Luchino Visconti

Luchino Visconti
Visconti in 1972
Born	Luchino Visconti di Modrone (1906-11-02)2 November 1906 Milan, Kingdom of Italy
Died	17 March 1976(1976-03-17) (aged 69) Rome, Italy
Relatives	Eriprando Visconti (nephew)
Awards	Palme d'Or 1963 The Leopard Golden Lion 1965 Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa

Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo (Italian: [luˈkiːno visˈkonti di moˈdroːne]; 2 November 1906 – 17 March 1976), was an Italian theatre, opera and cinema director, as well as a screenwriter. Visconti was one of the fathers of Italian neorealism in film, but later moved towards luxurious-looking films obsessed with beauty, death and European history – especially the decay of aristocracy. Among his best-known films are Ossessione (1943), Senso (1954), Rocco and His Brothers (1960), The Leopard^[1] (1963), The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971) and Ludwig (1972).

Biography[]

Luchino Visconti was born into a prominent noble family in Milan, one of seven children of Giuseppe Visconti di Modrone, Duke of Grazzano Visconti and Count of Lonate Pozzolo, and his wife Carla^[2] (née Erba, heiress to Erba Pharmaceuticals). He was formally known as Count don Luchino Visconti di Modrone, and his family is a branch of the Visconti of Milan where they ruled from 1277 to 1447, initially as lords then as dukes.

He grew up in the Milanese family seat, the Palazzo Visconti di Modrone in Via Cerva, as well as on the family estate, Grazzano Visconti Castle near Vigolzone. After his parents separated in the early 1920s, his mother moved with her younger children, including him, to her own house in Milan, as well as to her summer residence, Villa Erba in Cernobbio on Lake Como. The father, as chamberlain of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, also owned a villa in Rome that Luchino later inherited and lived in for decades.

• 

  Palazzo Visconti di Modrone in Milan

• 

  Grazzano Visconti Castle

• 

  Villa Erba on Lake Como

In his early years, he was exposed to art, music and theatre: The Palazzo Visconti di Modrone in Milan, where he grew up, had its own small private theater and the children participated in its performances. The family also had their own box in the La Scala opera house. Luchino studied cello with the Italian cellist and composer Lorenzo de Paolis (1890–1965) and met the composer Giacomo Puccini, the conductor Arturo Toscanini and the writer Gabriele D'Annunzio.^{[citation needed]} Visconti found literature by reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time, later a lifelong film project that he never realized. Before he started his film career, he was passionate about training racehorses in his own stable. An engagement concluded in 1935 with Princess Irma of Windisch-Graetz raised concerns with her father, Prince Hugo, whereupon Visconti broke it off.^[3]

In later years, Visconti made no secret of his homosexuality. While his first 3-years-relationship from 1936, with the photographer Horst P. Horst, remained discreet because of the circumstances of the time, he later showed up openly in the company of his lovers, among them the director and producer Franco Zeffirelli^[4] and the actor Udo Kier.^[5] His last lover was the Austrian actor Helmut Berger, who played Martin in Visconti's film The Damned.^[6] Berger also appeared in Visconti's Ludwig in 1973 and Conversation Piece in 1974, along with Burt Lancaster. Zeffirelli also worked as part of the crew in production design, as assistant director, and other roles in a number of Visconti's films, operas, and theatrical productions. According to Visconti's autobiography, he and Umberto II of Italy had a romantic relationship during their youth in the 1920s.^[7]

During World War II, Visconti joined the Italian Communist Party,^[8] which he considered to be the only effective opponent of Italian Fascism. While in his early years, at least the aesthetic aspects of the solemn parades of the National Fascist Party, marching in columns in boots and uniform, had impressed him, he had now come to hate the Mussolini regime. He accused the bourgeoisie of treason to tyranny. He supported the communists' partisan fight at risk of death; his villa in Rome became a meeting place for oppositional artists. After the king's flight in autumn 1943 and the intervention of the Germans, he went into hiding in the mountains, at Settefrati, under the pseudonym Alfredo Guidi. He helped English and American prisoners of war hide after they had escaped. He also gave shelter to partisans in his house in Rome.^[9]

In the aftermath of World War II he became one of the founding members of Italian neorealistic film that contended with the difficult economic and moral conditions, representing changes in the psyche and conditions of everyday life, including poverty, oppression, injustice, and desperation. The conflict that arose from this worldview and his origins from an important Italian noble family can be felt in his works. He himself, always financially independent, traditionally and comprehensively educated, considered himself to belong to a past world, that of the 19th century. In the film Il Gattopardo (1963) he addressed the decline of an old social order and the rise of “modern times”. He did not see his opulent flashbacks as an escape into imaginary, lost worlds, but saw them as the deciphering of signs. He wanted to put his finger on the signs of profound historical changes that will only become visible later. He searched world literature for relevant works to show the discrepancies between generations and their world views, as a task of realism in art. When he was accused of decadence, he recalled Thomas Mann and his way of creating art.^[10]

