Mort à Venise

I first saw "Death in Venice" 1971) about 15 years ago, found it profoundly moving and often thought about it. Watching it again few days ago, I realized that it is close to the top of the great works of cinema. With hardly any dialog it captivates a viewer with the beautiful cinematography, the fine acting, and, above all, the Mahler's music without which the movie simply could not exist.

"Death in Venice" is a stunning Luchino Visconti's adaptation of the Thomas Mann novella about a famous composer (in the novella he was a writer but making him a composer in a movie was a great idea that works admirably) Gustav von Aschenbach (loosely based on Gustav Mahler) who travels to Venice in the summer of 1911 to recover from personal losses and professional failures. His search for beauty and perfection seems to be completed when he sees a boy of incredible divine beauty. Ashenbach (Dirk Bogard) follows the boy everywhere never trying to approach him. The boy, Tadzio, belonged to very rare creatures that own an enigmatic and inconceivable power which captivates you, enchants you, conquers you and makes you its prisoner. Ashenbach became one of the prisoners of Tadzio spellbinding charms. He became addicted to him; he fell in love with him. Was it bless or curse for him? I think both. He died from unreachable, impossible yet beautiful love which object was perfection itself. The last image Ashenbach's eyes captured was that of the boy's silhouette surrounded by the sea and golden sun light. Nothing could compare to the beauty and charm of the scene and to take it with you to the grave is the death one can only dream about. If he could, Ashenbach probably would've said, "I was able to witness one of the faces of perfection, I could not bear it but I was chosen to learn that it exists here, in this world and I can die in peace now because it did happen to me."

Unforgettable music, Gustav Mahler's haunting adagietto of his Fifth Symphony found perfect use in a perfect movie. It reflects every emotion of a main character - it sobs, it longs, it begs for hope, and it summarizes the idea that once you are blessed to encounter beauty you are condemned to die. I may come up with hundreds movies that use classical music to perfection but nothing will ever compare to "Death in Venice". I dare say that Mahler's music IS its main character - it would change and sound differently depending on what was happening on the screen. It sounded triumphantly when Ashenbach returned back to Venice, to what he thought would be his happiness but turned to be his death. It sounded gloomy when he first entered Venice from the sea. You can hear so many different feelings in it - tenderness and adoration, confusion and self-loathing, worship and melancholy, but always - LOVE that gives the purest happiness and breaks the hearts (literally). The movie for a viewer is similar to what the boy was for the aging composer/writer/Artist. We are enchanted and captivated by its power and beauty as much as Achenbach was by the boy's mysterious charm.

Turn-of-the-century Venice is depicted in all its elegance and decay through the eyes of a composer who knows he has little time left to live. The composer is obsessed not just with beauty, but with the ideas behind beauty, and his theories are slowly proved wrong when he finds himself infatuated with a beautiful teenage boy. He becomes obsessed with the boy and amidst the backdrop of a city quietly dying with a plague, he simply observes and ponders, trying his best to keep his desires at bay.

The core of the film is in Dirk Bogarde's performance. As there is little dialogue in the film, he must act with his eyes and through his mannerisms, and he never falters. In the reflection of his eyes we see beauty as it is distinguished in the depths of all of our souls (well, those of us who have souls!). We see the awe, the pain, the fever, the fear, the desire and the ultimate surrender all in that forlorn face.

The music (most of it by Gustave Mahler) also reflects all this, and Visconti's incredible photography of the decaying Venice pinpoints the end of an era in a way that is both dreamlike and unsentimental (despite the romantic quality of the film).

The film is slow and langorous, like the hush of the ocean sweeping the shore. For those who like the visual quality of dreams and the somber romanticism of adagios, this film will be something to cherish forever.

I'm not sure where to start with this. In short, it was a disappointing movie. Having taught the novella, I was aware that it would be a hard story to turn into a movie. The movie has a couple of interesting lines (mainly between Alfred and Aschenbach) but it doesn't represent the debate on art that basically shapes the novella.

For one, I was expecting an older Aschenbach and a younger Tadzio. In the book, Tadzio is fourteen, but he is described as pure, ideal, innocent, whereas in the movie he reeks of sexuality and is a tease. He is an accomplice to Aschenbach, he always looks back at him, almost provokingly. In the book, it is Aschenbach who steals glances at the boy. As for Aschenbach, I imagined something closer to the professor-turned-clown in The Blue Angel (based on a story by Thomas Mann's brother Heinrich) than this forty-year old with hardly any gray hair. In all fairness, I do think that Dirk Bogarde did a good job, but either someone else should have done that, or he should have made to look older at the beginning.

I know that the discovery of homosexuality is important to the story, but the movie minimizes the talk about art and the duality between the Apollonian and Dyonisian inspirations and focuses instead on Aschenbach's obsession of Tadzio and does not justify it. I liked the fact that Mahler's music was used, because ultimately he did inspire Mann to write his story. I'm not sure turning Aschenbach into a musician was a particularly good move. Or the creation of Alfred who I don't remember in the book.

And one thing that really got to me was the sound and how it did not match the actors' lips. I was wondering if it was dubbed because I expected it to be in Italian. But then I remembered that each Italian movie I have watched has this problem. It just bothers me because these directors (Fellini is the other person I'm thinking of) are supposed to epitomize perfection in Italian cinema, and here are their characters laughing without sound, then you hear a noise that doesn't correspond to their faces (I'm thinking of the scenes when Aschenbach almost collapses and starts laughing. This scene could/should have been the strongest, but it was annoying instead).

