February 8, 2011 (XXII:4) Luchino Visconti, OSSESSIONE/OBSESSION (1943, 140 min)

Directed by Luchino Visconti Written by Luchino Visconti, Mario Alicota, Giuseppe De Santis, Gianni Puccini, James M. Cain (novel) Cinematography by Domenico Scala, Aldo Tonti Original Music by Giuseppe Rosati

Clara Calamai...Giovanna Bragana Massimo Girotti...Gino Costa Dhia Cristiani...Anita Elio Marcuzzo...Lo spagnolo Vittorio Duse...L'agente di polizia Michele Riccardini...Don Remigio Juan de Landa...Giuseppe Bragana

Luchino Visconti (November 2, 1906, Milan, Lombardy, Italy – March 17, 1976, Rome, Italy) directed 14 feature films and wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for all of them: 1976 L'innocente, 1974 Conversation Piece, 1972 Ludwig, 1971 Rome 11:00, 1950 Under the Olive Tree, 1949 Bitter Rice, and Death in Venice, 1969 La caduta degli dei, 1967 The Stranger, 1940 Don Pasquale. He also directed 18 films, including 1968 I 1965 Sandra, 1963 The Leopard, 1960 Rocco and His Brothers, sette fratelli Cervi, 1967 How to Win a Billion... and Get Away with 1957 Le Notti Bianche, 1954 Senso, 1951 Bellissima, 1948 La It, 1967 Fury of Johnny Kid, 1965 I soldi, 1965 The Double Bed, Terra Trema, and 1943 Ossessione. 1965 I Kill, You Kill, 1964 Amore facile, 1962 The Attic, 1958 Il marito,1958 Carmela è una bambola, 1957 Honor Among Thieves, Giuseppe De Santis (February 11, 1917, Fondi, Latium, Italy – and 1951 Il capitano di Venezia. May 16, 1997, Rome, Italy) wrote or co-wrote 20 films, some of which are 1964 Attack and Retreat, 1960/I La garçonnière, 1958 James M. Cain (July 1, 1892, Annapolis, Maryland, USA – The Year Long Road, 1957 I fidanzati della morte, 1956 Men and October 27, 1977, University Park, Maryland, USA) was a novelist, Wolves, 1954 Days of Love, 1954 Angels of Darkness, 1953 A many of whose works were adapted for film, some of them more Husband for Anna , 1953 Riscatto, 1952 Rome 11:00, 1950 Under than once. Some of these adaptations are 2011 “Mildred Pierce” (in the Olive Tree, 1949 Bitter Rice, 1947 Caccia tragica, 1947 Ultimo production), 2004 Swing My Swing High, My Darling (novel The amore, 1946 Outcry, 1946 Desire, 1943 Ossessione, and 1940 Don Postman Always Rings Twice - uncredited), 1998 Szenvedély (novel Pasquale. He also directed 13 films, including 1964 Attack and The Postman Always Rings Twice), 1995 Girl in the Cadillac (novel Retreat, 1960/I La garçonnière, 1958 The Year Long Road, 1956 The Enchanted Isle), 1982 Butterfly (novel), 1981 The Postman Men and Wolves, 1954 Days of Love, 1953 A Husband for Anna, Always Rings Twice (novel), 1973 “Double Indemnity” (novel 1952 Rome 11:00, 1950 Under the Olive Tree, 1949 Bitter Rice, Double Indemnity in Three of a Kind), 1960 “Double Indemnity” and 1947 Caccia tragica. (1960) (novel Double Indemnity in Three of a Kind), 1956 “Mildred Pierce” (novel), 1954 “Double Indemnity” (novel), 1946 The Gianni Puccini (November 9, 1914 in Milan, Italy – December 3, Postman Always Rings Twice (novel), 1945 Mildred Pierce (novel 1968 in Rome, Italy) is credited for all or part of 35 screenplays, Mildred Pierce), 1944 Double Indemnity (novel Double Indemnity some of which are 1967 How to Win a Billion... and Get Away with in Three of a Kind), 1943 Ossessione (novel The Postman Always It, 1965 I Kill, You Kill, 1964 Love and Marriage, 1960 Rings Twice - uncredited), 1939 Le dernier tournant (novel The L'impiegato, 1958 The Year Long Road, 1957 Supreme Confession, Postman Always Rings Twice), and1934 She Made Her Bed (story 1957 Honor Among Thieves, 1956 Men and Wolves, 1954 Days of "The Baby in the Ice-Box") Love, 1954 Angels of Darkness, 1953 A Husband for Anna, 1952 Visconti—OSSESSIONE—2

