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Home , Clara Calamai, Claudia Cardinale, Helmut Berger, Laura Antonelli, Massimo Girotti, Ossessione

Ossessione JUNE 8–28JUNE . TICKETS: FILMLINC.ORG FROM THE ARCHIVES ON VISCONTI BY DONALD LYONS

This is an excerpt from the March-April 1979 issue of Film Comment. Back issues of Film Comment are available to purchase at shop.filmlinc.org

amily and history, two of the most , based on James M. Cain’s basic enduring themes, confront us The Postman Always Rings Twice, drew Fat the start. Count some mood and structure from Renoir’s La di Modrone, direct descendant of Gian Bête humaine (1939). Ossessione became Galeazzo Visconti, the fourteenth-century known, misleadingly, as a precursor of Duke of and remote kinsman of neorealism. Desiderius, father-in-law of Charlemagne. Visconti’s first feature after the war Indeed. He was born on November 2, 1906, was (1974), a plein-air study to Duke Giuseppe, whose family title may of a Sicilian fishing family. It was financed mount the centuries to Charlemagne or be by the Italian Communist Party, used non- merely a recent Bonapartist creation under actors, and revolves around a failed effort Napoleon III—in either case, a formidable at economic liberation, though actually piece of background. impressing more as the tragedy of a family The early years included much that rent by the centrifugal forces of history. went with the territory: artistic mother, It prefigured spell at eighteen in monastery, passion (1960), the Sicilian family come north, for horses, restless dissatisfaction, etc. though Rocco is ultimately memorable At thirty came the turning point. In 1936, less for its sociology than for the spiritual, Visconti went to France, the Paris of the metahistorical sweetness of Rocco. Popular Front, so alien in spirit and ferment Among the key films of the Visconti to the mood of Mussolinian . He was career are Senso (1954) and assistant director and costumer on Jean (1962), two anti-political Risorgimento Renoir’s A Day in the Country and worked studies, and the three “German” movies: on The Lower Depths. Transformed by The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), the generous populism of Renoir’s Paris, and Ludwig (1973). The Viscontis were, Visconti returned with him to Italy in 1939 after all, Lombards, and Visconti’s Drang to assist on a film of Tosca, aborted by the nach Norden in these years reinforces the war. Three years later, his own first film, sense of him as a historically torn character, The Damned

a victim of Mannian self-consciousness. examine characters formed by Romantic These tensions were again crucial in his music). He was, Visconti, a high Romantic late masterwork, the intimate Conversation sensibility, unafraid to deal with Passion, Piece (1974). Art, and Death. From 1945 to the mid sixties, Visconti Visconti died on March 17, 1976, his was an important force on the Italian influence surviving especially in Bernardo stage, directing Cocteau, Sartre, Anouilh, Bertolucci, whose lurid readings of , Miller—even Two history as sensation (The Conformist, for the Seesaw. He staged Goldoni, 1900) owe much to a side of Visconti. A Beaumarchais, Shakespeare, Chekhov. certain filiation with Visconti can be seen And from 1954 to 1964, he directed (all over in , and in fact works Italy, in , Paris, and elsewhere) still- like Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket or famous opera productions, the first four Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Stratagem, with with the singer-actress , whose their closed family thrashings, can actually genius flowered under him. It was altogether surpass a murky Visconti like Sandra (1965). a position whose centrality and versatility But, as with the other giants of postwar Italy recalls that of Ingmar Bergman in Sweden. like Fellini or Rossellini, Visconti was too And music—its relation to personality, compact a figure to have allowed any real reinforcing or satirically contrasting—forms cult or school. a major Viscontian theme: from Ossessione Visconti was, among other things, the (where the husband sings La Traviata while John Ford of Italy, epic elegist of national his wife and her lover plot his murder) to myths. But celebration, in both men, often Death in Venice and Ludwig (which directly yielded to melancholy and irony. Italian nobility, a member of the Italian Communist Party during World War II, openly gay and staunchly Catholic, Luchino Visconti inhabited a complicated, at times paradoxical, role in Italian cinema culture. A leader in the neorealismo movement who also worked with international stars like , Helmut Berger, , and Dirk Bogarde, Visconti produced an oeuvre of modest and humane dramas as well as decadent, sprawling historical spectacles. Deftly aware of the subtle and rich means of cinematic expression, he uniquely imposed the narrative customs of opera and the novel onto film, yet remained sharply attuned to the social and political climates of the 20th century. Following their recent series about and , the Film Society and Istituto Luce Cinecittà are pleased to now co-present a complete retrospective of Visconti’s feature films, most of them premiering in new restorations and rare imported prints, followed by a weeklong run of a new 35mm print of his 1973 historical masterpiece Ludwig (pictured above).