Visconti was hostile to the Protests of 1968 and didn't even try to follow the movement and adopt the airs of a youth, like Alberto Moravia or Pier Paolo Pasolini did. In his view the protesters sought change for the sake of destruction without building something new. Disgusted, he looked at the young people in their enthusiasm, outbursts of anger, parties and tumults, their abstract speeches, their confused juggling with Mao, Marx and Che Guevara. They saw him as a symbol of reaction, a member of the mandarin caste. The emerging radical-left terrorism in Italy frightened him and made him fear the rise of a new fascism.^[11]

Visconti smoked 120 cigarettes a day.^[12] He suffered a stroke in 1972, but continued to smoke heavily.^{[citation needed]} He died in Rome of another stroke at the age of sixty-nine on 17 March 1976.^{[citation needed]} There is a museum dedicated to the director's work in Ischia where he had his summer residence La Colombaia.^[13]

Career[]

Films[]

He began his film-making career as an set dresser on Jean Renoir's Partie de campagne (1936) through the intercession of their common friend Coco Chanel.^[14] After a short tour of the United States, where he visited Hollywood, he returned to Italy to be Renoir's assistant again, this time for Tosca (1941), a production that was interrupted and later completed by German director Karl Koch.

Together with Roberto Rossellini, Visconti joined the salotto of Vittorio Mussolini (the son of Benito, who was then the national arbitrator for cinema and other arts).^{[citation needed]} Here he presumably also met Federico Fellini. With Gianni Puccini, Antonio Pietrangeli and Giuseppe De Santis, he wrote the screenplay for his first film as director: Ossessione (Obsession, 1943), one of the first neorealist movies and an unofficial adaptation of the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice.^[15]

In 1948, he wrote and directed La terra trema (The Earth Trembles), based on the novel I Malavoglia by Giovanni Verga. Visconti continued working throughout the 1950s, but he veered away from the neorealist path with his 1954 film, Senso, shot in colour. Based on the novella by Camillo Boito, it is set in Austrian-occupied Venice in 1866. In this film, Visconti combines realism and romanticism as a way to break away from neorealism. However, as one biographer notes, "Visconti without neorealism is like Lang without expressionism and Eisenstein without formalism".^[16] He describes the film as the "most Viscontian" of all Visconti's films. Visconti returned to neorealism once more with Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), the story of Southern Italians who migrate to Milan hoping to find financial stability. In 1961, he was a member of the jury at the 2nd Moscow International Film Festival.^[17]

Throughout the 1960s, Visconti's films became more personal. Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963) is based on Lampedusa's novel of the same name about the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy at the time of the Risorgimento, where the change of times becomes visible in two of the main characters: Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster) appears patriarchal but humane, while Don Calogero Sedara (Paolo Stoppa), a shrewd entrepreneur and social climber from the village, appears submissive, but foxy and brutal at the same time, a mafia-like type of the future. The tension arises from the marriage of their relatives of the next generation, combined with the fall of the old Bourbon rule and the rise of a united Italy. This film was distributed in America and Britain by Twentieth-Century Fox, which deleted important scenes. Visconti repudiated the Twentieth-Century Fox version.^{[citation needed]}

It was not until The Damned (1969) that Visconti received a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The film, one of Visconti's better known works, concerns a German industrialist's family which begins to disintegrate during the Nazi consolidation of power in the 1930s. The film opened to widespread critical acclaim, but also faced controversy from ratings boards for its sexual content, including depictions of homosexuality, pedophilia, rape, and incest. In the United States, the film was given an X rating. The avant-garde filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder praised it his favorite movie. Its decadence and lavish beauty are characteristic of Visconti's aesthetic − very visible also in the movie Death in Venice (1971) that processed the daring novella Death in Venice published in 1912 by Thomas Mann.

Visconti's final film was The Innocent (1976), in which he returns to his recurring interest in infidelity and betrayal.

Theatre[]

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Visconti was also a celebrated theatre and opera director. During the years 1946 to 1960 he directed many performances of the Rina Morelli-Paolo Stoppa Company with actor Vittorio Gassman as well as many celebrated productions of operas.

