DEATH IN VENICE Luchino Visconti

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the Thomas Mann room at the Hotel des Bains on the Lido. ...


"A stunning, richly romantic evocation of time and place! Visconti's Venice is a cinematic dream. Bogarde gives a superior performance!"

— PLAYBOY MAGAZINE

"A masterpiece! A film of rare beauty! A work of pure enchantment! Dirk Bogarde is brilliant!"

— NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

"DEATH IN VENICE is Visconti's masterpiece! A perfect pearl, incredibly lustrous. So beautiful is this gem that we must joy in it for the splendor it gives!"

— MADEMOISELLE MAGAZINE



Death in Venice .....

The first few minutes of Death in Venice, Luchino Visconti's heavily ornamented film adaptation of the Thomas Mann short story, are an almost perfect evocation of the scene Mann sets as the prelude to Gustav Aschenbach's marvelous doom.

On the soundtrack we hear what seem, at first, to be the echoes of one of Mahler's most lonely melodies—the adagietto of the Fifth Symphony, which is a kind of requiem for the living. A small, fat steamer moves across a windless sea, trailing coal smoke that hangs in the air like a long, thin shred of dirty cotton. The time could be either dawn or dusk. The light is bluish pink and very dim, and there is no clearly defined horizon.

The movie has not been written and directed as much as it has been decorated by Visconti. by the extensive use of Mahler's music on the soundtrack, by the magnificent care that has been taken to re-create the look of the 1911 period, in costumes, in the Venice locale, in the color, and even in the sounds.



Luchino Visconti's adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel is the very definition of sumptuous: the costumes and sets, the special geography of Venice, and the breathtaking cinematography combine to form a heady experience. At the center of this gorgeousness is Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde in a meticulous performance), a controlled intellectual who unexpectedly finds himself obsessed by the vision of a 14-year-old boy while on a convalescent vacation in 1911. Visconti has turned Aschenbach into a composer, which accounts for the lush excerpts from Mahler on the soundtrack (Bogarde is meant to look like Mahler, too). Even if it tends to hit the nail on the head a little too forcefully, and even if Visconti can test one's patience with lingering looks at crowds at the beach and hotel dining rooms, Death in Venice creates a lushness rare in movies. For some viewers, that will be enough. --Robert Horton

s I was reviewing my piece on The Go-Between last week, I was reminded how many of my favorite films were released in 1971. It came as something of a shock to realize this would be their 30th anniversary. Can they—and I—really be that old? This was an impressionable time in my life: my college years, I reluctantly admit. But I don’t believe I’m alone in feeling 1971 was a vintage movie year. With the Hollywood studios in decline and ambitious young talent on the rise (Altman, Bogdanovich, Coppola, Lucas, Rafelson, Roeg, Russell, Schlesinger, Scorsese, Spielberg), the early ’70s are often said to have been the movies’ second Golden Age. So in the last few weeks of 2001, I’d like to give a nod of appreciation to a few old friends now turning 30.
Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of the Thomas Mann novella, Death in Venice, remains a flawed but haunting work. The film inevitably literalizes a highly philosophical and allegorical book that deals with an older man’s contemplation of youth, beauty, love, and the value of his life’s ideals in the face of his unexpected infatuation with a young boy. The movie is at its clumsiest trying to incorporate Mann’s intellectual ideas in discursive flashbacks which hope to convince us the attraction is more than sexual. Fortunately these are relatively brief, with the bulk of Visconti’s film devoted to Aschenbach’s rambling tours of a seductive, sordid Venice in pursuit of the elusive Tadzio. Death in Venice is surely one of the cinema’s most languorous and luxurious visual achievements. The sun-struck close-ups of the boy, which are obviously intended to recall Mann’s evocations of Apollo, are especially breathtaking.
The film has been derided as being too “gay.” Ken Russell included a fairly wicked parody of it in his Mahler, with a little boy swinging temptingly around train-station columns before the aged composer. But what finally makes Visconti’s film so moving is that it clearly is personal. I don’t think there’s any question that this gay director was fighting many of the same demons that torment his hero, Aschenbach, who is facing artistic and physical decline. Born to an aristocratic family, the Italian Visconti had had a dazzling career in film, with many directorial successes that included La Terra Trema (1948), Senso (1954), Rocco and His Brothers (1960), The Leopard (1963), The Stranger (1967), and The Damned (1969). But Death in Venice would be his last major picture, and five years later he would be dead. The film also proved to be a climax of sorts to the career of star Dirk Bogarde. Is it any wonder Aschenbach’s hopeless love for the just-out-of-reach boy conveys real sadness—his fears of ugliness and death real sting? One of the film’s most poignant sequences is that in which the desperate composer is dyed and rouged by a barber into a pathetic parody of youth. “There is no impurity so impure as old age.” For anyone who was gay or coming out in 1971, when it was still so rare for a film to even touch upon the subject of homosexuality, Death in Venice invariably made an indelible impression.
Above, 15-year-old Bjorn Andresen as pretty boy Tadzio. Andresen made no other major motion pictures and quickly slipped into obscurity, allowing him to remain ageless in memory, the embodiment of eternal youth and perfect beauty.