Domenico Scala (March 26, 1903,Turin, Piedmont, Italy – 1976 L'innocente, 1974 The Kiss of Death, 1974 Cagliostro, 1972 December 25, 1989) was cinematographer for 60 films, some of Last Tango in Paris, 1969 Medea, 1969 The Red Tent, 1968 which were 1963 Colossus and the Headhunters, 1960 Un eroe del Teorema, 1967 “I promessi sposi”, 1965 Marco the Magnificent, nostro tempo, 1953 The Wayward Wife, 1953 Empty Eyes, 1952 Io, 1965 “La tua giovinezza”, 1965 “Il re”, 1963 Mafia alla sbarra, Amleto, 1950 Mountain Smugglers, 1950 Domenica d'agosto, 1950 1963 The Shortest Day, 1961 Duel of the Titans, 1960 The The Counterfeiters, 1948 Fuga in Francia, 1947 Cronaca near, Cossacks, 1960 Cavalcata selvaggia, 1959 Le notti dei Teddy Boys, 1945 Chi l'ha visto?, 1941 Se non son matti non li vogliamo, 1941 1959 Asphalt, 1959 Herod the Great, 1957 Goddess of Love, 1957 Le due tigri, 1941 Il signore a doppio petto, 1941 Un marito per il La bestia humana, 1955 Marguerite de la nuit, 1954 Senso, 1953 mese di aprile, 1940 Scarpe grosse, 1939 Le educande di Saint-Cyr, The Love of a Woman, 1953 Sins of Rome, 1952 Leathernose, 1952 1939 The Knight of San Marco, 1939 Il barone di Corbò, 1938 Rome 11:00, 1951 Fugitive in Trieste, 1950 Story of a Love Affair, Fireworks, 1933 Fanny, 1932 What Scoundrels Men Are!, 1932 The 1948 Anni difficili, 1947 Lost Youth, 1946 Desire, 1946 Shamed, Blue Fleet, and 1931 La segretaria private. 1943 Apparition, 1943 Ossessione, 1943/I Harlem, 1942 A Pilot Returns, 1941 Pirates of Malaya, 1941 The Story of Tosca, and Aldo Tonti (March 2, 1910, Rome, Italy – July 7, 1988, Rome, 1940 Dora Nelson. Italy) has 134 cinematographer credits, among which are 1979 Dhia Cristiani (June 27, 1921, Ashanti, 1977 Rene the Cane, Dovadola, Emilia-Romagna, Italy 1976 Une femme à sa fenêtre, – July 17, 1977, Rome, Italy) 1974 Tough Guys, 1974 Crazy appeared in 16 films: 1954 Tua Joe, 1973 Le guerriere dal seno per la vita, 1944 Zazà, 1943 nudo, 1972 The Valachi Papers, Addio, amore!, 1943 Sempre più 1971 The Designated Victim, difficile, 1943 Ossessione, 1943 1971 The Deserter, 1971 A Girl La statua vivente, 1942 Love in Australia, 1970 The Family, Story, 1942 Via delle cinque lune, 1970 Fortunata and Jacinta, 1942 Yes, Madam, 1942 Fari 1968 Bandits in Rome, 1967 nella nebbia, 1940 A Romantic Reflections in a Golden Eye, Adventure, 1940 Centomila 1966 The Treasure of San dollari, 1939 Due milioni per un Gennaro, 1965 Casanova 70, sorriso, 1939 Department Store, 1964 The Ape Woman, 1964 1939 Nobody's Land, and 1938 Castle of the Living Dead, 1962 Ettore Fieramosca. Damon and Pythias, 1961 Barabbas, 1960 The Savage Innocents, 1959 For the First Time, Elio Marcuzzo (July 27, 1917, Treviso, Veneto, Italy – July 28, 1959 Lost Souls, 1958 Tempest, 1957 Nights of Cabiria, 1954 The 1945, Breda di Piave, Veneto, Italy) appeared in 14 films: 1945 Ship of Condemned Women, 1952 The Greatest Love, 1950 Side Lettere al sottotenente, 1945 Carmen, 1944 Il cappello da prete, Street Story, 1949 Adam and Eve, 1949 The Mill on the Po, 1948 1943 Silenzio, si gira!, 1943 Ossessione, 1943 Il treno crociato, L'apocalisse, 1947 How I Lost the War, 1946 Roma città libera, 1943 Rita da Cascia, 1942 La signorina, 1942 Fedora, 1942 Yes, 1946 The Bandit, 1943 Ossessione, 1942 Merchant of Slaves, 1942 Madam, 1941 Nozze di sangue, 1940 I Met You Too Late, 1937 Il Fari nella nebbia, 1941 Caravaggio, il pittore maledetto, 1940 The feroce Saladino, and 1937 The Last Enemy. Knight of Kruja, 1939 Cardinal Messias, 1939 Diamonds, 1939 The Little Adventurers, 1938 Under the Southern Cross, and 1935 Vittorio Duse (March 21, 1916, Loreto, Ancona, Marche, Italy – Odette. June 2, 2005, Rome, Italy) appeared in 105 films and TV series, among them 2002 When in Rome, 2000 Fate un bel sorriso, 2000 Clara Calamai (September 7, 1909, Prato, Tuscany, Italy – “The Sopranos”, 1993 “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles”, September 21, 1998, Rimini, Emilia-Romagna, Italy) appeared in 1992 Enchanted April, 1990 The Godfather: Part III, 1989 Queen 47 films, some of which were 1975 Deep Red, 1975 