July 18 – August 23

The cinema of Italian master Luchino Visconti (1906 - 1976) is consummate and consuming. From the operatic Senso and baroquely artificial White Nights, through the majestic family sagas of The Leopard and Rocco and His Brothers, to the morbidly languid Death in Venice and ornately upholstered Conversation Piece and The Innocent, Visconti tended to the highly wrought and the extravagant, his grand manner coupled to a growing fascination with the corruption, decay, and imminent collapse of the old order.  

In his lovely essay on his calling as a director, “Anthropomorphic Cinema,” Visconti claimed, “among all my activities in the cinema, my favourite is working with actors,” and, aside from its singular narrative and formal opulence, Visconti’s oeuvre offers a seemingly ceaseless succession of great performances: Clara Calamai in Ossessione, Alida Valli in Senso, Burt Lancaster in The Leopard and Conversation Piece, Marcello Mastroianni in White Nights, Anna Magnani in Bellissima, the entire ensemble of Rocco and His Brothers, Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice. Even the peasant non-professionals of La Terra Trema are indelible. (Though Andrew Sarris claimed that Visconti was “the best director of actresses in the world,” the actors in his films – most obviously Helmut Berger – qualify as divas as much as the women.) A traversal of the complete Visconti is a wade in glory, an experience whose richness will not soon be equalled or forgotten.

The life and career of Italian master Luchino Visconti bear striking parallels with those of his younger compatriot Pier Paolo Pasolini (whose work we featured in a complete retrospective in 1990, and hope to do so again soon). Central figures of post-war European culture, both were – if biographers are to be believed – guilt-ridden homosexuals with fixations on their mothers, and a taste for getting and giving humiliation. Both had multifarious careers – Pasolini’s poetry and essays, Visconti’s opera and theatre productions were as important as their films. Both were leftists and anticlerics, at once revolutionary in their politics and reactionary in their rejection of certain aspects of modern life; for example, they shared an abhorrence of abortion, feminism, and divorce, which they regarded as