Conversation Piece

As Martin Scorsese notes in My Voyage to Italy, no 20th Century film-maker can lay claim to the unique disposition of Count Don Luchino Visconti di Modrone, the final heir to one of Europe’s oldest aristocratic families. For much of his youth, Visconti exulted in the privileges of his lifestyle. His house was a frequent retreat for the likes of Arturo Toscanini, Gabrielle d’Annunzio and Giacomo Puccini. His lifelong engagement in theatre and opera was imbibed from an early age along with brief passions such as raising horses and maintaining stables. It wasn’t long before Visconti began questioning the limitations of his lifestyle. Inspired by his intellectual yearnings, Visconti wandered away from his comfortable shelter and visited Paris. This would be a turning point in his life. Through his friendship with Coco Chanel, Visconti met French director Jean Renoir. He served as assistant director on some of Renoir’s best films from the 30s, including Toni, Partie de campagne and The Lower Depths.

In addition to his newly discovered interest in film-making, the political climate of France proved an equally transformative experience. For an Italian under Mussolini’s Fascist rule, the spirit of the cross-partisan Popular Front provided a much needed political education. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Luchino Visconti completed the unexpected transition from a privileged aristocrat to a lifelong member of Italy’s Communist Party. Visconti directly participated in Italy’s resistance to Fascism (which led to a period of brief imprisonment in 1944). Simultaneously, Visconti served as a founder of Italian Neorealism, an aesthetic revolution that sprung out of the war. Ossessione, made in 1942, was an adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice transposed to contemporary Italy. Deeply influenced by Renoir, Ossessione’s tale of carnal passion among the lower reaches of society was released two years before the worldwide success of Rome, Open City. His first film already displays Visconti’s distinctive skill in juxtaposing naturalistic detail with an operatic approach to violence and human relationships.

Visconti’s second feature was more obviously neorealist in construction. Commissioned by the Communist Party, La Terra Trema was an unprecedented production; shot on location in Sicily with a local non-professional cast who spoke in their own dialect. The film was a box-office failure but was highly lauded by Michelangelo Antonioni and later cited by John Cassavetes as an influence on his work. This was followed by Bellisima, an uncharacteristic comedy which boasted a vibrant performance from Anna Magnani. Senso, shot in Technicolor, depicted the outcome of an aristocratic woman’s misplaced passion during Italy’s Risorgimento. This lush period film, which boasted two international stars (Alida Valli and Farley Granger), was a complete turn from the director of La Terra Trema; as such, Visconti was accused of artistic betrayal. The richness of the film’s recreation of the 19th Century was described by supporters as “a neorealism of the past” while Martin Scorsese remarked, that “if Stendhal had a camera it would be like Senso.”

Visconti’s baroque sensibility was already perceptible in his neorealist works. In his review of La Terra Trema, André Bazin (founder of Cahiers du Cinéma magazine) astutely observed that the director had ennobled Sicilian fisherman with the bearing of princes in Renaissance paintings. Visconti sought to enshrine a level of grandeur to the struggles of the working class by evoking classical foundations. Rocco and His Brothers borrowed elements from Thomas Mann’s works as well as Dostoyesky’s The Idiot to portray the destructive fraternal relationships of a working-class family. His mature period, pivoted around period narratives, nonetheless boasted a more modern perspective; one rooted in the 20th Century while gazing into the 19th. Visconti’s depiction of the gradual decadence of Europe’s aristocracy introduced a self-reflexive and autobiographical dimension to his films. The psychosexual melodramas of American dramatist Tennessee Williams (which Visconti successfully mounted on the Italian stage) was a powerful inspiration for his mature period.

In the short term, films such as Senso, Ludwig and Death in Venice received acclaim for their detailed recreation of bygone opulence. Visconti’s critical vision in depicting the gradual decadence of Europe’s aristocracy, their erosion into madness (Ludwig) and obsolescence (The Leopard, Conversation Piece), was often overwhelmed by his luxurious mise-en-scène. A harsher expression of his mature perspective can be found in The Job (Il Lavoro), his contribution to the omnibus Boccaccio’70. The film depicts the existential crisis faced by a young aristocratic housewife (played by Romy Schneider) when her husband becomes publicly embroiled in a sex scandal. Visconti’s compassionate portrait of her slow spiral into despair stems from his complex identification; a former denizen of the life of privilege he had renounced but which his characters remained mired in. Aristocrats, in Visconti’s films, were prisoners of the same power and privilege which they wielded to oppress their subjects; leopards who eventually confronted the golden bars of cages built by themselves. —Mr Bongo