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

Some people say she just counted from one to twenty.

Reading the new Renoir bio, I learned that Jean was beside himself realizing two versions of The Golden Coach.

RWF used dubbing most of the time too. So Ali in "Fear Eats the Soul" was dubbed by a German actor, Irm Hermann dubbed the character based on her in "Beware of a Holy Whore" and was dubbed herself by Margit Carstensen n "Effi Briest".

(xp) Is that sense of "realize" in common use in English, or at least academic use?

The Criterion of Die Dreigroschenoper comes with a French version and maybe an English one? Spanish Dracula, done by a different director with different cast but the same sets, I think, is reckoned by many to be better than the English language one.

http://articles.latimes.com/1998/sep/19/news/mn-24408

Italian dubbers often boast of improving the original performance. The best are stars in their own right--with the added ability to recite dialogue in sync with the screen actor's lips and create the impression that Dustin Hoffman, for example, is speaking Italian.

Hoffman was said to be so impressed with Ferruccio Amendola's dubbing of "Little Big Man" that he felt a need to tell the actor, "Bravo, Ferruccio, but don't forget: I'm Dustin Hoffman." Laurence Olivier, on the other hand, was appalled to hear his performance of Hamlet in Italian and threatened to sue.

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/18/style/18iht-dub_.html

Professional dubbers, many of whom are the children of dubbers and who, unlike their colleagues in other countries, seldom do any other acting work, make big money.An in-demand dubber can easily make $200,000 a year, and one like Ferruccio Amendola, who "voices" Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Sylvester Stallone and Robert de Niro, is reckoned to earn some $4 million.

Threatened to sue because the Italian geezer was better than him, I assume.

No doubt

"beside himself realising two versions" seems like a neat productivity trick

it's a recognised use that i wd probably sub to something like "make" in this instance unless the writer was a prima donna not worth annoying :D

Realizin' Whoopee

The dubbing practice also made Italian cinema much freer than almost everywhere else. It's a huge reason why neorealism happened there, that they never cared about sound recording while running around in the ruins of Rome. It's also part of the reason why Rossellini so easily could make films with Ingrid Bergman, one of the most important collaborations in film history. So yeah, it's fairly important. It never stops being weird, though...

Exactly. Is it time to talk about the almost reverse way Poland dealt with foreign language imports?

I don't know what you're talking about, so would love if you did :)

http://edubbing.blogspot.com/2007/10/polish-dubbing-no-emotions-attached.html?m=1
Enjoy. The reader is called, obviously, the lektor.

Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lector

In Poland, a lektor is a (usually male) reader who provides the Polish voice-over on foreign-language programmes and films where the voice-over translation technique is used. This is the standard localization technique on Polish television and (as an option) on many DVDs; full dubbing is generally reserved for children's material.

haha in the uk in the 60s the lektor technique was mainly used in children's TV, to repurpose foreign series like robinson crusoe (which was french)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE10msGsCn4

Oh yeah, I'd heard about that! In the great Polish film The Last Family from last year, one of the characters does that. This guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomasz_Beksiński

In Denmark, all the Astrid Lindgren films were done like that, presented with a lector. A woman, though. Brings back memories :)

Speaking of Day For Night, it's Jean-Pierre Léaud's birthday today. Bon Anniversaire!.

Ludwig is getting a bunch of screenings in New York:

https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/film-week-ludwig/

I remember Ludwig as downright constipated with period detail. But then if I had permission to film in Neuschwanstein I'd probably go over the top too.

lol yeah - when I saw it (this is about 10 yrs ago) I dismissed it as The Leopard but without the control. I like the review quite a bit - if that print comes around here I'd be up for a re-watch.

This is Nick Pinkerton on the same season: https://www.artforum.com/film/the-royal-treatment-75708

Ludwig is the culmination of a NY retro, so i'll have my last 3 blind spots covered.

https://www.filmlinc.org/series/visconti/#films

more on LV (and Antonioni)

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5732-journeys-beyond-italy-with-visconti-and-antonioni

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.