 1957 (reprinted in Guido Aristarco (ed.) Antologia di
Cinema Nuovo, Rimini/Florence: Guaraldi, 1975)
Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Jean Domarchi, ‘Entretien avec Luchino
Visconti’, Cahiers du cinema no. 93, March 1959

226
Jean Slavik, ‘Rencontre avec Visconti’, Cahiers du cinema no. 106,
April 1960
Guido Aristarco, ‘Ciro e i suoi fratelli’, Cinema Nuovo no. 147,
September-October 1960
Adriano Apra, Jean-Andre Fieschi, Maurizio Ponzi and Andre Techine,
‘Intervista con Luchino Visconti’, Filmcritica no. 159-60, August-
September 1965

There are also interviews with Visconti in the Italian scripts of The Leopard
(with Antonello Trombadori) and of Death in Venice (with Lino Micciche).
(See §2, above.)

There is a very informative interview in English with Suso Cecchi D’Am¬

ico in Sight and Sound, Winter 1986/7, conducted by Peter Brunette.

§5. Biographies
There are three biographies ofVisconti in (or translated into) English:

Monica Stirling, A Screen of Time: A Study of LuchinoVisconti, New York:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979
Gaia Servadio, LuchinoVisconti:A Biography, London:Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1981
Laurence Schifano, LuchinoVisconti: The Flames of Passion, London:
Collins, 1990 (original in French: LuchinoVisconti: les feux de la passion,
Paris: Librairie Academique Perrin, 1987)

Schifano’s is the fullest, but Servadio is sometimes more perceptive about

Visconti and his environment. A good picture of working with Visconti is
given by Dirk Bogarde in his autobiography, Snakes and Ladders (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1978). Also valuable is the photographic collection
edited by Caterina D’Amico de Carvalho: Album Visconti: la vita e le opere in
221 fotografie (Milan: Sonzogno, 1978).

§6. General Critical Studies

a) In Italian (very reduced selection)
Pio Baldelli, LuchinoVisconti, Milan: Mazzotta, 1973. Rev. edn. 1982
Alessandro Bencivenni, LuchinoVisconti, Florence: II Castoro
Cinema, 1982
Gianni Rondolino, Visconti,Turin: utet, 1982
Guido Aristarco, Su Visconti: materialiper un ’analisi critica, Rome: La
Zattera di Babele, 1986
Franco Mannino, Visconti e la musica, Lucca: Akademos & Lim, 1994

227
*Lino Micciche, Luchino Visconti: un profilo critico, Venice: Marsilio, 1996.
Rev. edn. with updated bibliography, 2002
David Bruni and Veronica Pravadelli (eds), Studi viscontiani, Venice:
Marsilio, 1997
Sandro Bernardi (ed.), Visconti, special number of Dramaturgia, Rome:
Salerno Editrice, 2000

b) In French
Premier Plan, No. 17: Luchino Visconti, Lyon, 1961
Yves Guillaume [Youssef Ishaghpour], Visconti, Paris: Editions
Universitaires, 1966
*Youssef Ishaghpour, Luchino Visconti: le sens et Pimage, Paris: Editions de
la Difference, 1984
Michele Lagny (ed.), Classicisme et subversion, Paris: Publications de la
Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1990

c) In English
Besides this one, there have been two book-length studies of Visconti’s
work in English:

ClarettaTonetti, LuchinoVisconti, Boston:Twayne, 1983

*Henry Bacon, Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and Decay, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998

Books with chapters or major sections devoted to Visconti:

Roy Armes, Patterns of Realism, London: Tantivy, and New York: A. S.
Barnes, 1971
Beverle Houston and Marsha Kinder, Close-Up:A Critical Perspective on
Film, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972
*Parker Tyler, Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies, New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972 (new edition from Da Capo Press,
1993)
Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, New York:
Frederick Ungar, 1983 (later editions published by Continuum)
Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984

Articles include:

*Eric Rhode, ‘Why neo-realism failed’, Sight and Sound,Winter 1961

Fernaldo Di Giammatteo, ‘“Marienbadism” and the new Italian direc¬
tors’, Film Quarterly vol. 16 no. 2, Winter 1962-3

228
*Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Luchino Visconti’, Brighton Film Review no. 17,
February 1970
Walter F. Korte, ‘Marxism and Formalism in the films of Luchino
Visconti’, Cinema Journal \o\. 11 no. 1, Fall 1971
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘Visconti’, in Richard Roud (ed.), Cinema:A
Critical Dictionary, London: Seeker & Warburg, 1978
Guido Aristarco, ‘Luchino Visconti: critic or poet of decadence?’. Film
Criticism vol. 12 no. 3, Spring 1988 (translation of an article first
published in Italian in 1985)

§7. Studies of Particular Films

a) In Italian or French
La terra trema
Lino Micciche (ed.), La terra trema di Luchino Visconti: analisi di un
capolavoro, Turin: Lindau, 1993

Senso
Michele Lagny, Senso, Poitiers: Nathan, 1992

Rocco and His Brothers

Guido Aristarco, ‘Esperienza culturale ed esperienza originale’, in Rocco e i
suoifratelli (screenplay), 1960

The Leopard
Michel Esteve (ed.), Luchino Visconti: I’histoire et Testhetique. Special
number of Etudes cinematographiques no. 26-7, Autumn 1963
Laurence Schifano, Le Guepard, Poitiers: Nathan, 1991
Lino Micciche (ed.), II Gattopardo, Naples: Electa, 1996

Death in Venice
Lino Micciche, ‘Visconti e le sue ragioni’, in ‘Morte a Venezia’ (screen¬
play), 1971

Ludwig
*01ivier Assayas, ‘Autoportrait du cineaste en despote d’un autre siecle’,
Cahiers du cinema no. 350, August 1983

b) In English
La terra trema
* Alain Tanner, ‘La terra trema’. Sight and Sound, Spring 1957
Millicent Marcus, Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary
Adaptation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993

229
Rocco and His Brothers
*Sam Rohdie, Rocco and His Brothers, BFI Film Classics series, London:
British Film Institute, 1992
John Foot, ‘Cinema and the city: Milan and Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and
His Brothers', Journal of Modern Italian Studies vol. 4 no. 2, 1999

The Leopard
Brenda Davis, ‘Can the leopard ...?’ Sight and Sound, Spring 1964
Millicent Marcus, Filmmaking by the Book, 1993

The Damned
Joan Mellen, ‘Fascism in contemporary cinema’, Film Quarterly vol. 24
no. 1, Summer 1971
Parker Tyler, Screening the Sexes, 1972

Death in Venice
Parker Tyler, Screening the Sexes, 1972
Joan Mellen, Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film, London:
Davis-Poynter, 1974
Giorgio Bertellini, ‘A battle d’arriere-garde: notes on decadence in Luchino
Visconti’s Death in Venice’, Film Quarterly vol. 50 no. 4, Summer 1997
Michael Wilson, ‘Art is ambiguous: the zoom in Death in Venice’,
Literature /Film Quarterly vol. 26 no. 2, 1998
CarloTesta, Masters ofTwo A rts, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002

