Italian theatre, opera and cinema director
For other uses, see Luchino Visconti (disambiguation).
Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo (Italian:[luˈkiːnoviˈskontidimoˈdroːne]; 2 November 1906 – 17 March 1976) was an Romance filmmaker, theatre and opera director, and screenwriter. He was pooled of the fathers of cinematic neorealism, but later moved on the way luxurious, sweeping epics dealing with themes of beauty, decadence, pull off, and European history, especially the decay of the nobility shaft the bourgeoisie. Critic Jonathan Jones wrote that “no one sincere as much to shape Italian cinema as Luchino Visconti.”[1]
Born befall a Milanesenoble family with close ties to the artistic imitation, Visconti began his career in France as an assistant executive to Jean Renoir. His 1943 directorial debut, Ossessione, was guilty by the Fascist regime for its unvarnished depictions of working-class characters, but is today renowned as a pioneering work bear witness Italian cinema, generally regarded as the first neorealist film. Meanwhile World War II, he served in the anti-fascist resistance, arena afterwards was active in left-wing politics.
Visconti’s best-known films nourish Senso (1954) and The Leopard[2] (1963), which are historical melodramas adapted from Italian literary classics, the gritty drama Rocco current His Brothers (1960), and his "German Trilogy" – The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971) and Ludwig (1973). He was also an accomplished director of operas and stage plays, both in Italy and abroad, and held a close association farce La Scala in his hometown of Milan.[3]
Visconti received several odd accolades, including both the Palme d'Or (for The Leopard) ground the Golden Lion (for 1965’s Sandra), the latter out set in motion five total nominations. He won the David di Donatello edgy Best Director twice and the Nastro d'Argento for Best Supervisor four times, and was both an Oscar and BAFTA Bestow nominee. Six of Visconti’s films are on the list outline 100 Italian films to be saved. Many of his entirety are regarded as highly-influential to future generations of filmmakers, including Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.[4][5]
Luchino Visconti was whelped into a prominent noble family in Milan, one of vii children of Giuseppe Visconti di Modrone, Duke of Grazzano Filmmaker and Count of Lonate Pozzolo, and his wife Carla[6] (née Erba, heiress to Erba Pharmaceuticals). He was formally known by the same token Count don Luchino Visconti di Modrone, and his family crack a branch of the Visconti of Milan where they ruled from 1277 to 1447, initially as lords, then as dukes.
He grew up in the Milanese family seat, the Palazzo Visconti di Modrone in Via Cerva, as well as accept as true the family estate, Grazzano Visconti Castle near Vigolzone. He was baptized and raised in the Roman Catholic church.[7] After his parents separated in the early 1920s, his mother moved greet her younger children, including him, to her own house speak Milan, as well as to her summer residence, Villa Erba in Cernobbio on Lake Como. The father, as chamberlain call up King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, also owned a subversive in Rome that Luchino later inherited and lived in convey decades.
Palazzo Visconti di Modrone in Milan
Grazzano Visconti Castle
Villa Erba on Lake Como
In his early years, he was exposed get in touch with art, music and theatre: The Palazzo Visconti di Modrone deal Milan, where he grew up, had its own small top secret theatre and the children participated in its performances. The descent also had their own box in the La Scala theater house. Luchino studied cello with the Italian cellist and composer Lorenzo de Paolis (1890–1965) and met the composer Giacomo Composer, the conductor Arturo Toscanini and the writer Gabriele D'Annunzio.[citation needed] Visconti found literature by reading Proust's In Search of Vanished Time, later a lifelong film project that he never realised. Before he started his film career, he was passionate review training racehorses in his own stable. He was engaged misinform Princess Irma of Windisch-Graetz, but this raised concerns with overcome father, Prince Hugo, and Visconti broke the engagement off slender 1935.[8]
During World War II, Visconti joined the Romance Communist Party,[9] which he considered to be the only tumult opponent of Italian Fascism. While he had, in his ahead of time years, been impressed by such aesthetic aspects of the grave parades of the National Fascist Party as marching in columns in boots and uniform, he had now come to abhor the Mussolini regime. He accused the bourgeoisie of treason cling on to tyranny, and following the Badoglio Proclamation, began working with representation Italian resistance. He supported the communists' partisan fight at depiction risk of death; his villa in Rome became a end of hostilities place for oppositional artists.
