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Luchino Visconti

 

TSPDT Rating

Director / Screenwriter / Producer
1906 - 1976 
Born November 2, Milan, Lombardy, Italy
Key Production Countries: Italy, France 
Key Genres: Drama, Family Drama, Psychological Drama, Period Film, Melodrama, Romantic Drama
Key Collaborators: Suso Cecchi D'Amico (Screenwriter), Mario Serandrei (Editor), Enrico Medioli (Screenwriter), Mario Garbuglia (Production Designer), Ruggero Mastroianni (Editor), Pasqualino De Santis (Cinematographer), Helmut Berger (Leading Player), Silvana Mangano (Leading Player), Massimo Girotti (Leading Player), Franco Mannino (Composer)
Highly Recommended: La Terra trema (1947), Senso (1954)
Recommended: Ossessione (1942), Rocco and His Brothers (1960), The Leopard (1963), Of a Thousand Delights (1965), Ludwig (1973)
Links: [ IMDB ] [ TCMDB ] [ All-Movie Guide ] [ Film Reference ] [ BFI Feature ] [ Derek Malcolm's Century of Films: The Leopard ] [GLBTQ Biography ] [ Guardian Unlimited Article ]
Books: [ Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood ] [ Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and Decay ] [ Luchino Visconti ] [ Luchino Visconti (Twayne's Filmmakers Series)  ]
DVD's: [ Amazon ] 
1,000 Greatest Films: Ossessione (1942), La Terra trema (1947), Senso (1954), Rocco and His Brothers (1960), The Leopard (1963), The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), Ludwig (1973)
 
Senso (1954)La Terra Trema (1947)Ossessione (1942)Ludwig (1973)
 
     
  "This Italian director offered strong, stern, unremitting portraits of societies, often high, and veneers crumbling under exterior pressures. Most of them are impressive, and beautifully decorated with all the visual elegance of a man who was both set designer and costume designer early in his career. However, after 1960, they have progressively less to offer in terms of entertainment. A trip to a late Visconti film became increasingly an occasion for admiration rather than enjoyment." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999)  
     
  "A Marxist aristocrat, Count Don Luchino Visconti di Morone was widely praised for both the realism and vaguely politicised tone of his early films, and the operatic sumptuousness of his later historical costume dramas. Throughout his career, however, style dominated content; all too often, the result was camp, decorative melodrama disguised as solemn, socially significant art." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)  
     
  "The films of Luchino Visconti are among the most stylistically and intellectually influential of postwar Italian cinema. Born a scion of ancient nobility, Visconti integrated the most heterogeneous elements of aristocratic sensibility and taste with a committed Marxist political consciousness, backed by a firm knowledge of Italian class structure...Visconti turned out films steadily but rather slowly from 1942 to 1976. His obsessive care with narrative and filmic materials is apparent in the majority of his films." - Joel Kanoff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)  
     
  "A director of intense, frequently opulent dramas, Visconti began his career as one of the purveyors of Italian neorealism (La Terra trema, 48) of a heavy, surging kind. Later he was more grandiose, cutting to the depths of human emotions in decadent atmospheres." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)  
     
 
 
 
 

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Last updated: 28/01/2010 10:35 AM.  Contact Us: bill@theyshootpictures.com.
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