He loved German culture and its Austrian sister, Goethe, Mahler, Wagner, the nostalgia of Zweig and Thomas Mann for a dying empire.
Like many a Mediterranean princeling wanting to affect above his Latin origin, perchance a Marxist yearning for proximity to the philosopher's motherland, Visconti prized his family's Germanic ancestry. These conundrums extend to the man's identity as a European, national affinity, and cultural fixation out of sorts. As an artist, he was one of the sires of Italian Neorealism, yet his most famous works renounce documentary-like depictions to strive for operatic grandeur, melodrama another of his passions. Going further into the wonderland of incongruity, Visconti considered himself a Catholic until his dying day despite being openly queer. From the opposite direction, there's empathy despite the vivisection, the contradictory compassion of a man who was all contradiction.īorn Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo, The Damned's writer-director was that obversion of a communist nobleman. Instead of a needle puncture, he often preferred the scalpel slash, his films dissections. Oh, but there are limits to the metaphor, the director prone to do more than just jab a pin through the humans in his scripts. They're skewered still and flattened down by a plane of glass, the better to appreciate painted-like wings. That would be Luchino Visconti's The Damned, marking the start of his German trilogy, the international metamorphosis of his cinema, and the most open expression of gay sensibilities in his oeuvre to that point…įrom Senso to The Innocent, Luchino Visconti treated his aristocratic characters as a collector might handle prized butterflies. The winner was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a western which has inspired queer readings for over half a century though it was far from the queerest picture in the race. Whether seen as seminal works in their author's careers or cultural milestones with much to reveal about the society that produced them, the films form an illustrious bunch, going from Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice's pop psychology to the revisionist brutality of The Wild Bunch. You wouldn't know it in 1969, but all nominees would be studied for years to come. At the 42nd Academy Awards, the Best Original Screenplay category was a rarity of historical importance.
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