Luchino Visconti: The decadent realist
Jaime Jeske
Born into opulence, mesmerised by Marxism, Visconti poured his life into
his films
David Thomson
Saturday February 15, 2003
The Guardian
It is not the nicest face one ever saw on a film director: as cruel as a
hawk, as supercilious as an aristocrat who does not expect to be
understood, it glared out through the cigarette smoke of an 120-a-day
habit. Luchino Visconti imposed himself on others and on his
productions. On The Leopard , when he had to accept his producer's
decision to cast Burt Lancaster as the Sicilian prince, he responded by
ignoring the American actor. It was domination through distance. Yet
observers noted how, gradually, the shrewd but insecure Lancaster began
to pick up the lordly gestures, the sneers and the mannerisms, of
Visconti himself. The actor had learned that you can't expect a real
aristocrat to explain himself, or to be accessible. But he can offer an
example. When the film was a triumph, and took the Palme d'Or at Cannes,
Visconti must have been all the more resolved to stay aloof and alone.
Visconti, who died in 1976, has not exactly faded away. Yet surely he is
not the power he was. It will be interesting to see whether the
immersion that is coming our way will hasten his removal, or make this
gloomy narcissist a model for much larger things. In 1962, in Sight and
Sound's poll of the best films ever made, Visconti's La Terra Trema
(1948) finished at number nine. Today that starkly beautiful and formal,
yet allegedly neo-realist study of poor fishermen in Sicily is rarely
seen. The gulf between the poverty of the people and the richness of the
art is a little hard to take. In 2002, Visconti was not in the top 10,
yet some critics and film-makers held out for a few films - Senso, Rocco
and His Brothers, The Leopard, Ludwig. There was even one vote for Death
in Venice, which in some quarters is regarded as a gruesome parody of
the "art film".
The Visconti festival is very thorough. A full version of Death in
Venice has just been released; starting in mid-April, the National Film
Theatre will screen all of his pictures in the best versions available;
and a restored 203-minute version of The Leopard will get a wider
release on May 2. Also appearing in mid-April is a third edition of
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's book, Visconti, first published in 1967, but now
rewritten to incorporate those last very personal films: The Damned,
Death in Venice, Ludwig, Conversation Piece and The Innocent, which are
masterpieces, or not, depending on your point of view. But there is
something else coming in April, and because of shortcomings in the
Nowell-Smith book it may be the most useful: a two-hour documentary
film, made by Adam Low for Arena, The Life and Work of Count Luchino
Visconti .
Nowell-Smith's book, the early part of which has been kept intact (as a
historical document), is an auteurist study, bent on tracking Visconti's
pursuit of the "realist aesthetic". To that extent, it is a pious,
theoretical work, prepared to expound on the films at length, but shy of
supplying biographical or circumstantial detail. Nowell-Smith always had
problems, therefore, with wondering what became of the realist in
Visconti, and he has never been very fond of Death in Venice . But the
Arena documentary blows his caution away. One shot of that cruel face is
clue enough: this man was fiercely himself, gloriously selfish and
self-centred and about as dedicated to realism as any communist duke.
Count Don Luchino Visconti di Modrone was born in Milan in 1906, into
one of the most important aristocratic families in Italy. His father,
the Duke of Modrone, was a man of many extravagant houses, a famous
bisexual, a lover of the queen of Italy; Visconti's mother was a member
of a hugely wealthy family in the pharmacy and cosmetics business. By
the early years of the second world war, with both parents dead and an
older brother killed at El Alamein, Visconti was probably the wealthiest
man ever who elected to become a film and stage director.
The Arena documentary shows us some of the houses - and the ways they
were used in subsequent films - and leaves us in no doubt about the
emotional importance to Visconti of distinction, property and command.
He was a man who needed fine things, who kept many servants (and kept
them in their place), who believed passionately in money, property and
the poignant situation of an upper class inevitably seeming more archaic
or stranded. All of these conservative attitudes were bound up with the
life of a homosexual who was not initially comfortable about revealing
himself.
As a young man, Visconti dabbled in painting and collecting, but his
greatest enthusiasm lay in the breeding and racing of fine horses. His
life had been sheltered; he moved and travelled with the ease of great
wealth. But then in 1936, a trip to Paris seems to have woken him up.
Through the agency of fashion designer Coco Chanel, he fell in with the
circle of Jean Renoir. It was a startling encounter. Perhaps Visconti
bought his way into a troubled production, but he became an assistant to
Renoir on Une Partie de Campagne , and then on Les Bas-Fonds . And in
his talks with the Renoir group (very much leftwing), somehow,
magically, the count discovered that he was a communist. He visited the
US too, around this time, but with far less reward.
As war overtook Europe, Visconti probably contributed funds to Renoir's
attempt to film Tosca in Italy. In the event, Renoir fled to the US, but
Visconti remained in Italy throughout the war, even though he had,
theoretically, become a communist. During these years he helped
administer family affairs as his parents died; became so notable in
anti-fascist politics that he was briefly arrested and interrogated by
the authorities; and made his own film debut, Ossessione, stolen from
the James M Cain novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Filmed in black
and white, in poor rural settings, Ossessione is a crime passionel story
fully committed to the harsh poverty of its characters. With Massimo
Girotti and Clara Calamai as its doomed lovers, it is a very good film,
and no was small influence on Michelangelo Antonioni. Indeed, the two
men thought of collaborating at this time.