§8 Films,TV Programmes andVideos aboutVisconti

a) in Italian
Visconti. Director: Maurizio Ponzi. Production: Corona
Cinematografica. 1967. 17 minutes
Luchino Visconti. Directors: Giorgio Ferrara and Luca De Mata.
Production: Port Royal/RAI. 1975. 60 minutes
Luchino Visconti, ricordo in musica. Director: Walter Licastro. Production:
RAI. 1977. 56 minutes
Luchino Visconti. Director: LucaVerdone. Production: Istituto Luce.
1982. 71 minutes
Luchino Visconti. Director: Carlo Lizzani. 1999. 61 minutes

b) in English
Luchino Visconti. Director: Barrie Gavin. Production: BBC. 1966.
29 minutes
The Life and Times of Count Luchino Visconti. Director: Adam Low.
Production: BBC Arena. 2002. 120 minutes

230
Filmography

Une partie de campagne La Tosca (Italy 1941)

(France 1937) Production company:
Production company: Scalera Films
Les Films du Pantheon Producer: Arturo Ambrosio
Producer: Pierre Braunberger Script: Jean Renoir, Carl Koch,
Production managers: Jacques Luchino Visconti, from the play
Brunius, Roger Woog by Victorien Sardou
Director: Jean Renoir Directors: Jean Renoir, Carl Koch
Assistant directors: Jacques Becker, Assistant director: Luchino Visconti
Claude Heymann, Jacques B. Photography (black and white):
Brunius, Yves Allegret, [Luchino Ubaldo Arata
Visconti] Music: Giacomo Puccini, arranged
Script and dialogues: Jean Renoir, by Umberto Mancini
from the story by Guy de Music direction: Fernando Previtali
Maupassant Singers: Mafalda Favero, Ferruccio
Photography (black and white): Tagliavini
Claude Renoir Editor: Gino Bretone
Camera operator: Jean-Serge Cast includes: Imperio Argentina
Bourgoin (Tosca), Michel Simon (Scarpia),
Music: Joseph Kosma Rossano Brazzi (Cavaradossi)
Editor: Marguerite Renoir Running time: 105 minutes
Cast includes: Jeanne Marken First shown:
(Mme Juliette Dufour), Rome, 27 January 1941;
Gabriello (M. Dufour), Sylvia Paris, 30 September 1942
Bataille (Henriette Dufour), (dubbed into French)
Georges Darnoux (Henri),
Shooting started in the autumn of
Jacques Borel [Jacques B.
1939. Renoir directed five shots only,
Brunius] (Rodolphe)
before returning to France. It was
Original running time:
finished by Koch early in 1940, but
46 minutes
not released until the following year.
Surviving prints: 41 minutes
Shot: July-August 1936.
Ossessione (Italy 1943)
First shown: Paris, 8 May 1946
Production company:
Visconti was in charge of the ICI (Industrie Cinematografiche
costumes for the production. Italiane)

231
Production director: Libero Solaroli Editors: Mario Serandrei, Carlo
Script and dialogues: Luchino Alberto Chiesa
Visconti, Mario Alicata, Giuseppe Music: Costantino Ferri
De Santis, Gianni Puccini, freely Running time: 71 minutes
adapted from James Cain’s The First shown: 18 October 1945
Postman Always Rings Twice
The film was sponsored by various
Director: Luchino Visconti
Resistance organisations and
Assistant directors: Giuseppe De
produced for them by Titanus. The
Santis, Antonio Pietrangeli
sequence of the Fosse Ardeatine
Photography (black and white):
massacre was directed by Pagliero,
Aldo Tonti, Domenico Scala
those of the trial of Caretta and
Camera operator: Gianni Di
lynching of Pietro Caruso by
Venanzo, assisted by Carlo Di
Visconti. Serandrei and De Santis
Palma
were overall co-ordinators of the
Sound: Arrigo Usigli, Tommaso
production.
Barberini
Music: Giuseppe Rosati La terra trema
Music direction: Fernando Previtali (.Episodio del mare) (Italy 1948)
Art direction: Gino Franzi
Production company:
Editor: Mario Serandrei
Universalia Produzione
Cast includes: Massimo Girotti
Producer: Salvo D’Angelo
(Gino Costa), Clara Calamai
Script, dialogues and
(Giovanna Bragana), Juan de
commentary:
Landa (her husband), Elio
Luchino Visconti, Antonio
Marcuzzo (the ‘Spaniard’), Dhia
Pietrangeli, loosely adapted from
Cristiani (Anita), Michele
the novel I Malavoglia (The
Riccardini (Don Remigio),
House by the Medlar Tree) by
Vittorio Duse (policeman)
Giovanni Verga
Original running time: 141 minutes
Director: Luchino Visconti
Surviving prints: 135 minutes
Assistant directors: Francesco Rosi,
First shown: Rome, 16 May 1943
Franco Zeffirelli
Giorni di gloria (Italy 1945) Photography (black and white):
Production company: Titanus G. R. Aldo
Producer: Fulvio Ricci Camera operator: Gianni Di
Directors: Mario Serandrei, Venanzo, assisted by Aiace
Luchino Visconti, Marcello Parolin
Pagliero, Giuseppe De Santis Sound: Vittorio Trentino
Commentary written by Umberto Music co-ordinated by Luchino
Calosso and Umberto Barbaro, Visconti and Willy Ferrero and
spoken by Umberto Calosso performed under the direction of
Photography (black and white): Willy Ferrero
Umberto Della Valle, DeWest, Editor:
Gianni Di Venanzo Mario Serandrei

232
Cast (uncredited) includes: Production directors: Paolo Moffa,
Antonio Arcidiacono (’Ntoni), Vittorio Musy Glori
Giuseppe Arcidiacono (Cola), Director: Luchino Visconti
Nelluccia Giammona (Mara), Script and dialogues:
Agnese Giammona (Lucia), Rosa Cesare Zavattini, Luchino
Costanzo (Nedda), and other Visconti, Suso Cecchi D’Amico,
inhabitants of the village of Francesco Rosi, from an original
AciTrezza story by Cesare Zavattini
First shown: Assistant directors: Francesco Rosi,
Venice, 2 September 1948 Franco Zeffirelli
Running time: 161 minutes Photography (black and white):

The full version as premiered has Piero Portalupi, Paul Ronald

dialogues in Sicilian dialect and a Camera operators: Oberdan

commentary in standard Italian. Trojani, Idelmo Simonelli

The film was released in Italy in a Sound: Ovidio Del Grande
shortened version and dubbed into Music: Franco Mannino, based on
Italian. The sub-title Episodio del themes from L’elisir d’amore by
mare is a relic ofVisconti’s original Gaetano Donizetti
intention to make this the first of Music direction: Franco Ferrara
three episodes. Set design: Gianni Polidori
Costumes: Piero Tosi
Appunti su unfatto di
Editor: Mario Serandrei
cronaca (Italy 1951)
Cast includes: Anna Magnani
(Notes on a news item) (Maddalena Cecconi), Walter
Producers: Riccardo Ghione, Chiari (Alberto Annovazzi),
Marco Ferreri Gastone Renzelli (Spartaco
Director: Luchino Visconti Cecconi), Tina Apicella (Maria
Script and commentary: Cecconi), Alessandro Blasetti
Vasco Pratolini (himself), Tecla Scarano (voice
Photography (black and white): teacher), Lola Braccini
Domenico Scala (photographer’s wife), Arturo
Music: Franco Mannino Bragaglia (photographer), Nora
Running time: 5 minutes Ricci, Gisella Monaldi, Linda
Sini, Liliana Mancini, Teresa
Made as an episode of no. 2 of the
Battazzi, Vittorio Musy Glori,
alternative newsreel ‘Documento
Mario Chiari, Geo Taparelli
mensile’, this short film was later
First shown:
re-edited by Visconti in an eight-
Milan, 27 December 1951
minute version, now lost.
Running time: 115 minutes
Bellissima (Italy 1951)
Production company: Anna Magnani
Film Bellissima (Episode of the compilation film
Producer: Salvo D’Angelo Siamo donne, Italy 1953)

