Luchino Visconti
Luchino Visconti
RANKED:
7. La Terra Trema (1948)
Originally planned as a Communist propaganda film, "La Terra Trema" was Luchino Visconti's realistic vision of modern life for the fishermen of Aci Trezza. Using real locations, non-professional actors, and a partially non-fictional plot, the film demonstrates the unyielding hold that capitalism has over this new, modern Italy. When one family tries to break free of this system and the powerful wholesalers, their lives begin to fall apart. Any attempt to break free of the system will only cause chaos and pain, thereby ensuring compliance. Visconti's camera stays in Aci Trezza, making the viewer feel just as trapped by this environment as the characters. There is nowhere to run to and there is no place to hide this oppression and economic despair. "La Terra Trema" continues the Italian neo-realist movement in striking fashion and is everything the movement is and should stand for.
6. White Nights (1957)
In adapting the 1848 short story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Luchino Visconti details the nights spent by two lonely lovers in his 1957 film "White Nights." After meeting by chance one night, two lonely souls meet again each night thereafter to assist a woman who is searching for a man she loved a year ago and waits patiently for on a bridge every night. Starring Marcello Mastroianni and Maria Schell as this couple, the film has a dreamlike quality to it. The quiet desperation and loneliness of its characters create the conditions for love and heartbreak, friendship and grievance, and in the end, a bittersweet final moment. Visconti did Dostoyevsky's work a great service with "White Nights."
5. Bellissima (1951)
In teaming up with Luchino Visconti for his 1951 film "Bellissima," Anna Magnani delivers what is perhaps the greatest performance of her career. Playing an economically destitute mother who is desperate to get her daughter into the film industry, Magnani's emotions range from rage to humiliation to material love. Visconti continues to morph the style of neo-realism with this work and demonstrates how the low economic living standard of many Italians create a dependency on industry and big business. Because of this dependency, leverage can be used. "Bellissima" is a film full of characters bending over backwards to get close to the source of this industry, power, and financial security. Magnani's mother protagonist is just one of many who must doing everything in her power to secure a better future for herself and her child.
4. Ossessione (1943)
Many film scholars would argue as to what the ignition point of the Italian neorealist film movement is. My money is placed firmly on Luchino Visconti's 1943 film "Ossessione." Filmed during the Mussolini fascist regime, the film starts many of the signifiers that Italian neorealism would be known for. Most notably, the gritty and grainy realism instilled in the cinematography. This realism and grittiness echoes the stark reality of its economically destitute characters, who continually are pursuing a desirable life for themselves. However, only tragedy awaits every decision they make. The film was eventually banned by the fascist government and wasn't released in the United States until 1976. But its impact on an entire film movement are immeasurable. The film movement wouldn't come into full effect until a couple of years later when the fascist government fell. But its audacious "Ossessione" that set the tone.
3. Senso (1954)
Luchino Visconti's first color film, 1954's "Senso" is basically an inverse of his debut, the ignition of the Italian neo-realist movement, 1943's "Ossessione." In "Senso" the grainy, low-budget neo-realism is replaced with lush, colorful, picturesque, and painterly images. Taking place in 1866 at the start of the Italian-Austrian war of unification, a countess falls for a Austrian soldier and meets this lover in secret and even goes to great lengths to hide him. This all ends in tragedy, of course. The rich, textured images aides in the film's themes regarding our characters choosing blind sensual passion as some sort of antidote to the chaos that envelops them. Our countess creates this fantasy love affair with our Austrian lieutenant and even betrays her family and leaves her comfort and abundance to chase something that never existed to begin with. Our blind passions and sensual obsessions are just hollow opioids that will only sour before our eyes.
2. Rocco and His Brothers (1960)
With his 1960 masterwork "Rocco and His Brothers," Luchino Visconti turns an intimate family drama into a sprawling three hour epic. Centering on a brother who tries to take care of his disintegrating family in the wake of his father's death and their immigration to the industrialized northern part of Italy, the film combines the emotional components of a family melodrama with the socio-economic critical lens that Visconti oft attaches to his works. Obviously, there is a neo-realist style that Visconti employs, but his injection of visual emotionality heightens the film into more expressionistic waters. On top of this, some of these plot points, along with themes involving the immigrant experience, shirking the system to get by, and the attempt to keep a family together despite their complication was an enormous influence on Francis Ford Coppola when he made "The Godfather" twelve years later. "Rocco and His Brothers" is Visconti at his most masterful, and is perhaps the most complex and compelling work in all his oeuvre.
1. The Leopard (1963)
The 1963 book-to-screen adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's 1958 novel "The Leopard" is perhaps the greatest film that Italian director Luchino Visconti ever directed. This is quite the statement, given the director's illustrious career and his signification as the founder of the Italian neo-realist movement. But it is "The Leopard" that holds this distinction, simply due to its completeness as a piece, its epic quality both in scope and emotion, and its ability to communicate the existential thoughts of its protagonist through its visual style and Visconti's apt hand. The story centers on a prince's attempts to keep his family in power during the Italian re-unification of the mid-19th century. Despite Visconti's breadth and scope, the film feels completely intimate. The changing landscape of social reform, of political realignment, and of one's own place in their respective hierarchy are all universal themes that emanate from "The Leopard." It is a film that so adeptly communicates a range of themes from the existential to the intimate, from the social to the political, and from across region and generation. "The Leopard" is Visconti's crowning achievement and is one of the greatest cinematic experiences of all time.
Comments
Post a Comment