| Description |
ix, 285 pages ; 24 cm |
| Contents |
1. Visconti and Neorealism. Ossessione. La terra trema. Bellissima. Our Women -- 2. The Risorgimento Films. Senso. The Leopard -- 3. The Family and Modern Italian Society. Rocco and His Brothers. Sandra. The Witch Burned Alive. Conversation Piece -- 4. Visconti and Germany. The Job. The Damned. Death in Venice. Ludwig -- 5. Visconti as an Interpreter of European Literature. White Nights. The Stranger. The Stranger as film and literature. Remembrance of Things Past. The Innocent |
| Summary |
In this study, the first in the English language to consider Luchino Visconti's entire oeuvre, Henry Bacon examines the films of one of Italy's preeminent filmmakers, against the cultural, historical, and biographical contexts in which they were made. The author focuses on three fundamental themes of Visconti's cinematic output: his varying styles and strategies of audiovisual narration, which create enthralling images of individuals and societies at a given moment in their development; his ability to take literary works and other cultural influences into his possession and recreate them as a highly individualized cinema; and the interplay between the filmmaker's intense feeling for life, art, and beauty and his critical detachment, disillusion, and painful awareness of death and decay. In Bacon's analysis Visconti emerges as a twentieth-century inheritor and renewer of the nineteenth-century narrative tradition, especially that of the novel and the opera |
| Bibliography |
Filmography: pages 247-259 |
|
Includes bibliographical references (pages 273-278) and index |
| Subject |
Visconti, Luchino, 1906-1976 -- Criticism and interpretation.
|
|
Motion picture producers and directors -- Italy.
|
| LC no. |
97019635 |
| ISBN |
0521590574 |
|
0521599601 (paperback) |
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