Write with the eyes. Luchino Visconti, director, gay and believer
Text by Lavinia Capogna (to my love S.)Cinema is the most recent art, he is one hundred years old and between the 1920s and 1970s he met his golden age.
Of great importance was the Italian cinema that was the art that since 1945 redeemed the melense films of fascism and showed true Italy, the rubble, the physical and moral wounds but also the hopes and projects.
This new way of making cinema, also inspired by the French realism of the late 1920s and thirty of directors such as Jean Vigo and Jean Renoir, had among his greats a highly talented filmmaker who already at 36 years old, in 1942 he anticipated Italian neorealism with "Obsession".
The film was the story of a forbidden love: that between a vagabond that was the beautiful Massimo Girotti and a married woman, Clara Calamai, Femme Fatali in regime films, but here a poor bored housewife.
Set in the Po Valley, the film was initially forbidden because it was strongly transgressive, it was taken from an American novel, "The postman always sounds twice" by James Caan, is shot, unlike the films of the time entirely made of Cinecittà, in the real exteriors of the Ferrarese is the story of an adultery.
Luchino Visconti makes a disruptive debut, filming the first neorealist film. In Milan on November 2, 1906 the director descended from the noble family who had the lordship in Milan and other cities in the Renaissance.
Sua madre,Carla Erba,ra figlia del fondatore della nota casa farmaceutica e Luchino l’amava moltissimo.
In his penultimate film "Family group in an interior" (1975) in the sober and lonely professor, Burt Lancaster, the mother will appear, dressed in delicate twenty hills and who has the features of Dominique Sanda, twenty years old. It is probably a re -enactment of Carla.
The father, Giuseppe Visconti, was a lover of literature and opera. The young Luchino, a cello scholar, then sent to the military academy in Pinerolo, aspiring writer, at 30 years of age he runs away to Paris where he falls in love with cinema, becoming assistant to the most important French filmmaker, Jean Renoir and in the living room of Coco Chanel meets the His first love, an anti -Nazi German photographer.
In Paris Visconti he attends anti -fascist exiles and becomes a communist. In Italy in 39 during the war he will support resistance by helping partisans and hiding people at risk of life.
In the world of cinema, Count Rosso will be called. His splendid work includes 16 films, theatrical and operistic regions, including Verdi's "La Traviata" with Maria Callas who raised a sensation.
Qui scriverò solo di qualche film. Il regista si dichiarò sempre credente. Nel 48 egli realizzò un capolavoro “La terra trema”,dal romanzo ‘I Malavoglia’ di Verga.
Il film, che narra la storia di una povera famiglia di pescatori in un paesino siciliano,è un miracolo di intensità e poesia.
Interamente recitato da attori non professionisti in dialetto venne fischiato nel 1948 alla Mostra del cinema di Venezia perché sui titoli di testa Visconti aveva scritto che “l’italiano non è la lingua dei poveri”.
In “Bellissima” Visconti lavora con Anna Magnani e nel 54 dirige un’altra star Alida Valli.In “Senso” il regista milanese fa infuriare la Democrazia Cristiana(DC) retriva e bigotta con un amore proibito e adultero.
E’ accusato di aver offeso il Risorgimento,visto dai potenti solo in modo retorico e apologetico e senza i suoi elementi socialisti e popolari.
In “Senso”,ambientato in una splendida Venezia del 1866, Livia(la bella e intensa Alida Valli)è sposata con un anziano nobile filoaustriaco ma è di idee libertarie e imprevedibilmente si innamora di un tenente austriaco Franz Mahler,interpretato dall’attore gay americano Farley Granger.
Ma Franz è un opportunista che ottenendo da Livia i soldi che lei ha in custodia dai patrioti garibaldini riesce a pagare un dottore e a sfuggire alla battaglia di Custoza.
“Senso” ha l’andamento di un melodramma e i sentimenti della contessa Livia è un personaggio splendidamente ottocentesco con la sua ingenuità e la sua passione.
Visconti's cinema has strong literary and musical influences such as that of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the other brilliant gay director declared of the golden era of the seventh art, has strong pictorial influences, by ancient Greece and medieval.
In 1963 Luchino Visconti returned to Sicily to shoot "Il Gattopardo" with Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale.
Declaredly gay and reserved are attributed to the director a few but important love stories such as the one with Alain Delon and then with Helmut Berger, a former ski teacher, who Visconti transforms into a good actor into "The fall of the gods" and in the masterpiece "Ludwig "Also played by Romy Schneider.
Of the 71 is "Death in Venice", from the famous novel by Thomas Mann. A serious musician Aschenbach went in 1911 in a Venice where he is about to burst out the cholera and is fascinated by a Polish teenager Tadzio.
The musician is not a pedophile, there is nothing morbid or criminal in him. Tadzio is a figure who represents beauty and Aschenbach does not want to talk to us but only admire it.
In 72 a serious illness makes the director's life fear that in difficult health he managed to shoot two films again and died in 1976, at 70 years old.
Luchino Visconti era appassionato del suo lavoro,un geniale cineasta che seppe raccontare con sensibilità i drammi,le passioni,le gioie delle persone.
Considerato spesso un decadente fu invece un rivoluzionario nel cinema italiano.
