REFRAMING LUCHINO VISCONTI

Reframing Luchino Visconti: Film and Art gives new and unique insights into the roots of the visual vocabulary of one of Italy’s most reputed film authors. It meticulously researches Visconti’s appropriation of European art in his set and costume design, from pictorial citations and the archaeology of the set to the use of portraits and pictorial references in costume design. Yet it also investigates Visconti’s cinematography in combination with his mise-en-scène in terms of staging, framing, mobile framing, and mirroring. Here not only aesthetic conventions from art but also those from silent and sound cinema have been clearly appropriated by Visconti and his crew.
Reframing Luchino Visconti: Film and Art gives answers to the question: where does the visual splendour of Visconti’s films come from?
CLUES is an international scientific series covering research in the field of culture, history and heritage which have been written by, or were performed under the supervision of members of the research institute CLUE+.
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FILM AND ART REFRAMING LUCHINO VISCONTI
“This book, apart from showing a long-standing passion and fidelity, gives us one of the most original international researches ever produced on Visconti’s work.”
Gian Piero Brunetta (Università degli Studi di Padova)
“This journey through Visconti’s films broadens our view of an oeuvre whose richness is not as much due to its manifold cultural references, but more to their daring use by the artist.”
Michèle Lagny (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3)
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Sidestone Press
Published by Sidestone Press, Leiden www.sidestone.com
Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.
Imprint: Sidestone Press Dissertations
Lay-out & cover design: Sidestone Press Cover: The Leopard (Luchino Visconti 1963). Courtesey Geoffrey Donaldson
Institute.
RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR CULTURE, COGNITION, HISTORY AND HERITAGE
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Introduction: Intervisuality, Theory and History 9
I. Pictorial Citations, Art Direction, and Costume Design in Visconti’s Films 33
1. Pictorial Citation: Il Bacio and Other Citations in Senso 33 2. Archaeology of the Set (I): Greuze and The Leopard 51 3. Archaeology of the Set (II): The Conversation Pieces in Conversation Piece 69 4. The (Photo) Portrait and the Remembrance of Things Past 81 5. Costume and Painting in Senso 99 6. Costume: Veiling, Unveiling and Revealing with Visconti 123
II. Staging, Framing, and Mirroring in Visconti’s Films 139
7. Staging in Depth: Objects and People 141 8. Framing: Doors, Windows, and Anti-Framing 175 9. Mobile Framing and Visual Explorations 207 10. Mirrors: Awkward Confrontations 253
Conclusion 293
Acknowledgements 299
Index 303
This book is dedicated to Piero Tosi, Mario Garbuglia and Giuseppe Rotunno.
9introduction
Introduction: Intervisuality, Theory and History
The year 2006 commemorated the births of Mozart and Rembrandt, as well as the centenary of the filmmaker, Luchino Visconti (1906-1976), and his death thirty years before. It prompted the Milanese publisher Federica Olivares and me to organize a seminar on Visconti and visual culture where we screened the restored version of his historical drama, Senso (1954). This event took place in the beautiful ballroom of Palazzo Visconti in Milan where the young Count Visconti di Modrone grew up.1 This richly decorated and ornate environment seduced Francesco Casetti, then professor at Milan’s Università Cattolica, into saying that if we wanted to characterize Visconti with a word, it would have to be monumentality. Monuments typically invoke such adjectives as impressive, memorable, historical but also, inevitable and perhaps weighty. Casetti’s statement was touché, because, it may be asked: who dares to write a book about a filmmaker about whom so many books have already been written? Biographies, scientific studies, coffee table books: it’s all there and in abundance. Despite the surfeit of riches, however, our seminar clearly indicated that at least one methodological approach had not been fully appreciated by film scholars.
From Ossessione (Obsession, 1943) onward, Visconti made history with movies like La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948), Senso, Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli, 1960), The Leopard (Il Gattopardo, 1963), The Damned, (La caduta degli dei1969), Death in Venice (Morte a Venezia, 1971), and Ludwig (1972), films that were often based on European literary classics and which offered innovative interpretations of nineteenth and twentieth-century history.2 In addition, Visconti was one of the most important innovators of the post-war Italian stage. He introduced Italy to the modern French and American repertory of Jean Cocteau, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. He staged opera performances with the legendary Maria Callas. Despite the post-structuralist deconstruction of the author, Visconti still – and perhaps increasingly – stands on a pedestal in any study of European cinema. This is evident especially from the plethora of French and Italian publications and conferences. Visconti’s films are now almost all restored, reintroduced into circulation, and on DVD – this has facilitated analysis of his
1 See also the additional essay released at the time, Ivo Blom, Visconti e le arti visive/Visconti and Visual Arts (Milano: Olivares Edizioni, 2006), with an introduction by Caterina D’Amico.
