Visconti, Luchino

(1906–1976)

   The scion of one of Italy’s oldest and most aristocratic families, Visconti entered the cinema relatively late and was nearly 30 when a chance social contact enabled him to work with the great French director Jean Renoir. Visconti’s first film, Ossessione (Obsession, 1942), was based on the American novel The Postman Always Rings Twice and aroused an uproar in Italy because of its frank sexuality. Visconti had to make a personal appeal to Benito Mussolini to get the film past the censors. Fortunately the dictator allowed this first masterpiece of neorealism to appear with only limited cuts. Visconti was later arrested by the authorities and charged with aiding the resistance. For some time he was at grave risk of execution. In 1947 Visconti made his second great film, La terra trema (The Earth Trembles), which was based on Giovanni Verga’s novel I malavoglia. Set in the Sicilian fishing village of Aci Trezza, the film manages both to show the hardship and agony of the villagers’lives and to include scenes of ravishing poetic beauty. Visconti used no professional actors in the film, and the film had to be subtitled in Italian for non-Sicilian viewers. Visconti produced two masterpieces in the 1950s. Senso (Feeling, 1954) was his first foray into the use of color, but its visual opulence and subject matter (the film is a love story set during the Risorgimento) were regarded with suspicion by the neorealists. Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and his Brothers, 1960), by contrast, marked a return to the naturalism of his earlier films and was a major critical and box office success. From 1960 onward, however, Visconti turned more toward the big-budget, visually enchanting style of Senso. Turning his back on neorealism and Italy’s Marxist critical establishment, Visconti chose to adapt Di Lampedusa’s novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963), even though the book had been derided as reactionary when it first appeared in the late 1950s. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Visconti’s last major film was Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, 1971). The depiction of the decadent beauty of Venice is the most successful aspect of the film; the psychological trauma undergone by Aschenbach, the protagonist, is portrayed somewhat ponderously. In addition to his film career, Visconti was Italy’s preeminent opera and theater director. He died in Rome in 1976.