Visconti
Explorations of Beauty and Decay

The first thorough study of the Italian filmmaker, Luchino Visconti.

Henry Bacon (Author)

9780521599603, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 28 March 1998

300 pages
22.7 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.528 kg

In this study, the first to consider Luchino Visconti's entire works, Henry Bacon examines the films of one of Italy's pre-eminent filmmakers against the cultural, historical, and biographical contexts in which they were made. Through analysis of his achievements, Visconti also emerges as a twentieth-century inheritor and renewer of the nineteenth-century narrative tradition, especially that of the novel and the opera.

Introduction
Part I. Visconti and neorealism: 1. Ossessione
2. The background, theory, and practice of neorealism
3. La Terra Trema
4. Bellissima
5. Our Women
Part II. The Risorgimento Films: 6. Senso
7. The Leopard
Part III. The Family and Modern Italian Society: 8. Visconti's two families
9. Rocco and his brothers
10. Sandra
11. The Witch Burned Alive
12. Conversation piece
Part IV. Visconti and Germany: 13. Visconti, Thomas Mann and two aspects of Europe
14. The Job
15. The Damned
16. Death in Venice
17. Ludwig
Part V. Visconti as an interpreter of European literature: 18. Experiencing literature and cinema
19. White Nights
20. The Stranger 21
Remembrance of things past
22. The Innocent
Filmography
Stage productions
Unrealised film projects
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Films, cinema [APF]