233
Production company: Assistants: AldoTrionfo, Giancarlo
Titanus, Film Costellazione Zagni
Producer: Alfredo Guarini Photography (Technicolor):
Director: Luchino Visconti G. R. Aldo, Robert Krasker
Script and dialogues: Cesare Camera operator: Giuseppe
Zavattini, with Suso Cecchi Rotunno
D’Amico Assistant operator: Michele
Assistant director: Francesco Cristiani
Maselli Technicolor consultants: John
Photography: Gabor Pogany Craig, Neil Binney
Music: Alessandro Cicognini Music: Symphony No. 7 in E major
Editor: Mario Serandrei by Anton Bruckner, with the RAI
Cast: Anna Magnani (herself) Symphony Orchestra conducted
First shown: by Franco Ferrara
Lecce, 22 October 1953 Sound: Vittorio Trentino, Aldo
Running time: 22 minutes Calpini
The film was released in Britain in Production design: Ottavio Scotti
1954 as We, the Women. Other Sets: Gino Brosio
episodes were directed by Alfredo Costumes: Marcel Escoffier, Piero
Guarini (Prologue), Gianni Tosi
Franciolini (Alida Valli), Roberto Editor: Mario Serandrei
Rossellini (Ingrid Bergman) and Cast includes: Alida Valli (Countess
Luigi Zampa (Isa Miranda). Livia Serpieri), Farley Granger
Total running time: 102 minutes. (Lt. Franz Mahler), Massimo
Girotti (Marquis Roberto
Senso (Italy 1954) Ussoni), Heinz Moog (Count
Production company: Lux Film Serpieri), Rina Morelli (Laura),
Producer: Renato Gualino Marcella Mariani (Clara),
Executive producer: Domenico Christian Marquand (Bohemian
Forges Davanzati officer), Sergio Fantoni (Luca),
Production manager: Claudio Tino Bianchi (Captain Meucci),
Forges Davanzati Ernst Nadhreny (garrison
Script and dialogues: Luchino commander in Verona), Tonio
Visconti, Suso Cecchi D’Amico; Selwart (Col. Kleist), Marianna
script contributions by Carlo Leibl (wife of Austrian general),
Alianello, Giorgio Bassani, Goliarda Sapienza (patriot at
Giorgio Prosperi; additional La Fenice)
dialogues by Tennessee Williams First shown:
and Paul Bowles; from a novella Venice, 3 September 1954
by Camillo Boito Original running time: 121 minutes
Director: Luchino Visconti
Assistant directors: Francesco Rosi, G. R. Aldo died during the shooting;
Franco Zeffirelli the film was finished by Robert

234
Krasker, assisted by Giuseppe Art direction (uncredited): Mario
Rotunno. Dialogue scenes between Chiari, Mario Garbuglia
Alida Valli and Farley Granger were Decor: Enzo Eusepi
shot in English. The film is normally Costumes (uncredited): Piero Tosi
seen in its Italian post-synchronised Choreography: Dick Sanders
version, but a print of the English- Editor: Mario Serandrei
language version is preserved in the Assistant editors: Eva Latini,
National Film Archive in London. Ruggero Mastroianni
The film was released in Britain in a Cast includes: Marcello
shortened English-language version Mastroianni (Mario), Maria
(91 minutes) under the title The Schell (Natalia), Jean Marais
Wanton Countess. (the lodger), Clara Calamai
(prostitute), Marcella Rovena
Le notti bianche (landlady), Maria Zanolli (maid),
(Italy/France 1957) Elena Fancera (cashier), Corrado
White Nights
Pani (young man), Sandro
Moretti (young man), Dick
Production company: CIASAfides
Sanders (dancer), Ferdinando
(Rome), Intermondia Films
Guerra (manager), Leonilda
(Paris)
Montesti (his wife)
Producers: Franco Cristaldi,
First shown:
Jean-Paul Guibert
Venice, 6 September 1957
Script and dialogues: Luchino
Visconti, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Rocco e i suoi fratelli
based on the novel by Fyodor (Italy/France 1960)
Dostoyevsky Rocco and His Brothers
Director: Luchino Visconti Production company:
Assistant directors: Fernando Titanus, Les Films Marceau
Cicero, Albino Cocco Producer: Goffredo Lombardo
Photography (black and white): Production manager:
Giuseppe Rotunno Giuseppe Bordogni
Camera operator: Silvano Ippoliti Story: Luchino Visconti, Vasco
Sound: Vittorio Trentino, Pratolini, Suso Cecchi D’Amico,
Oscar Di Santo based on the book II ponte della
Music: Nino Rota Ghisolfa by Giovanni Testori
Musical direction: Franco Ferrara Script and dialogues: Luchino
Songs: ‘Scusami’ Visconti, Suso Cecchi D’Amico,
(Colombo-Malagodi-Perrone), Pasquale Festa Campanile,
Cinico Angelini Orchestra; Massimo Franciosa, Enrico
‘O cangaqeiro’ (Nascimento), Medioli
Luiz el Grande Orchestra; Director: Luchino Visconti
‘Thirteen women’ Assistant director: Rinaldo Ricci
(Thomson-Gadda-Lidianni), Assistants:
Bill Haley and His Comets Lucio Orlandini, Jerry Macc

235
Photography (black and white): Producers:
Giuseppe Rotunno Carlo Ponti, Antonio Cervi
Camera operators: Nino Cristiani, Production manager:
Silvano Ippoliti, Franco Delli Sante Chimirri
Colli Script: Suso Cecchi D’Amico,
Sound: Giovanni Rossi Luchino Visconti, based on the
Music: Nino Rota story by Guy de Maupassant
Musical direction: ‘Au bord du lit’
Franco Ferrara Director: Luchino Visconti
Art direction: Mario Garbuglia Photography (Technicolor):
Costumes: Piero Tosi Giuseppe Rotunno
Editor: Mario Serandrei Art direction: Mario Garbuglia
Cast includes: Alain Delon (Rocco Music: Nino Rota
Parondi), Renato Salvatori Editor: Mario Serandrei
(Simone), Annie Girardot Cast includes: Romy Schneider
(Nadia), Katina Paxinou (Pupe), Tomas Milian (Ottavio),
(Rosaria), Roger Hanin (Morini), Paolo Stoppa, Romolo Valli,
Paolo Stoppa (Cecchi), Suzy Amedeo Girard
Delair (Luisa), Claudia Cardinale Running time: 46 minutes
(Ginetta), Spiros Focas First shown: 1 February 1962
(Vincenzo), Max Cartier (Ciro),
Other episodes in the film were
Rocco Vidolazzi (Luca), Adriana
directed by Federico Fellini
Asti (laundry worker)
(Le tentazioni del Dottor Antonio),
Running time: 180 minutes
Vittorio De Sica (La riffa [The
First shown:
Raffle]), and Mario Monicelli
Venice, 6 September 1960
{Renzo e Luciana). Total running
A number of small cuts were time: 198 minutes. The Monicelli
demanded by the Italian censors episode was dropped shortly after
before release. A further six minutes first release.
were cut before the film was
released in Britain. The current II gattopardo
version available in Britain is (Italy/France 1963)
complete. The Leopard
Production company:
II lavoro (Episode of the Titanus (Rome)/SN Pathe
compilation film Boccaccio ’70, Cinema, SGC (Paris)
Italy/France 1962) Producer: Goffredo Lombardo
The Job Production directors: Enzo
Production company: Provenzale, Giorgio Adriani
Concordia Compagnia Production manager:
Cinematografica, Cineriz Pietro Notarianni
(Rome), Francinex, Gray-Films Script: Suso Cecchi D’Amico,
(Paris) Pasquale Festa Campanile,