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OSSESSIONE LA TERRA TREMA Italy, 1943, 140m Italy, 1948, 160m Considered by many the first neorealist In Visconti’s Sicilian masterpiece, a fish- masterpiece, Visconti’s bombshell debut erman’s budding leadership of the local is a sexy, sweaty adaptation of James M. labor force threatens the price-fixing Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings schemes of wholesalers all too willing to Twice. The chiseled is put down an incipient rebellion. Based the penniless drifter who breezes into on a classic novel by Giovanni Verga, La unhappily married ’s whis- Terra trema was one of the most formally tle-stop roadhouse, setting the stage for daring of all neorealist works, establishing a torrid saga of lust, murder, and betrayal. the template for dozens of later films that In blending the sordid source material with would examine the emergence of political an earthy evocation of underclass life, consciousness. The many extraordinary Visconti incurred the wrath of the Fascist sequences are played out by a cast of censors, who promptly suppressed the actual fishermen, who are, to critic André film. Among their objections was the Bazin, filmed as though “Renaissance homoerotic charge supplied by a charac- princes.” Digital restoration from Istituto ter not in Cain’s novel: a gay, communist Luce Cinecittà. artist, whom one is tempted to read as a stand-in for the queer, Marxist Visconti. Saturday, June 9 2:00pm Restored by Istituto Luce Cinecittà, CSC- Monday, June 11 6:00pm Cineteca Nazionale and VIGGO.

Saturday, June 9 5:15pm Saturday, June 13 6:30pm

FOR TICKETS VISIT FILMLINC.ORG

BELLISSIMA SENSO Italy, 1951, 35mm, 108m Italy, 1954, 35mm, 123m Visconti deftly blends showbiz satire with Set amidst Italy’s struggle for unification, heart-tugging pathos in this neorealist Visconti’s operatic melodrama is a key melodrama. When Cinecittà Studios puts link between the neorealist grit of his out a casting call for a new child actress, early work and the increasingly grand- they’re flooded with starry-eyed stage scale historical spectacles to come. The mothers and their talentless tots, among Third Man’s plays a tremulous them Anna Magnani’s working-class 19th-century Venetian countess torn Roman nurse and her rather indifferent between loyalty to her country and a dis- daughter, whom she’s driven to make a solute Austrian officer (Hollywood beauty star. As in similar Hollywood-plays-itself Farley Granger). As much an aesthete melodramas such as Sunset Boulevard as a political radical, Visconti luxuriates and The Bad and the Beautiful, Bellissima in the aristocratic period trappings—a both romanticizes the power of celluloid Technicolor feast of sumptuous gold, dreams and delivers a cuttingly cynical lavender, scarlet, and emerald jewel takedown of the industry. Magnani’s tones—while casting a jaundiced eye on affecting performance as a mother whose Italian history, class, and nationalism. A desperation for success is outweighed Rialto Pictures Release. 35mm print from only by her love for her child helps the film Istituto Luce Cinecittà. achieve true poignancy. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà. Tuesday, June 12 6:30pm

