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Luchino Visconti's 'Death in Venice' is one of the most misunderstood masterpieces of cinema. Based on Thomas Mann's 1913 classic novella of the same name, the film not only capture the quintessential of the novel but also reinforce a powerful questioning through superb visuals. Adapted by Mr. Visconti himself who decided to focus on the Venice chapter only as well as to modify the occupation of the main protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach who becomes a music composer (highly inspired by the composer Mahler), the film was also inspired by other Thomas Mann's novel like 'Doctor Faustus' or by Marcel Proust's writing. Often reduced and presented as a decadent film in which homosexuality and pedophilia are the main themes, the novel like the movie deals in fact with a much more complex and powerful dynamic.

Indeed the film is based on an equation between Death and Beauty as an aphorism for Perfection and in which the results is Time (or the lack of it). Perfection, Beauty is a chimer, pursuing it is pursuing Death as Time is passing by. At first von Aschenbach does not understand why the perfection of the form in his musical composition does not lead to the perfection of his symphony and therefore lose himself in a quest for Beauty following the young Tadzio as not only a symbol for this ultimate Beauty / Perfection but also as the Mask of Death. In this Venice, marked by Death and cursed by the plague, the Time is running out and the fascinating quest for Perfection finally appears to be a dangerous game to play.

All the notions that build up to the main questioning are revealed during this quest for Perfection and this race against Death. The notion of Urgency reinforced by an avoidable sorrow as Von Aschenbach realizes he is getting old in the hair dresser scene. The notion of isolation right from the beginning emphases by the personality of Aschenbach himself and showed by Visconti as someone cold and rigid and therefore alone. The notion of Desire which leads to the understanding of the main questioning: for Aschenbach, Perfection is reached through hard work it is a consequence not a fact. The Young Tadzio blows away this certitude. Does von Aschenbach desire Tadzio or is he fascinated by what he represents: Perfect Beauty?

The challenge of Luchino Visconti was to apply a superb cinematography and a precise narrative method to a film that in nature deals with complex concepts. By succeeding in this task Mr. Visconti delivers a haunting piece of cinema, a true emotional experience, a masterpiece.

Set in Venice mainly on the Lido, Visconti's "Death in Venice" is a triumph of filmmaking combining the excellence of Dirk Bogarde's characterisation and expert photography of the resort area in all its various daily moods. For those who love Venice, this is a film to cherish.

Mahler's music frequently heard throughout the film heightens the drama. The mood it creates is not always happy. But then what else would you expect with a title like that?

There is not a lot of dialogue in the film. Rather sparse in fact. It's mainly background noises and chatter and laughter among the hotel guests. The intriguing part is to interpret the exchange of glances between Gustav von Aschenbach a composer of some renown and a slim teenage youth Tadzio who see each other from time to time across the tables of the hotel dining room, on the beach and at odd unexpected places around Venice. They seem to acknowledge each other's presence shyly at first with little more than the suggestion of a smile but later with a strong and riveting and urgent gaze.

Each viewer will have his own interpretation. The composer has lost a child of his own. Is this behaviour an expression of yearning for the child he loved? Is it perhaps a sexual attraction towards this fragile young man with his dazed somewhat girlish stare? Could he be discovering some new inspiration for a yet unwritten musical masterpiece? Who knows?

From beginning to end this film captures the true spirit of 19th Century Venice. The elegance of the ladies, the deck chairs on the sand, the children frolicking in their neck-to-knee bathing costumes, the glow of sunsets and a general feeling of satisfaction with the world. While some may think the pace is rather slow at times, the film has an overall gentle quality, but with a simmering indecision between two repressed human beings. Be prepared for a sad and beautiful ending.

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's "Death in Venice" is a masterpiece of utterly haunting beauty that will capture the imagination of anyone interested in the screen's capacity for breathtaking images. It is a poignant tragedy based on Thomas Mann's classic novella of the same name. Visconti has captured many of the essential qualities of the book and employed a superb visual style (with the assistance of the great cinematographer Pasqualino DeSantis) for a story which is essentially an interior one. It is about the struggle within the soul of a man, Gustav von Aschenbach, a composer vacationing in the Venice of 1911.

In Mann's book Aschenbach was a writer, but Visconti asserted that the book had been inspired by events in the life of Gustav Mahler, whose music, mostly the haunting adagietto of his Fifth Symphony, is used as background (and foreground) music, helping create an almost tactile mood of melancholy.