236
 Enrico Medioli, Massimo Luxe colour stock. The full version
Franciosa, Luchino Visconti, was finally released by Fox in
from the novel of the same title English-speaking countries in 1983.
by Giuseppe Tomasi di
Lampedusa
Vaghe stelle delVOrsa
Director: Luchino Visconti
(Italy 1965)
Assistant directors:
Of a Thousand Delights (UK)
Rinaldo Ricci, Albino Cocco
Sandra (USA)
Photography (Technirama,
Technicolor): Giuseppe Rotunno Production Company: Vides

Camera operators: Producer: Franco Cristaldi

Production manager:
Nino Cristiani, Enrico Cignitti,
Giuseppe Maccari Sergio Merolle
Script:
Sound: Mario Messina
Art direction: Mario Garbuglia Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Enrico
Medioli, Luchino Visconti
Assistant art director: Ferdinando
Giovannoni Director: Luchino Visconti
Assistant director: Rinaldo Ricci
Costumes: Piero Tosi
Assistant to the director:
Editor: Mario Serandrei
Albino Cocco
Music: Nino Rota, and an
Photography (black and white):
unpublished waltz by Giuseppe
Verdi Armando Nannuzzi
Camera operators: Nino Cristiani,
Cast includes: Burt Lancaster (Don
Claudio Cirillo
Fabrizio Salina), Alain Delon
Music: Prelude, Chorale and Fugue
(Tancredi Falconeri), Claudia
for piano by Cesar Franck,
Cardinale (Angelica Sedara),
performed by Augusto D’Ottavi
Paolo Stoppa (Don Calogero
Songs: ‘Io che non vivo senza te’
Sedara), Rina Morelli (Maria
(Donaggio-Pallavicini); ‘Una
Stella, wife of Don Fabrizio),
rotonda sul mare’
RomoloValli (padre Pirrone),
(Migliacci-Falem); ‘E se domani
Ivo Garrani, Leslie French, Serge
...’ (Giorgio Calabrese-Carlo
Reggiani, Lucilla Morlacchi,
Alberto Rossi); ‘Strip-Cinema’
Mario Girotti, Pierre Clementi,
(Pino Calvi); ‘Let’s go’ and ‘If
Giuliano Gemma, Ida Galli,
you don’t want’ (performed by
Ottavia Piccolo, Brock Fuller,
Le Tigri)
Rina De Liguoro
Sound: Claudio Maielli
Running time: 205 minutes
Art direction: Mario Garbuglia
First shown: Rome, 27 March 1963
Costumes: Bice Brichetto
20th Century-Fox, who owned Editor: Mario Serandrei
overseas rights on the film, released Cast includes: Claudia Cardinale
it in a dubbed version in New York (Sandra), Jean Sorel (Gianni),
and London at the end of 1963, cut Michael Craig (Andrew), Renzo
to 161 minutes and printed on De Ricci (Gilardini), Marie Bell (the

237
 mother), Fred Williams (Pietro), Other episodes were directed by
Amalia Troiani (Fosca) Mauro Bolognini (Senso civico),
Running time: 100 minutes Franco Rossi (La siciliana), Pier
First shown: Paolo Pasolini (La terra vista dalla
Venice, 3 September 1965 luna), Vittorio De Sica (Una sera
come le altre).

La strega bruciata viva Total running time: 121 minutes

(Episode of the compilation film First shown:
Le streghe, Italy/France 1967) Rome, 23 February 1967
(The witch burnt alive)
Production company: Dino De Lo straniero
Laurentiis Cinematografica (Italy/France/Algieria 1967)
(Rome), Les Productions Artistes UEtranger
Associes (Paris) Production company: Dino De
Producer: Dino De Laurentiis Laurentiis Cinematografica,
Executive producer: Raster Film (Rome), Marianne
Alfredo De Laurentiis Production (Paris, in
Production manager: collaboration with Casbah Film
Giorgio Adriani Algiers)
Script: Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, Producer: Dino De Laurentiis
with Cesare Zavattini Production director:
Director: Luchino Visconti Alfredo De Laurentiis
Assistant director: Rinaldo Ricci Script: Luchino Visconti, Suso
Photography (Technicolor): Cecchi D’Amico, Georges
Giuseppe Rotunno Conchon, in collaboration with
Camera operator: Emmanuel Robles, from the
Giuseppe Maccari recit L’Etranger by Albert Camus
Music: Piero Piccioni Director: Luchino Visconti
Sound: Vittorio Trentino Assistant directors:
Art direction: Mario Garbuglia, Rinaldo Ricci, Albino Cocco
Piero Poletto Photography (Technicolor):
Costumes: Piero Tosi Giuseppe Rotunno
Editor: Mario Serandrei Camera operators: Giuseppe
Cast includes: Silvana Mangano Maccari, Mario Capriotti
(Gloria), Annie Girardot Music: Piero Piccioni
(Valeria), Francisco Rabal Musical direction: Bruno Nicolai
(Valeria’s husband), Massimo Sound: Vittorio Trentino
Girotti, Elsa Albani, Clara Art direction: Mario Garbuglia
Calamai,Veronique Vended, Nora Costumes: Piero Tosi
Ricci, Leslie French, Helmut Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni
Steinbergher [Helmut Berger] Cast includes: Marcello Mastroianni
Running time: 40 minutes (Meursault), Anna Karina (Marie
First shown: 22 February 1967 Cardona), Georges Wilson

238
 (examining magistrate), Bernard Costumes: Piero Tosi, Vera Marzot
Blier (defence lawyer), Alfred Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni
Adam (public prosecutor), Cast includes: Dirk Bogarde
Georges Geret, Jacques Herlin, (Friedrich Bruckmann), Ingrid
Bruno Cremer Thulin (Sophie von Essenbeck),
Running time: 108 minutes Helmut Griem (Aschenbach),
First shown: Helmut Berger (Martin von
Venice, 6 September 1967 Essenbeck), RenaudVerley
(Gunther), Umberto Orsini
The film was released in the USA as
(Herbert Thalmann), Rene
The Stranger and in Britain as The
Koldehoff (Konstantin),
Outsider (which was the title under
Albrecht Schonhals (Joachim),
which the translation of Camus’s
Florinda Bolkan (Olga), Nora
novel had been published).
Ricci (governess), Charlotte

La caduta degli dei Rampling (Elisabeth Thalmann)

Running time: 156 minutes
(Switzerland/Italy/West
Germany 1969) First shown: 16 October 1969