Visconti's love of opera is evident in the 1954 Senso, where the beginning of the film shows scenes from the fourth act of Il trovatore, which were filmed at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. Beginning when he directed a production at Milan's Teatro alla Scala of La vestale in December 1954, his career included a famous revival of La traviata at La Scala in 1955 with Maria Callas and an equally famous Anna Bolena (also at La Scala) in 1957 with Callas. A significant 1958 Royal Opera House (London) production of Verdi's five-act Italian version of Don Carlos (with Jon Vickers) followed, along with a Macbeth in Spoleto in 1958 and a famous black-and-white Il trovatore with scenery and costumes by at the Royal Opera House in 1964. In 1966 Visconti's luscious Falstaff for the Vienna State Opera conducted by Leonard Bernstein was critically acclaimed. On the other hand, his austere 1969 Simon Boccanegra with the singers clothed in geometrical costumes provoked controversy.

Work[]

Filmography[]

Feature films[]

Year	Original title	International English title	Awards
1943	Ossessione	Obsession
1948	La terra trema	The Earth Will Tremble	Special International Award — 9th Venice International Film Festival Nominated – Grand International Prize of Venice — 9th Venice International Film Festival
1951	Bellissima	Bellissima
1954	Senso	Senso or The Wanton Countess	Nominated – Golden Lion — 15th Venice International Film Festival
1957	Le notti bianche	White Nights	Silver Lion Prize – 18th Venice International Film Festival Nominated – Golden Lion — 18th Venice International Film Festival
1960	Rocco e i suoi fratelli	Rocco and His Brothers	Special Prize – 21st Venice International Film Festival FIPRESCI Prize – 21st Venice International Film Festival 1961 Nastro d'Argento for Best Director 1961 Nastro d'Argento for Screenplay Nominated – Golden Lion — 21st Venice International Film Festival
1963	Il gattopardo	The Leopard	Palme d'Or – 1963 Cannes Film Festival
1965	Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa	Sandra	Golden Lion — 26th Venice International Film Festival
1967	Lo straniero	The Stranger	Nominated – Golden Lion — 28th Venice International Film Festival
1969	La caduta degli dei	The Damned	1970 Nastro d'Argento for Best Director Nominated – Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay — 42nd Academy Awards
1971	Morte a Venezia	Death in Venice	25th Anniversary Prize — 1971 Cannes Film Festival David di Donatello for Best Director — 16th David di Donatello Awards 1972 Nastro d'Argento for Best Director Nominated — Palme d'Or — 1971 Cannes Film Festival Nominated — BAFTA Award for Best Film — 25th British Academy Film Awards Nominated — BAFTA Award for Best Direction — 25th British Academy Film Awards
1973	Ludwig	Ludwig	David di Donatello for Best Director — 18th David di Donatello Awards
1974	Gruppo di famiglia in un interno	Conversation Piece	1975 Nastro d'Argento for Best Director
1976	L'innocente	The Innocent

Other films[]

•  [it], documentary, 1945
• Appunti su un fatto di cronaca, short film, 1951
• Siamo donne (We, the Women), 1953, episode Anna Magnani
• Boccaccio '70, 1962, based on the episode Il lavoro in Boccaccio's Decameron
• Le streghe (The Witches), 1967, episode La strega bruciata viva
•  [it], TV movie, 1970

Opera[]