Sunday, June 10 3:30pm Monday, June 11 9:15pm

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WHITE NIGHTS ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS Italy/France, 1957, 35mm, 101m Italy/France, 1960, 177m Visconti’s adaptation of a classic short Visconti’s rich and expansive masterpiece story by Dostoevsky is a ravishing roman- has an emotional intensity and tragic tic reverie in incandescent black and white. grandeur matched by few other films. Marcello Mastroianni is the lonely flâneur The director turned to Giovanni Testori, who meets and falls in love with a fragile Thomas Mann, Dostoevsky, and Arthur young woman (Maria Schell) amidst the Miller for inspiration, achieving a truly epic fog-shrouded night world of the Tuscan sweep for this story of a mother and her canal city of Livorno. The resulting tale of grown sons who head north from Lucania all-consuming love and loss is a swoon- in search of work and new lives. In one ing dream vision elevated to the nearly beautifully realized scene after another, we operatic by Visconti’s rapturously stylized observe a tightly knit family coming apart, direction. 35mm print from Istituto Luce one frayed thread at a time. Alain Delon Cinecittà. is Rocco, is his brother Simone, is the woman who Sunday, June 10 8:00pm comes between them, and Katina Paxinou Wednesday, June 13 9:15pm is matriarch Rosaria. One of the defining films of its era, Rocco and His Brothers has been beautifully restored, and ’s black and white images are as pearly and lustrous today as they were always meant to be. Restored by Cineteca di Bologna in association with Titanus, TF1 Droits Audiovisuels and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding by Gucci and The Film Foundation.

Friday, June 8 1:30pm Saturday, June 9 8:00pm

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THE LEOPARD SANDRA Italy/France, 1963, 186m Italy, 1965, 105m Visconti reached new heights of epic Shady family secrets, incestuous siblings, grandeur with his sweeping, Palme descents into madness, decades-old d’Or-winning account of political conspiracies . . . With Sandra, Visconti upheaval and generational sea change traded The Leopard’s elegiac grandeur in Risorgimento-era Italy. A bewhiskered for something grittier and pulpier—the Burt Lancaster is the leonine patriarch of Electra myth in the form of a gothic melo- a ruling class Bourbon family in the last drama. ’s title character gasps of its dominance as Garibaldi and returns to her ancestral home in Tuscany his redshirts upend social order and a new and has an unexpected encounter with spirit ascends—embodied by beautiful her long-lost brother and a reckoning with people Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale. her family’s dark wartime past. Shooting With fastidious attention to period detail, in a decaying mansion set amidst a land- Visconti evokes a gilded world fading into scape of ruins, Visconti came upon the oblivion, his camera gliding over baroque great theme he would return to in his palazzos, magnificent banquets, and late career: the slow death of an aristoc- ornate ceremonies. It all culminates in a racy rooted in classical ideals but long majestic, dusk-to-dawn ball sequence since hollowed out by decadence and that is as poignant as it is breathtaking. corruption. Restored in association with Cineteca di Bologna, Pathé, Fondation Jérôme Sunday, June 10 5:45pm Seydoux-Pathé, Twentieth Century Friday, June 15 3:45pm Fox, and CSC-Cineteca Nazionale. Restoration funding by Gucci and The Film Foundation.