At the close of war, Visconti was one of several directors on a
documentary about the fall of Italy, Giorni di Gloria . Three years
later, he made La Terra Trema and secured an international reputation.
Originally, the plan was to do a three-part film, on fishermen, farmers
and miners, but the fishing picture ran two hours and 40 minutes, and
was finished only when Visconti paid for it himself. It was on location
in Sicily on that film that he began a love affair with the assistant
director, Franco Zeffirelli, who also noted how much of a dictator
Visconti was, and how he hired real fishermen but then asked them to do
very melodramatic things.
Still, the vestiges of realism remained in Visconti's next film,
Bellissima , in which Anna Magnani is an insufferable mother determined
to get her daughter a job in the movies. By that time, Visconti was also
Italy's most fashionable stage director - he would do new plays by Jean
Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis-Clos , as well as most of the new
plays by Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie , A Streetcar Named
Desire) and Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View
from the Bridge). Also, in the 1950s, at La Scala in Milan, he launched
a career as an opera director, in which Maria Callas would be one of his
stars.
I think his new involvement in theatre and opera helped loosen the reins
of realism. Visconti discovered a love of costume and decor, to say
nothing of broad symbolic values in action, and the society audience
that preferred live events. At any event, Senso is a breakthrough
picture, away from modernity towards period literary adaptation. It is
the love story of an Austrian lieutenant (Farley Granger) and a lovelorn
Italian countess (Alida Valli), set in the 1860s, with music from
Bruckner and Verdi. It is another magnificent film, and just the kind of
exposé of the real, ugly lives of nobility that Renoir might have made.
It seems to have set Visconti on a new path: that of literary
adaptation, period, romantic melodrama, and a gradual concentration on
his own emotions as the centrepiece of the film. Indeed, inasmuch as
Visconti lusted after Farley Granger, he surely identified with the
countess in Senso . The next films were White Nights , adapted from
Dostoevsky, with Marcello Mastroianni and Maria Schell; and Rocco and
His Brothers , a return to Italian poverty (Sicilians who come to Milan)
but with Dostoyevsky's The Idiot in mind, and Visconti's unrequited
desire for star Alain Delon as the chief energy in the film. Rocco was
an art-house hit, but it is an uncomfortable film, in which the story's
violence begins to take on undertones of sado-masochism.
The Leopard came from the novel by Lampedusa, and Visconti was thwarted
in his wish to cast Laurence Olivier. But nothing now impeded his
sumptuous vision of aristocratic taste as a formative (and scarcely
Marxist) thrust in history. Moreover, the prince is a character not just
receding into history but passing into his increasingly self-sufficient
point of view. There is no real element of social criticism in The
Leopard , just a mounting, faintly sinister self-satisfaction as the
central character becomes more isolated.
Was the fatalist and the sensualist (not to mention the owner) always
working towards this end? For a moment he seemed lost. Nowell-Smith is
an admirer of Sandra , but in general it is placed alongside his
adaptation of Albert Camus's The Outsider (with Mastroianni) as a
failure. But then, as he made an episode from a longer film, Le Streghe
, he met a young Austrian actor, Helmut Berger. There is a lot of Berger
in Low's documentary, and I don't think many will find him pleasant. But
Visconti took him on as son, as lover and as lead actor. For the first
time, his homosexual appetite smothered his instinct as a director of
actors.
Three times, Visconti cast Berger's dead yet handsome look in major
films, and then turned the pictures into wilfully decadent studies of
that face: The Damned (1969), about a wealthy family that turns fascist;
Ludwig (1973), a four-hour, ritualistic celebration of the art projects
of a mad king that destroy his nation, Bavaria; and Conversation Piece
(1975), in which Berger and Lancaster, again, played out a maudlin
portrait of the Berger-Visconti relationship.
Long, and as slow or prolonged as delicious torture, these films do not
lack in fascination or horror: in The Damned , Berger rapes his own
mother (played by Ingrid Thulin), which is among the most loathsome of
such screen events. Ludwig , it seems to me, has forsaken any shred of
socialism for the self-absorption of the mad artist king whose creations
can sustain any sacrifice.
In all of these Berger films, and in Death in Venice (1971), Visconti is
re-creating the splendour of his own childhood and the world's last gasp
of unfettered or irresponsible aristocracy. The clothes are divine; the
boys are putty in his hands; the music (like the slow movement from
Mahler's Fifth) is the nursery music of a resplendent tyrant. And idiot.
For all the worldliness of Visconti, these are among the most ridiculous
movies ever made. Under the guise of a disdainful, classically snobbish
farewell to the plain world (for Visconti felt he had been dying for
years, along with the age of princes), the movies are truly decadent. As
such, Visconti is of the most enormous importance in that his story is
that of theatrical or cinematic flair, a sense of reality and a love of
actors turning slowly towards monstrous self-monument. The great curse
of the movies.
* Death in Venice is at the National Film Theatre, London SE1, until
February 28. The Visconti season opens at the NFT on April 18, then
tours. Box office: 020-7928 3232.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
Jaime
