Introduction: About Luchino Visconti

Aristocrat and Marxist, master equally of harsh realism and sublime melodrama, Luchino Visconti (1906-1976) was without question one of the greatest film directors of the mid-twentieth century. Immensely rich and a bit of a dilettante, he went to Paris in the 1930s to escape the stifling culture of Fascist Italy. In Paris he met, and fell in love with, the fashion photographer Horst P Horst. But even more formative was his meeting with Jean Renoir in the heady political atmosphere of the Popular Front.

In 1937 he worked with Renoir on Une partie de campagne and was imbued with a lifelong love of cinema. Returning to Italy he took part in the Resistance and became a convinced Marxist, which he remained until his death. A leading light of the neo-realist movement in the 40s, he also acquired a reputation as an innovative theatre and opera director.

With the costume spectacular Senso in 1954 he applied his theatrical talents to a more melodramatic form, while retaining his commitment to a Marxist interpretation of Italy's troubled history. From then on, he mixed contemporary subjects - as in Rocco and His Brothers (1960) - with a meditation on the past and on a world which is lost but has left a deep mark on the present. The focus of almost all his films is families, either the disintegration of large families or the breakdown of couples, with betrayal - whether of marriages or of political causes - a recurring motif. Although his films usually end unhappily, in the earlier ones some hope is expressed for the future. But in his later films his vision becomes darker as he chronicles the collapse of dynasties and his personal focus turns inward on to themes of sadness, ageing and death. An autobiographical strain emerges, first in The Leopard (1963), but also in Death in Venice (1970) and even more powerfully in the sublime Ludwig (1973). During the making of Ludwig he suffered a severe stroke, from which he never fully recovered.

In all his films, regardless of period or subject matter, visual splendour is combined with meticulous realism and deep historical and psychological insight. Although he put a lot of himself into his films, he did not make them for himself, but always for an audience. Famous as the embodiment of art cinema, films such as The Leopard and Rocco were also hugely popular at the box office, particularly in Italy but also worldwide.

At the same time, however, Visconti never compromised his art. He was fanatical about detail, but even more so about the integrity of his vision, which he expected the audience to be able to share.

Sometimes his overpowering self-belief led to errors of judgement but, with the possible exception of his adaptation of Camus's The Stranger (1967), none of his films was a failure with the public and the critics at the same time. In the bfi retrospective we showed all of his films, including those never released in this country, such as the Resistance film Days of Glory (1945). A number of new prints have been struck, based in many cases on restored negatives, enabling many of the films to be seen for the first time in all their splendour

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

More on Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's revised Luchino Visconti from bfi Publishing.