Luchino Visconti was one of the greatest filmmakers in history. His bold narrative, his constant questionings and philosophical reflections easily surpass the work of most directors. "Death in Venice", based in Thomas Mann's novel, is arguably one of his best films. Many could disagree, but one has to wonder, how many film directors are able to summarize the entire Western philosophical and historical approach to beauty in one single, elegant, stroke of inspiration? Only one: Luchino Visconti.

What happens when a man is obsessed with beauty? As unpredictable as it may seem, what happens is that beauty is redefined in ways the man could not have anticipated. In a society enslaved to the heterosexual normative, a man should only find beauty in women. And yet, in this passionate story beauty lies in the body of a young boy.

However, one should first define what kind of beauty this Phoebus reveals. Could one find some sort of connection to Plato's thoughts in "The Banquet"? Certainly not. Here a beautiful spirit does not equal a beautiful subject, far from it, the mind and the intellect are worthless when the body is the only substance we can dare to grab; the Platonic Ideal world has no meddling with this world, the only world we know. In Visconti's film beauty answers, without a doubt, to the Apollonian concept of beauty as Nietzsche would understand it: Clean lines, symmetry and harmonic design that serve but one purpose: to conceal the true horror of existence, to veil and cover the real (it's only symptomatic then that the official discourse, which belongs to the symbolic order and the reality of the luxurious Venetian hotel brings the irreconcilable real to light, id est, the subversive discourse of the people who tell Achenbach the truth about the plague and the high count of bodies, and advise him to leave before it's too late). Kant would also elaborate beauty as the intrinsic relationship between life and death, and in this correlation beauty would be that which reminds people of death, which makes people accept the possibility of death; beauty could only be found in humanity's own mortality, as so many artistic masterworks convey so extraordinarily.

One could venture to affirm that Mr. Achenbach can discern young Tadzio's beauty in two different ways. First, he is the embodiment of Classic Greek Male Beauty because his body responds to Apollonian guidelines. Second, he reminds Achenbach of his own age, therefore his own mortality. Nietzsche's and Kant's understanding of beauty can come to terms in this riveting character.

According to Lacan's theories, Tadzio also places himself as a phantasmatic recipient for Achenbach's desire. In many ways, the young boy resides only in the imaginary order, he's first and foremost an image, an image full of erotic power and seductive force, but only an image at last. It's through sheer power of desire, that Achenbach seemingly vanquishes an entire life of repressed homosexual urges. Nonetheless, this is not a love story. There is neither a single conversation between Achenbach and Tadzio nor the briefest or faintest contact between them. There is only fantasy. Fantasy driven by desire. Fantasy that encapsulates and idolizes the nubile male body more than anything else.

Achenbach soon finds himself immersed in a tortuous experience. He can never reach the boy, he can only glance at him from a distance. He can never talk to him, only listen to his name when it's pronounced by his mother. He can never touch him, only envy the other boys who manhandle him during boyish roughhousing. He can never know him, only imagine him. And as Slavoj Zizek would explain, fantasy becomes more powerful than reality, fantasy becomes the fundamental support of reality. Because here Achenbach's desire is not only supported by the phantasmatic Tadzio, it depends and relies entirely on this phantom.

Perhaps Tadzio is transformed in the Lacanian phallus. The adolescent is the phallus Achenbach has long lost. Because it's made clear in the beginning of the book as well as in the first scenes of the movie, that Achenbach is a man deprived of joy, of happiness, of hope. The phallic jouissance has eluded him for so long that one as a reader or viewer starts to doubt if he could ever regain the phallus. But can the phallus be recuperated in homosexual dynamics? Lacan does not concentrate his theory in homosexuality. Sometimes it would appear as if the Lacanian concept of homosexuality is an uncomfortable byproduct of people's inability to reclaim a symbolic masculine or feminine position. Nonetheless, "Death in Venice" greatest accomplishment is to surmount these theory limitations as it ascertains a new way to understand beauty, a way to understand beauty beyond the materialistic limitations of the male and the female body.

Michele Foucault wrote in "Histoire de la Sexualite" about "bodies and pleasures" as well as poli-sexuality in Ancient Greece. Wouldn't life be healthier and better if one could concern only about bodies and pleasures, without worrying about the exact labeling imposed by social constraints, without worrying about finding the right prefix to confine one's sexual desire to a hetero-, bi-, homo-, or trans- sexuality? That question may go unanswered, but one thing is evident in Visconti's film: Art and beauty share one immortal truth: the ability to move men and women hearts in unforeseen ways; the ability to destabilize society's strict and rigid laws, the ability to find its way regardless of prohibitions or dire outcomes. "Death in Venice" as the title announces, it's not a story about love, it's rather a story about death and loss, about the possibility of beauty and the failure of desire.

I first saw "Death in Venice" when it was initially released in 1971. Today, I saw it again (by chance!) while I was channel-surfing. It had the same hypnotic effect on me that it had then. To wit: I sat down, vacuum cleaner in hand, and remained there. In 1971, at age 21, I recognized the film's poignancy but not in the way I was able to now, at age 56. Yes, it's slow-moving and not very much "happens". But its beauty, especially the wonderful close-ups and the use of Mahler's music, endures. Those familiar with Thomas Mann's novella of the same name,and other of his works (e.g., The Magic Mountain) will recall that nothing much "happens" in these stories, either. However, these classics (both in print and film) are apt to remain with us long after the latest special effects action film has disappeared.