2 In this book, the English film titles will be used for White Nights, Rocco and His Brothers, The Leopard, The Damned, Death in Venice and Conversation Piece, and Italian titles for all other films. This follows the division made by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s Luchino Visconti (London: BFI, 2003).
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work.3 The films are by no means outdated. The Fondazione Gramsci in Rome, curator of Visconti’s professional legacy, not only made accessible his archival collection of scenarios, contracts, letters and such, but also has published a three- volume comprehensive bibliography of works by and about Visconti, entitled biblioVisconti.4
When watching one of Visconti’s films, one is always struck by the sheer beauty, the rich detail, and the pictoriality of his images. As spectators we have the sensation of walking through a living picture, cultivated through Visconti’s predilection for visual exploration, in which characters often function as stand- ins for us, the spectators. But where does this spectacular imagery come from? This is this book’s core question, though a complex one because Visconti’s films are Gesamtkunstwerke, continuous and all-embracing artistic projects, which are forged from different media, each with their own language. This is because he alternated filmmaking with directing stage plays and operas, and because he often based his films on classic nineteenth and twentieth century European literature that he greatly admired. Moreover, music played an important role in Visconti’s films and he paid great attention to it during the production process. Studies, biographies and interviews with Visconti and his staff have revealed the role of theatre, literature, and music in his work. More obscure, though, is the role of painting. Both critics and Visconti’s intimates agree that his images are living paintings, tableaux vivants, that are not just l’art pour l’art, but perform key functions in both narrative and character development. But where do these images come from? How are they created? And within which aesthetic traditions or innovations should we consider them?
The pictoriality in Visconti’s films manifests itself in three particular areas: art direction, costume design, and cinematography. The most apparent concern within this approach is the issue of pictorial citation (citation of paintings in films). Visconti’s use of it (though infrequent) reveals his stylistic choices and helps to explain why they would show up in particular places within his films. He used painting more often indirectly – covertly. In the pre-production or production phase, Visconti gave his staff explicit references to artists or works of art that would express his idea on a certain filmic element: e.g., the costume of a character. His staff would also use art as documentation to reconstruct the past. Visconti used art on his sets not only as interchangeable, decorative parts, but also as
3 In 2005 Dutch distributor Cinemien released a DVD box with five Visconti films, for which I wrote an introductory text. This box included the first worldwide DVD release of L’innocente (1976). The last Visconti DVDs that appeared in Italy were those of Senso (2007) and Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa (2009). Only Lo straniero (1967) and the episode film Le streghe (1967) fail, as well as the collective documentary Giorni di gloria (1945) and the non-fiction short Appunti su un fatto di cronaca (1953). In the US, The Criterion Collection has released Senso, White Nights and The Leopard in deluxe editions. In the mean time Blue-rays have appeared too, including the 4k restoration of The Leopard (Criterion 2010). See http://www.criterion.com/people/8886-luchino-visconti.
4 Antonella Montesi ed., biblioVisconti, vol. 1 (Roma: Scuola Nazionale del Cinema/ Fondazione Istituto Gramsci, 2001); idem, biblioVisconti, vol. 2 (Roma: Scuola Nazionale del Cinema/ Fondazione Istituto Gramsci, 2004); idem, biblioVisconti, vol. 3 (Roma: Scuola Nazionale del Cinema/ Fondazione Istituto Gramsci, 2009). For volume 3 I coordinated the research on the Dutch and German written publications for which Daniël Singelenberg (Amsterdam) and Ulrich Döge (Berlin) did the research.
11introduction
meaningful props and catalysts within the narrative. This also includes painted and photographed portraits. Pictoriality is strongly represented in the staging and framing of his images. His staging in depth, his use of framing (with the film frame echoed in windows, doors and vistas), and his use of mirrors are clearly rooted in aesthetic traditions derived from painting. At the same time, framing and staging also have their cinematic traditions, even if they might derive from traditions in other media such as theatre. With their remarkable tracking shots and zooms, and with the techniques of temporarily blocking or filtering characters, Visconti’s films even deviate from painting. Mobile framing strongly relates to the historical development of cinema itself, even if camera panning has its precedents in panoramic painting. More narrowly, this can also be contextualized by Visconti’s early film career, and his familiarity with European cinema, particularly – but not exclusively – that of Jean Renoir. Tracing of Visconti’s imagery can be done on different levels that can be hard to conceptualize. Can we find a theoretical framework, a model or concepts to explain what is happening here?