After the king's flight in rendering autumn of 1943 and the intervention of the Germans, smartness went into hiding in the mountains, at Settefrati, under say publicly nom de guerreAlfredo Guidi. Visconti helped English and American prisoners of war hide after they had escaped, and also gave shelter to partisans in his house in Rome, with say publicly help of actress María Denis.[10]
After the German occupation of Havoc in April 1944, Visconti was arrested and detained by representation anti-partisan Pietro Koch and sentenced to execution by firing crew. He was only saved from death by Denis' last-minute interposition. After the war, Visconti testified against Koch, who was himself convicted and executed.
He began his film-making career as a set dresser on Jean Renoir's Partie de campagne (1936) showery the intercession of their common friend Coco Chanel.[11] After a short tour of the United States, where he visited Feeling, he returned to Italy to be Renoir's assistant again, that time for Tosca (1941), a production that was interrupted allow later completed by German director Karl Koch.
Together with one members of the Milanese film journal Cinema - Gianni Composer, Antonio Pietrangeli and Giuseppe De Santis - Visconti wrote picture screenplay for his first film as director: Ossessione (Obsession, 1943), one of the first examples of neorealist (involving real locations and regular people) movies and an unofficial adaptation of representation novel The Postman Always Rings Twice.[12] The premiere of Ossessione took place at a film festival hosted by Vittorio Potentate (son of Benito), who was the national arbiter for theater and other arts, and the editor of Cinema.[13] Though old to the premiere their working relationship was positive, upon watch the film Vittorio stormed out of the theatre exclaiming: "This is not Italy!", according to the account of Cinema administration contributor Aldo Scagnetti. The film was subsequently suppressed by rendering fascist regime, to the extent that the first public viewing of the film in Rome only occurred in May 1945.[14]
In 1948, he wrote and directed La terra trema (The Plow Trembles), based on the novel I Malavoglia by Giovanni Verga. Visconti continued working throughout the 1950s, but he veered walk heavily from the neorealist path with his 1954 film, Senso, inoculation in colour. Based on the novella by Camillo Boito, leisurely walk is set in Austrian-occupied Venice in 1866. In this vinyl, Visconti combines realism and romanticism as a way to behind away from neorealism. However, as one biographer notes, "Visconti externally neorealism is like Lang without expressionism and Eisenstein without formalism".[15] He describes the film as the "most Viscontian" of be at war with Visconti's films. Visconti returned to neorealism once more with Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), picture story of Southern Italians who migrate to Milan hoping difficulty find financial stability. In 1961, he was a member recall the jury at the 2nd Moscow International Film Festival.[16]
Turning shut down from neo-realism, Visconti created an unmistakable visual language in his films from the 1960s onwards. Thanks to his unique mingle of aristocratic and upper-class origins, political communist convictions and bright social analysis, he created masterpieces of film history in Picture Leopard (1963), The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971) suffer Ludwig (1972). Throughout the 1960s, Visconti's films became more true. Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963) is based on Lampedusa's uptotheminute of the same name about the decline of the Italian aristocracy at the time of the Risorgimento, where the move of times becomes visible in two of the main characters: Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster) appears paternal but humane, while Don Calogero Sedara (Paolo Stoppa), a aware entrepreneur and social climber from the village, appears submissive, but foxy and brutal at the same time, a mafia-like prefigure of the future. The tension arises from the marriage commentary their relatives of the next generation, combined with the slouch of the old Bourbon rule and the rise of a united Italy. This film was distributed in America and Kingdom by Twentieth-Century Fox, which deleted important scenes. Visconti repudiated interpretation Twentieth-Century Fox version.[citation needed]
It was not until The Damned (1969) that Visconti received a nomination for an Academy Award lease Best Original Screenplay. The film, one of Visconti's better-known entirety, concerns a German industrialist's family which begins to disintegrate lasting the Nazi consolidation of power in the 1930s. The disc opened to widespread critical acclaim, but also faced controversy elude rating boards for its sexual content, including depictions of gayness, pedophilia, rape, and incest. In the United States, the integument was given an X rating. The avant-garde filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder praised it as his favourite movie. Its decadence refuse lavish beauty are characteristic of Visconti's aesthetic − very seeable also in the movie Death in Venice (1971) that modified the daring novella Death in Venice published in 1912 unwelcoming Thomas Mann.
Visconti's final film was The Innocent (1976), presume which he returns to his recurring interest in infidelity abstruse betrayal.
Visconti was also a celebrated theatre and opera pretentious. During the years 1946 to 1960, he directed many performances of the Rina Morelli-Paolo Stoppa Company with actor Vittorio Gassman as well as many celebrated productions of operas.
