One evening some time in the mid- to late 1960s, my father, at that time a student in Rome, was invited to dinner with an Italian family living in the hills just outside the city.He had become friendly with their son through a keen shared interest in archaeology - the family was well known in Italy for having produced successive generations of eminent and well-respected archaeologists. That evening, after dinner, a family heirloom was brought up from the vaults to show my father. It was a manuscript handwritten by the composer Giuseppe Verdi, and dedicated to the son's great-grandfather. The score was written on the headed notepaper of the Piedmontese parliament (the progressive seat of government during Italian unification in the 1860s), and was a piece of Risorgimento doggerel set to music by the composer during a (presumably boring) meeting of the parliament at which both Verdi and the great-grandfather were present. Never published or performed, the manuscript remained a private family treasure - an artefact symbolizing not just the point at which art and politics met, but where creative and historical forces joined in testament to the personal.
'Va, pensiero' (better known as the 'Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves'), from Verdi's opera Nabucco (1842), was the unofficial anthem heralding the birth of Italian unification. At the composer's funeral in 1901 thousands turned up and sang it. Verdi was an artist whose work mirrored his political heroism, an example of how art, in many ways, is an index of the points at which the individual intersects with history and the swell of social evolution. The creative act can register the extent to which individuals have sway over the unfolding of events around them, almost becoming analogous to the political efficacy of the individual's gesture. The cinema of Count Don Luchino Visconti di Modrone - lavish, decadent, tragic and humane - is one that describes the tides and currents that buffet and throw us through our short occupation of time. Narrative in his films is plotted with the bold strokes and sweeping trajectories of melodrama, but the grandiose is always nuanced, modelled and shaded by princes, working-class boxers, self-absorbed aesthetes, Sicilian fishermen, Risorgimento reformists, mad kings and wealthy businessmen - all painfully aware of their innermost emotional contradictions and their resultant actions.
The late Richard Wollheim once said that history would 'not forgive an age whose record cannot be set straight without an excess of footnotes over text'. However, the biographical footnotes to Visconti's films are illuminating. He was the product of a wealthy aristocratic Milanese family. The undertow of privilege carried through his life, and castles, palazzi and villas formed the architecture of his formative years. Throughout his 20s he successfully bred racehorses until, in 1936, he left Fascist Italy for France. Following a chance meeting with Coco Chanel, he found himself working in the costume department and then as assistant director on Jean Renoir's Les Bas-Fonds (The Lower Depths, 1936) and Une Partie de Campagne (A Day in the Country, 1937). The left-wing ideals and communist beliefs of Renoir's circle had a profound influence on Visconti, turning him from the political right to Marxism. In 1940 he returned to Italy, where, along with struggling for the Italian resistance, he began his film career with Ossessione (Obsession, 1943), an adaptation of James Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), funded by the sale of some family jewels. From there his work followed a trajectory that moved between explicit political humanism - La Terra Trema (The Earth Shakes, 1948) or Rocco and his Brothers (1960), for example - and the period epics of Senso (1954), The Leopard (1963), The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), and Ludwig (1973), films closer to the melodrama of opera than the no frills Neo-realism of contemporaries such as Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica.
Throughout Visconti's life Marxism was the guiding light by which his work developed. Paradoxically, at the same time he led a life of palazzi, servants and all the material trappings of noble privilege. The idea of the Marxist aristocrat is one that seems patently oxymoronic, as absurdly untenable as that of an atheist priest or republican monarch. It's never been entirely clear how Visconti reconciled his beliefs. (Dirk Bogarde, who starred in both Death in Venice and The Damned, was always promised an explanation by Visconti, though he never received it.) Perhaps the equation of Marxist belief with material penury is too simplistic. A favourite Latin maxim of Marx's was nihili humani a me alienum puto (nothing human is alien to me), and Visconti's class certainly did not preclude him from sophisticated observation of the ways in which individuals are affected by social change. His interpretations of Marx came via Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács. Gramsci provided a reading of historical forces in which the individual can reach compromises for better or for worse. From Lukács, Visconti was able to work with the idea that the artist occupies a uniquely progressive position from which they can provide criticism and analysis of bourgeois society. Shaped by that society, the artist's work contains an inherent critical subtext of the forces that produced it. As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith points out, Visconti borrowed from Gramsci the slogan 'pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will', meaning that 'things will not necessarily turn out for the better, but there is a better, and it is worth believing in and fighting for.' 1
The play-off between individual sovereignty and compromise with the outside world was both Visconti's central theme and his personal struggle; as his films evolved from stark Neo-realism to stately historical grandeur they became, in some ways, increasingly informed by the contradictions of his own situation. As the eccentric king in Ludwig believes, politics comes second to art. Visconti's lifestyle raised questions of artistic and moral responsibility, but it also made sense of the claim that, as the composer von Aschenbach's friend Alfred puts it in Death in Venice, 'art is a paradise of double meanings [...] ambiguity made a science.'