Year	Title and Composer	Opera House	Principal cast / Conductor
1954	La vestale, Gaspare Spontini	La Scala	Maria Callas, Franco Corelli, Ebe Stignani, Nicola Zaccaria Conducted by Antonino Votto[18]
1955	La sonnambula, Vincenzo Bellini,	La Scala	Maria Callas, Cesare Valletti, Giuseppe Modesti Conducted by Leonard Bernstein[19]
1955	La traviata, Giuseppe Verdi	La Scala	Maria Callas, Giuseppe Di Stefano, Ettore Bastianini Conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini[20]
1957	Anna Bolena, Gaetano Donizetti	La Scala	Maria Callas, Giulietta Simionato, Nicola Rossi-Lemeni Conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni[21]
1957	Iphigénie en Tauride, Christoph Willibald Gluck	La Scala	Maria Callas, Franceso Albanese, Anselmo Colzani, Fiorenza Cossotto Conducted by Nino Sanzogno[22]
1958	Don Carlo, Verdi	Royal Opera House, London	Jon Vickers, Tito Gobbi, Boris Christoff, Gré Brouwenstijn Conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini[23]
1958	Macbeth, Verdi	Spoleto Festival	William Chapman & Dino Dondi; Ferruccio Mazzoli & Ugo Trama;Shakeh Vartenissian. Conducted by Thomas Schippers[24]
1959	Il duca d'Alba, Donizetti	Spoleto Festival[25]	Luigi Quilico, Wladimiro Ganzarolli, Franco Ventriglia, Renato Cioni, Ivana Tosini. Conductor: Thomas Schippers[26]
1961	Salome, Richard Strauss	Spoleto Festival[25]	George Shirley, Lili Chookasian, Margarei Tynes, Robert Anderson, Paul Arnold. Conductor: Thomas Schippers[26]
1963	Il diavolo in giardino, Franco Mannino (1963)	Teatro Massimo, Palermo[25]	Ugo Benelli, Clara Petrella, Gianna Galli, Antonio Annaloro, Antonio Boyer. Conductor: Enrico Medioli. Libretto: Visconti & Filippo Sanjust[26]
1963	La traviata, Verdi	Spoleto Festival	Franca Fabbri, Franco Bonisolli, Mario Basiola Conducted by Robert La Marchina[27]
1964	Le nozze di Figaro, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart	Teatro dell'Opera di Roma[28]	Rolando Panerai, Uva Ligabue, Ugo Trama, Martella Adani, Stefania Malagù. Conductor: Carlo Maria Giulini[26]
1964	Il trovatore	Bolshoi Opera, Moscow (September)	Pietro Cappuccilli, Gabriella Tucci, Giulietta Simionato, Carlo Bergonzi Conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni[29]
1964	Il trovatore, Verdi	Royal Opera House, London (November) (Sanjust production)	Peter Glossop, Gwyneth Jones & Leontyne Price, Giulietta Simionato, Bruno Prevedi Conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini[30]
1965	Don Carlo, Verdi	Teatro dell'Opera di Roma	Cesare Siepi, Gianfranco Cecchele, Kostas Paskalis, Martti Talvela, Suzanne Sarroca, Mirella Boyer. Conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini.[31]
1966	Falstaff, Verdi	Vienna Staatsoper	Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Rolando Panerai, Murray Dickie, Erich Kunz, Ilva Ligabue, Regina Resnik. Conducted by Leonard Bernstein[32]
1966	Der Rosenkavalier, Strauss	Royal Opera House, London[28]	Sena Jurinac, Josephine Veasey, Michael Langdon. Conductor: Georg Solti[33]
1967	La traviata, Verdi	Royal Opera House, London	Mirella Freni, Renato Cioni, Piero Cappuccilli. Conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini[34]
1969	Simon Boccanegra, Verdi	Vienna Staatsoper	Eberhard Wächter, Nicolai Ghiaurov, Gundula Janowitz, Carlo Cossutta Conducted by Josef Krips[35]
1973	Manon Lescaut, Giacomo Puccini	Spoleto Festival[28]	Nancy Shade, Harry Theyard, Angelo Romero, Carlo Del Bosco. Conductor: Thomas Schippers.[26]

References[]

Notes

Sources

• Ardoin, John, The Callas Legacy, London: Duckworth, 1977 ISBN 0-7156-0975-0
• Bacon, Henry, Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and Decay, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998 ISBN 0-521-59960-1
• Düttmann, Alexander García, Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood, translated by Robert Savage, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009 ISBN 9780804757409
• Glasenapp, Jörg (ed.): Luchino Visconti (= Film-Konzepte, vol. 48). Munich: edition text + kritik 2017.
• Iannello, Silvia, Le immagini e le parole dei Malavoglia Roma: Sovera, 2008 (in Italian)
• Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, Luchino Visconti. London: British Film Institute, 2003. ISBN 0-85170-961-3
• Visconti bibliography, University of California Library, Berkeley. Retrieved 7 November 2011.
• Schifano, Laurence: Luchino Visconti (biography, in French), Paris 1987 (German translation: Luchino Visconti, Fürst des Films, Gernsbach 1988)
• Viscontiana: Luchino Visconti e il melodramma verdiano, Milan: Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 2001. A catalog for an exhibition in Parma of artifacts relating to Visconti's productions of operas by Verdi, curated by Caterina d'Amico de Carvalho, in Italian. ISBN 88-202-1518-7

External links[]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Luchino Visconti.

• Luchino Visconti at IMDb
• Biography, Filmography and More on Luchino Visconti (in Italian)
• British Film Institute: "Luchino Visconti": filmography
• Hutchison, Alexander, "Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice", Literature/Film Quarterly, v. 2, 1974. (In-Depth Analysis of Death in Venice).
• Luchino Visconti at Find a Grave