Luchino Visconti, a revolutionary Italian director - Article by Lavinia Capogna

Luchino Visconti, a revolutionary Italian director

Article by Lavinia Capogna 

Luchino Visconti was one of the Maestri of Italian cinema. Author of 14 films, some episodes, stage directions, opera (starring Maria Callas) he was during his artistic career much opposed because was a communist and a homosexual. 

Born in 1906 into the noble Milanese Visconti family, he devoted himself as a teenager to the study of the cello and composed an interesting novel that remained unfinished. Destined by his family for a military career, he fled to Paris where he fell in love with French Realist cinema and became assistant to the great director Jean Renoir.

Back in Italy, he debuted in 1942 with a groundbreaking film "Ossessione," starring the well-known actress Clara Calamai and the young and handsome Massimo Girotti. The film had besides splendid directing at least three scandalous elements for that time, first of all it was inspired by an American novel ("The Postman Always Rings Twice" by James Cain) which was a great challenge to the prohibitions of Fascism, then it told of adultery and murder, unthinkable subjects for that time, and finally it was shot from life in the countryside of the Ferrara lowlands at a time when almost only the leesy and unrealistic comedies of the "white telephones" and heavy propaganda films, all shot in studios, were seen on the big screen. Luchino Visconti, on the other hand, had fully assimilated the lesson of French Realism directors such as Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné and thus made the first Italian Neorealist film, which was first censored and later allowed back into theaters. Shortly afterwards the director stand for PCI (Italian Communist Party) and the Resistance, his villa on Rome's Via Salaria became a place of refuge for wounded partisans at the risk of his life. As soon as Rome was liberated, he directed the documentary "Days of Glory." Years later he declared that the Resistance had been the best time of his life.

In 1948 Visconti made "La terra trema" a masterpiece that scandalized many for its social content. It was a story about some Sicilian fishermen inspired by a novel by Giovanni Verga. The actors were real Sicilian fishermen and peasants who spoke in dialect.

The following film "Bellissima," on the other hand, was the meeting of two talents: Visconti and the great actress Anna Magnani. The film narrated the cynicism of the film industry that promised easy success and the moving hopes of a simply Roman woman capturing the transformations of 1950s society. 

In 1954 Visconti made "Senso" inspired by Camillo Boito's 19th-century short story. Here, too, the director dared to tell a scandalous story: the tale of an Italian gentlewoman, unhappily married, who fell madly in love with an Austrian lieutenant. The film was intensely acted by Alida Valli and the American actor, Farley Granger. The perfection of the shots, the exceptional aesthetic beauty that is never an end in itself, the dreamy dialogues that the great playwright Tennessee Williams wrote for a scene, make "Senso" an almost misunderstood masterpiece at the time: it was strongly criticized, even considered anti-patriotic by DC (Christian Democrats Party) and which, not surprisingly, did not win the Golden Lion in Venice to which a calligraphic version of "Romeo and Juliet" directed by Castellani was preferred.

 "Senso" is a film that has a big loss on cinematography and the rest seen on digital screens and should be seen, if possible, on the big screen in 35mm film where it is truly stunning.

In 1957 Visconti made a film based on a Dostoevsky short story "Le notti bianche" starring Marcello Mastroianni and the sweet and beautiful Austrian actress Maria Schell. 

In this film Visconti recounted the vague dashed hopes and early disillusionment of a young dreamer captivated by a girl he met by chance on an evanescent Petersburg night.

"Rocco e i suoi fratelli" on the other hand, is a realistic film about the degradation and moral corruption of a southern immigrant family in Milan starring a young French actor almost discovered by the director, Alain Delon, and Annie Girardot.

Beautiful shots of the suburbs, the boxing training gym as well as the alienation that ends in madness of Renato Salvatori.

Later Visconti made two opposite films, the essential and existentialist "Lo straniero" from the novel by Albert Camus and the great fresco of "Il Gattopardo" from the famous novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. "Everything must change so that nothing changes" , this is the basic idea that runs through the entire film, which is the story of a Sicilian prince at the time Garibaldi landed on the island in 1860. The film featured extraordinary performers such as Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, Claudia Cardinale, Serge Reggiani, Rina Morelli, Paolo Stoppa, and Romolo Valli.

After it, Visconti made a crepuscular and almost disturbing film about a taboo subject, the attraction between a brother and sister in "Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa," starring Claudia Cardinale and French actor Jean Sorel. The title was taken from a line by the poet Giacomo Leopardi.

In 1971 the director began a 'German trilogy' whose first film was "Morte a Venezia" from Thomas Mann's novel, in which he narrated another scandalous theme with great rigor: the platonic and wholly intellectual fascination of a German musician in crisis for a Polish teenager, Tadzio, whom he admired without ever speaking to him on the beach of the Venetian Lido in 1911. The film was masterfully played by English actor Dirk Bogarde and a Visconti discovery, the teenage Björn Andresen (who recently participated at a very unfair Swedish documentary towards Visconti).

"La caduta degli Dei" on the other hand is Visconti's darkest film, a Lady Macbeth set in the early days of Nazism in Germany, beautiful in its realization but, in my opinion, overly loaded in its screenplay. 

"Ludwig," on the other hand, is a masterpiece, now almost forgotten, that chronicled the life of the sensitive, fragile, romantic and gay prince of Munich who emptied the kingdom's coffers to finance Wagner's music and have fairy-tale castles built. These last two Visconti films were played by Helmut Berger, a very good Austrian actor who was also the director's last great love, as the actor himself told in an interview.

During the making of "Ludwig" the director had a severe stroke from which he recovered only partially physically and made two films before he died in 1977 at the age of 71. It is admirable that in that condition of health and disability he was able to make "Gruppo di famiglia in un interno," another masterpiece and an essential film for understanding the 1970s that chronicles the demure affection of an elderly and lonely American professor (excellent Burt Lancaster) for a rather dissolute and neo-fascist family. The film is also a profound reflection on illness, nostalgia and death, themes on which director must have reflected in his later years.

"L'innocente," on the other hand, is a well made film and well acted by Giancarlo Giannini and Laura Antonelli but with an indigestible plot based on a novel by Gabriele D'Annunzio.

As can be seen from his work Visconti was a great innovator in Italian cinema and, as he had written in an autobiographical note at the beginning of his film career, he was interested in showing men and women, their steps, their uncertainties, doubts and hesitations. Visconti's films always have a strong moral and social tension running through them, a tension that was also part of the director's emotional temperament.