Luchino Visconti
Death in Venice, based on the decadent novel, Der Tod in Venedig, published in 1912, by one of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century, Thoman Mann. Luchino Visconti transposes on the screen, with painful autobiography of himself, of his class but of the whole of Europe in general, the existential balance of a man aware of having reached the end of his days. A work, of Mann, considered one of the peaks of conservative culture, is ideologically reversed in film by a director with Marxist ideas, in which Aschenbach, symbol of the old idealism embodies the declining Europe that is preparing to face the Great War and provides the words to a wider crisis of ideal-spiritual values of the bourgeoisue and the aristocracy.
To act as a bridge between the decline of a traditional civilization and the hope, or the illusion of being able to 'relieve' it in a modern way, is Tadzio interpreted by the Polish euphobic Björn Andrésen, in a rotten and fascinating Venice, among a fish soup at the Grand Hotel Des Bains, a cholera epidemic that does not pay attention to portfolios and noble classes and a sense of superiority towards the lower classes, GvA finds an aestetich outlet for its personal frustrations and sexual in the minor Tadzio. A masterful interpretation of Dirk Bogarde, able to render the innumerable nuances of the protagonist's personality by interpreting a role in which the character expresses himself only with gestures and emotions.
Death in Venice, a funeral film in which the end of the cultured and aristocratic world is consummated, of the moralism of form and abstraction of the senses. This awareness is staged by an almost total absence of dialogues that give way to the elegance of the images and the poignant musical commentary of Gustav Mahler. A weave of past and present Visconti's life, where Tadzio is the nostalgia (and desire) of Visconti for youth, but is also the young Luchinom handsome, innocent, who plays on th beach unaware of his own beauty and innocence.
Death In Venice
director LUCHINO VISCONTI
year 1971
director of photography PASQUALINO DE SANTIS
cast DIRK BOGARDE, BJORN ANDERSEN, MARK BURNS, SILVANA MANGANO and ROMOLO VALLI
words SILVIA GAIA MARCELLI
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