translated by Luciana Bohne
The following essay gives an overview of Luchino Visconti's career by one of Visconti's most acute interpreters. A follower of Georg
Lukacs, Guido Aristarco, editor of Cinema Nuovo, has defended Visconti's realism and historical materialism against charges of
"decadentism" since the debate over Visconti began to rage with Senso in 1954. Aristarco continued to see in Visconti, then and
afterwards, what Lukacs had praised in Thomas Mann's novels: realism in the service of a historical reality that must be changed.
Aristarco's proximity to Visconti from 1942 (the year of the shooting of Ossessione) to the end gives him a privileged perspective into
the creative machinery and political thought of this singular director. This essay was written in 1985. (L.B.)
The golden age of Italian cinema closed with only one great film on the Mezzogiorno [the Italian South], La Terra Trema by Luchino Visconti, a man from the North. This film is still today a vindication for those people who look to neorealism for something more lasting than a phenomenon bound to the stimulus of the Resistance and for something more accomplished than a movement based on simplistic formulas of non-professionalism and location shooting.
In 1948 I was an isolated, unheeded member of the jury at the Venice Film Festival where the film was shown. I shall never forget the emotion I felt watching the film's conclusion, hearing the rhythmic sound of the oars which the smiling protagonist, 'Ntoni, sank violently into the bitter Sicilian sea in unison with other fishermen, poor and desperate like himself. Perhaps this sequence is the only sign of struggle that the neorealist cinema has been able to produce against the accusations of defeatism, thereby absolving itself from them. Later, the critic Dario Natoli observed: "The pulsing of the oars in propelling the boat brings to mind, not accidentally I think, the pulsing of the pistons at the end of The Battleship Potemkin. The sea itself --as Fellini and the French New Wave would discover later--was a symbol of hope."
Just as the "meek" of Verga were not those of Manzoni, so the "meek" of Visconti were not those of I Malavoglia, the Verga novel on which La Terra Trema was based. Whereas Verga's 'Ntoni was defeated and discouraged, Visconti's 'Ntoni Valastro gained consciousness of his strength. Resignation, in fact, was excluded as an option in Bellissima (1953), Senso (1954), and Rocco and His Brothers (1961) as were Manzoni's God and Verga's fatalistic agnosticism. The end of the line for 'Ntoni, Maddalena Cecconi (Bellissima), Franz Mahler and Livia Serpieri (Senso), and the Parondi family (Rocco and His Brothers) contradicted traditional notions of fatalism, of irrevocable destiny determined by a superior entity, of surrender to the will of chance, of fate, of God. Visconti's discourse in these films (as well as in his debut film, Ossessione) was social change. This discourse dominated films depicting a long and complex struggle in which the success of some individuals echoed a multiple and contradictory historical process. Visconti was the first director in Italy to formulate a critical neorealism and the first to narrate films with the sweeping narrative scope of the novel. I think both qualifications, "critical" neorealist and "cinematic" novelist, derived from a need in Visconti for perspective, for determining a provenance and a destination for his characters whose problems he sought to articulate anew: he conceived them as craving the unknown not out of instinct but 'out of consciousness; he depicted them as vanquished conquerors, defeated winners; he allowed them suffering but did not permit them to be resigned to it.
Visconti's "novel" contained, in addition to cinematographic elements, elements of melodrama, especially the operatic melodrama of Verdi (it is symptomatic that La Traviata was one of Visconti's theatrical masterpieces)--melodrama, I hasten to add, which never stooped to the merely melodramatic. In the relationship between method and style, Visconti did not distinquish film from spectacle, from melodrama, to be precise, which he considered the "most complete form of spectacle." In Rocco and His Brothers, in Senso, indeed, already in La Terra Trema the traces of this form were obvious. Visconti did not hesitate to stage scenes as arias, duets, choruses, monologues, tactics indigenous to the lyrical melodrama, all of which are traditionally intended to interrupt the naturalistic and (usually) logically banal flow of the genre's action. Other characters remained silent during such staging by Visconti, placed aside for the moment and waiting for the scene to end. This is to say that the succession of events was in Visconti's films based on a rhythm of juxtaposed scenes which needed to exhaust itself, the logic of the narrative requiring its constitution through this very juxtaposition. The episodic structure inherent in melodrama coincided in Visconti with the novel constructed by blocks or pieces. Both approaches were justified by a resulting realistic concreteness obtained through conventional means which, nevertheless, deepended, as they did for Verdi, the forces of expression peculiar to Visconti. In this sense, melodrama was part of Visconti's cultural and creative experience, of his intellectual and historical inheritance as well as of his praxis. I would remind the purists, who might object, that even the classic realism of Balzac, for example, bears traces of melodrama, that the history of art is rich with contaminations, and that art itself is a constant process of one contamination succeeding another.
After Death in Venice, Visconti was preparing to adapt for the screen Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. One could have predicted, even then, the continuity between the two films, just as Death in Venice was presaged by The Damned. Mann's text gradually leads toward the perception of an artist's anguish and death, a perception imbued with a negative, romantic feeling dominated by the Nietzschean concept of sympathy with death. "Can't you see I'm dying?" said Visconti (in 1963), the day after the premiere of Sandra, Vaghe stelle dell'orsa, while asking me how far I had got in writing his monograph study, promised long ago and still unwritten.