The Sinner, of Hearts, 1984 “The Octopus”, 1976 “Origins of the Mafia”, 1972 1958 Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, 1957 Le Notti Bianche, 1949 Don Camillo e i giovani d'oggi, 1972 The Assassin of Rome, 1971 Sicilian Uprising, 1947 Ultimo amore, 1946 The Adulteress, 1945 “I racconti di Padre Brown”, 1970 Investigation of a Citizen Above Two Anonymous Letters, 1943 Henry IV, 1943 Ossessione, 1942 Le Suspicion, 1968 “L'affare Dreyfuss”, 1968 Galileo, 1967 The vie del cuore, 1941 L'avventuriera del piano di sopra, 1941 Pirates Stranger, 1965 The Possessed, 1965 “Antonio e Cleopatra”, 1963 of Malaya, 1941 Caravaggio, il pittore maledetto, 1940 Boccaccio, The Leopard, 1960 The Loves of Salammbo, 1954 Ultima illusione, 1939 L'eredità in Corsa, 1938 They've Kidnapped a Man, 1938 Il 1948 The Mysterious Rider, 1946 Outcry, 1945 Two Anonymous destino in tasca, and 1938 Pietro Micca. Letters, 1943 Ossessione, 1942 The Lion of Damascus, 1942 Girl of the Golden West, and 1941 Il cavaliere senza nome. Massimo Girotti (May 18, 1918, Mogliano, Macerata, Marche, Italy – January 5, 2003, Rome, Italy) appeared in 128 films, some Michele Riccardini (October 2, 1910, Perugia, Umbria, Italy – July of which are 2003 Facing Windows , 2000 “Senso di colpa”, 2000 24, 1978, Merate, Lecco, Italy) appeared in 53 films and TV “Der Kardinal - Der Preis der Liebe”, 1997 Un bel di' vedremo, dramas, among them 1973 “All'ultimo minuto”, 1972 “Pensaci, 1994 The Monster, 1990 Rebus, 1989 La révolution française, 1988 Giacomino!”, 1971 “I racconti di Padre Brown”,1967 La Bohème, 1985 The Berlin Affair, 1985 “Christopher Columbus”, “Caravaggio”, 1967 “I promessi sposi”, 1966 “Le inchieste del 1985 “Quo Vadis?”, 1976 “Origins of the Mafia”, 1976 Mr. Klein, commissario Maigret”, 1965 “Antonio e Cleopatra”, 1955 The Miller's Beautiful Wife, 1954 Ulysses, 1952 Rome 11:00, 1950 Visconti—OSSESSIONE—3

Under the Olive Tree, 1947 Lost Youth, 1943 Ossessione, 1943 La turned out films steadily but rather slowly from 1942 to 1976. His danza del fuoco, 1942 La fabbrica dell'imprevista, 1942 Via delle obsessive care with narrative and filmic materials is apparent in the cinque lune, 1941 La compagnia della teppa, 1940 The Sinner, majority of his films. 1940 Manon Lescaut, and 1934 Like the Leaves. Ossessione, a treatment (the second and best) of James M. Cain’s Juan de Landa (January 27, 1894, Motrico, Spain – February 18, The Postman Always Rings Twice. In it the director begins to 1968, Motrico, Spain) appeared in 49 films, some of which were explore the potential of a long-take style, undoubtedly influenced 1958 Cuatro en la frontera, 1957 The Man Who Wagged His Tail, by Jean Renoir, for whom Visconti worked as an assistant. Having 1957 Faustina, 1953 Beat the Devil, 1952 The Woman Who met with the disapproval of the Fascist censors for its depiction of Invented Love, 1952 Il sogno di Zorro, 1950 Devotion, 1949 Una the shabbiness and desperation of Italian provincial life, Ossessione mujer cualquiera, 1948 La fiesta sigue, 1943 Ossessione, 1942 was banned from exhibition. Tragic Night, 1941 The Conspiracy of the Crazy, 1940 The Pirate's Dream, 1936 El secreto de Ana María, 1933 A Prisoner Has Like Gramsci, who often returned to the contradictions of the Escaped, 1930 El presidio, and 1930 El valiente. Risorgimento as a key to the social problems of the modern Italian state, Visconti explores that period once more in Il gottopardo, from the Lampedusa novel. An aristocratic Sicilian family undergoes transformation as a result of intermarriage with the middle class at the same time that the Mezzogiorno is undergoing reunification with the North. The bourgeoisie, now ready and able to take over from the dying aristocracy, usurps Garibaldi’s revolution; in this period of transformismo, the revolutionary process will be assimilated into the dominant political structure and defused.