Appropriation, pictorial references and ekphrasis
Appropriation, as defined within the new art history, is a key concept in this study. In Cultural Appropriation and the Arts (2008), James O. Young distinguishes three categories of appropriation: object, subject and content appropriation.5 This study focuses on the third, content appropriation (appropriation of ideas), under which Young also groups style appropriation and motif appropriation. One can thereby speak of ‘influence’ whether intentionally transferred or not. The idea of painters or painting influencing filmmakers, though, has been criticized. When dealing with cultural appropriation Young states that the ‘giving’ party are ‘insiders’ while the ‘taking’ party are ‘outsiders’, thus implying that the former is the most important. In Patterns of Intentions (1985), however, Michael Baxandall claims that we should reverse this movement: ‘’influence’ is a curse of art criticism primarily because of its wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient: it seems to reverse the active/passive relation which the historical actor experiences and the inferential beholder will wish to take into account. If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than Y did something to X’. If we rather conceive of Y instead of X as agent, then the vocabulary becomes much richer, more attractive, more varied.6
According to Baxandall, thinking in terms of influence and its basis, the classic concept of causality ossifies because it impoverishes the possibilities in differentiation. Baxandall uses the metaphor of billiard balls on an American pool table. The cue ball is not X (the original artwork or artist) but Y (the appropriator). Every time Y deliberately hits X, all balls are rearranged, and form new relations to each other. In terms of artistic influence, when dealing with pictorial quotations, it might be that the citation modifies our notion of the original painting instead of the other way around. The first chapter will analyse this in the pictorial quotation of
5 James O. Young, Cultural Appropriation and the Arts (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 5-9. 6 Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention. On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven/
London: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 58-60.
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the romantic historicist painting, Il bacio (1859) by Francesco Hayez, in Visconti’s historical film Senso. When researching this cultural appropriation, we cannot stop at formal resemblances though we often will start there. The historical trajectories between painting and film also need to be investigated. How is it possible that certain images are privileged over others, and migrate from and resurface in other media but in transformed and reconfigured ways? Has the original meaning changed and, if so, why and what is left of it? Finally, does this changed meaning alter our understanding of the original artwork?
Baxandall’s approach seems related to the New Historicist reaction against historical teleology, that is, against a linear reading of history that neglects alternative possibilities. In the 1970s and 1980s resistance rose against this approach as it often involved a chronological-organic model (childhood/maternity/decline) or a chronological-teleological model (a development towards ever greater filmic realism or mastery of technical means). This was the main critique against the art historian Anne Hollander’s study, Moving Pictures (1989), in which she argued figurative – here Northern European – painting used techniques and concepts that preceded the language of cinema.7 Hollander rightly indicated, however, how important reproduction was as an intermediate state to explain cinema’s appropriation of painting: ‘This proto-cinematic art was mostly created by painters. But in large part the emotional effects that were most telling in their paintings and most deeply internalized by the public, and that eventually found their way into cinema, first reached the hearts of their viewers though the medium of reproduction’.8 This matches my argument about Il bacio, in which reproduction is an important missing link between painting and citation in Senso. Hollander was also one of the first to analyse the formal qualities of Northern European painting – light & shadow, colour, composition, staging in depth, framing, etc. – and relate these to cinematic mise en scène and framing. While her teleological approach was criticized by Glass (2003), Dalle Vacche (1996), and Mills (2001), others objected to the contrast between her vast knowledge on painting and the relative paucity of her discussion on cinema.9 Some film or art historians sought to fill in this gap. They did closer research on the Baxandallian appropriation of figurative painting in cinema, either in the formal and aesthetic ways similar to Hollander, e.g., in analysing cinematic framing and staging (Bellocchio, 2005; Zagarrio, 1993; Bernardi, 2002; Aumont, 2007/1989; Costa, 2006; Salt, 1992; Brewster, 1992; Deleuze, 2005; Thompson,
7 Anne Hollander, Moving Pictures (New York: Knopf, 1989). 8 Hollander 1989, p. 4. On the importance of reproduction for quotation and iconicity, see my article,
‘Quo vadis? From Painting to Cinema and Everthing in Between‘, in: Leonardo Quaresima, Laura Vichi eds., La decima musa. Il cinema e le altre arti/ The Tenth Muse. Cinema and other arts (Udine: Forum, 2001), p. 281-96, republished in: Richard Abel ed., Early Cinema: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2014), vol. III, pp. 9-22. In reworked version in Dutch as‘Gérôme en Quo Vadis? Picturale invloeden in de film’, Jong Holland 4, 2001, p. 19-28.
