Luchino Visconti

by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
BFI Publishing, London, UK, 2003
250pp., illus. Trade, £48.00; paper, £13.99
ISBN: 0-85170-960-5; ISBN: 0-85170-961-3.

Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg
9 Belvedere Road, London SE1 8YW, UK

andrea.dahlberg@bakernet.com

2003 was the year Luchino Visconti made a major resurgence in the English-speaking world. New versions of The Leopard and Death in Venice were released; more Visconti films were released on DVD. In the United Kingdom a major retrospective of Visconti’s films toured the country. And the British Film Institute published a new edition of Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s monograph on Visconti.

The book was originally published while Visconti was still alive and working in 1967 and was updated in 1973 to include 3 films he made in the intervening years. At this time it was probably the leading work in the English language on the Italian director and was known in particular for proposing a variant of auteur theory to the effect that a film director could produce a coherent, recognisable body of work without being conscious of all those characteristics that marked out and defined his work.

In the 2003 edition of the book Nowell-Smith adds a new preface and an excellent retrospective essay but leaves the body of the text as it was in 1967 and 1973. Regrettably, few additional studies of Visconti have since been published in English and any serious study of this director must still rely on Italian and French sources. It is a pity, therefore, that Nowell-Smith did not take this opportunity to completely rewrite the book for a new readership of film studies students and serious readers interested in this complex and contradictory director. As he explains in the preface, because the bulk of the text was written before film studies had developed and flourished as a subject there is, apart from putting forward a variant on auteur theory, nothing of a theoretical nature in it.

The monograph was intended for an "educated general reader". Such a person seems not to be much interested in film theory but understands, without further elaboration, statements such as a description of Death in Venice as "the film in which Visconti reaches the culminating point of his identification with the Hegelian Geist". This educated reader is also someone who has a reasonable grasp of Italian history. The analyses of Visconti’s films are rather too narrow by today’s standards, and there is almost no consideration of the processes leading to the making of the films, of the other people involved in their making and their meaning and reception by particular audiences. There are complaints about several censored versions of English releases of films such as Rocco and His Brothers that are now outdated as full versions are now available to English-speaking audiences.

The retrospective, written in 2002, is a fascinating attempt to give an overview of Visconti’s films, to identify what characterises them and to critically assess them from today’s perspective. Nowell-Smith argues that the inheritors of European art cinema of the 1960’s are Coppola, Scorsese, Woody Allen and Jim Jarmusch. He considers the significance of Visconti’s homosexuality as evidenced in his films and against the background of denial at the time they were made. But it is his argument that what truly distinguishes Visconti as a film director is his understanding and interpretation of the Marxism of Gramsci and Lukacs and his own construction of a theory of history evident in all his films that it most impressive. It seems that Visconti has suffered from the inability of commentators to characterise his work as neo-realist, melodramatic or operatic or unify them under the heading of some other genre. Visconti is too complex for easy characterisations, but Nowell-Smith makes an original and fascinating case for a unique theory of history as the unifying theme present in the diverse range of his works.

The monograph includes a select bibliography, full filmography, and list of Visconti’s theatre and opera stagings. Despite the dated qualities of the body of the text, it is still probably the leading text on Visconti’s films in the English language.