Death in Venice | |
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Italian | Morte a Venezia |
Directed by | Luchino Visconti |
Screenplay by |
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Based on | Death in Venice by Thomas Mann |
Produced by | Luchino Visconti |
Starring | |
Cinematography | Pasqualino De Santis |
Edited by | Ruggero Mastroianni |
Production companies |
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Distributed by |
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Release dates |
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Running time | 130 minutes |
Countries | |
Language | English |
Budget | $2 million [3] |
Death in Venice (Italian : Morte a Venezia) is a 1971 historical drama film directed and produced by Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti, and adapted by Visconti and Nicola Badalucco from the 1912 novella of the same name by German author Thomas Mann. It stars Dirk Bogarde as Gustav von Aschenbach and Björn Andrésen as Tadzio, with supporting roles played by Mark Burns, Marisa Berenson, and Silvana Mangano, and was filmed in Technicolor by Pasqualino De Santis. The soundtrack consists of selections from Gustav Mahler's third and fifth symphonies, but characters in the film also perform pieces by Franz Lehár, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Modest Mussorgsky. Preceded by The Damned (1969) and followed by Ludwig (1973), the film is the second part of Visconti's thematic "German Trilogy".
The film premiered in London on 1 March 1971, and was entered into the 24th Cannes Film Festival. It received positive reviews from critics and won several accolades, including, at the 25th British Academy Film Awards, the awards for Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, and Best Sound, in addition to nominations for Best Film, Best Direction, and Best Actor in a Leading Role for Dirk Bogarde. For his work on the film, Visconti won the David di Donatello Award for Best Director. Retrospectively, Death in Venice was ranked the 235th greatest film of all time in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll, [4] the 14th greatest arthouse film of all time by The Guardian in 2010, [5] and the 27th greatest LGBT film of all time in a 2016 poll by the British Film Institute. [6]
Composer Gustav von Aschenbach travels to Venice for rest, due to serious health concerns. During his ship's arrival, an importunate and conspicuously made-up older man approaches Aschenbach with suggestive gestures and phrases, whereupon Aschenbach turns away indignantly. Aschenbach takes quarters in the beachside Grand Hotel des Bains on the Venice Lido. While awaiting dinner in the hotel's lobby, he notices a group of young Poles with their governess and mother, and becomes spellbound by the handsome boy Tadzio, whose casual dress and demeanor distinguishes him from his modest sisters. Tadzio's image causes Aschenbach to recall an increasingly emotional and heated conversation with his friend and student Alfred, in which they question whether beauty is created artistically or naturally, and if beauty, as a natural phenomenon, is superior to art.
In the following days, Aschenbach observes Tadzio playing and bathing. When he manages to get close to the boy in the hotel's elevator, Tadzio seems to throw a lascivious look at Aschenbach while exiting the lift. Returning to his room in an agitated state, Aschenbach remembers a particularly personal argument with Alfred, and he hesitantly decides to leave Venice. However, when his luggage is misplaced at the train station, he is relieved and delighted at the prospect of returning to the hotel in order to be near Tadzio again. Before his return, he sees an emaciated man collapse in the station concourse, and, when he attempts to investigate this, the flattering hotel manager speaks in a dismissive matter of exaggerated scandals in the foreign press.
Aschenbach adopts Tadzio as an artistic muse, but fails to master his passion for him and frequently loses himself in daydreams of the unattainable boy. When a travel agent on Saint Mark's Square hesitantly reports to Aschenbach that a cholera epidemic is sweeping through Venice, Aschenbach's attention falters and he fantasizes about warning Tadzio's mother of the danger while stroking her son's head. Though Aschenbach and Tadzio never converse, Tadzio notices he is being watched and responds with an occasional returned glance. Aschenbach follows Tadzio and his family to St Mark's Basilica, where he observes him praying. He gets a makeover from a chatty hairdresser, giving him a resemblance to the old man who had pestered him upon his arrival, and pursues Tadzio's family again, until he collapses near a well and bursts into a pained laughter. Back in his hotel room, Aschenbach dreams of a disastrous performance in Munich and Alfred's accusations afterward.
When Aschenbach learns that Tadzio's family will be leaving the hotel, he weakly makes his way to the nearly-deserted beach, where he watches with concern as Tadzio's game with an older boy degenerates into a wrestling match. Upon recovering, Tadzio strolls away and wades into the sea to the enraptured tones of Mahler's Adagietto . He slowly turns and looks toward the dying Aschenbach, then raises his arm and points off into the distance. Aschenbach tries to rise, but collapses in his deck chair, dead.
