5 ways to tell a Luchino Visconti film

There are many filmmakers who have dabbled and even excelled in other artforms, but very few can match the intermedial dexterity of Luchino Visconti. In a directorial career spanning four decades, he moved between cinema, theatre and opera with both self-assurance and uncompromising rigour. 

His feature film output (14) was relatively modest compared with his theatrical productions (42) – he even directed more operas (20) than features – but cinema allowed him the greatest amount of freedom. “A play by Chekhov or Ibsen or Shakespeare presents itself to the theatre director in a form that is complete, untouchable and demanding of respect,” he told Giovanni Calendoli in 1957. “I’ve never felt the need to show the same kind of respect for a screenplay. There have been many occasions when I’ve deviated completely from the original script simply because the filming conditions were so different to how I imagined them during the writing process.”

Looking at these 14 features – plus three episodes he contributed to multi-director anthology projects – how many formal and thematic elements recur? Would we be able to recognise his final film, 1976’s period drama The Innocent, as the work of the same filmmaker who made the neorealist noir Ossessione (1943)? Apart from the change in historical period and social setting, the two pictures have much in common, whether it’s Visconti’s characteristically free approach to adaptation, his mastery of mise en scène or his skilful mentoring of actors. But more than these three elements, there’s a fascination in failure, a dark core which runs throughout his entire filmography.

The opening credits of The Innocent provide one of the defining images in late Visconti. The director’s own hand is shown carefully leafing through an early edition of the Gabriele d’Annunzio source novel as it rests on a blanket of artfully arranged red velvet. Just about every Visconti picture draws on a literary source of some kind. Of his films for the cinema, 10 were direct literary adaptations, from authors such as James M. Cain (Ossessione), Giovanni Verga (La terra trema), Camillo Boito (Senso), Fyodor Dostoevsky (White Nights), Giovanni Testori (Rocco and His Brothers), Guy de Maupassant (‘The Job’ from Boccaccio 70), Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (The Leopard), Albert Camus (The Stranger), Thomas Mann (Death in Venice) and Gabriele d’Annunzio (The Innocent). 

With the remaining films, literary allusions are easy to detect. In the late 1960s, Visconti was offered the chance to adapt one of his favourite novels, Marcel Proust’s seven-volume modernist opus In Search of Lost Time. After months of discussion, he entrusted his long-time collaborator Suso Cecchi d’Amico to complete the screenplay and pre-production, later advanced as far as location scouting and discussions about casting. “Visconti always said that he wanted it to be his final film,” d’Amico reveals in her foreword to the French edition of the screenplay. “Given that he idolised Proust and had studied and admired the book since his youth, the idea of adapting it both fascinated and terrified him.” 

Ultimately, the project proved too ambitious and costly, even for an artist like Visconti who had a track record of orchestrating on large canvases with starry casts. It remains one of cinema’s most tantalising unrealised projects.

In his 1999 documentary My Voyage to Italy, Martin Scorsese dedicates a section to the opening of Senso (1954), Visconti’s 19th-century drama (and his first film in colour), which tells the story of the torrid, doomed affair between an Italian countess (Alida Valli) and an Austrian officer (Farley Granger) against the tumult of the Italian unification. 

The picture opens with a performance of Verdi’s Il trovatore at Venice’s La Fenice opera house. Scorsese rightly eulogises the choreography of the scene and the precise framing, noting how despite the theatricality, the scene manages to capture an extraordinary authenticity (“Visconti brought the 19th century to life […] If Stendhal had a camera, he would’ve made a film like Senso”). 

The feature Visconti made after Senso turned out to be even more stylised. For 1957’s White Nights, he meticulously recreated large sections of the Tuscan town of Livorno in Rome’s Cinecittà studios (“Everything should look like it’s fake,” he told his production designers, “but as soon as you get the sense that it’s fake, it has to look real.”)

While Alfred Hitchcock famously compared actors to cattle, Visconti had more of an equine reference point. “When I was a young man, I used to breed and train horses,” he told L’Europeo in 1974. “And what are actors? They’re thoroughbreds. They’re nervous, highly sensitive. Working with them, you always need both the carrot and the stick.” 

From the post-war period onwards, Visconti mentored several young actors who would go on to become major European stars. Vittorio Gassman, Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Romy Schneider, Alain Delon and Helmut Berger all went through the Viscontian school. Even an established Hollywood veteran such as Burt Lancaster found his experience with the Milanese auteur to be career-defining, often stating in interviews that he was the best director he had ever worked with. According to biographer Kate Buford, the encounter with Visconti marked “a major change in Lancaster’s sense of himself as an actor and a man of his time”. 

In his 2014 memoir, actor Giancarlo Giannini tells the story of his first day filming The Innocent and how he found the atmosphere on set to be deathly serious and silent, quieter than any set he had ever known. Visconti noticed Giannini’s unease and said “You’re used to performing in chaos, aren’t you? Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.” Rather than tell his star to knuckle down and get used to it, the director – ever sensitive to the needs of individual performers – ordered his crew to loosen up and make more noise.

Like Yasujiro Ozu, but in a markedly different register, Visconti was particularly drawn to family dynamics – or, more specifically, family dysfunction. The families in his films are often on the verge of unravelling, buckling under pressure from external forces. In some cases, family members turn on each other with violence; in others they’re tormented by incestuous desires or haunted by childhood traumas. 

This is the case with earlier work (La terra trema) as well as his mid to late-period output (Rocco and His Brothers, The Leopard, Sandra, The Damned). In his later pictures, Visconti punctuates this high drama with quieter, more personal moments – such as the family scenes in Death in Venice – where he looks back with a real sense of longing at the belle epoque era of his parents.

Critic Lino Miccichè has argued that every Viscontian protagonist is ultimately defeated. “There’s no exception in his filmography, there’s no room for a sense of liberation or a glimmer of hope.” It’s an element that links him to filmmakers like John Huston or Jean-Pierre Melville. The idea of decline, or decadence, is something that the director himself frequently discussed. In an interview with David Bailey around the time of Ludwig (1972), Visconti talks of his long-time interest in things that are coming to an end. “You can call this ‘decadent’” he says, “but decadence is a very important movement in literature, film and painting.” 

Whether it’s contemporary-set films or his historical pictures, large-scale epics or chamber pieces, you’ll do well to find anything resembling a happy ending. Plans and schemes are scuppered, ideals are corroded, relationships sour, beauty quickly fades.

Luchino Visconti: Decadence & Decay plays at BFI Southbank in January.