S/D: Luchino Visconti (born 100 years ago today)

I've missed so many screenings of The Leopard over the last two years that the powers that be decided to make a cracking film about the novel the film is based on (shown last night) and to show the film itself tonight on BBC four.

Bah, I might miss a screening of Sandra tonight do to a last-minute time change for a company party. Hopefully I can make The Leopard tomorrow.

really dug Le notti bianche for its studio set artificiality, not that familiar with other italian films like that

senso out on criterion soon

A guy and I broke up shortly after watching Senso.

took break from 2010 film avalanche to see Conversation Piece, sort of a 1970s epilogue to The Leopard. Good Burt (alas dubbed Italian print) and Helmut Berger in bellbottoms.

the English print is on yT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aqMLCwmceQ

I was skeptical of yet another restoration, but this time the color in The Leopard looks more amazing than I remember.

also didn't remember that Burt has two telescopes in his study, possibly a reference for Local Hero?

By far Visconti's best, and close to Burt and Delon's too. One of the few films to capture the sense of time present and time past in the same scene.

Anyone seen White Nights? The library just got a copy.

Too long ago to offer a useful opinion

Sounds like a Senso-type weeper (which means I gotta be in the mood).

I like it, just like someone wrote upthread is wonderfully artificial, but something is missing: also Maria Schell is pretty terrible. But there is Clara Calamai, who also worked in Ossessione (always my favourite Visconti).

Caught Obsession last night as part of Neo-Realism rep series...easily the best Postman... rip. It was also amusing to see Visconti's taste for sprawl was already present there in the beginning (140 minutes--the thing has to be one of the longest noirs).

The Earth Will Tremble (La Terra Trema) in two weeks.

La Terra Trema tonight. Once again with the sprawl, all the better to crush the protagonists completely into the dust

^ LTT on disc tomorrow; I'd never seen it before. The amateur cast really delivers, and one can see it in a way as a precursor of Rocco.

senso is amazing.

i'm a fan of ludwig, actually, though that film has a bad rep. i thought it was kind of great.

i think senso is his best though.

i like the leopard of course but i might be a little tired of it? i've seen like 20 restorations by now.

The Stranger not out yet

watching Senso for the first time since '98? One of the few times I "identified" with a protagonist.

I have less patience with Valli this time -- she's not a resourceful actress, is she? I'm again impressed though with how his men and women interact with architectural spaces.

Don't think I've ever thought see was much good in anything except The Third Man.

see=she. auto typo

yeah, valli is a weak point. farley granger though.

i really liked "ludwig" but nobody else seems to

A few powerful passages with a lot of boring ones.

Or so it felt like at the time..

4K restoration of Rocco showing at Film Forum in NY before it rolls out across the country

http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/rep-diary-rocco-and-his-brothers/

always disappointed me that Delon wasn't nude in it

sending you to meme jail

the new restoration of rocco is gorgeous (as is delon in the movie itself, mamma mia)

finally going to catch ossessione in a few weeks at the BFI. cant wait. was never keen on the leopard, but i might have a different view, now that im older, wiser, etc etc.

#mindBlown

a pity Delon was never nude in The Leopard

The A.V. Club on The Leopard:

The prince’s melancholy self-awareness, his embodiment of the nostalgia at the heart of so many films about the past, is just one element that’s ushered The Leopard into the pantheon. Some have come to think of it as cinema’s grandest epic, the most beautiful example of large-canvas filmmaking. It won the Palme D’Or at Cannes in 1963, which is one of those calls that makes perfect sense in retrospect, given the glowing reputation the film has acquired, and plenty more sense if you think about how it really operates. Jury members at Cannes don’t usually go for a high-budget historical drama, a truly big movie; doing so would theoretically push against the very principles of the fest. But The Leopard is a very Cannes kind of epic: For all the sheer size of its production and the history it chronicles, this is ultimately a movie about characters just going about their charmed daily lives as momentous events occur around them. It’s a neorealist epic, in pacing if not in the wealth and status of its subjects. It luxuriates where other epics churn, churn, churn. It is uneventful, and gloriously so.

