Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Few of the great film directors have embodied contradiction quite as strikingly as Luchino Visconti. The scion of Milanese nobility dating back to the 11th century, Count don Luchino Visconti di Modrone was raised amid aristocratic splendour but became a member of the Italian Communist party. He made films about working-class life, and about Europe’s pampered grandees, less often about people in between. His films are known for emotional intensity, even frenzy — but also for stately, sombre grace.A cinematic maestro who worked across four decades, he also sustained parallel careers directing opera and theatre. Earlier, he devoted seven years to breeding and training racehorses, before giving that up to work for the French director Jean Renoir, among whose circle Visconti took his political left turn; during the second world war, he joined the anti-Mussolini resistance.So it is hard to pin down Visconti — and today, not easy to sell a filmmaker who has often been out of fashion. A new British Film Institute retrospective puts the emphasis on a particular aspect of Visconti’s work: its subtitle is “Decadence & Decay”. The programme note by season curator Christina Newland says: “Don’t let the painterly elegance fool you — Visconti’s cinema is one of queer desire, hysteria and transgression.” This might suggest a cross between Pedro Almodóvar and John Waters, but anyone expecting camp extravagance should be warned that the painterly elegance — and august, deliberate pacing — often predominates, to meticulously calibrated effect.One of Visconti’s greatest achievements is The Leopard, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 1963. Set in 1860, and based on a novel by another aristocrat, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, it stars Burt Lancaster as an ageing Sicilian prince confronting the social transformations of Italy’s Risorgimento period. The Leopard is famed for its thunderous battle scenes, but also for its opulent staging and leisurely pace. To quote Martin Scorsese, who lists it among his top 10 favourite films, “Time itself is the protagonist of The Leopard: the cosmic scale of time, of centuries and epochs, on which the prince muses; Sicilian time, in which days and nights stretch to infinity; and aristocratic time, in which nothing is ever rushed and everything happens just as it should happen.”But queer desire? Certainly. Throughout Visconti’s oeuvre, the focus is often on desirable males. His first feature, Ossessione (1943), one of the founding texts of Italian neo-realism, studies the murderous relationship between a married woman and a drifter. Based on James M Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, it pre-empted the first Hollywood version starring Lana Turner. In Visconti’s film, the erotic emphasis is always on the muscular presence of actor Massimo Girotti; the shot in which Giovanna (Clara Calamai) first beholds him, transfixed, is still startling in its no-frills depiction of female desire.Antonio Arcidiacono, the young Sicilian fisherman cast as the lead of La Terra Trema (1948), was a natural star who, beret and all, wouldn’t look out of place on today’s Milan catwalks. Subsequent male leads included Farley Granger as the officer who drives Alida Valli crazy in 19th-century drama Senso (1954); Alain Delon in Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and The Leopard (1963); and the 15-year-old Björn Andrésen, as the Botticelli-like boy who captivates Dirk Bogarde’s composer in Death in Venice (1971).Then there was Helmut Berger, Visconti’s lover and muse, and the star of three of his features. Inexperienced as an actor, the young Austrian was transformed by the director into a striking if eccentric screen presence. In The Damned (1969) he gave a mesmerisingly deranged performance as a wealthy Nazi in the making, and he held the camera’s attention for four hours as the troubled king of Bavaria in Ludwig (1973).Visconti’s attraction to beauty was visceral, according to Rocco actress Adriana Asti, who said, “When confronted with beauty, he went almost blind.” Such overwhelming effect is dramatised in Visconti’s penultimate film Conversation Piece (1974), an absurdist home invasion drama, with Berger’s character entrancing Burt Lancaster’s hermit-like professor. According to Lancaster, this was very much an autobiographical work: Visconti told him, “It’s my life, I’m a very lonely man.”As for hysteria, the word one can’t avoid with Visconti is “operatic”. Indeed, as a director of opera on stage, he was celebrated for renewing the art form, not least in his collaborations with Maria Callas. Senso begins at a performance of Verdi’s Il Trovatore, prefiguring the intrigue that follows, which merges private passion with the turmoil of