The Damned At the insistence ofWarner Bros,

Production company: the film was shot in English.
Prasidens Film (Zurich),
Pegaso-Italnoleggio (Rome), All ricerca di Tadzio
Eichberg Film (Munich) (Italy 1970)
Producers: Production company: RAI
Ever Haggiag, Alfred Levy Director: Luchino Visconti
Production manager: Running time: 30 minutes
Giuseppe Bordogni First broadcast:
Executive producer: RAI-2, 7 June 1970
Pietro Notarianni
Script: Nicola Badalucco, Enrico Morte a Venezia
Medioli, Luchino Visconti (Italy/France 1971)
Director: Luchino Visconti Death in Venice
Assistant directors: Production company:
Albino Cocco, Fanny Wessling Alfa Cinematografica (Rome),
Photography (Eastmancolor): PECF (Paris)
Armando Nannuzzi, Pasqualino Producer: Luchino Visconti
De Santis Associate executive producer:
Camera operators: Nino Cristiani, Robert Gordon Edwards
Giuseppe Bernardini, Mario Executive producer: Mario Gallo
Cimini Script: Luchino Visconti, Nicola
Music and musical direction: Badalucco, from the story by
Maurice Jarre Thomas Mann
Sound: Vittorio Trentino Director: Luchino Visconti
Art direction: Pasquale Romano Assistant director: Albino Cocco

239
Photography (Panavision, Executive producer:
Technicolor): Pasqualino De Robert Gordon Edwards
Santis Script: Luchino Visconti, Enrico
Camera operators: Medioli, with Suso Cecchi
Mario Cimini, Michele Cristiani D’Amico
Music: Gustav Mahler, Symphony Director: Luchino Visconti
No. 3 and ‘Adagietto’ from Assistant director: Albino Cocco
Symphony No. 5 Assistants: Giorgio Ferrara, Fanny
Musical direction: Franco Wessling, Luchino Gastel, Louise
Mannino, with the orchestra of Vincent
the Accademia Nazionale di Photography (Panavision,
Santa Cecilia (contralto, Lucretia Technicolor): Armando Nannuzzi
West) Camera operators: Nino Cristiani,
Sound: Vittorio Trentino Giuseppe Bernardini, Federico
Art direction: Ferdinando Scarfiotti Del Zoppo
Costumes: Piero Tosi Music: Robert Schumann, Richard
Make-up: Mario Di Salvio; Mauro Wagner, Jacques Offenbach
Gavazzi Musical direction: Franco Mannino
Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni with the orchestra of the
Cast includes: Dirk Bogarde Accademia Nazionale di Santa
(Gustav von Aschenbach), Bjorn Cecilia (piano solos, Franco
Andresen (Tadzio), Silvana Mannino)
Mangano (the mother), Romolo
Sound: Vittorio Trentino, Giuseppe
Valli (hotel manager), Leslie
Muratori
French (clerk at Thomas Cook),
Art direction:
Mark Burns (Alfried), Marisa
Mario Chiari, Mario Scisci
Berenson (Gustav’s wife), Carole
Costumes: Piero Tosi
Andre (Esmeralda), Sergio
Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni
Garfagnoli (Jasciu)
Cast includes: Helmut Berger
Running time: 133 minutes
(Ludwig II of Bavaria), Trevor
First shown:
Howard (Richard Wagner),
London, 1 March 1971;
Silvana Mangano (Cosima von
Rome, 5 March 1971
Billow), Romy Schneider
(Elisabeth of Austria), Helmut
Ludwig Griem (Diirckheim), Gert Frobe
(Italy/France/West Germany (Father Hoffmann), Isabella
1973) Telezynska (the Queen Mother),
Production company: Mega Film Umberto Orsini (Count von
(Bari-Rome), Cinetel (Paris), Holnstein), John Moulder-Brown
Dieter Geissler Filmproduktion, (Prince Otto), Sonia Petrova
KG Divina Film (Munich) (Princess Sophie), Folker Bohnet
Producer: Ugo Santalucia (Joseph Kainz), Heinz Moog
Production manager: Lucio Trentini (Professor Gudden), Adriana Asti

240
 (Lila von Buliowski), Marc Porel Art direction: Mario Garbuglia
(Richard Hornig), Nora Ricci Costumes: Vera Marzot
(Ida Ferenczy), Mark Burns Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni
(Hans von Billow) Cast includes: Burt Lancaster (the
Running time: 237 minutes Professor), Helmut Berger
First shown: (Konrad Hubei), Silvana
Bonn, 18 January 1973; Mangano (Countess Bianca
Milan, 7 March 1973 Brumonti), Claudia Marsani
(Lietta Brumonti), Stefano
The precise length of the different
Patrizi (Stefano), Romolo Valli
versions of this film is difficult to
(lawyer), Elvira Cortese
determine. The film was released in
(Erminia), Philippe Hersent, Guy
a version of approximately three
Trejan, Umberto Raho, Claudia
hours and then further cut to just
Cardinale (Professor’s wife),
over two hours in 1977. It was
Dominique Sanda (Professor’s
posthumously restored to a length
mother)
of just under four hours in 1980.
Running time: 121 minutes
First shown:
Gruppo di famiglia in un
Milan, 10 December 1974
inter no (Italy 1974)
Conversation Piece
Production company: Rusconi Film L’innocente (Italy/France 1976)
Producer: Giovanni Bertolucci The Intruder (UK)
Production manager: Lucio Trentini The Innocent (USA)
Story: Enrico Medioli Production company:
Script: Enrico Medioli, Suso Cecchi Rizzoli Film (Rome), Films
D’Amico, Luchino Visconti Jacques Leitienne, Francoriz
Director: Luchino Visconti (Paris), Imp.Ex.Ci (Nice)
Assistant director: Albino Cocco Producer: Giovanni Bertolucci
Photography (Technicolor, Todd- Production manager:
AO): Pasqualino De Santis Lucio Trentini
Camera operators: Script: Suso Cecchi D’Amico,
Nino Cristiani, Mario Cimini Enrico Medioli, Luchino
Music: Franco Mannino, with Visconti, from the novel
excerpts from the aria ‘Vorrei L’innocente by Gabriele
SpiegarVi, Oh Dio’ (soprano, D’Annunzio
Emilia Ravaglia) and from the Director: Luchino Visconti
Sinfonia Concertante K 364 by Assistant directors: Albino Cocco,
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Giorgio Treves
(Prague Chamber Orchestra, Photography
Jozef Suk violin, Jozef Kodousek (Technicolor, Technivision):
viola) Pasqualino De Santis
Sound: Claudio Maielli, Decio Camera operators: Mario Cimini,
Trani Giuseppe Bernardini

241
Music: Franco Mannino; Frederic
Chopin, ‘Berceuse’ and ‘Waltz’;
W. A. Mozart, ‘Rondo all turca’;
Franz Liszt, ‘Les Jeux d’eau a la
Villa d’Este’ (Franco Mannino,
piano); C.W. Gluck, ‘Che faro
senz’Euridice’ (mezzo-soprano,
Benedetta Pechioli, accompanied
by Franco Mannino)
Musical direction: Franco
Mannino, with the orchestra of
the Gestione Autonoma dei
Concertisti dell’Accademia
Nazionale di Santa Cecilia
Sound: Mario Dallimonti
Art direction: Mario Garbuglia
Costumes: Piero Tosi
Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni
Cast includes: Giancarlo Giannini
(Tullio Hermil), Laura Antonelli
(Giuliana, his wife), Jennifer
O’Neill (Countess Teresa Raffo),
Didier Haudepin (Federico,
Tullio’s brother), Rina Morelli
(Tullio’s mother), Marie Dubois
(the princess), Massimo Girotti,
Elvira Cortese, Philippe Hersent
Running time: 129 minutes
First shown:
Cannes, 15 May 1976;
Milan, 18 May 1976

D’Annunzio’s novel, first published

in 1891, appeared in English in
1899 under the title The Intruder.

