Luchino Visconti‘s reputation precedes him, and it is slightly terrifying. There are few directors who require quite so deep an intake of breath before discussing — his relatively small filmography spans divergent impulses that can seem so unbridgeable as to be self-contradictory. How can one auteur rise to prominence as part of the Italian neo-realist movement, alongside contemporaries Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, but become most famous for wildly decadent, brocaded period melodramas, often so theatrical as to be operatic, and sometimes so stately as to be stultifying?
It is famously a paradox embodied by Visconti himself. Born a wealthy aristocrat (his official title was Count don Luchino Visconti di Modrone), he was friends with the likes of opera composer Puccini, conductor Toscanini, and writer Gabriele D’Annunzio (who would write Visconti’s last film, “The Innocent“). Indeed, his entree into film (Visconti directed plays and operas prior, as he would continue to throughout his career), was on films such as “A Day in the Country” as assistant director to Jean Renoir, to whom he was introduced by mutual friend Coco Chanel.
He was openly gay and throughout his life had relationships with collaborators such as actor Helmut Berger (whom he cast as the memorably deranged and perverse Martin in “The Damned“) and Franco Zeffirelli, who started out as crew on various Visconti productions before embarking on a directorial career of his own. But Visconti was also insistently Marxist, joining the Italian Communist Party during World War II, around the time he made his first film, “Obsession,” during the filming of which he offered up his family’s palazzo as a clandestine meeting place for local communist agitators. His personal life, as a gay Marxist aristocrat often provides an irresistible template for interpretation of his more confounding directorial tendencies.
And there are practical reasons to be daunted. Many of Visconti’s films skate close to the 3-hour mark (or right over, depending on which cut you see — almost all exist in different versions). And the then-common practise of post-syncing the dialogue, often in a language other than the one the actor was speaking, can be distracting, especially when you’re watching a film in Italian in which the English subtitles more closely mimic the mouth movements of the principals than the words you hear. He often took as his backdrops period of Italian history that might be unknown to foreign audiences, and he was never afraid of a long take, or a slow, lingering shot. It’s no wonder the offputting aura of “advanced cinephilia” clings to Visconti’s name.
So why persevere? Because at his best, and in his career he only went truly off the boil a couple of times, Visconti’s scope and vision, and the fearlessness with which he tackles extraordinarily difficult and weighty topics, is breathtaking and highly rewarding. With the restoration of his seminal “Rocco and his Brothers” starting its run tomorrow through the end of October at Film Forum in New York, whether you’re a neophyte, or whether you’re hoping to expand your knowledge of a remarkable filmmaker whose portraits of doomed relationships, families and entire classes have fallen unfairly out of fashion, here’s a basic primer in eight of Luchino Visconti’s most essential titles.
“Obsession”/”Ossessione” (1943)
If there’s a central enigma to Visconti’s career it is how a director initially associated with the grit, social agenda, and docu-drama sensibilities of the Italian neo-realist movement could ultimately become more celebrated for his lush, theatrical melodramas. But all the way back in his very first film, we can see how those apparently contradictory impulses can blend. First time out, Visconti took the pulpy noir of James M Cain‘s “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and gave it an unmistakable socio-political edge, almost inadvertently birthing the neo-realist movement with its unglamorized stars, naturalist locations, and grainy, loose, black-and-white photography. Conversely, he got to slide some sly Marxist commentary (just count how pointedly often conversations between strangers revolve around one’s duty to “be good to one another”) into a genre entertainment, and thus slip it past Mussolini’s censors (not without cuts and controversy, though). The grimy little story, told twice thereafter in the terrific, more stylized noir of 1946’s John Garfield and Lana Turner-starrer and then again the overheated 1981 version starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, is all about the pitiless workings of lust and greed in a blue-collar love triangle. A penniless drifter, Gino (the remarkably handsome Massimo Dirotti) makes a pit stop at a gas station/store/bar in a one-horse town and immediately falls into a torrid affair with Giovanna (Clara Calamai), the beautiful bored wife of the older proprietor, which ultimately leads to murder and tragedy. But while the A-storyline beats are familiar, Visconti’s spends considerable time away from the central trio, developing Gino’s friendship with a free-spirited artist, for example, and showing his later flirtation with a young dancer. It hampers the suspense, perhaps, but develops into another Visconti’s trademark: an episodic approach to pacing, where often scenes continue to play out for some time after they reach their dramatic crescendo, subtly changing the meaning and mood of the whole.