Ossessione (1943) was Visconti's first feature and a forerunner of post-war neo-realism. Ossessione is a film about the destructive power of sexual passion. A man turns up by chance at a roadside country inn, stays on as a labourer and falls in love (or in desire) with the innkeeper's wife and she with him. Tragedy ensues.
La Terra Trema recounts the struggle of a fishing family to escape from poverty and exploitation. In 1947, Visconti went to Sicily, with a small amount of capital advanced by the Communist Party, to make what was initially to have been a short documentary. He stayed there for six months, and the project gradually expanded in scale until what was proposed became a mammoth epic on the conditions of the poor workers and peasants and their struggle to liberate themselves from oppression.
In Senso (1954), Visconti turned his attention to the problem of divorce - a particularly contentious subject in Italy - where state law was the same as that of the Church. Countess Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli) is a patriot, her husband is a collaborator. But she abandons both her husband and her cause in the pursuit of a love affair with an Austrian officer. The style of the film is itself an operatic re-creation of a human drama.
The story of White Nights (1957) is basically the same as that of the Dostoyevsky novel from which it is adapted. A lonely man meets a lonely girl. She is in love with a man whom she does not expect ever to return to her but who continues to occupy her life to the exclusion of any other possible relationships. The lover does return, she is vindicated, and the man who had befriended her and had hoped for her love is left behind, more isolated than before.
ROCCO E i SUOI FRATELLI (ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS) (1960)
The story of Rocco e i Suoi Fratelli (Rocco and his Brothers) (1960) unfolds as a series of episodes, merging into each other, in which each of Rosaria Parondi's five sons moves in turn to occupy the centre of the stage. Each brother in a crude sense represents a certain kind of solution to the problems facing a Southern immigrant in a Northern urban environment. The film was a huge popular hit, particularly with working-class audiences, though critics were divided.
Taken from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's best-selling novel, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) (1963) tells the story of an aristocratic Sicilian family threatened by the political upheavals of the Risorgimento. The House of Salina is directly involved in the process of transformation and it is political and economic cunning which enables it to survive.
Lo Straniero (The Stranger) (1967), Visconti's adaptation of Albert Camus's novel "L'Etranger", received mixed press on first release and has rarely been seen since. A man, a pied noir living in Algiers, hears the news of his mother's death in a home out in the country. While visiting a friend he points a revolver at and shoots dead an Arab who in a vague way is threatening his friends; he is arrested and condemned to death for murder. This action does not cohere as a plot but merely a succession of events, and the significance, in so far as they are significant, lies in their discontinuity.
Taken from Thomas Mann's novella, Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice) (1971) is exactly what its title claims it to be: a film about Venice and a film about death. Gustav von Aschenbach arrives in Venice in search of spiritual refreshment. But everything disturbs him, including - and especially - the vision of a beautiful young boy on holiday at the Lido with his mother and sisters. There are two deaths in the film, that of Aschenbach, crumbling away under his mask, and that of Venice itself, crumbling into the lagoon.
The Ludwig of the film's title, Ludwig (1973), is Ludwig II, King of Bavaria, sometimes known as the Mad King and sometimes known as the Virgin King. The film tells the story of his reluctant assumption of the duties of kingship, his love of art, and his tormented discovery of his own homosexuality, with all the consequences this had for the survival of his dynasty in the new order dominated by Bismarck's Prussia.
L'Innocente (released in the UK as The Intruder, in the US as The Innocent) (1976) takes place among the social class to which Visconti belonged, but in the 1890s, ten years before he was born. This was to be Visconti's swansong, and he died just as the editing was being finished. The film tells the story of Tullio Hermil, a man whose pose is at odds with the society in which he lives. When his wife gets pregnant by a rival his world collapses around him and his emptiness is revealed.
Luchino Visconti's film career spanned over four decades, making him a key force in 20th-century Italian cinema. However, it was in Paris that his career began when he befriended the fashion designer Coco Chanel, who introduced him to Jean Renoir. Visconti worked with Renoir on various film projects, one of which was the film Une Partie de Campagne (1936), as costume designer and assistant director. During this period, and contrary to his aristocratic upbringing, he became influenced by Marxist ideology, and these beliefs would later shape his own style of film-making.
Visconti did not direct his first film until 1942, when he returned to Italy. Ossessione was based on the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain. Visconti's adaptation was unauthorised - which meant the film was rarely screened in the USA - and heavily censored by fascist officials of Mussolini's regime. Despite all its difficulties, it remained a success in Italy and is regarded as the first film of the Italian neo-realist movement.
Visconti's political leanings were expressed in his second film La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles) (1947), which tells the story of class exploitation in a small Sicilian fishing village. This theme continued with the 1960 film, Rocco e i Suoi Fratelli (Rocco and his Brothers).
In his later work, Visconti seemed to move away from the neo-realist style towards more historical and literary themes. The battle between progress and nostalgia is constantly fought in this director's work, but towards the end of his career Visconti seemed to favour the latter with a definite air of scepticism about the value of progress.
One such film was the cinematic epic Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) (1963), starring Burt Lancaster as the Prince of Salina. By arranging the marriage of Tancredi, his nephew, and Angelica, the daughter of a rich merchant, the Prince attempts to financially rescue and secure the future of his family by joining the old aristocracy with the new money of the bourgeoisie. This film's operatic style was a cross over from Visconti's theatre work.
Visconti was openly gay, but few of his films dealt with the issue of male homosexuality. The most notable exception to this was the 1971 film Morte a Venezia (Death In Venice) from the novel by Thomas Mann. Dirk Bogarde plays the lead character, the reserved composer Gustav Aschenbach who, when confronted with the purity and beauty of a young boy, played by Bjorn Andresen, allows the secret passion within him, his homosexuality, to awaken.
Visconti returns to the topic of the aristocracy in the melodrama L'Innocente (The Intruder) (1976). This was to be his final film. As a result of the strokes he suffered in 1972 and 1974, which left him completely paralysed, Visconti died at the age of 70 before editing was completed.
During his life, Visconti had made over 20 films, many of which are considered cinematic masterpieces, directed plays by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and staged ballets and operas, such as La Vestale (1954) and La Sonnambula (1955), starring Maria Callas.
"Visconti's death marked the end of an era of Italian cinema" -Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
Born into one of Northern Italy's richest families as one of the Duke of Modrone's seven children.
From 1946 to 1960, he directed many plays of the Rina Morelli-Paolo Stoppa Company and became also a respected theater director.
Developed the movement of "Italian neo-realism" together with other directors such as Vittorio De Sica or Roberto Rossellini in the 1940s and 1950s.
A museum on the island of Ischia is dedicated to him.
Interview with Maria Callas
Death In Venice (1971)
In Luchino Visconti's magnificent adaptation of Thomas Mann's 1912 novella, "Death In Venice," (1971) the hero Gustav von Aschenbach (played to perfection by Dirk Bogarde) argues with his friend Alfred (Mark Burns) about the underlying nature of life, beauty and art ... Aschenbach refuses to believe that art is "demonic," that "evil is necessary" to reach the heights of artistic creation or that music itself is spiritually "ambigiuous" ... basically, he shies away from regarding beauty as more Dionysian than Apollonian ... as the great film unfolds, Aschenbach will inevitably and tragically realize Alfred's insight ... a moody, powerful, often wrenching work, set to the music of Gustav Mahler (who Aschenbach is made to resemble), most of Mann's Nietzschean themes are present...