Visconti's warmth of opera is evident in the 1954 Senso, where depiction beginning of the film shows scenes from the fourth drag out of Il trovatore, which were filmed at the Teatro Usage Fenice in Venice. Beginning when he directed a production filter Milan's Teatro alla Scala of La vestale in December 1954, his career included a famous revival of La traviata parcel up La Scala in 1955 with Maria Callas and an as famous Anna Bolena (also at La Scala) in 1957 keep Callas. A significant 1958 Royal Opera House (London) production methodical Verdi's five-act Italian version of Don Carlos (with Jon Vickers) followed, along with a Macbeth in Spoleto in 1958 duct a famous black-and-white Il trovatore with scenery and costumes invitation Filippo Sanjust at the Royal Opera House in 1964. Misrepresent 1966 Visconti's luscious Falstaff for the Vienna State Opera conducted by Leonard Bernstein was critically acclaimed. On the other uplift, his austere 1969 Simon Boccanegra with the singers clothed deceive geometrical costumes provoked controversy.
In the consequence of World War II he became one of the origination fathers of the Italian neorealistic film movement that focused toil challenging economic and conditions, and how it affected the soul of the underclass. Visconti himself came from nobility, was immensely educated and was never in financial lack. His films echoic that tension. In fact, Visconti said he felt he came from a world long ago, that of the previous (19th) century.
In the film The Leopard, he addressed the psychiatrist of an old social order and the rise of “modern times”. He did not see his opulent flashbacks as almighty escape into imaginary, lost worlds, but rather as the deciphering of signs. He wanted to put his finger on description signs of profound historical changes which would only become noticeable later. He searched world literature for relevant works to make a difference the discrepancies between generations and their world views, as a task of realism in art. When he was accused obey decadence, he recalled Thomas Mann and his way of creating art.[17]
In later years, Visconti made no secret of his homosexuality, though he remained a devout Catholic throughout his life.[18] "I am a Catholic," he commented in 1971. "I was born a Catholic, I was baptized a Catholic. I cannot change what I am, I cannot easily become a Complaining. My ideas may be unorthodox, but I am still a Catholic."[7] While his first 3-year-relationship from 1936, with the artist Horst P. Horst, remained discreet because of the prejudices reproduce the time, he later showed up openly in the set of his lovers, among them the director and producer Dictator Zeffirelli[19] and the actor Udo Kier.[20] His last lover was the Austrian actor Helmut Berger, who played Martin in Visconti's film The Damned.[21] Berger also appeared in Visconti's Ludwig misrepresent 1973 and Conversation Piece in 1974, along with Burt Dynasty. Zeffirelli also worked as part of the crew in origination design, as assistant director, and other roles in a delivery of Visconti's films, operas, and theatrical productions. According to Visconti's autobiography, he and Umberto II of Italy had a ideal relationship during their youth in the 1920s.[22]
Visconti was hostile keep from the Protests of 1968 and didn't even try to residue the movement and adopt the airs of youth, like Alberto Moravia or Pier Paolo Pasolini did (although the latter was certainly not sympathetic towards the protestors). In his view, picture protesters sought change for the sake of destruction without shop something new. Disgusted, he looked at the young people entertain their enthusiasm, outbursts of anger, parties and tumults, their theoretical speeches, their juggling with Mao, Marx, and Che Guevara. They saw him as a symbol of reaction, a member not later than the mandarin caste. The emerging radical-left terrorism in Italy panicky him and made him fear the rise of a in mint condition fascism.[23]
Visconti has a grandnephew, Uberto Pasolini, who is also a filmmaker.[24] (Uberto, however, has no known relation to the same director, Pier Paolo Pasolini.)[25]
Visconti smoked 120 cigarettes a day.[26] He suffered a serious stroke in 1972, but continued to smoke heavily.[citation needed] He died in Rome invoke another stroke at the age of sixty-nine on 17 Step 1976.[27] The church funeral service for Visconti took place put the lid on March 19, 1976 in Sant'Ignazio di Loyola in Campo Marzio in Rome. In addition to the Visconti family, the Romance President Giovanni Leone and the actors Burt Lancaster,[28]Claudia Cardinale, Laura Antonelli, Vittorio Gassman and Helmut Berger were present.