At the core of much of Visconti's work was the family. La Terra Trema, funded by the Italian Communist Party, examined the exploitation of a fishing family, the Valestros, in the Sicilian village of Aci Trezza. Acted entirely by the family itself and other residents of the village, the film forged an unsentimental but humane tale of a struggle for basic justice and dignity. Similarly, Rocco and his Brothers - about the trials and tribulations of a southern working-class family moving to Milan in the hope of a better life - used the family as the springboard to highlight the economic exploitation of southern Italy by the north. At the other end of the scale are the historical films: both Senso and The Leopard looked at the fortunes of the dying aristocratic dynasties during the Risorgimento in the 1860s, while The Damned charted the internal destruction of a wealthy industrialist family by greed, corruption and the pernicious influence of Nazism. For Visconti the family was both the starting-point for political action and a cipher for his own political ideas.
The House of Salina in The Leopard, Visconti's adaptation of the 1958 novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, is perhaps the family that most singularly expresses Visconti's ideas and reflects his own position and background. Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, is the patriarchal head of an aristocratic Sicilian family in the 1860s, a class doomed by the reforms sweeping Italy. The prince accepts that he and his family must move with the times if they are to stand any chance of survival - as his nephew Tancredi, a politically savvy soldier in Garibaldi's army, observes: 'everything must change so that everything can stay the same.' (We also inhabit a present that fetishizes the past: preservation societies pickle history in aspic in the name of 'heritage', allowing nothing to die, to change, or run to ruin.) Reform becomes a force for preservation, and the historically determinist Marxist view of history becomes pockmarked by all the contradictions of reality itself.
Visconti's attention to detail was notoriously highly tuned. When Burt Lancaster, who played the prince, arrived on set to film The Leopard, Visconti treated him with cold contempt. Slowly but surely, however, Lancaster began to pick up the director's aristocratic aloofness, translating this into his own magisterial interpretation of Don Fabrizio. For the famous ball scene that makes up the final third of the film, fresh flowers were brought in daily for each room, whether or not it would be used for filming. The servants and guests at the ball were all played by the real descendants and servants of Italy's aristocracy. Visconti's vision was opulent, sensuous and operatic (a lover of opera, his reputation is still that of one of Italy's finest stage directors). The camera drank in the beauty of his actors in order to spill forth from the screen a highly charged but cold eroticism. Be it the carefully sculpted lighting of Alain Delon in Rocco and his Brothers, the sinister elegance of Helmut Berger's sadistic SS officer in The Damned or the sumptuous Technicolor radiance of Claudia Cardinale in The Leopard, beauty was sharpened into a cut-glass blade under Visconti's gaze. Beauty and youth become synonymous with a destructiveness only tamed by age - in the character of the Prince of Salina, or the professor in Conversation Piece (1974), for example. Wisdom can be found in the scars and knots of the ageing tree, not the blankness of untested young saplings. Visconti's films unfolded slowly for hours, as if reflecting a conception of time that was able to become interwoven with history itself, to stand back and encompass every increment of progress.
'The problem with people not knowing about the past,' wrote G. K. Chesterton, 'is that they do not know about the present.' We live in an age of chronic a-history. Politicians still, as always, fail to learn from the mistakes of their forebears. Artists repeat the strategies of history partly because they are ignorant of them. In the opening scene of Senso, set at the climax of a Verdi opera performed at La Fenice in Venice, Italian nationalists drop hundreds of small tricolore flags from the balconies on to the occupying Austrian officers below. The ringleaders behind this gesture of defiance are two cousins, members of a family bound by revolutionary ideals. Like the private Verdi manuscript my father saw some 40 years ago, Visconti's films remind us, in all their flawed, contradictory and tarnished glory, that the political begins with the personal and that the spirited gestures of the individual are like butterfly wings that may or may not cause the earth to shake. Some time after the release of La Terra Trema, the main participants of the film, the Valestro family, wrote to Visconti: 'The family Valestro wishes to express publicly its gratitude to Luchino Visconti and his collaborators for making their story known to Italy and the world through La Terra Trema. We are profoundly grateful for the experience we underwent together, from which we have reaped the highest hopes for our future.'
1. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Luchino Visconti, British Film Institute Publishing, London, 2003, p.216.