The sequence in The Leopard, where the Prince, don Fabrizio (a persona for Visconti), contemplated Greuze's painting, "Death of the Just," was also indicative of the thematic love of death which was beginning to haunt the director. Faithful to the novel, The Leopard, nevertheless, altered the protagonist in the sense, noted by Leonard Sciascia, that don Fabrizio was changed from representing a neo-classical man in the novel to a decadent one in the film. Sciascia remarked that the long sequence of the ball in The Leopard marked don Fabrizio's devaluation through which one sensed the stench of death more than the courtship of death under the guise of beauty to which don Fabrizio ostensibly devoted himself throughout the evening. I am among those who maintain that there were two Viscontis: the one from Ossessione through Il Lavoro [episode in Boccaccio 701 and the Visconti of the subsequent films. I do not think it possible to sustain the thesis--argued with self-assurance by critics like Cesare Cases, whom I admire--that there were not in Visconti two manners of cinematographic expression but only an alternation between populism and decadence. This thesis acknowledges only the aesthete in in Visconti--evident, it insists, early on in La Terra Trerna and in Bellissima--and contends that Visconti "was a master of composition and description but was inept with narration. This flaw was constant in his art: no sooner did he begin to tell a story than he became complicated and byzantine."
This opinion was printed in 1976, the year Visconti died. But the difference of opinions dates back to a more ancient time. Then as now, it seems to me, such opinions show an incapacity to overcome the prejudice against the refined and precious form of his images, an incapacity to mediate his total cinematic production through single films, an inability to resist labelling him an aesthete and a great decadent. "We have an extraordinarily dogmatic and formalist idea of decadence," warned Lukacs in his reflections about the struggle between progress and reaction. "I know that there are critics who still consider Thomas Mann a petit-bourgeois, decadent writer. This shows that the continuing polemic against formalism is based on banal premises which fail to focus on the real contrasts between realism and formalism."
In 1960 I ventured to write an essay pointing out the parallels between Thomas Mann and Luchino Visconti. Like the German writer, I wrote, the Italian director had aristocratic origins and, like Mann, had become selfconscious, placing his art and his characters at a crossroad (I was writing, then, of the early Visconti). I maintained that Ossessione was akin to Mann's The Magic Mountain because it signalled the beginning of the struggle between progress and reaction; that La Terra Trema (the ideological and artistic peak of neorealism) recalled Joseph and His Brothers in its epic sweep, cyclical vision, and bridging between the internal and social world; that Senso, like Budenbrooks, was an epos of decadence, a story of the decline of a class; that Rocco and His Brothers had clearly alluded in its title to Mann.
In that 1960 essay, I emphasized that even Visconti's apparently natural realism was, like Mann's, a critical realism, which--this is Lukacs' judgment on Mann--did not exclude perspective but was incapable of representing the ideal of future man. Visconti's vanquished/conquerors, once they gained consciousness of themselves, tended to move toward a precise goal, but they stopped temporarily before the problem of how to develop the newly-gained knowledge of themselves.
Visconti's refined images were not mere artificial, formal experiments, I remarked in 1960 and continue to argue now. To call them "photographic compositions," and not to proceed to their analysis, to identify Visconti as "decadent"--all this is to reinforce Lukacs's thesis that we, indeed, have a banal idea of decadence. Although in his youth, Visconti aped the playboy type his social position invited him to ape (very young, his hobby was horses, and he was fascinated by Alain Fournier's "domaine inconnu"), as soon as his artistic activity began, he chose anthropomorphic cinema, a vision of representation that underlined the dangers of a decadent (and defeatist) view of life.
Evidently, one needs to distinguish, as Walter Binni reminded us in 1936, between "poetics" and "poetry"; between "programmed poetics" and "process poetics." It is appropriate to capture the contradictions of an artist--the critical consciousness an artist has of his art, his goals, his methods, and the possible collision of all these in the final product. But one must also remember, as Binni said, that decadence and decadentism are not equivalent even if they look so related etymologically that the second term seems a historicization of the first. Thus I can affirm, from studying Senso, that the film was not "decadentist" but about decadence. The film's refined elegance, much vilified for appearing to idealize and mourn an oppressive class, underscored the decadence of that world.
There is no doubt, on the other hand, that Visconti bore traces of decadentism: it suffices to remember the sympathy he had for the prostitute of White Nights and for Nadia in Rocco and His Brothers. He had a presentiment of cultural decline and of a decidedly unavoidable crisis. The consciousness of living at the conclusion of a historical cycle, that would bring about civilization's end instigated a personal obsession with death, in the deepest sense. All the same, should it be assumed that these aspects of Visconti produced, even before Rocco and His Brothers and Il lavoro, an aesthetic hedonism? Is it not more likely that, beginning with The Leopard, he showed sympathy for ultra-refined and exhausted old times and that h is sense of being at the crossroads of history was being challenged by mournful regret--in short, that he shared with the romantics a melancholy passion for death?