9 Marguerite Ann Glass, Ch. 2, ‘Appropriation’, Vermeer in Dialogue: From Appropriation to Response (diss. University of Maryland, 2003), pp. 21-53. Angela Dalle Vacche, ‘Introduction’, Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), pp. 8-11. Jane Mills, ‘Light! Camera! Painbrush!’, Senses of Cinema 18 (December 2001), http://www.sensesofcinema. com/contents/01/18/paint.html.
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1988)10 or in the use of quotations in early cinema (Blom, 1992, 2001/2013),11 or in classical Hollywood cinema portraiture from the 1940s (Sykora, 2003; Felleman, 2006; Jacobs, 2011).12 These contributions laid the groundwork for my analysis of Visconti’s use and appropriation of painting in his films.
David Bordwell wrote in On the History of Film Style: ‘In 1947, in his hugely popular Le musée imaginaire, [André] Malraux […] argued that the doctrines of the turn-of-the-century modernism, according to which the creator dominated reality by means of a style, were valid only for a brief moment in the history of art. The cinema, he claimed, was heir to the long tradition of descriptive painting. While modernism liberated painting from narrative demands, cinema took over those illustrative purposes that had been paramount from the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century. Malraux thereby implied that cinéphiles had erred in trying to align film with modernism. The sound cinema was pledged to realism by its very place in the history of the visual arts’.13 While this assertion needs to be nuanced, Malraux does stand close to Hollander’s claim about figurative painting’s anticipation of fiction film, and to Bazin’s claim that cinema is a ‘realist’ medium. As Visconti’s cinema shows, however, style and reality are both very prominent, and the balance can move back and forth, for example, in his alternation of deep staging and compressed spaces in films like La terra trema (see Chapter 9).14
In her dissertation, Vermeer in Dialogue: From Appropriation to Response (2003), Marguerite Ann Glass researched the ways in which painters, writers and filmmakers have appropriated the work of the seventeenth century Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer.15 From a theoretical and art historical perspective, she investigated the trajectory from high art to popular culture. Yet, despite her invocation of
10 Letizia Bellocchio, ‘Identificazione e straniamento in Ossessione e La terra trema’, in: Letizia Bellocchio, Mauro Giori, Tomaso Subini eds., Guarda bene, fratello, guarda bene. Kubrick, Pasolini, Visconti (Milano: CUEM, 2005), pp. 53-67. Vito Zagarrio, ‘Le “quinte” della storia: riflessioni sulla regia’, in: Lino Miccichè ed., La terra trema di Luchino Visconti. Analisi di un capolavoro, (Roma/Torino: Associazione Philip Morris Progetto Cinema/CSC/Lindau, 1993), pp. 117-39. Sandro Bernardi, Il paesaggio nel cinema italiano (Venezia: Marsilio, 2002). Jacques Aumont, L’oeil interminable (Paris: La Différence, 2007/ Paris: Séguier, 1989). Antonio Costa, ‘Finestre sullo schermo’, in: Letizia Bellocchio ed., Finestre. Atti della Scuola Europea di Studi Comparati (Firenze: le Monnier, 2006), pp. 79-91. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image / Cinema 2. The Time-Image (London/New York: Continuum, 2005). Barry Salt, Film Style & Technology: History & Analysis (London: Starword, 1992). Ben Brewster, ‘Deep Staging in French Films, 1900-1914’, in T. Elsaesser, A. Barker eds., Early cinema: space-frame-narrative (London: BFI, 1992), pp. 45-55. Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor. Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). See also Ben Brewster, Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema. Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
11 Ivo Blom, ‘Il Fuoco or the Fatal Portrait. The XIXth Century in the Italian Silent Cinema’. Le portrait peint au cinéma. Iris no. 14-15, Autumn 1992, pp. 55-66. See also Blom 2001.
12 Susan Felleman, Art in the Cinematic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Steven Jacobs, Framing Pictures. Film and the Visual Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Katharina Sykora, As You Desire me. Das Bildnis im Film. Cologne: Walther König, 2003. Ivo Blom, ‘Of Artists and Models. Painters and Sculptors in Italian Silent Cinema’, Acta Sapientiae Universitatis. Film and Media Studies 7 (2013), pp. 97-110.
13 David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 49. 14 Cf. Bazin’s analysis of Welles’s one-shot sequences, deep staging and deep focus, which Bazin links
with a general development of the filmic language in the late 1930s and 1940s, also traceable in in the films of Renoir and Visconti. André Bazin, What…