Dirk Bogarde plays Aschenbach, a man possessed by feelings of failure, haunted by the grief he and his wife (Marisa Berensen) shared over the death of their daughter. He is a man on the precipice of emotional collapse who finds both redemption and destruction in the contemplation of beauty. "The creation of beauty and purity is a spiritual act." God and composers are alike.

In this film beauty becomes incarnate in the form of a young Polish boy vacationing at the same hotel, the Hotel des Bains on the Lido. The boy's stately mother is played by Silvana Mangano. The long-haired blond boy is Tadziu, aged 14, played by the Swedish Bjørn Andresen. Aschenbach is smitten by, then obsessed with, the boy's beauty, in a manner that is more spiritual than sexual, but which must also contain a good deal of sublimated sexual longing.

At first he merely steals opportunities to look at the lad. They never speak. Gradually he starts to seek him out, self-destructively spurred-on by the boy's coquettishness and knowing glances. Bogarde makes the character's longing as tangibly moving as it is ultimately pathetic.

All this takes place in a misty Venice dense with metaphorical gloom and a mysterious plague (cholera) carrying death to its inhabitants. In one horrifying scene a barber "re-makes" Aschenbach's face so that it is both a grotesque parody of youth and an ominous death mask.

Visconti's skill in recreating lush period detail, to paint family-album poses of aristocracy, to make beauty seem dangerous, to underline the complexity of human psychology, are all in evidence here. The color photography by Pasqualino De Santis, and the costumes by Piero Tosi are excellent.

The ending of the film is unforgettable: Gustav languishing on the beach, the Polish folk song in the background, the boy Tadziu in the water turning into an angelic apparition with extended hand. Overwhelming!

I cannot imagine a better film ever being made of Mann's great and essential work.

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 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.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind watching films with no plot, they're nice, but usually they have something else that compensates for it. A fixation on a little boy that does noting, but a 45° turn with his head and looks at you is so lacking. Also the subplots about the epidemic and his former life with a wife and child had brought a little more interest, but filled only a very little part.

Nonetheless I liked the cinematography, there was some really pretty stills, (even though they didn't fully exploit being in gorgeous Venice), the music was captivating and the dialogues with Alfred was interesting.

Death in Venice is a movie I need to see once every ten years. It is always different, because I am always at a different stage of life.

The movie is about art, beauty, longing, death. Some scenes are painfully slow, others simply annoying to watch, especially if you have seem them before. Yet I would not want to miss a single frame. The music is repetitive, the main theme of the adagietto from Mahler's fifth is used again and again. Yet I would not want to miss a single note. When the last image fades, the last note dies, I am left numb and exhausted.

This movie is a monument to film making. As with most really good movies, the saturday evening crowd should stay away from it. And this is simply the best movie ever.

This is an adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel , avant-garde composer Gustave Aschenbach (Dick Bogarde) , loosely based on Gustav Mahler character , being well portrayed in this brooding as well as slow-moving classic movie . The celebrated story of a man obsessed with ideal beauty written by prestigious Thomas Mann is magnificently brought to the screen , concerning about desire , homosexuality , children lost , plagues and adult situations throughout .

Thought-provoking character studio of a reputed artist , his mishaps , digresses , loves his homosexuality and continuous search for beauty and perfection . this is the second part of Luchino Visconti's German Trilogy also including The damned (1969) and Ludwig (1972). It deals with Gustav Mahler lookalike whom Dick Bogarde is made up to resemblance . However , the film results to be overlong , it seems longer than its 130 minutes running time . Colorful as well as visually absorbing cinematography in Panavision by Pascualino de Santis . Impressive and immortal musical score by Mahler , in fact his Third and Fifth Symphonies were adapted as background music for the film ; being excellently conducted by orchestra director Fanco Mannino.

This studied as well as slow motion picture was masterfully directed by Luchino Visconti . Visconti was a director and writer, considered to be one of the best Italian filmmakers . At the beginning his career he developed the movement of "Italian neo-realism" together with other directors such as Vittorio De Sica or Roberto Rossellini in the 1940s and 1950s such as ¨Bellissima¨ (1952) , ¨La Terra Trema¨(1948) , and ¨Ossessione¨ (1943) was based on James M. Cain's 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' . Luchino is especially known for Rocco and brothers (1960), "Il Gattopardo" or "The Leopard" (1963) , ¨The damned¨ (1969) , ¨Ludwig¨(1972) , "The Innocent" (1976) and , of course , this Death in Venice (1971). His sense of visual style was equally impressive in his film work, never better demonstrated than through his masterpiece Senso (1954).