242
Appendix:
Theatre and Opera Stagings

All theatre productions are in Italian unless otherwise stated. Titles are
those of the original play rather than the production (though some
have been translated into English).

1. Plays Antigone (Jean Anouilh), Teatro

Eliseo, Rome
a) As set/costume designer or Huis clos (Jean-Paul Sartre), Teatro
production supervisor Eliseo, Rome
1936 Adam (Marcel Achard), Teatro
Carita mondana (G. A. Traversi), Quirino, Rome
Teatro Sociale, Como Tobacco Road (John Kirkland, from
the novel by Erskine Caldwell),
1938
Teatro Olimpia, Milan
Sweet Aloes (Jay Mallory), Teatro di
Via Manzoni, Milan 1946
Le Voyage (Henry Bernstein), Le Manage de Figaro (R A. Caron
Municipal Casino, San Remo de Beaumarchais), Teatro
1947 Quirino, Rome
Life with Father (Howard Lindsay Crime and Punishment (adapted by
and Russel Crouse, from the Gaston Baty from the novel by

novel by Clarence Day), Teatro Fyodor Dostoyevsky), Teatro

Eliseo, Rome Eliseo, Rome
The Glass Menagerie (Tennessee
1954
Williams), Teatro Eliseo, Rome
Festival (Revue by Age, Scarpelli,
Verde and O.Vergani), Teatro 1947
Nuovo, Milan Eurydice (Jean Anouilh), Teatro La
Pergola, Florence
b) As director
1948
1945
AsYou Like It (William Shakespeare),
Les Parents terribles (Jean Cocteau),
Teatro Eliseo, Rome
Teatro Eliseo, Rome
The Fifth Column (Ernest 1949
Hemingway), Quirino, Rome A Streetcar Named Desire
La Machine a ecrire (Jean Cocteau), (Tennessee Williams), Teatro
Teatro Eliseo, Rome Eliseo, Rome

243
Oreste (Vittorio Alfieri),Teatro Immagini e tempi di Eleonora Duse,
Quirino, Rome Teatro Quirino, Rome
Troilus and Cressida (William Look Homeward,Angel (Ketti Frings,
Shakespeare), Boboli Gardens, from the novel by Thomas Wolfe),
Florence Teatro Quirino, Rome

1951 Two for the Seesaw (William

Death of a Salesman (Arthur Gibson), Theatre des

Miller), Teatro Eliseo, Rome Ambassadeurs, Paris (in French)

A Streetcar Named Desire Mrs Gibbons’ Boys (Will Glickman

(Tennessee Williams), Teatro and Joseph Stein), Teatro Eliseo,

Nuovo, Milan Rome

II seduttore (Diego Fabbri), Teatro 1959
La Fenice, Venice Figli d’arte (Diego Fabbri), Teatro
1952 Eliseo, Rome (world premiere)
La locandiera (Carlo Goldoni), 1960
Teatro La Fenice, Venice L’Arialda (Giovanni Testori), Teatro
Three Sisters (Anton Chekhov), Eliseo, Rome (world premiere)
Teatro Eliseo, Rome
1961
1953
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (John Ford),
Medea (Euripides), Teatro diVia
Theatre de Paris, Paris (in
Manzoni, Milan (production
French)
preceded by the performance of
a monologue by Anton Chekhov 1963
entitled ‘O vrede tobaka’ [‘On Le treizieme arbre (Andre Gide),
the harmfulness of tobacco’]) Festival of Two Worlds, Spoleto

1954 1965
Come le foglie (Giuseppe Giacosa), After the Fall (Arthur Miller),
Teatro Olimpia, Milan Theatre du Gymnase, Paris (in
1955 French)
The Crucible (Arthur Miller), Teatro The Cherry Orchard (Anton
Quirino, Rome Chekhov), Teatro Valle, Rome
Uncle Vanya (Anton Chekhov), 1967
Teatro Eliseo, Rome Egmont (J. W. von Goethe, music by
1957 Ludwig van Beethoven), Palazzo
Miss Julie (August Strindberg), Pitti, Florence
Teatro delle Arti, Rome La monaca di Monza (Giovanni
L’impresario dell Smirne (Carlo Testori),Teatro Bonci, Cesena
Goldoni), Teatro La Fenice, (world premiere)
Venice 1969
1958 L’inserzione (Natalia Ginzburg),
A View from the Bridge (Arthur Teatro San Babila, Milan (world
Miller), Teatro Eliseo, Rome premiere)

244
1973 Macbeth (text by Francesco Maria
Old Times (Harold Pinter), Teatro Piave from the play by William
Argentina, Rome Shakespeare, music by Giuseppe
Verdi), Festival of Two Worlds,
2. Opera and ballet Spoleto

1954 1959
La Vestale (text by Etienne de Jouy, II Duca d’Alba (text by Eugene
music by Gaspare Spontini), Scribe, music by Gaetano
Teatro alia Scala, Milan Donizetti), Festival of Two
Worlds, Spoleto
1955
La Sonnambula (text by Felice 1961
Romano, music by Vincenzo Salome (text by Hedwig Lachmann
Bellini),Teatro alia Scala, Milan based on the play by OscarWilde,
La Traviata (text by Francesco music by Richard Strauss),
Maria Piave, music by Giuseppe Festival ofTwo Worlds, Spoleto
Verdi), Teatro alia Scala, Milan
1963
1956 II diavolo in giardino (text by
Mario e il mago (ballet, adapted and Luchino Visconti, Filippo
choreographed by Luchino Sanjust, Enrico Medioli, music
Visconti from the story by by Franco Mannino), Teatro
Thomas Mann), Teatro alia Massimo, Palermo
Scala, Milan La Traviata (text by Francesco
Maria Piave from the novel and
1957
play by Alexandre Dumas fils,
Anna Bolena (text by Felice
music by Giuseppe Verdi),
Romani, music by Gaetano
Festival ofTwo Worlds, Spoleto
Donizetti), Teatro alia Scala,
Milan 1964
Iphigenia in Tauris (text by Nicola- Le nozze di Figaro (text by Lorenzo
Fran^ois Guillard, music by Da Ponte from the play by
Christoph Willibald Gluck), Beaumarchais, music by W. A.
Teatro alia Scala, Milan Mozart), Teatro dell’Opera,
Maratona di danza (ballet devised Rome
by Luchino Visconti to music by II Trovatore (text by Salvatore
Hans Werner Henze), Stadtische Cammarano from the play by
Oper, West Berlin (world Antonio Garcia Gutierrez, music
premiere) by Giuseppe Verdi), Bolshoi
Theatre, Moscow
1958
II Trovatore, Covent Garden,
Don Carlo (text by Joseph Mery and
London
Camille du Locle from the play
by Friedrich Schiller), Covent 1965
Garden, London Don Carlo, Teatro dell’Opera, Rome