from World Film Directors V. 1, Ed John Wakeman, H.W.Wilson Co. 1987. Count don Luchino Visconti di Modrone was born in Milan, Italy, the third son of Giuseppe Visconti and the former Carla Erba. His mother was the daughter of a millionaire industrialist and his father was the son of the Duke of Modrone. His father’s family, wealthy landowners, had received their dukedom from Napoleon. They trace their ancestry to the Visconti who ruled Milan from 1277 to 1447, and on back to Desiderius, father-in-law of Charlemagne. With his six brothers and sisters, Luchino Visconti grew up in his father’s palazzo in Milan. His education was supervised by his mother. She was a talented musician and he first envisaged a musical career also, studying the cello for ten years in childhood and adolescence. His delight in the theatre and opera also developed in childhood, inspired by the plays and entertainments his father liked to arrange in the palazzo’s private theatre. From the age of seven, he attended performances at La Scala opera house in Milan, which his grandfather and then his uncle had helped to support. Although Visconti usually described his childhood as idyllic, there was discord between his parents. In 1921 they separated for good, and a bitter court battle over Carla Visconti’s share of the Erba fortune ensued. She eventually regained her property but lived thereafter in retirement, the children staying sometimes with her, sometimes with their father. As a youth Visconti was restless and discontented. He ran “Luchino Visconti,” From The St. James Film Director’s away repeatedly from home, and once from a college in Geneva. Encyclopedia, ed. Andrew Sarris, Visible Ink Press, 1998 Hoping that military discipline might bring him under control, his The films of Luchino Visconti are among the most stylistically and father sent him to the cavalry school at Pinerolo, where he intellectually influential of postwar Italian cinema. Born a scion of conceived a passion for horses. ancient nobility, Visconti integrated the most heterogeneous For some ten years after that the breeding of racehorses elements of aristocratic sensibility and taste with a committed was Visconti’s principal interest—he often remarked on the Marxist political consciousness, backed by a firm knowledge of similarity between the problems involved in schooling horses and Italian class structure. Stylistically, his career follows a trajectory directing actors (and said that horses were on the whole preferable from a uniquely cinematic realism to an operatic theatricalism, from because they didn’t talk). During this period Visconti dabbled in the the simple quotidien eloquence of modeled actuality to the arts but remained uncertain of his direction. He painted, designed heightened effect of lavishly appointed historical melodramas. His sets for one or two plays, and tried his hand as a film scenarist. He career fuses these interests into a mode of expression uniquely was nearly thirty when in 1936 he left Italy with the intention of Viscontian, prescribing a potent, double-headed realism. Visconti Visconti—OSSESSIONE—4 working for the cinema in England or France. The same year, some years after the war. It was almost universally hailed as the having been introduced by Coco Chanel to Jean Renoir at a first masterpiece of Italian neorealism. Pierre Leprohon has called it racetrack, he found himself on the great French director’s “a great film, the portrait of a miserable, greedy, sensual, obstinate production team. race at grips with the daily struggle for existence and with instincts At first in charge of costumes, Visconti then served as they are unable to master. For over and above the neorealism, this Renoir’s third assistant director on Une Partie de Campagne (1936) film has the ingredient indispensable for its lasting greatness, and Les Bas Fonds (1937). Escaping in this way from the poetry.” claustrophobia of Italy, home, and Fascism, and finding himself For a time during the war, Visconti was imprisoned by the accepted by a group of dedicated and talented artists in the heady Fascist authorities, charged with aiding the Resistance. Moved from atmosphere of the Popular Front, permanently changed Visconti’s jail to jail and threatened with shooting, he was only reprieved by life. Of Renoir himself he said: “His was a human influence, not a the Allied invasion. After the liberation of Rome, he filmed the trial professional one. To be with and execution of several Fascist Renoir, to listen to him, that officials, including his jailer, and opened my mind.” the death of another at the hands After a brief, of an angry mob; these disillusioning visit to Hollywood sequences appear in Giorni di in 1937, Visconti went home. In Gloria (Days of Glory,1945), a 1940 he was able to work once documentary produced by the more with Renoir, who had gone Allies. to Italy to film an adaptation of In 1945 Visconti began La Tosca. Renoir had to abandon another and immensely the movie when Italy declared successful and influential career war on France and it was as a theatre director. No one did completed by Charles Koch. more to free the Italian stage Visconti himself remained in from outworn conventions, Italy, where he joined the techniques, and attitudes or to editorial staff of the magazine modernize its repertoire, to Cinema. The young critics and which he added the works of filmmakers associated with such contemporary French and Cinema were in vigorous revolt American writers as Sartre, against the insipidity and conformism of the contemporary Italian Cocteau, Anouilh, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Hemingway film industry. Their aim was to make cinema an extension of the and Erskine Caldwell. Visconti built up a repertory company which literary realism that had developed in Italy at the end of the later provided acting and technical talent for his films, and whose nineteenth century, notably in the work of the Sicilian novelist best-known products are the actor Marcello Mastroianni and the Giovanni Verga. director Franco Zeffirelli. Visconti’s first film was Ossessione (Obsession, 1942), There were no professional actors at all in Visconti’s next based on James M. Cain’s starkly naturalistic thriller The Postman film, however. Visconti was a Marxist, though an unorthodox one, Always Rings Twice, with the action translated from America to the much influenced by the Italian socialist leader and theorist Antonio Romagna region of Italy. Visconti had been looking for a subject Gramsci. In 1947 he went to Sicily with some funds advanced by which would not invite the hostility of the Fascist censors, and the the Communist Party, intending to make a short documentary. What Cain novel had been suggested to him by Renoir (whose stylistic he saw there inspired