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Feb.27,2005 -Mar.6,2005 |
The Maestro of Italian Cinema
Visually striking and enigmatic filmmaker LuchinoVisconti gets long-awaited retrospective
By Angela Baldassarre
Originally Published: 2004-07-11
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.
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