Saw The Stranger tonight at a Mastroianni retro, fine 35mm print. (Rights issues have kept it off US disc.) It's odd and baffling, in some of the ways Camus is, but certainly worth seeing.

https://ebiri.blogspot.com/2012/01/forgotten-films-stranger-luchino.html

watched THE DAMNED last year on youtube for research purposes (alongside THE NIGHT PORTER on DVD) and really didn't come to love it: obviously youtube entirely strips out one important dimension that matters a *lot* visconti-wise, and i shd give it another go on the big screen, but i ended up feeling it was hammer horror for viewers who considered themselves too cultured and politico-historically savvy for hammer horror, and the homo-bi element seems to be indiluted grand guignol self-loathing

i am -- i fear this won't go down well on this thread? -- somewhat allergic to dirk bogarde :(

i mean i know he's a great actor and etc, i can see why people totally fall for his thing and just want to watch him doing it, but it mainly just annoys me (a disgusting savage)

cabaret is way smarter than both of course, in the late 60s/early 70s run of "movies take a grown-up look at the nazi thing" (as is salo, far away in the other direction)

i am -- i fear this won't go down well on this thread? -- somewhat allergic to dirk bogarde :(

I'm hearing you.

carry on, doctor

wish DB had done more funny stuff in among all the po-faced euro-arty stuff -- maybe not more carry on-type stuff (a little goes a very long way) but he's easily the best thing in modesty blaise

also wish he'd used his full name more often: derek jules gaspard ulric niven van den bogaerde

anyway, back to luchino

(except to say there was a point in the mid-70s when i was still working thru all this stuff and rural access to fact-checking was non-existent, when i took it as read that luchino visconti and tony visconti -- of bowie producer fame -- were the same person) (salad of all the DBs)

I don't much care for Bogarde either, although I finally saw Victim as part of the Eclipse series and his starchiness was well-deployed.

I saw The Stranger on YouTube a couple years ago -- "baffling" is right, not unpleasantly so.

Fassbinder loved The Dammed - and watching Lili Marleen last week it occurs to me he might have done so bcz well, he couldn't give Nazi Germany the treatment he wanted to - his instincts are to open things up which he couldn't in a place with all the hatreds are open. No alternative strategy.

I realy loved The Night Porter, probably my favourite of Dirk's films - and not many of them are that good. How many English actors at that time engaged with po-faced euro film?

The Dammed - and I only watched it once but it so stayed with me. Its kinda ridiculous but that approach is something I can see a provocateur like Fassbinder really getting off on. Lili Marleen was so flimsy by comparison (and its probably an unfair comparison)

was the damned filmed to be released more than one language (not untypical for post-dubbed european films of that date)? if so it's possible the german version (for german viewers) actually works better than the eng lang version works for eng lang viewers)

i can also see RWF not being bothered by the rhythm of the conversations always being slightly off, which is one of the issues for me in the eng lang version -- seeing as his own sense of rhythm was so stylised and quirky (it doesn't botther me with him bcz it's controlled by him and you adjust p quickly to his ear; in the damned it's just a randomising effect)

lol at "the dammed", this is a very 70s take on on the topic (tho not RWF's: didn't think he for a minute imagined openness wd ever ease the damage caused by repression)

RWF - in his melodramas the openness is present on race, class, etc. things that are in general hidden beneath this veneer of everyone pulling together to work in a booming economy. So whenever he is putting a story he can let his imagination run on how these things intersect: people can spew hatred one minute and be kind the next. It doesn't ease the damage, but you can see the inner workings of the damage.

w/Nazi Germany everything seemed too set in stone.

Visconti also more beholden to adapting works of lit, often doing well by them, but The Stranger aside his tendency was to aggrandize and elongate/attenuate. It works for The Leopard, whose material meshes with Visconti's fascinations with objects, finery, design, and generally how exteriors summon a history.

I haven't DIV in ages. A lit professor in college told me that at a revival viewing in the late '70s he heard a strange noise two rows back and after a few minutes it was obvious the stranger was masturbating.

I saw The Stranger on YouTube a couple years ago

well, that's better than nothing, but damn, Rotunno's lensing is as usual a knockout on the big screen.

How many English actors at that time engaged with po-faced euro film?

David Hemmings, for one. Actually I'm guessing more than you might think.

Terence Stamp too

They were certainly in demand by Italian directors in the mid to late 60s.

I didn’t see much similarity between Ludwig and The Leopard at all. Thematically and main characters are pretty divergent and Ludwig (necessarily for the subject) gradually moves toward camp bordering absurdity. I agree w Kael’s line about it being “footage in search of a style”. Most interesting thing to me are the ways his ambition is shown to have no hope of being realized fairly early on.

knocked off the last 2 features i hadn't seen

White Nights > Ludwig

Maria Schell (and Bill Haley and his Comets) crucial to the success of WN

Bluray of Rocco:

https://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/rocco-and-his-brothers

La Terra Trema is beautiful, hard to believe it was made 71 years ago

I saw Sandra projected (DCP) a few months ago. One thing that stuck out was the use of the Italian song that became "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me" on the soundtrack.

looking forward to seeing Sandra at some point

I want to visit Aci Trezza

uh, DEATH IN VENICE?? why has no one talked about this movie other than Alfred 13 years ago

I haven't read the Mann novella, and have only seen The Leopard, Senso, The Damned, and DIV. all great, but DIV is something else- so little dialogue, so many amazing images, incredible Bogarde performance, the music... it reminded me most of Bad Timing, an intellectual in a foreign European city flummoxed and destroyed by impossible passion.