In Mann's novella, the character of Aschenbach is an author, but, for the film, Visconti made him a composer. This allows the musical score, in particular the Adagietto from Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony (which opens and closes the film) and sections from Mahler's Third Symphony, to represent Aschenbach's work. Apart from this change, and the addition of the scenes in which Aschenbach and a musician friend debate the degraded aesthetics of his music, the film is relatively faithful to the book.
In the second volume of his autobiography, Snakes and Ladders, Dirk Bogarde recounts how the film crew created his character's deathly white skin for the final scenes of the film, just as he dies. The makeup department tried various face paints and creams, but none were satisfactory, as they smeared. When a suitable cream was finally found and the scenes were shot, Bogarde recalls that his face began to burn terribly. The tube of cream was located, and, written on the side, was: "Keep away from eyes and skin". The director had ignored this warning and had various members of the film crew test it out on small patches of their skin, before finally having it applied to Bogarde's face.
In another volume of his memoirs, An Orderly Man, Bogarde relates that, after the finished film was screened for them by Visconti in Los Angeles, the Warner Bros. executives wanted to write off the project, fearing it would be banned in the United States for obscenity because of its subject matter. They eventually relented when a gala premiere was organized in London, with Elizabeth II and Princess Anne attending, to gather funds for the sinking Italian city of Venice.
In 2003, Björn Andrésen gave an interview to The Guardian in which he expressed his dislike of the fame Death in Venice brought him and discussed how he sought to distance himself from the objectifying image he acquired by playing Tadzio. [7] He stated that he disapproved of the film's subject matter, as "Adult love for adolescents is something that I am against in principle. Emotionally perhaps, and intellectually, I am disturbed by it – because I have some insight into what this kind of love is about", and also recounted attending the film's premiere at the Cannes Film Festival: "I was just 16 and Visconti and the team took me to a gay nightclub. Almost all the crew were gay. The waiters at the club made me feel very uncomfortable. They looked at me uncompromisingly as if I was a nice meaty dish...it was the first of many such encounters".
In 2021, Juno Films released The Most Beautiful Boy in the World . [8] It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 29, 2021. [9]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Death in Venice has a 71% approval rating based on 28 reviews, with an average score of 7.10 out of 10; the site's "critics consensus" reads: "Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice is one of his emptier meditations on beauty, but fans of the director will find his knack for sumptuous visuals remains intact". [10]
Derek Malcolm, in a 1971 review of the film for The Guardian wrote: "It is a very slow, precise, and beautiful film, ... an immensely formidable achievement, engrossing in spite of any doubts". [11]
Roger Ebert wrote: "I think the thing that disappoints me most about Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice is its lack of ambiguity. Visconti has chosen to abandon the subtleties of the Thomas Mann novel and present us with a straightforward story of homosexual love, and although that's his privilege, I think he has missed the greatness of Mann's work somewhere along the way". [12]
Film historian Lawrence J. Quirk wrote in his study The Great Romantic Films (1974): "Some shots of Björn Andrésen, the Tadzio of the film, could be extracted from the frame and hung on the walls of the Louvre or the Vatican in Rome". He stated that Tadzio does not represent just a pretty youngster as an object of perverted lust, but that novelist Mann and director-screenwriter Visconti intended him as a symbol of beauty in the realm of Michelangelo's David or Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa , the beauty that moved Dante to "seek ultimate aesthetic catharsis in the distant figure of Beatrice". [13]
In a 2003 review of the film for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw hailed Dirk Bogarde's performance as one of the greatest of all time, concluding: "This is exalted film-making". [14]
Writer Will Aitken published Death in Venice: A Queer Film Classic, a critical analysis of the film, in 2011 as part of Arsenal Pulp Press's Queer Film Classics series. [15]
On September 1, 2018, the film was screened at the 75th Venice International Film Festival in the Venice Classics section. [16] The Criterion Collection released a remastered edition of the film on Blu-Ray and DVD on February 19, 2019. [17]
Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo was an Italian filmmaker, theatre and opera director, and screenwriter. He was one of the fathers of cinematic neorealism, but later moved towards luxurious, sweeping epics dealing with themes of beauty, decadence, death, and European history, especially the decay of the nobility and the bourgeoisie. Critic Jonathan Jones wrote that “no one did as much to shape Italian cinema as Luchino Visconti.”
Sir Dirk Bogarde was an English actor, novelist and screenwriter. Initially a matinée idol in films such as Doctor in the House (1954) for the Rank Organisation, he later acted in art house films, evolving from "heartthrob to icon of edginess".
The Symphony No. 5 by Gustav Mahler was composed in 1901 and 1902, mostly during the summer months at Mahler's holiday cottage at Maiernigg. Among its most distinctive features are the trumpet solo that opens the work with a rhythmic motif similar to the opening of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, the horn solos in the third movement and the frequently performed Adagietto.