“Luchino Visconti occupies a unique place in history of world cinema; he is the most Italian of internationalists, the most operatic of realists, and the most aristocratic of Marxists. Although one of the progenitors of the Italian neorealist movement, Visconti, with his love of spectacle and historical panorama, would seem to have more in common with Orson Welles or even Erich von Stroheim than with Rossellini or DeSica. Directors as diverse as Bertolucci, Scorsese, Coppola and Fassbinder have named him as a major influence.”
—Ruth McCormick, The Encyclopedia of Film

“One of the themes of Mann’s brilliant novella has to do with the artist’s recognition of the power and validity of physical beauty, and Visconti’s cinematic approach conveys his understanding of this theme in every frame. The splendor of Venice, the elegance of Aschenbach’s seaside hotel, the androgynous perfection of the boy Tadzio—all are photographed in a lush, unhurried manner that allows the viewer to linger on a detail or to simply absorb the richness of the scene as a whole. This is a story—and a film—of contemplation, and Visconti permits his audience to share in the overwhelming sensuality that will penetrate Aschenbach’s emotional reserve and shatter his lifelong convictions about philosophy and art.”
—Janet E, Lorenz, The International Dictionary of Films
and Filmmakers

Death in Venice (Morte a Venezia)

A stunningly beautiful hotel of incomparable magnitude - a veritable cornucopia of antiques and art, Murano crystal and a myriad of fine and sumptuous décor and furniture statements.This is more a revelation of miraculous palatial splendour, rather than just a luxury hotel. But hey they have everything you need here too. Good service, cleanliness, and efficient and friendly staff. And the most sensational and mind-blowing views that would move even the most miserable guest. Even the food is sky-high quality-wise.If you want a life changing experience and a memory to savour forever, then the Danieli comes up trumps. More than that, it transcends the ordinary and reaches the realms of the stratospheric extraordinary.A national monument, the trick of the 14th century Danieli, is that it is every inch a luxury hotel and more.One of the top most beautiful hotels, the Danieli vies with equally luminous works of hotel art, such as the superb Dorchester in London and the magnificent Crillon in Paris.I cannot imagine anyone not being totally smitten by this incredible hotel.


Come and discover the Hotel Des Bains, Venice Lido Resort, a charming resort situated on Venice Lido. Surrounded by a lovely, large private park and opposite the legendary beach, we're just a 15-minute boat ride from St. Mark's Square. Built in pure Palladian style with Art Nouveau decorations, the Hotel Des Bains has welcomed international guests since 1900 and has been the preferred holiday destination of many.

by Thomas Mann, selected and translated by Richard Winston, by Clara Winston

Knopf, 690 pp., $17.50

Thomas Mann's persona fits bulkily into much of his fiction, like an outsize old-fashioned oblong brass-tacked trunk—the sort that Gustave Aschenbach might well have had carried into his suite at the Hotel des Bains on the Lido, in Death in Venice. Mann was almost insistently conscious of this autobiographical presence. He writes to Felix Bertaux in 1923 explaining that Death in Venice is the autobiographical Tonio Kröger "retold at a later stage of life," while Tonio Kröger itself is the autobiographical continuation of Buddenbrooks.


The Hotel des Bains on the Lido, the grand Art Nouveau hotel that serves as the backdrop for Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and also for the Visconti movie based on the book.





REVIEWS


"A stunning, richly romantic evocation of time and place! Visconti's Venice is a cinematic dream. Bogarde gives a superior performance!"

— PLAYBOY MAGAZINE

"A masterpiece! A film of rare beauty! A work of pure enchantment! Dirk Bogarde is brilliant!"

— NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

"DEATH IN VENICE is Visconti's masterpiece! A perfect pearl, incredibly lustrous. So beautiful is this gem that we must joy in it for the splendor it gives!"

— MADEMOISELLE MAGAZINE

Italy 1971 /Dir Luchino Visconti / 128 mins / colour / cert 12A / subtitles
With Dirk Bogarde, Bjorn Andresen, Silvana Mangano, Marisa Berenson
Released 14 February 2003

Death in Venice, a masterful, symphonic study of sensuality and decay returns to cinema screens on 14 February. Dirk Bogarde stars as Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated, aging composer facing a creative crisis. Entranced by the ethereal beauty of a Polish youth who seems to embody his ideals of physical perfection and spiritual purity, he succumbs to a fateful obsession.