The Leopard is extraordinary though...

You can watch the English version of The Stranger on a pretty good YouTube clip.

Seeing this revive suddenly made me search out (not that Visconti is not great on his own) all these great Italian cinematographers, like Rotunno (who did The Leopard and The Stranger; still alive at 96!), but also Vittorio Storaro (I guess he's been working with Woody Allen?) and Dante Spinotti (who hasn't been doing much of note since his run with Michael Mann and Curtis Hanson). Kind of fascinating to look at their filmographies and a) see how busy they were and b) watch their creative fortunes sort of ebb and flow.

People kinda forget how many incredible cinematographers Woody Allen has worked with. He made three films with Zhao Fei!!! The guy who shot Raise the Red Lantern also shot The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. And yeah, Storaro too. Café Society is absolutely worth watching just for his cinematography alone, I haven't watched the two other films they made together. And honestly, while they're probably worth watching, I'm not really seeking them out...

He also worked with the Spanish cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, and Darius Khondji and Vilmos Zsigmond and ... yeah, lots of talented DPs in recent years. (And of course earlier years, too.) He and Scorsese have worked with pretty much everyone of note, but Woody has really made the rounds with the greats.

Yup. And most critics just write about a couple of one-liners and gives four stars. Year after year.

well, not anymore (except in Italy)

A shame he couldn't work with incredible screenwriters.

I didn’t think that Death In Venice had the depth of the Mann novel, but I haven't ever seen another film that made Venice look as beautiful

(while at the same time kind of 1970s bourgeois)

lol, Alfred

The novel The Leopard was great and the film The Leopard was really beautiful, especially the extended ballroom sequence

thinking about other films that had a memorable Venice setting The Comfort of Strangers and Don't Look Now come to mind

the Arrow release of Ludwig is great. I watched the five part TV version over two days, just intoxicating. better than The Damned but it has a foot in camp where Death in Venice and The Leopard don't. It's a shame that set is OOP, it looks incredible.

Senso: I forgot what a dumbass Farley Granger is when A. Valli comes to visit him in his bender apartment. Why taunt? Keep the prostitute in the bedroom. Say not now, Countess. Surely the firing squad was not far from his mind!

Anyway, I watched Meet Me in St. Louis yesterday and Senso muted. Although MMIST is surely one of if not the height of Technicolor?

A really nice on set account.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/on-set-death-venice-visconti-bogarde

Except for swoony-gross tracking shots on blood-stained boy limbs to rub his Thanatos fetish in the audience's faces, The Damned is minor and often leaden Visconti. Not his fault that I've seen this material done better in later films.

After The Leopard, his better films were the intimate ones. I don't know where Ludwig fits in that evaluation; it's an intimate film that happens to go on for four hours in the gaudiest locations imaginable.

Well, Death in Venice worked.

That's intimate inasmuch as it's about the observations of one character, not a social panoply like The Leopard or The Damned.

The Damned was Fassbinder's favorite film, I'll have to find his quote on it, basically "everything true and evil and wrong and beautiful and filthy, can be found in The Damned." I agree with you Alfred, I found it too campy and, if only because it isn't in widescreen, its form is at odds with its content. A world away from the sublime aesthetics of his next film, Death in Venice, even down to the title cards!

That's what I mean: Fassbinder did this soak-in-it decadence better, whereas Visconti's let's say doctrinal purity didn't produce sufficiently fraught results.

I like The Dammed precisely because it's campy, it's not something you think Visconti had it in him. It's a more worthwhile watch than Death in Venice.

RIP Austrian bisexual actor Helmut Berger who has died at 78. Visconti was his longtime partner while he had an affair w/ Marisa Berenson and later w/ Nureyev, Britt Ekland, Ursula Andress, Tab Hunter, Linda Blair, Marisa Mell, Anita Pallenberg, Jerry Hall & Bianca & Mick Jagger pic.twitter.com/BUi2k4NE6Q

— Bruce LaBruce (@BruceLaBruce) May 19, 2023