"Slow", "slow", "slow"... I read many people complain "it's slow"... slow what? This movie takes its time. All the most beautiful things in life take time. When you make sex with your girlfriend would you try to make it last five minutes? No you would like to make it last the whole night. When you eat good food in a good restaurant would you like to finish it in two minutes? No, you sit down, enjoy the place, the food, the company and the wine. When you visit an art museum, would you rush through the rooms? No, you would move slowly, pay attention, and stop at the artworks that mean more to you. So why should a movie be different?

If you want speed, then eat at McDonald's, rush in the tube, watch TV commercials, and pay a prostitute for a 5 minute work.

If you are looking for real emotions, deep feelings and thoughts that will last in your memory and heart for a long time, then you don't want to miss this movie.

One caveat: don't go watching it for the gay theme. This movie isn't about gay love, if you look at it through this point of view, it will let you down completely. This movie is symbolism from beginning to end, it does not speak of what you see. It speaks of the struggle of the artist to reach the beauty, so close, always unreachable, and, like another reader perfectly commented, so inevitably connected with death, because the only perfection that a living being can ever attain, is in the death. If you look at the movie from this point of view, it will show to you for what it is: a complete masterpiece, from beginning to end.

I saw this movie in 1971 when I was very young. All I recall is a very sad story about an artist who was very ill when visiting Venice where he spent time furtively seeking out a boy he was attracted to. It was sad and depressing and a bit creepy. I watched it again 45 years later on TCM and it seemed to be a much more powerful statement about a tragic life and death that reaches its climax in Venice during a sweltering summer in 1911 when the city is overtaken by a cholera epidemic. The main role is played by Dirk Bogarde, a British actor, who is making the best of his last days longing for a love he can never achieve. The background music by Mahler is very sombre and fits the tragic ending. The city is being scrubbed to stop the spread of disease and no one wants to frighten away the tourists, who are the city's economic lifeblood. Again, the symbolic conflict between dreams and reality. The acting is superb. The period costumes are stunning. The photography is powerful and sweeping with seas, sunsets and the skyline of Venice. Directed by Luchino Visconti, this movie is not entertainment but a work of art. I couldn't take more than one of these works at a time but it is worth seeing as a unique achievement.

You haven't seen slow until you have seen this film. And I thought Barry Lyndon was slow. This film makes Barry Lyndon look like a runaway train. And since Mann's book was actually a novella this film is probably longer than the book it is so drawn out. But it is riveting in its own way. Visconti is never dull that's for sure. And his films are always visually stimulating. His eye for detail is unmatched, although he did overlook a couple of TV antennas in one scene, but I doubt anyone would have noticed them. Dirk Bogarde is as always absolutely wonderful and clearly exhibits what makes a star and it's making things happen without lifting a finger. He is in virtually every scene and the scenes are very long so he's on camera forever yet he manages to keep your interest because he is so interesting. The film is really about him and he does carry it brilliantly. But the original story is just too abstract for a film and they should have never made it.

Art film lovers would probably rank this much higher on their scale of appreciation, but I found DEATH IN VENICE, while sumptuous to look at and listen to (the music of Gustav Mahler fills the soundtrack with his symphonic music), as beautiful and empty as a multi-colored seashell. It assails the senses with sensuous shots of Tadzio's youthful beauty as seen by DIRK BOGARDE, but fails to give us a narrative strong enough to sustain over two hours of story.

Furthermore, it moves at a snail's pace while exploring the beauty of the seashore in Venice, spending far too much time on close-ups of Bogarde as he sinks deeper and deeper into despair over never possessing the creature he so desires. SYLVANA MANGANO, the great Italian actress, is fine as the boy's mother and the fair-haired Italian boy himself (BJORN ANDRESEN) is merely seen and glimpsed from afar and remains an enigma until the very end.

Based supposedly on composer Gustav Mahler's personal life (although never actually proved), it's the kind of film that could fill art houses in the '80s with high approval from the pseudo-intellectuals who claimed to have read Thomas Mann's novel and approved of the film's tasteful rendering of a difficult and, at that time, taboo subject.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder--for some, this film is a masterpiece of its kind--for others, beware the tranquility of the whole piece. It may put you in a dreamlike trance.