In La Terra Trema, the idea of historical change was articlulated in quite an opposite spirit from the ambivalence, noted earlier, of later times. In this landmark film, the meaning and context conveyed by the form were not only signs of struggle but also of a critique of utopian socialism's facile illusions. La Terra Trema underscored the difference between personal revolution--destined to fail if isolated--and, "Revolution" in the utopian, Marxian sense. 'Ntoni's conflict was Visconti's first ideological expression of the exigencies of a still immature proletariat that was becoming aware of the contradictions within society and was tending toward resolving them. Such a resolution was doomed because of the inadequate ideological preparation of the proletariat itself. Visconti's 'Ntoni represented the individual's moral strength colliding with the collective weakness of a historically immature proletariat; fully aware himself of oppression, he suffered the distrust of his ideologically unprepared companions, who would have preferred to avert a confrontation with their exploiters rather than jeopardize the means of meager subsistence the exploiters grudgingly provided. The resolution of contradictions in La Terra Trema was, therefore, deliberately sabotaged by Visconti's intention to expose the naivete of utopian solutions. This is not decadentism. This profound historical expose is not the mark of a "tourist of grief," as Visconti's immersion in the Sicilian tragedy, indeed the tragedy of the whole South, was derisively dismissed by negative critics of La Terra Trema.
Should one abandon oneself to decadence or struggle against it? Until Rocco and His Brothers, Visconti had clearly expressed this alternative. Thus, one could argue that he was a poet of decadence, but, at the same time, that he was also its critic--and not just on an autobiographical scale. Senso demonstrated the director's acute reading of Buddenbrooks. In the person of Christian Buddenbrook, the conflict between the new era and the subversion of the old patrician bourgeoisie absolutely dissolves the old morality. The same forces of dissolution operate on the person of Christian's brother, Thomas, who represses them with severe discipline. Whereas Christian disintegrates as a human being, Thomas molds himself to the spirit of the new bourgeoise. We find an analogy of the Buddenbrook brothers in Senso's Mahler and Ussoni, two characters whose dialectical juxtaposition represented the dual personality of Visconti just as Thomas was actually, although secretly and subconsciously, Christian's double.
After Rocco and His Brothers, Visconti fell victim to the moral crisis of the sixties, passing from revolution to disillusionment, to pessimism, and to a retreat into inwardness. For him, the dilemma was no longer a choice between Gramsci and Croce, between realism and naturalism. The threads of decadence were no longer woven within the fabric of the imperatives of a great historicaVmorat tapestry. The theme of Visconti's Death in Venice was not the same as that of Mann's novella, which draws a parallel between decadence in society and decadence in traditional art. The different historical contexts in which each author lived make strict adaptation impossible. A comparative reading of the two texts reveals that Visconti articulated within his Aschenbach, on the one hand, the defeat of his own aspirations and, on the other hand, a confession of his sexual "difference" as a homosexual--a "difference" meant as sin, demonic possession, and regarded with pity.
In the film, Aschenbach's denial of the demonic roots of art and his affirmation that beauty was a result of wisdom, truth, and dignity became the sign of a useless protest. His friend's cynicism prevailed. Borrowed from Mann's Dr. Faustus, the character of Aschenbach's friend in Death in Venice was an echo of Senso's Franz Mahler, a character who embodied moral exhaustion. In fact, from Death in Venice on, everything Visconti created was pervaded by insecurity and anxiety toward death, and his creations betrayed a desire for self-destruction and annihilation.
The Innocent was the last chapter of Visconti's personal and artistic autobiography. With an authentic epiphany, the film opened on a close-up of the director's hands slowly turning the pages of a photograph album. The dual personality of Ussoni/Mahler, which had once co-existed dramatically yet dialectically, had made of Visconti a poet and critic of decadence, a duality dissolved in his latest films. He ended with characters who were no longer vanquished conquerors but, like Tullio Hermil in the adaptation of Gabriele D'Annunzio's novel, plainly vanquished.
Nevertheless, I think it would be a mistake to consider The Innocent dannunziano, that is, embodying D'Annunzio's particular glorification of decadence; it would be inaccurate to equate the protagonist of D'Annunzio's third novel in the cycle of The Romance of the Rose with Visconti himself. The Tullio Hermil character served Visconti as a vehicle to utter Verlaine's dictum, "I am the empire of extreme decadence." I maintain that Visconti's creative domain remained an "empire," and I don't mean in the realm of cartoon strips Uumettil, as some have argued.
With his accustomed visual flair, Visconti underscored in his last film the false echo--additionally "deaf' and dark--of the novel, indeed, of the story itself, sumptuously melodrarntic and fixated on longings for pleasure. How did it come about that Visconti made The Innocent? How did the vanquished conquerors of his early career evolve into the mere vanquished ones? The creative progress of this great artist represents a paradigm of the progress of culture from the post-war to our days--and I don't mean only Italian film culture. Many modern intellectuals have followed the same path: starting from a position of protest, they later show symptoms of impotence and fatigue, sometimes even indifference and, worse, co-option, overwhelmed by the shadow of power.