The Lido, or Venice Lido, is an 11-kilometre-long (7-mile) barrier island in the Venetian Lagoon, Northern Italy; it is home to about 20,400 residents. The Venice Film Festival takes place at the Lido in late August/early September.
Death in Venice (German: Der Tod in Venedig) is a novella by German author Thomas Mann, published in 1912. It presents an ennobled writer who visits Venice and is liberated, uplifted, and then increasingly obsessed by the sight of a boy in a family of Polish tourists—Tadzio, a nickname for Tadeusz. Tadzio was likely based on a boy named Władzio whom Mann had observed during his 1911 visit to the city.
The Damned (Götterdämmerung) is a 1969 historical-drama film directed and co-written by Luchino Visconti, and starring Dirk Bogarde, Ingrid Thulin, Helmut Berger, Helmut Griem, Umberto Orsini, Charlotte Rampling, Florinda Bolkan, Reinhard Kolldehoff and Albrecht Schönhals in his final film. Set in 1930s Germany, the film centers on the Essenbecks, a wealthy industrialist family who have begun doing business with the Nazi Party, and whose amoral and unstable heir, Martin, is embroiled in his family's machinations. It is loosely based on the German Krupp family of steel industrialists from Essen.
The Night Porter is a 1974 Italian psychological war drama film co-written and directed by Liliana Cavani. It stars Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling, with Philippe Leroy, Gabriele Ferzetti and Isa Miranda in supporting roles. Set in Vienna in 1957, the film centers on the sadomasochistic relationship between a former Nazi concentration camp officer (Bogarde) and one of his inmates (Rampling).
The Folding Star is a 1994 novel by Alan Hollinghurst.
Death in Venice, Op. 88, is an opera in two acts by Benjamin Britten, his last. The opera is based on the novella Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. Myfanwy Piper wrote the English libretto. It was first performed at Snape Maltings, near Aldeburgh, England, on 16 June 1973.
Björn Johan Andrésen is a Swedish actor and musician. He is best known for playing the 14-year-old Tadzio in Luchino Visconti's 1971 film adaptation of the 1912 Thomas Mann novella Death in Venice. He also played a minor role in Ari Aster's 2019 folk horror film Midsommar.
Death in Venice may refer to:
The Beautiful Boy is a book by radical feminist academic Germaine Greer, published in 2003 as The Boy in the Commonwealth by Thames & Hudson and in the rest of the world by Rizzoli. Its avowed intention was "to advance women's reclamation of their capacity for and right to visual pleasure". The book is a study of the youthful male face and form, from antiquity to the present day, from paintings and drawings to statuary and photographs.
Mahler is a 1974 British biographical film based on the life of Austro-Bohemian composer Gustav Mahler. It was written and directed by Ken Russell for Goodtimes Enterprises, and starred Robert Powell as Gustav Mahler and Georgina Hale as Alma Mahler. The film was entered into the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Technical Grand Prize.
Senso is a 1954 Italian historical melodrama film directed and co-written by Luchino Visconti, based on Camillo Boito's novella of the same name. Set during the Third Italian War of Independence, the film follows the Italian Contessa Livia Serpieri, who has an affair with the Austrian Lieutenant Franz Mahler. It was Visconti's first color film.
San Nicolò al Lido refers to both the San Nicolò Church and most importantly to its annexed Monastery of San Nicolò located in Venice, northern Italy. The two Catholic institutions are located in the northern part of the Lido di Venezia and house the relics of Saint Nicholas, patron of sailors. From this church, the traditional thanksgiving Mass of the Sposalizio del Mare is celebrated. The complex houses monks of the Franciscan order.
Ruggero Mastroianni was an Italian film editor. In his obituary of Mastroianni, critic Tony Sloman described him as "arguably, the finest Italian film editor of his generation."
Richard Arthur Sohl was an American pianist, songwriter and arranger, best known for his work with the Patti Smith Group. He also played with Iggy Pop, Nina Hagen and Elliott Murphy. He died on June 3, 1990, of a heart attack while on vacation in Cherry Grove, New York.
The Grand Hotel des Bains is a former luxury hotel on the Lido of Venice in northern Italy. Built in 1900 to attract wealthy tourists, it is remembered amongst other things for Thomas Mann's stay there in 1911, which inspired his novella Death in Venice. Luchino Visconti's film of the novella was shot there in 1971.
Władysław Gerard Jan Nepomuk Marya Moes was a Polish landowner and has been claimed as the inspiration for the character Tadzio in Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, which was filmed as Death in Venice by Luchino Visconti.
The Most Beautiful Boy in the World is a 2021 Swedish documentary film about Björn Andrésen and the effects of fame thrust upon him when he appeared in Luchino Visconti's 1971 film Death in Venice. Andrésen was just 16 when the film came out, and was unprepared for instantly becoming an international celebrity.