Philistines beware, especially American ones! This has all the elements you'll hate - a langorous approach to film language, a painterly sense of composition, an intense homoerotic focus to its elegant narrative, a wonderful and unusual use of music and, even worse, it's based on a story you'd probably hate as well... If, however, you do feel that films don't to have derivative plotlines, be full of action and crappy dialogue, don't need the visual grammar of MTV/TV Commercials, then watch this. It's one of my favourite films, and is perhaps Visconti's most perfectly formed piece of work. It's sublime, like the movement of Mahler he uses insistently throughout the film.

Composer Gustave Aschenbach is sick with stress. He goes to a seaside resort only to obsess about a beautiful young boy who is on vacation with his family. The vacationers discover that a cholera outbreak in the nearby city of Venice has been kept from them.

This is good controversial Italian art-house. It's a tale of desire but not simply a sexual desire. The boy often looks angelic. His beauty is ethereal as well as sexual. Gustave's struggle is palpable in the sweat of his brow. This is not a film of plot. Director Luchino Visconti incorporates a lot of classical music in a study of this man. The demeanor of his pale sickly haunted face is a story in itself.

This film is terrible, it completely misses the point of the book, and destroys any of the philosophical discussion the book created. It's honestly just some not very well done scenes of a guy following a child around Venice. Unlike in the book there is no internal monologue describing why this man feels this way or why he is doing this. The few flashback scenes were pointless and the philosophy discussed in them isn't anything intellectual. A huge disservice to the beauty and tragedy of the novel. I can't believe the number of people raving over this film. It turns a book about beauty, idolization, decay, obsession, and aestheticism into a pretentious 2 hours of a creepy guy following s boy around.

I must admit that on the surface Death in Venice seems to have a rather troubling, unpleasant plot. An old man follows a teenage boy for most of the movie. Let's pretend that we don't know anything about Mann's book and we dived straight into this film on television.

Death in Venice is a lesson to avoid writing stories off as what you think it means or is about. There's much more going on beneath the surface here. If you don't relate to our lead character, who looks rather lost in Venice... then you should at least appreciate the absolutely incredible cinematography and the way the music Mahler fits into it. This is one of the best uses of classical music to pictures you will see after Stanley Kubrick's work on 2001 and a Clockwork Orange. Yet, this movie has a level of sophistication that you might compare more to Barry Lyndon.

Okay, moving away from Kubrick, Visconti is his own artist, reaching levels typical of the greats of Italian art. Many won't agree with me because this film might not be their cup of tea for several reasons. There's some really long scenes here with seemingly not much point to further a plot. But that's not the style of Death in Venice. It's all about mood, atmosphere, often all the background people and fanfare going on at the hotel all around him, it reflects his state of mind and it's achieved with such precision to detail... and again here I'm going to compare to Kubrick, like Jack in the Shining - that kind of psychological breakdown. But The Shining has been appreciated by the mainstream too, while Death in Venice is largely unwatchable for the mainstream.

This is higher art. The scenes where he comes close to the boy, and the finale is just so perfectly executed, that every filmmaker should watch Death in Venice as a lesson.

"Death in Venice" is the middle film of the German trilogy of Luchino Visconti, further consisting of "The damned" (1969) and "Ludwig" (1973).

The keywords in this trilogy are old money and decay. In "Ludwig" the decay is mental, in "Death in Venice" the decay is physical and in "The damned" a wealthy family disintegrates through hatred, jealousy and betrayal.

The reviews of "Death in Venice" were in general not positive. It was thought that the film put too much emphasis on the homo erotic tension between the middle aged Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) and the juvenile Tadzio (Bjorn Andresen) and thereby lost much of the complexity of the novel by Thomas Mann.

This criticism maybe partially correct but is in my opinion too harsh. The film is also about an artist who always thought that beauty was spiritual and timeless and now must conclude that it (also) is physical and transient.

How transient this physical beauty is can be seen in "Midsommar" (2019, Ari Aster) and "The most beautiful boy in the world" (2021, Kristina Lindström & Kristian Petri), both starring the aging Bjorn Andresen. In fact the last mentioned film is a documentary about the effect "Death in Venice" has had on his life. For some reason the young Bjorn Andresen always make me think of the young Mick Taylor (Rolling Stones) because of their outward similarity at the beginning of the seventies.

"Death in Venice" did have a lasting impact on the adagietto from Mahlers Fifth, which it usesd as film music. Originally ment as love music for Mahlers wife Alma, after "Death in Venice" it became primarily funeral music.

That's it. There is no real plot, just a gross pedophilia premise. People who rave about this film have more pretense than taste. Why couldn't he have his stroke at the beginning of the film? We wouldn't have missed anything.