historical change in the Risorgimento. Visconti’s films gravitate towards moments of ferocious dramatic and emotional discharge: Rocco and His Brothers contains an act of sexual violence shocking for the cinema of the time and still profoundly distressing to watch.Visconti was transfixed by female performances of high intensity: Maria Schell as a dreamer in a state of permanent exaltation in the strangely balletic Dostoevsky adaptation White Nights (1957); Claudia Cardinale, shocking a patrician dinner table with her raucous laughter in The Leopard; Anna Magnani at full blast as the would-be showbiz mother in Bellissima (1951), a caustic satire on the illusions of the movie business; the unbridled lamentations of Katina Paxinou’s matriarch in the culminating family confrontation of Rocco.“For me,” Visconti said, “things must be completely hot or completely cold — never, never tepid.” He certainly liked things icy: for all its regal opulence, Ludwig is one of the frostiest, most austere of spectacles.Transgression in Visconti’s films takes on many forms, from the illicit liaisons of Ossessione and Senso to considerably more disturbing guises in the later films. In his swan song, the exquisite but disturbing period piece The Innocent (1976), the perversity flourishes within an aristocratic marriage, rather than between the husband and his mistress. And dynastic nightmare The Damned uses extremity — paedophilia, incest — to depict Germany’s Nazi generation as one that destroyed its children and parents alike. But Berger’s troublingly glamorous performance helped fuel the eroticisation of Third Reich imagery that became so chic in the 1970s (The Night Porter, Salon Kitty).Visconti’s cinema often seems out of step with its times. In the 1960s, he disparaged the new formal radicalism, saying, “If you have content, mechanics will take care of itself.” But his influence is immeasurable. As a member — alongside Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini — of the generation that created Italian neo-realism, he changed the way that film can depict everyday life. His second feature, 1948’s La Terra Trema, was a quasi-documentary fiction in which the members of a Sicilian fishing community essentially played themselves; it helped launch the practice of casting non-professional actors, an inspiration to generations of filmmakers who followed.And while few directors have the resources, or the patience, to equal the meticulous exactitude of Visconti’s history films, their influence too has been remarkable. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather merged the augustness of The Leopard and the masculine brutality of Rocco. Among directors who listed The Leopard as a favourite in the most recent Sight and Sound Greatest Films poll are Olivier Assayas, James Gray and Scorsese, who have all emulated the Visconti touch in their own period dramas; Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence is surely the only film to observe the protocol of dinner table setting with The Leopard’s precision.The BFI season, showcasing 11 Visconti features, offers the chance to rediscover the acknowledged greats as well as some neglected titles. There is of course the arthouse greatest hit Death in Venice, but it doesn’t entirely hold up, either in its narrative (boiling down Thomas Mann’s novella into a gender-reversed Lolita-on-sea), its shouty debates on aesthetics, or in its merciless overuse of that Mahler adagietto. And, for a sense of how unhappy Andrésen was at being objectified during the shoot — and how drastically his life was affected by being identified with the seraphic Tadzio — the 2021 Swedish documentary The Most Beautiful Boy in the World makes a very sobering watch. But try the lesser-known titles, such as Conversation Piece, The Innocent and a new restoration of the dreamlike White Nights, with its studio sets and choreographed artifice (and Marcello Mastroianni freaking out to Bill Haley). Then there is the season centrepiece, Rocco and His Brothers, which exemplifies Visconti at his grittiest. This is a ferociously gripping saga about murderous rivalry within a working-class family, and the woman who is its casualty: an astonishing performance from Annie Girardot. Coming from Visconti the Marxist, it is also a critique of industrial society devouring the energies of the proletariat — a theme etched in the change in Alain Delon’s face from the doe-eyed innocent of the opening to the final scene’s mugshot of him as a scowling bruiser. For sure, excess and extremity are here in plenty. But give the stately and measured a chance too. ‘Luchino Visconti: Decadence & Decay’, BFI Southbank, London, January 1-30, bfi.org.uk; ‘Rocco and His Brothers’, cinemas in the UK and Ireland from January 3Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