Friday, June 15 6:00pm Sunday, June 17 1:00pm

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THE STRANGER THE DAMNED Italy/France/Algeria, 1967, 35mm, 104m Italy/West Germany, 1969, 156m Visconti brilliantly translates Albert The Damned chronicles the downfall of Camus’s landmark work of existential the Essenbecks, a wealthy German family humanism to the screen in this shatter- (led by Dirk Bogarde and ) ing adaptation. Marcello Mastroianni is with business ties to the Nazis. Visconti’s (perhaps unexpectedly) perfectly cast as symphony of decadence is perhaps best the alienated atheist Meursault, who, due remembered for Helmut Berger’s indelible to a series of seemingly random events, turn as depraved son Martin, vamping in shoots an Arab man on an Algerian beach drag as from The Blue and finds himself on trial for murder. The Angel. Kinky and perverse (the film was cosmic absurdity of Camus’s vision is rated X upon initial release), Visconti’s delivered with a gut-punch by Visconti epic features a score by and Mastroianni in a stunning final scene (Lawrence of Arabia) and a stylistic opu- that stands as one of the actor’s greatest lence that led Rainer Werner Fassbinder moments. Long unavailable (and never to name it as one of his ten favorite films. released on DVD), The Stranger deserves Restored by Cineteca di Bologna and to be rediscovered for its singular, haunt- Institut Lumière (Lyon). ing power. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà. Saturday, June 16 8:30pm Sunday, June 17 4:45pm Friday, June 8 5:00pm Tuesday, June 12 9:00pm

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DEATH IN VENICE LUDWIG Italy/France/USA, 1971, 130m Italy/France/West Germany, 1973, Opening with the otherworldly image of a 35mm, 238m steamship emerging ghostlike from inky Visconti’s remarkable film about the life blackness and closing with one of the and death of Bavaria’s King Ludwig II is most transcendent denouements in all of an opulent, complex study of romantic cinema, Visconti’s exquisite adaptation ambition in the era of 19th century dec- of Thomas Mann’s novella is a piercing adence. Helmut Berger plays the title meditation on mortality, sexuality, beauty, role as a loner tormented by unrequited and the longing for youth. In a career-cap- love for his cousin, Empress Elisabeth of ping performance of tragic vulnerability, (); an obsession Dirk Bogarde plays gravely ill composer with the music of Richard Wagner; and Aschenbach, who, while on a rest cure in excessive state-funded expenditures. Venice, is spellbound by an angelic teen- Visconti’s lavishly composed portrait of age boy (Björn Andrésen)—an infatuation one of history’s most complicated figures that escalates as pestilence consumes is as much an operatic descent into mad- the city. Visconti’s painterly compositions ness as a requiem to a monarch at the enter the realm of the sublime thanks dawn of the modern republican world. An to the tension-swelling, never-resolv- AGFA release. New 35mm print made by ing strains of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Istituto Luce Cinecittà. Restored by Cineteca di Bologna, Istituto Luce Cinecittà. Saturday, June 16 1:30pm Friday, June 22–Thursday, June 28 Friday, June 8 7:30pm 2:00pm & 6:45pm Sunday, June 17 8:00pm

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CONVERSATION PIECE THE INNOCENT Italy/France, 1977, 35mm, 121m Italy/France, 1979, 35mm, 129m Visconti reunited with The Leopard star In his final film, Visconti offers a cutting Burt Lancaster for this profoundly per- variation on the theme that most con- sonal, contemporary chamber study. sumed him: the moral decay of the soul- Once again the actor is cast as an emblem sick aristocracy. Based on a novel by the of Old World honor passing into obsoles- proto-fascist sensualist Gabriele d’Annun- cence, here a retired professor living out zio, this poison-pill melodrama concerns a quiet retirement in his art-stuffed Roman a callously self-absorbed nobleman palazzo; his dignified solitude is drastically () whose “liberal” views upended by a turbulent marchesa (a ser- on marriage extend only as far as his own pentine ) and her bisex- extramarital affairs. When his tormented ual boy toy (Helmut Berger) who insinuate wife () pursues a dalliance themselves into his life. Visconti master- with a writer, the full monstrousness of his fully interweaves provocative ideas—on chauvinism is unleashed. Working with a class, sex, art, fascism—in what is ulti- late-career rigorousness, Visconti returns mately his own disquieting confrontation one last time to the luxuriant, red velvet with mortality. 35mm print from Istituto world of the 19th century, stripping away Luce Cinecittà. operatic excess in favor of a supremely controlled emotional intensity. 35mm print Friday, June 15 9:30pm from Istituto Luce Cinecittà. Monday, June 18 6:30pm Saturday, June 16 6:00pm Monday, June 18 9:00pm

