Mort à Venise

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.

Death in Venice is a must see for all of those interested in "great" film-making. I regard the film as essential watching. The final scene, in which the lovesick middle aged man watching a beautiful boy as his absurd makeup runs and he dies of the plague is one of the most horrific and sad in film history. Featuring the music of Gustav Mahler, we are visited by the dark, amber strains of his Fourth Symphony as we visit Venice, which has been beset with the plague. A middle aged man falls in love with a teenage boy, and is heartsick from afar. This is sumptuous, heartbreaking film-making. A must see.

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 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.

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.