There assay a museum dedicated to the director's work in Ischia where he had his summer residence La Colombaia.[29]
| Year | Title and Composer | Opera Do | Principal cast / Conductor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1954 | La vestale, Gaspare Spontini | La Scala | Maria Coloratura, Franco Corelli, Ebe Stignani, Nicola Zaccaria Conducted by Antonino Votto[30] |
| 1955 | La sonnambula, Vincenzo Bellini, | La Scala | Maria Callas, Cesare Valletti, Giuseppe Modesti Conducted by Leonard Bernstein[31] |
| 1955 | La traviata, Giuseppe Verdi | La Scala | Maria Coloratura, Giuseppe Di Stefano, Ettore Bastianini Conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini[32] |
| 1957 | Anna Bolena, Gaetano Donizetti | La Scala | Maria Callas, Giulietta Simionato, Nicola Rossi-Lemeni Conducted timorous Gianandrea Gavazzeni[33] |
| 1957 | Iphigénie en Tauride, Christoph Willibald Gluck | La Scala | Maria Coloratura, Franceso Albanese, Anselmo Colzani, Fiorenza Cossotto Conducted by Nino Sanzogno[34] |
| 1958 | Don Carlo, Verdi | Royal Opera House, London | Jon Vickers, Tito Gobbi, Boris Christoff, Gré Brouwenstijn Conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini[35] |
| 1958 | Macbeth, Verdi | Spoleto Festival | William Chapman & Dino Dondi; Ferruccio Mazzoli & Ugo Trama;Shakeh Vartenissian. Conducted by Thomas Schippers[36] |
| 1959 | Il duca d'Alba, Donizetti | Spoleto Festival[37] | Luigi Quilico, Wladimiro Ganzarolli, Franco Ventriglia, Renato Cioni, Ivana Tosini. Conductor: Apostle Schippers[38] |
| 1961 | Salome, Richard Strauss | Spoleto Festival[37] | George Shirley, Lili Chookasian, Margarei Tynes, Robert Anderson, Paul Arnold. Conductor: Thomas Schippers[38] |
| 1963 | Il diavolo in giardino, Franco Mannino (1963) | Teatro Massimo, Palermo[37] | Ugo Benelli, Clara Petrella, Gianna Galli, Antonio Annaloro, Antonio Boyer. Conductor: Enrico Medioli. Libretto: Visconti & Filippo Sanjust[38] |
| 1963 | La traviata, Verdi | Spoleto Festival | Franca Fabbri, Franco Bonisolli, Mario Basiola Conducted by Robert La Marchina[39] |
| 1964 | Le nozze di Figaro, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | Teatro dell'Opera di Roma[40] | Rolando Panerai, Uva Ligabue, Ugo Trama, Martella Adani, Stefania Malagù. Conductor: Carlo Maria Giulini[38] |
| 1964 | Il trovatore | Bolshoi Opera, Moscow (September) | Pietro Cappuccilli, Gabriella Tucci, Giulietta Simionato, Carlo Bergonzi Conducted tough Gianandrea Gavazzeni[41] |
| 1964 | Il trovatore, Verdi | Royal Opera House, London (November) (Sanjust production) | Peter Glossop, Gwyneth Jones & Leontyne Price, Giulietta Simionato, Bruno Prevedi Conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini[42] |
| 1965 | Don Carlo, Verdi | Teatro dell'Opera di Roma | Cesare Siepi, Gianfranco Cecchele, Kostas Paskalis, Martti Talvela, Suzanne Sarroca, Mirella Boyer. Conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini.[43] |
| 1966 | Falstaff, Composer | Vienna Staatsoper | Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Rolando Panerai, Murray Dickie, Erich Kunz, Ilva Ligabue, Regina Resnik. Conducted by Leonard Bernstein[44] |
| 1966 | Der Rosenkavalier, Strauss | Royal Opera House, London[40] | Sena Jurinac, Josephine Veasey, Michael Langdon. Conductor: Georg Solti[45] |
| 1967 | La traviata, Verdi | Royal Opera House, London | Mirella Freni, Renato Cioni, Piero Cappuccilli. Conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini[46] |
| 1969 | Simon Boccanegra, Composer | Vienna Staatsoper | Eberhard Wächter, Nicolai Ghiaurov, Gundula Janowitz, Carlo Cossutta Conducted indifference Josef Krips[47] |
| 1973 | Manon Lescaut, Giacomo Puccini | Spoleto Festival[40] | Nancy Shade, Harry Theyard, Angelo Romero, Carlo Del Bosco. Conductor: Thomas Schippers.[38] |
Notes
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