FOR TICKETS VISIT FILMLINC.ORG The Witches

SHORTS PROGRAM: 1953-67 Visconti directs Anna Magnani, Romy Schneider, and Silvana Mangano in this potent trio of offbeat, often comic shorts drawn from omnibus films We, the Women; Boccaccio ’70; and The Witches. TRT: 114m

ANNA MAGNANI THE WITCH BURNED ALIVE Italy, 1953, 21m Italy/France, 1967, 35mm, 37m In this segment from the marvelously off- Visconti’s contribution to Dino De beat portmanteau film We, the Women, Laurentiis’s omnibus curio The Witches superstar actress Anna Magnani protests is an enigmatic, unsettling dissection of a taxi fare surcharge for traveling with her celebrity, beauty, and artifice. A divinely dachshund, spiraling into a comic melee helmet-haired Silvana Mangano plays a involving half of ’s police officers. nerve-shattered movie star who retreats Digital restoration from Istituto Luce to an Alpine chalet for some much-needed Cinecittà. peace—only to become embroiled in the emotional and sexual gamesmanship of a THE JOB coterie of upper-crust vultures. Look out for Visconti’s soon-to-be muse and lover Italy, 1962, 35mm, 56m Helmut Berger in his debut. Between Rocco and His Brothers and The Leopard, Visconti contributed to Boccaccio Sunday, June 10 1:00pm ’70, an anthology comedy inspired by the Friday, June 15 1:15pm irreverent spirit of the Decameron author. His segment plays like a sophisticated deconstruction of the battle-of-the-sexes bedroom farce, featuring an effervescent Romy Schneider as an idle, rich heiress putting the screws on philandering hus- band when one of his esca- pades winds up in the scandal sheet. It’s all fun and games—until it’s not. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà.

@filmlinc VISCONTI SCHEDULE A Retrospective

FRIDAY, JUNE 8 FRIDAY, JUNE 15 1:30 Rocco and His Brothers 1:15 Shorts Program 5:00 The Stranger 3:45 Sandra 7:30 Death in Venice 6:00 The Leopard 9:30 Conversation Piece SATURDAY, JUNE 9 2:00 La Terra trema SATURDAY, JUNE 16 5:15 Ossessione 1:30 Ludwig 8:00 Rocco and His Brothers 6:00 The Innocent 8:30 The Damned SUNDAY, JUNE 10 1:00 Shorts Program SUNDAY, JUNE 17 3:30 Bellissima 1:00 The Leopard 5:45 Sandra 4:45 The Damned 8:00 White Nights 8:00 Death in Venice

MONDAY, JUNE 11 MONDAY, JUNE 18 6:00 La Terra trema 6:30 Conversation Piece 9:15 Bellissima 9:00 The Innocent

TUESDAY, JUNE 12 FRIDAY, JUNE 22–THURSDAY JUNE 28 6:30 Senso 2:00 | 6:45 Ludwig 9:00 The Stranger

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 13 All Screenings at the Walter Reade 6:30 Ossessione Theater (165 W. 65th St.) 9:15 White Nights

THURSDAY, JUNE 14 No Screenings

SEE MORE AND SAVE WITH THE 3+ FILM PACKAGE OR ALL ACCESS PASS!* TICKETS: FILMLINC.ORG *(excludes Senso)

Organized by Florence Almozini and Dan Sullivan of Film Society of Lincoln Center, and by Camilla Cormanni and Paola Ruggiero of Istituto Luce Cinecittà. Co-produced by Istituto Luce Cinecittà, Rome. Presented in association with the Ministry of Culture of Italy Acknowledgments: Istituto Luce Cinecittà

THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER RECEIVES GENEROUS SUPPORT FROM OFFICIAL MEDIA SUPPORTING

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.