a far more ambitious project—a vast fresco of influence can be detected in this but in none of Visconti’s later the Sicilian poor, in three parts dealing respectively with the films). Ossessione is about the destructive passion that develops fishermen, the peasants, and the sulfur miners. In the event, only between Giovanna, wife of an aging innkeeper, and Gino, a young one part was completed—La terra trema: Episodio del mare. wanderer who takes a casual job at the inn. Gino begins to suspect The film is loosely based on Verga’s novel I malavoglia, that he has been used and goes to another woman, a young dancer but in Visconti’s Marxist adaptation the great enemy of the poor with whom his relationship is purely physical, uncomplicated by Sicilian fishermen is not the sea but the local wholesalers, who own financial greed or sexual politics. But the police are closing in, and the boats and pay the fishermen derisory prices for what they catch. Gino and Giovanna, reconciled, die together as they try to escape One family, the Valastro, try to free themselves form this pernicious arrest. system. They mortgage their house and buy their own boat, but are Several members of the Cinema group had a hand in the ruined when it is destroyed in a storm. The film centers around two script of Ossessione, which thus became a kind of manifesto. At its key episodes in the development of the political consciousness of first showing in Rome in 1942 it had an effect that was described as the young ‘Ntoni Valastro—when he leads a spontaneous if short- “explosive.” Appearing at a time when the Italian cinema was lived revolt against the wholesalers, and when, at the end, he devoted to optimistic trivia, Ossessione’s social and psychological recognizes the need for concerted rather than individual action authenticity and sexual frankness outraged the Church and the against exploitation/ Fascist censors, and terrified the commercial distributors. When the La terra trema is performed entirely by the people of the censors tried to ban it, Visconti and his friends appealed to village of Aci-Trezza, who contributed in important ways to Mussolini himself, who passed it with only a few cuts. In the Visconti’s scenario and who say what they have to say in their own confusion following the Allied invasion, the film was destroyed. dialect (which is so obscure that it was necessary to overlay the Visconti managed to preserve a duplicate, however, and a dialogue with a commentary in standard Italian.). There is an somewhat mutilated version of Ossessione was finally released elemental quality in the film that has reminded critics of Flaherty Visconti—OSSESSIONE—5 and Eisenstein. It has occasional longeurs, and purists have replaced another, and the new élite came to look suspiciously complained of certain hauntingly beautiful shots whose only similar to the old.” function is aesthetic. Nevertheless, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has …Visconti’s retreat from naturalism [in Le notti bianche said, “the chiseled beauty of its images, the simplicity and rigour of White Nights, 1957 adapted from Dostoevsky’s short story] was its narrative, and its unbending concern with social realities have all reversed in his next film, Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His cause La terra trema to be hailed as a masterpiece of the Brothers, 1960). It may be seen almost as a continuation of Le terra propaganda film.” It received first prize at the Venice Film Festival trema, examining the fate of the widowed Rosaria Pafundi and her in 1948. It was nevertheless not popular with audiences used to five sons, a peasant family from the impoverished south trying to lighter fare, was not widely distributed, and is said to have cost make a new life in the northern industrial city of Milan….Rocco Visconti almost $200,000 of his own money. and His Brothers was the first of Visconti’s films to gain worldwide For some years after that Visconti restricted his activities distribution and not to lose money. It won a special jury prize at the to the theatre, presenting among other things a number of 1961 Venice Film Festival and several other international awards. innovatory interpretations of the classics like his celebrated 1948 Though the version seen in the United States was damaged by production of As You Like It (with additional scenery and costumes extensive cuts, it was warmly received by most American by Salvador Dali), and an equally famous version of John Ford’s critics….This success made possible Visconti’s ambitious screen ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore produced in Paris in 1951. The excessive version of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel Il gattopardo (The visual effects and self-indulgent Leopard, 1963). A return to the coups de theater that had marred risorgimento, it is a study of an some of his earlier productions gave ancient family of Sicilian aristocrats way to a more purposive and at a time of rapid social change. This disciplined use of all the resources of theme, and the fact that Visconti the theatre, but he never lost his love undertook it with a multi-million of spectacle or his meticulous dollar budget provided by 20th concern for realistic detail (luxuries Century-Fox, using a wide screen and that he was prepared to pay for Technicolor, greatly disquieted the himself if necessary). nostalgics of neorealism. In fact, The same qualities Visconti recreates the story in his own distinguished his operatic way. Where the Prince of Lampedusa productions, which were often accounts for the survival of the House lavishly staged, but in which his of Salinain almost mystical terms, the singers were required to curb the “Red Duke” Visconti attributes it to traditional extravagance of operatic political and economic cunning—as gesture and to “act like people.” Many considered Visconti the another example of the way the old order perpetuates itself in the greatest operatic director of his day, especially in a triumphant face of revolutionary ferment. He shows the old Prince (played by series of productions with Maria Callas. “The real reason I have Burt Lancaster) coming to terms with the changing social order. done opera,” he once asserted, “is the particular opportunity of Over the timid objections of the family priest, the Prince gives his working with Mme. Callas, who is such a great artist.” His operas blessing and a bag of gold to his nephew Tancredi (Alain Delo), off were produced not only at La Scala and elsewhere in Italy but at to join Garibaldi’s forces, and upon Tancredi’s return, arranges a Covent Garden in London (where he staged an un forgettable marriage between this fiery young opportunist and the beautiful production of Verdi’s Don Carlos in 1958) and in other foreign Angela (Claudia Cardinale), daughter of a rich bourgeois. In the countries. In 1958 he helped Gian-Carlo Menotti to launch the brilliant and immensely long ball scene at the end, the alliance Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds, for which he directed a number of between aristocrats and parvenus is sealed, amid rumors of reprisals operas over the years. against Garibaldi’s peasant followers and intimations of the old Meanwhile Visconti had made his third film, Bellisima Prince’s mortality. Politically the film is highly ambiguous. The (The Most Beautiful, 1951), starring Anna Magnani as a working- strategems by which the privileged class will survive are set forth class woman befuddled by the movies….It was followed by Senso with unsparing realism, but as we see through the Prince’s eyes (Feeling, 1954), widely regarded as one of his greatest films. Set in what endures and what is lost of the past, the dominant note is the Risorgimento of the mid-1860s, it opens with a brilliant scene in unmistakably one of nostalgia. a Venetian theatre where a performance of Verdi’s Il Trovatore The film won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival disintegrates into an Italian nationalist demonstration against and had splendid reception in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. The occupying Austrian forces. The story (from a novella by Camillo version shown in the United States, however, was shorn of several Boito) turns on the love affair that develops between an Italian important scenes, badly printed on inferior color stock, and countess—a nationalist, played by Alida Valli—and a young insensitively dubbed. Visconti, denying paternity of this version, Austrian officer (Farley Granger) for whom she betrays her remarked: “It is our destiny to be always in the hands of husband, her brother, and her political allegiance. This personal assassins….We work for months and months to create material that drama resembles that of Ossessione, not least in the way that is then torn to shreds by ravening dogs.” emotional responses and moral standards are shown to be …Even thus mutilated, the film seemed to David Robinson influenced by class and historical factors—notably in the complex “a beautiful and fascinating spectacle….The mise-en-scène is characterization of the Austrian officer Franz. As Geoffrey Nowell- superb. Each scene is staged with the rhythm of a Smith points out there is, moreover, “an implicit parallel between choreographer and the composition of a painter” and “it is a film of the events of 1866 and those of 19343-1945. In each case, one élite enormous virtuosity and brio.”… Visconti—OSSESSIONE—6

Visconti’s perfectionism is legendary, and his attention to apprenticeship in the industry, Visconti was still living in seclusion authenticity of detail was carried to extreme lengths in Morte a and undecided about the future nature of his artistic interests. An Venezia (Death in Venice, 1971)….Georges Sadoul called it accomplished musician, interested also in painting (interests which “unquestionably [Visconti’s] most perfect film…a richly textured, remain latent in his film work for a long time to emerge again more obsessional study of passion and social putrefaction.” Soon after fully with Senso in 1954), his only foray into the world of spectacle completing Death in Venice Visconti collapsed with “nicotine was as set-designer for a play by G.A. Traversi in 1928. He was poisoning.” He never fully nearing thirty when in 1936 he left recovered his health but Italy with the intention of working continued to work, making three in the cinema in England or more films….Directed from a France. wheelchair [L’nnocente/ The As luck would have it, Innocent 1976] this ravishingly and thanks to a chance meeting elegant movie” was Visconti’s with Coco Chanel, he found last. He was editing it when he himself, shortly after his arrival in died in his sumptuous Roman France, attached to Jean Renoir’s villa of influenza and heart semi-permanent production team disease. in charge of costumes and then as Luchino Visconti was a assistant director on Une partie de stocky, elegant man, deep- campagne and Les Bas-Fonds. In voiced, dark-eyed, with heavy an interview on BBC Television in eyebrows and the prominent nose 1966 he has recalled this of his great ancestors. He was experience mainly in terms of said to be liable to sky-rending rages” on set but in conversatoiin what it meant to him politically, to escape from a Fascist country was a person of “totally disarming courtesy and sly, laconic wit.” and to find himself working on equal terms with a group of left- Often accused of ‘voting Left and living Right,’ he remained a wing enthusiasts, many of them Communists, in the heady communist all his life, though he would not join the party. He was atmosphere of the Popular Front. That this part of his experience also a Christian, though often anticlerical. As a young man, he said: had a lasting effect on him and helped to shape his future political ‘I was impelled toward the cinema, by, above all, the need to tell commitment there can be no doubt. What is harder to assess is stories of people who were alive, of people living amid things and Renoir’s influence on him as an artist. There is an obvious, if not of the things themselves. The cinema that interests me is an superficial, analogy between the French Popular Front and the post- anthropomorphic cinema. The most humble gestures of man, his war Italian left-wing bloc, to which Visconti belonged. Visconti’s bearing, his feelings and instincts, are enough to make the things career seems therefore like a bridge between the two. But on a that surround him poetic and alive. . . .And [his] momentary personal level the differences between the two artists are far more absence from the luminous rectangle gives to everything an striking than the similarities. Visconti’s debt to Renoir is mainly appearance of still life [natura morta].” stylistic and is confined to one film, Ossessione, which he made during the war. After that, when Visconti begins to find his own From Luchino Visconti, 3rd edition. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. bfi feet and establish an independent personality, all traces of Renoir’s publishing, London , 2003. influence disappear. They are, however, present in Ossessione, in Luchino Visconti belongs, with Welles and Resnais, to a the method used to establish a character, in the relationship of select company of major directors whose international reputation character to landscape, in the use of a fluid and yet probing camera, was established early in their careers and has been maintained, on and, on a more generic plane, on the shared debt to the naturalist the basis of a relatively small output, ever since. Among his Italian tradition—in Renoir’s case Maupassant and Zola, in Visconti’s contemporaries he is unique. Unlike Antonioni or Fellini he did not Giovanni Verga and Italian regional literature. have to wait for recognition. Unlike Rossellini he has never been a In 1940 it was Renoir’s turn to come to Italy to make a prolific director, and has managed to concentrate his energies over a film of La Tosca which was a cross between Sardou’s original quarter of a century on less than a dozen meticulously prepared melodrama and Puccini’s opera. For this film Visconti worked on productions. Unlike De Sica he has not degenerated as an artist with the adaptation and then as assistant director. Renoir was not able to the decline of the movement that first thrust him into prominence. finish the film himself. He had just directed the opening sequences His early films are now classics, and each new film he makes is an when Italy declared war on France, and Renoir left for the USA, eagerly awaited cultural event. [Written in 1967] And yet he has leaving the film in the capable but uninspired hands of Carl Koch. remained obstinately impervious to changes in intellectual fashions. Opinions differ on the subject of the finished film. In distant A lonely and unassailable giant, his work has a devious consistency retrospect, Visconti regards it as mediocre and banal, falling far paralleled, on the world scale, only by Fritz Lang and Orson short of what he himself had envisaged and what Renoir might have Welles. made had he stayed on. Bur something of La Tosca, whether echoes of the realization or images of how he himself would have made the film, remained lodged in Visconti’s imagination to appear in the Ossessione making of Senso, the most ‘operatic’ of Visconti’s films, fourteen Visconti’s interest in the cinema developed late. At an age years later… when Orson Welles was directing Citizen Kane, when Alexandre Ossessione, his first film, was produced in 1942, in an Astruc could complain that he was ‘already twenty-six and had not atmosphere of general disturbance. Italy was fighting, and yet made Citizen Kane’, and when most aspirant directors would be beginning to lose, a war around the Mediterranean. Within months starting as documentarists or serving a long and laborious of the film being finished the Allied forces landed in Sicily and Visconti—OSSESSIONE—7 began working their way slowly through the peninsula. The film did the Italian novel in the 1930s and 1940s, their cinema confrères not emerge properly into the light of day until some years after the have on the whole failed to recognize the debt of the Italian cinema war, and then only in a severely mutilated and shortened version. to the same source—and to the American movies. It is partly the As a result of these circumstances many legends have attached fact that in literature the connections are more obvious to the themselves to the story of the making of the film and an aura of academic mind: Pavese wrote a thesis on Melville; Visconti did not mystification has come to surround its interpretation. The general write a thesis on Griffith. But there remains a strange reluctance to purport of the legends is to bolster up the image of Ossessione as a accept the obvious. The fiction persists that Visconti chose The precocious, maligned, and yet marvelous flower of the still Postman Always Rings Twice for no better reason than that it would inexistent neo-realist movement. Both in the legends and in the not upset the censor and that the changes in his adaptation had no interpretation there is a nugget of truth. The other purpose than to Italianise its indifferent film has its origins in the cult of verismo [a theme. It never occurs to anyone to think that ‘truth’ or naturalism idealized in the writer the story might have appealed to him precisely Verga’s work] and was to serve as an because it was American, and that he might inspiration, of a kind, to later neo-realist have changed it not just to make it more Italian production. But there is also a lot of but to make it more Visconti. Ossessione legendary dross and more than a suspicion of certainly is very Italian, and it is also more critical alchemy in the proceedings. When the realistic than Tay Garnett’s film of the same dross has been removed and the alchemy novel. But there is a lot more to it than that. exposed, Ossessione emerges as a very Ossessione is a film about the different, and furthermore a greater rather destructive power of sexual passion. A man than a lesser film than its first admirers would turns up by chance at a roadside country inn, ever have claimed. stays on as a labourer and falls in love (or in Given a chance to direct a film of his desire) with the inn-keeper’s wife and she with own, Visconti’s first idea was a version of a him. They decide to leave together, but after short story by (significantly enough) Verga, half an hour on the road she turns back and he L’amante di Gramigna. When the project was goes away alone. A few weeks later the refused by the censors he turned instead to a husband and wife encounter him again by suggestion of Renoir’s, an adaptation of an chance in a nearby town and the husband, American thriller, James Cain’s The Postman innocently, insists that he go back with them. Always Rings Twice, which had already On the journey the lovers, mainly at her served as the basis for a French film in 1939 and was to be filmed instigation, murder the husband in a staged accident. They settle again by Tay Garnett in Hollywood in 1946. The story, widespread down uneasily to run the café. Unease and mutual mistrust grow but poorly documented, has it that the choice of Cain’s novel as when she collects the old man’s life insurance and he suspects her scenario was a subterfuge to deceive Fascist censorship, which of having used him to wield the hatchet to serve her own financial rubber-stamped the project as inoffensive on paper but was then purposes. In retaliation he spends an afternoon with another girl, but horrified to see the most un-Fascist image of Italian life portrayed in slips away when he realizes that the police are closing in. The the finished film, which transferred the action to an Italian setting. lovers are reconciled, but as they drive away to escape imminent The censors then attempted to ban the film outright, but it was arrest their car skids off the road and she is killed. … reprieved, so the story runs, only on personal instructions from the Turning Cain’s parable of arbitrariness into a Duce himself. demonstration of necessity required, however, or than a simple This story, though somewhat inaccurate, is quite alteration of plot mechanics. It meant creating a new structural significant. It manages at the same time to exalt Visconti as a framework in which to define the actions of the