245
1966
Falstaff (text by Arrigo Boito, music
by Giuseppe Verdi), Staatsoper,
Vienna
Der Rosenkavalier (text by Hugo
von Hofmannsthal, music by
Richard Strauss), Covent
Garden, London

1967
La Traviata, Covent Garden,
London

1969
Simone Boccanegra (text by F. M.
Piave and Arrigo Boito, music by
Giuseppe Verdi), Staatsoper,
Vienna

1973
Manon Lescaut (Giacomo Puccini,
libretto by various hands),
Festival of Two Worlds, Spoleto

246
Index
Figures in italics refer to llllustrations

Aeschylus 110,759 betrayal 23-5,68-71, 74, Cine-GUF 14

Age of Innocence, The 85, 89, 106, 110, 111- Cinecitta 45
(Scorsese) 205 12, 117, 132, 134 Cinema (magazine) 14
Aldo, G. R. 72 Bianco e nero 32 Citizen Kane 13
Alexander Nevsky 216 Big Country, The 80 Clift, Montgomery 49
Allen, Woody 211 Bitter Victory 220 Cocteau, Jean 44,213
Andresen, Bjorn 168 Blasetti, Alessandro 51, Communist Party,
‘anthropomorphic 55 Visconti and 1,31,
cinema’ 124-5, 128, Boccaccio ’70 46 136
151, 217 Bogarde, Dirk 153, 160, Conversation Piece 2,172,
Antonelli, Laura 201, 171 189-200, 205, 214,
202, 205 Boito, Camillo 63-4 215
Antonioni, Michelangelo Bradbury, Ray 222 Conversazioni in Sicilia 33
7, 14, 49, 55 Brecht, Bert 23 Coppola, Francis 211
Astruc, Alexandre 13 Brook, Peter 142 Cottafavi, Vittorio 80
Auschwitz 107,114 Buddenbrooks 137 Craig, Michael 111
Austria 64-6, 69, 179 Custoza, Battle of 76
auteurism - see Caduta degli dei - see
authorship Damned Damned,The 146-57,
authorship 3-4, 10-12, Cahiers du cinema 3, 5, 9 185, 214, 216
219-22 Cain, James 16-17,20 Dante Alighieri 22-3
Calamai, Clara 19, 22, Dassin, Jules 110
Barber of Seville, The 100 103 Day of Wrath 216
baroque 121 Camus, Albert 140,207, de Landa, Juan 22
Barthes, Roland 62, 142 218 De Sica, Vittorio 7,27,
Bas-Fonds, Les 13 Cardinale, Claudia 83, 57, 58, 209
Bazin, Andre 96 84, 87, 108, 109, 125, De Santis, Pasqualino
Beaumarchais, RA. Caron 727, 198 171, 205
de 62 Carne, Marcel 96 De Santis, Giuseppe 27,
Bell, Marie 776, 122 Cartier, Max 125, 130 209
Bellissima 12, 45-56, 61, Cecchi D’Amico, Suso Death in Venice (story)
64, 94, 96, 124, 214 124, 189, 198, 203 140, 165-9
Berger, Helmut 153, 173, censorship 16, 63 Death in Venice (film) 2,
190, 191, 212 Cervi, Antonio 57 158-70, 171-2, 187,
Bergman, Ingrid 63 Chanel, Gabrielle (Coco) 197, 210, 214, 215
Bertolucci, Giovanni 211 13, 57 Degre zero de I’ecriture, Le
Bertolucci, Bernardo 211 Chiari, Walter 50 142

247
Delmar, Rosalind 1 Ford, John (dramatist) Haley, Bill 100

Delon, Alain 57,125-6, 109 Hamlet 139, 154

134, 212, 213 Ford, John (film-maker) Hawks, Howard 49, 222

Delusion and Dream 172 9, 216 Hegel, G.W.F. 39

Demy, Jacques 105 Franck, Cesar 115 Heine, Heinrich 74, 76

Divorzio all’italiana 63 Franco, General history 27, 29-30, 63, 70,

Domarchi, Jean 3 Francisco 193 71, 82, 92, 120, 124-5,

Donizetti, Gaetano 46 Freda, Riccardo 80 151-2,185,215-17

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 95, French Cancan 9, 216 homosexuality 23, 199,
97-8, 139 Freud, Sigmund 172, 211-15
Dr Faustus (Mann) 167 220 Horst, Horst P. 212
Dreyer, Carl Theodor Houston, Penelope 1
207,216 Garbuglia, Mario 205 Howard, Trevor 176
D’Annunzio, Gabriele Garibaldi, Giuseppe 71, Hugo, Victor 183
201,202, 203,207,218 82, 85; followers of
(Garibaldini) 82, 85, In nome della legge 31
Edward II 185 92 incest 105,109-10,116
Eisenstein, Sergei 9, 31, Garnett, Tay 16, 17, 20 Innocente, L’ 201-8,215
33, 39, 81, 97, 216 Gattopardo, II — see Intruder, The - see
Etranger, L’ (Camus) 138, Leopard Innocente
140, 142, 207 -see Germi, Pietro 31, 63 Ishaghpour, Youssef 210
also Straniero Gertrud 207 Ivan the Terrible 184, 216
Giannini, Giancarlo 201,
Fahrenheit 451 222 202 Jarmusch, Jim 212
family 25-6, 36-7, 162, Giorni di gloria 29 Jensen, Wilhelm 172
184, 196-8, 214-15; Girardot, Annie 125,130 Jews, Jewishness 106,
in The Leopard 79, 82, Girotti, Massimo 17, 18, 110, 117, 118, 192
85, 92; in Vaghe stelle 70, 213
dell-Orsa 110-14; in Godard, Jean-Luc 40, Karina, Anna 143
Rocco and His Brothers, 120, 211 Koch, Carl 14
133-4; in The Damned Godfather, The 211 Krasker, Robert 72
146-7, 157 in Ludwig Golden Coach, The 51
178,181 Goldoni, Carlo 62 La Marmora 66
Fascism 13, 16, 30,, 33, Gradiva: a Pompeian Lampedusa, Giuseppe
212, 216; neo-fascism Fantasy 172 Tomasi di 79, 80-82,
192, 193; see also Gramsci, Antonio 30, 89, 140-1,218
Nazism 216-17, 219 Lancaster, Burt 80, 83.
Fellini, Federico 7, 49, Grande Illusion, La 9 84, 190, 195, 198, 214,
57, 58, 209 Granger, Farley 75, 212, 216-7
Femme mariee, Une 40 213 Lang, Fritz 7, 9
Flaherty, Robert 33, 40 Grapes of Wrath, The 9 Lattuada, Alberto 209
Flaubert, Gustave 26, 86, Gruppo di famiglia in un laughter 52-5
141 interno — see Lavoro, II 11, 46, 57-62,
Focas, Spiros 125, 127 Conversation Piece 76

