The Maestro of Italian Cinema

Visually striking and enigmatic filmmaker LuchinoVisconti gets long-awaited retrospective

As one of Italy's most visually striking and, often times, enigmatic filmmakers Luchino Visconti was also the industry's most famous contradiction. Born into one of the country's leading aristocratic families, he shunned Fascism, embraced Communism but never gave up his almost feudal private lifestyle.
Having made some of Italy's most gorgeous and sprawling movies, it was only a matter of time that Cinematheque Ontario re-introduced Toronto audiences to this legendary filmmaker in the retrospective Maestro: The Films Of Luchino Visconti.
Born Count Don Luchino Visconti di Modrone in 1902 in Milan, during his youth Visconti mixed with luminaries such as conductor Toscanini, composer Puccini and the novelist Gabriele D'Annunzio. Not surprisingly, he had an early interest in music and theatre, but also a passion for horses. He bred race horses for eight years, thinking of little else. When this interest began to fade, he moved to Paris and befriended Coco Chanel. She introduced him to Jean Renoir with whom he worked briefly as assistant on A Day in the Country (Aug. 13) and The Lower Depths (Aug. 13) before making the decision to try out Hollywood in the late 1930s. Disappointed with the lifestyle, he returned almost immediately to Italy where he worked as an assistant on Carl Koch's Tosca.
Determined to make his own film, Visconti first turned his attention to the works of renowned realism Sicilian leftist author Giovanni Verga, but the Fascist censors objected. So Visconti adapted James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice into Ossessione (July 31), which enraged the politicos because of its neorealist depiction of the proletariat under Fascism.
Visconti allowed his palazzo to be used as a secret headquarters for members of the Communist Resistance and he participated in armed action against the German occupiers. This led to a brief period of imprisonment by the Gestapo in 1944. His revenge came when he filmed the execution by firing squad of the head of the jail for the 1945 documentary Days of Glory (July 16). The Italian Communist Party commissioned him to produce a series of three films about fishermen, miners, and peasantry in Sicily but only La terra trema (1948) was made.
With La Terra Trema (July 16), based on a Verga novel, Visconti adds a more decorative style to his neorealism in portraying the life of inhabitants on a small Sicilian fishing village. The director employed locals, using their own dialects, to tell their stories of oppression.
More flamboyant is the colourful Senso (July 7), a classic of postwar Italian cinema that centres on a Venetian countess (Alida Valli) who betrays those around her for the love of an Austrian officer (Farley Granger).
A recurrent theme in Visconti's films is the moral disintegration of the family, such as Rocco and His Brothers (July 8 & 20) about a Sicilian widow who moves with her five sons to Milan; Bellissima (July 6 & 15) starring Anna Magnani as the mother of all stage mothers; The Leopard (July 21 & 27), about an aristocratic patriarch (Burt Lancaster) unable to control the rise of the Risorgimento; Conversation Piece (Aug. 11) about an American professor (Lancaster) obsessed with the hedonistic family that moved in next door; and The Damned (Aug. 6 and 14), which charts the disintegration of the German Krupp family during the onset of Nazism.
One of Visconti's most awarded films is his 1971 rendition of Thomas Mann's novel Death in Venice. Against the backdrop of Venice's Lido neighbourhood, we watch a dying composer (Dirk Bogarde) become tormented and obsessed with a young Polish boy on vacation with his beautiful mother (Silvana Mangano).
The retrospective also features Marcello Mastroianni's first major screen role, White Nights (July 29), where he plays a man who has regular night-time meetings with a suicidal woman (Maria Schell); and Sandra (Aug. 4), about a woman (Claudia Cardinale) who must accept the horrible truth that her mother denounced her Jewish father to the Nazis.
Lo Straniero, one of Visconti's rarest films, gets its second only Toronto screening on July 29. Based on a Camus novel, the story centres on a Frenchman (Mastroianni) who commits a murder solely for the existential experience of it.
One of this writer's favourite Visconti films is Ludwig (Aug. 12), an extravagant masterpiece about the troubled life of Ludwig, the mad King of Bavaria (Helmut Berger). A renowned lover of opera, Visconti adopts Wagnerian power into the film's emotional grandeur.
The retrospective also features the short programme, We, The Women, episodes or vignettes written for the anthologies The Witches, We, The Women and Boccaccio '70. In We, The Women Anna Magnani finds herself arguing with a cab driver over his one lira surcharge for her lap dog. It is supposedly based on an event that actually happened to the actress.
In Il Lavoro, from Boccaccio '70, Romy Schneider plays a contessa who discovers that her philandering husband (Thomas Milian) has been sleeping with prostitutes. So she decides to charge him a fee for all the free sex she's given him.
Finally, in La Strega Brucia Viva from The Witches, Silvana Mangano plays a movie star who arrives pregnant and unexpected at a birthday party in the Italian alps.
Not the easiest of directors (leading lady Clara Calamai called him "a medieval lord with a whip"), Visconti nonetheless commanded the greatest respect from his actors. Despite his famed ill treatment of Lancaster on the set of The Leopard, the actor still felt that Visconti was "the best director I've ever worked with... an actor's dream".
Luchino Visconti staged several plays including works by Jean Cocteau and Tennessee Williams. He was famed as an opera director as much as for his filmmaking, most significantly his work with Maria Callas who credited Visconti with teaching her how to act.
Openly bisexual, as was his father, Visconti's films have few explicitly gay characters, although there is often an undercurrent of homoeroticism. He favoured attractive leading men, such as Alain Delon, and his final obsession was Austrian actor Helmut Berger whom he directed in The Damned (1969), Ludwig (1972) and Conversation Piece (1974).
His smoking (up to 120 cigarettes a day) led to a stroke and subsequent ill health, but he rallied long enough to make The Innocent (Aug. 4) - about a woman (Laura Antonelli) so jealous of her husband's (Giancarlo Giannini) attention for her newborn that commits an unspeakable act - before dying in Rome in 1976.
Luchino Visconti's funeral was attended by President Giovanni Leone and Burt Lancaster.

Maestro: The Films of Luchino Visconti shows at the AGO's Jackman Hall, 317 Dundas St. West, from July 6 to August 13. For more information call 416.968.FILM.

Publication Date: 2004-07-11
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