characters, and crusader for the new realism and to denigrate him subtly by consequently making the characters themselves different. In the suggesting that this aristocratic dilettante had friends at court who film the lovers, Gino and Giovanna, are both in different ways gave him an influence and an escape route denied to lesser mortals. partial outcasts. They have an uneasy relationship with established In fact Mussolini did not reprieve the film, and Ossessione’s society. They are neither totally integrated nor totally independent, troubles did not end with the end of Fascism. More important, just and it is their inability either to be fitted in or to break loose that as the censorship difficulties which Ossessione encountered have leads to their destruction…. been misrepresented as simply a question of Fascist politics (they The theme of betrayal is important. It recurs in various involved the Church, bien-pensant opinion generally, commercial forms in many of Visconti’s films, notably in Senso, which distributors, and even the American occupying forces), so Ossessione most clearly foreshadows. Like that of the roles Visconti’s artistic intentions are simplified and belittled by the performed by the characters, this theme has a double significance. emphasis placed on the element of national realism in the On the one hand, taken in isolation, it emerges as a permanent item adaptation. of Visconti’s thematic concerns, a part of his universe. But it also as Cinema criticism is often curiously nationalistic. While a more specific function in the dynamics of the plot. In Ossessione literary critics have acknowledged for a long time the profoundly each relationship is seen, at least by one of the parties, as an renovating role played by American literature in the development of exclusive commitment and as conferring obligations…. Visconti—OSSESSIONE—8

The static pattern of Ossessione, then, is one in which easy Stylistically, Ossessione is the most realistic of Visconti’s love is shown as preferable to guilty passion and male comradeship films. At the same time it cannot be called, without qualification, a as an alternative to either. Passion, particularly sexual, is a disorder work of neo-realism. It is visually naturalistic in its use of which draws the victim out of relation with a society which cannot naturalistic locations, presented with a minimum of expressive accommodate him, and then destroys him. Betrayal is a permanent distortion. It is also rooted in a naturalistic conception of character, threat, part of the general instability of human relations. This is a and places character in landscape in a way which is generally pattern which will recur again later and is here clearly announced unaffected but does not exclude certain sophisticated expressive for the first time. But every bit as interesting as the static pattern is effects. One thinks notably of the scene of Bragana and the lovers at the way things are actually worked out in context, the way for the singing contest, which has a quite extraordinary similarity to instance that each relationship is Flaubert’s description of the formed by impulse or accident and comices agricoles in Madame then terminated by an act of Bovary. More importantly it betrayal, or the way the narrative excludes explicit moral and receives its formal articulation. political judgments but approaches The first striking thing its subject from the point of view about this formal articulation is of the participants in the action. how simple it is, and how Like the other features observed, conventional. The form is that the general cultural dissociation is traditional to classical theatre and just a fact about the setting: it is not opera, a series of scenes involving explicitly significant…. two or at most three people at a time. This formal articulation One of the most interesting features of Ossessione is its reflects (or determines; the two are inseparable) the structure and lack of political and historical perspectives. This in itself is development of the relations between characters, who form a series sufficient to mark it off from almost all Visconti’s later films on the of couples. Leaving aside the marginal couples—priest/husband, one hand and the bulk of neo-realist production on the other….The husband/Gino—the main development is expressed in the trajectory of Visconti’s career sweeps in a wide arc round the progression, Bragana/Giovanna, Giovanna/Gino, Spaniard/Gino, general area known as neo-realism. Ossessione is pre-neo-realist; it and Gino/Anita, or (more simple still) Bragana-Giovanna-Gino- anticipates certain of the themes and styles that were to become the Anita. The movement is linear and progressive, away from the stock-in-trade of the movement, but, for good historical reasons, stable world of marriage and village life towards a more fluid necessarily misses out on others. It is, one might say, realism existence. But it cannot be consummated. The forces of the past and without the neo-. Then, for six years, he does not make another of society are too strong. Gino is drawn back to Giovanna, and, film, and when he does, with La terra trema, it sets him moving on sweeping round in a wider circle to block all escape routes, the a new path, away from neo-realism altogether. police close in….The police in Ossessione are an extrinsic force whose only role is to give a conventional ending to the story. They From Conversations with Fellini. Ed. by Costanzo Costantini. represent an abstract justice which has no reality within the concrete Harcourt Brace NY 1995: world of the film until it suddenly imposes itself at the end. In I’m not as meticulous as Luchino Visconti was, but I pay great Visconti’s later films where the police and ‘justice’ have a role to attention to detail. play, this role is always more closely integrated….

COMING UP IN THE SPRING 2011 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XXII: Feb 15 Robert Bresson AU HASARD BALTHAZAR 1966 Feb 22 Martin Ritt THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD 1965 Mar 1 Nicholas Roeg WALKABOUT 1971 Mar 8 John Mackenzie THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY 1980 Mar 22 Bertrand Tavernier COUP DE TORCHON/CLEAN SLATE 1981 Mar 29 Werner Herzog FITZCARRALDO 1982 Apr 5 Nagisa Ôshima MERRY CHRISTMAS MR. LAWRENCE 1983 Apr 12 Stephen Frears THE GRIFTERS 1990 Apr 19 Jafar Panahi DAYEREH/THE CIRCLE 2000 Apr 26 Ridley Scott BLADE RUNNER1982 CONTACTS: ...email Diane Christian: [email protected] …email Bruce Jackson [email protected] ...for the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com ...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addto [email protected] ....for cast and crew info on any film: http://imdb.com/

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