248
Lawrence, D. H. 4,81 Marx, Karl 36,216 Ophuls, Max 174,207
Leopard, The {novel) 79, Marxism, Visconti and Ossessione 11, 13-28, 33,
80-1, 140-1 29, 71, 136, 154-6, 46, 54, 55, 60, 94, 96,
Leopard, The (film) 12, 198,214,216-7 124, 144; comparison
27, 37, 54, 79-93, Mastroianni, Marcello with Senso 73, 76, 77
115, 136, 140-1, 155, 95, 101, 140, 144 O’Neill, Jennifer 201, 202
185, 214, 215, 216 Mastroianni, Ruggero
Leopardi, Giacomo 109 172, 174 Partie de campagne, Une
Letter from Siberia 40 Maupassant, Guy de 14 13
Letter from an Unknown Medioli, Enrico 172, Paxinou, Katina 125,
Woman 207 189, 199, 203 127-8
Lohengrin 183 melodrama 20, 66-8, Phaedra 110
Lola Montes 174 109, 120-1, 150-1, Pietrangeli, Antonio 26
Loren, Sophia 63 199, 203, 210 Pinter, Harold 189
Losey, Joseph 155,189 Micciche, Lino 207-8 Ponti, Carlo 57, 63
Ludwig 2, 171-89, 198, Milian, Tomas 59 Popular Front 13
214, 215 Minnelli, Vincente 141 Postman Always Rings
Lukacs, Gyorgy 154—5, Mizoguchi Kenji 216 Twice 16-17
217, 219 Moderato Cantabile 142 Preminger, Otto 155
monarchy 184-7 Price, James 1,2
Macbeth 139, 152-4 Monicelli, Mario 57 Proust, Marcel 189
Madame de ... 207 Morelli, Rina 83 Prussia 71, 180, 181
Madame Bovary 26, 141 Morte a Venezia — see Puccini, Giacomo 14,
Madness of King George Death in Venice 189
184 Mrs Brown 184
Magnani, Anna 45, 47, music 46, 100, 215 Que viva Mexico! 32
48, 49-52, 50 Mussolini, Benito 16
Mahler, Gustav 158 My Darling Clementine 9 Ray, Nicholas 220
Malavoglia, I 33—4, 138 realism 7, 14, 26-8,
Mangano, Silvana 138, Nannuzzi, Armando 175 29, 40, 41, 94, 96,
168, 190, 196 Nazism 106, 147-7, 141, 150-1, 155, 157,
Mann, Thomas 124, 139, 151-2, 205, 216 217
140, 157, 158, 165-9, neo-realism 7, 9, 13-14, Rebel without a Cause 220
218 15-16,26-8, 29-30, Red River 49
Mannino, Franco 205 33, 47, 49, 77, 94, 96, Renoir, Jean 7, 9, 13-14,
Manon Lescaut 189 125, 151, 210, 16, 33, 51, 141, 155
Marais, Jean 213 Nibelungenlied 175 Resistance, the 29, 30,
Marcuzzi, Elio 22 Nietzsche, Friedrich 180, 198, 215
Marion de Lorme 183 203 Resnais, Alain 7, 95
Marius and the Magician Notti bianche, Le - see Ricci, Renzo 111
154 White Nights Richard II 185
Marker, Chris 40 Riffa, La 57, 58
Marlowe, Christopher 185 Old Times 189 Risorgimento 63, 70, 89,
Marsani, Claudia 191 opera 14, 41, 46, 65-7 140,205

249
Rocco and His Brothers Serandrei, Mario 29 Truffaut, Franfois 222
12, 25, 27, 39, 46, 54, Servadio, Gaia 198,212 20th Century-Fox 79,
60, 77, 87, 94, 115, Shakespeare, William 44, 80, 209, 210
123- 37,152,185, 67, 154 Tyler, Parker 212
186, 205, 214 Shaw, Bernard 52
Rohdie, Sam 210 Siegfried 181 Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa 11,
Rolland, Romain 216 Signora senza camelie 49, 12, 20, 27, 29, 46, 77,
Ronde, La 207 55 106-22, 133, 136,
Rosi, Francesco 209 Signs and Meaning in the 152, 156, 205, 214,
Rossellini, Roberto 27, Cinema 3 215
63, 209 Sorel, Jean 104 Valli, Alida 70, 75
Rossini, Gioacchino 100 Southern question 30-1 Verga, Giovanni 14,
Rotunno, Giuseppe 72, Sternberg, Josef von 40 33-4. 36, 41, 81,
78 Straniero. Lo 2, 64, 138-9
Rouch, Jean 40 138-45 verismo 14, 15, 33
Rusconi, Edilio 189 Streghe, Le 138 Vittorini, Elio 33
Stroheim, Erich von 155
Saga ofAnatahan, The 40 Wagner, Richard 186
Salvatori, Renato 125, Technicolor 80 Warner Bros. 211
130 Tentazioni del dottor Weaver, William 172
Sanda, Dominique 196 Antonio, Le 57, 58 Welles, Orson 7, 13
Sandra - see Vaghe stelle Terra trema, La 11, 25, Whannel, Paddy 1
dell’Orsa 29-44, 45, 49, 60-61, White Nights 12, 46,
Sardou, Victorien 14 76, 77, 89, 94, 96, 94-105, 118, 121,
Savage Innocents 220 115, 123, 124, 126, 123,213,215
Scarano, Tecla 54 133, 136 205, 214; Williams, Tennessee 44
Scarfiotti, Ferdinando and Testori, Giovanni Williams, Christopher 2
171 124,139,218 Wollen, Peter 1, 3
Sceicco bianco, Lo 49 Titanus 209
Schell, Maria 97 Tod in Venedig (Mann) Zavattini, Cesare 47, 48,
Schifano, Laurence 198, 158, 165-6 - see also 51,209
212, 214 Death in Venice Zeffirelli, Franco 209
Schneider, Romy 59, 173 Tosca, La 14 Zola, Emile 14
Scorsese, Martin 205 Tosi, Piero 205
Senso 12,13,25,27,54, trasformismo 70-71, 79,
55, 60, 62-78, 79, 82, 89
96. 97, 114, 119, 121, Traversi, G. A. 13
124- 5, 134, 136, Tristan and Isolde 178
138-9, 155, 215, 216 Trovatore, II 64-6

250
 DATE DUE
DATE DE RETOUR

CARR MCLEAN 38-296

EN TUN VER TY

64 0484894 1
Aristocrat and Marxist, master equally of harsh realism and sublime
melodrama, Luchino Visconti (1906-76) was without question one of the
greatest European film directors.

His career as a film-maker began in the 1930s when he escaped the stifling
culture of Fascist Italy to work with Jean Renoir in the France of the Popular
Front. Back in his native country in the 1940s he was one of the founders of
the neo-realist movement. In 1954, with Senso, he turned his hand to a
historical spectacular. The result was both glorious to look at and a profound
reinterpretation of history. In Rocco and His Brothers (1960) he returned to
his neo-realist roots and in The Leopard (1963), with Burt Lancaster, Claudia
Cardinale and Alain Delon, he made the first truly international film.

He scored a further success with Death in Venice (1971), a sensitive

adaptation of Thomas Mann’s story about a writer (in the film, a musician)
whose world is devastated when he falls in love with a young boy. A similar
homo-erotic theme haunts Ludwig (1973), a bio-pic about the King of Bavaria
who prefers art to politics and the company of stableboys to that of the
princess he is supposed to marry.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's celebrated study of the director was first published

in 1967 and revised in 1973. It is now fully updated to include the last three
films that Visconti made before his death, together with some reflections on
the ’auteur’ theory of which the original edition was a key example.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith is Professor of Cinema Cultures at the University of

Luton. His recent publications include a study of Antonioni’s L’avventura for
the BFI Film Classics series.

ISBN 0-85170-961-3

9 780851 70961 1 >