Abstract
Ivo Blom summarizes his book Reframing Luchino Visconti: Film and Art with the question ‘from where does the imagery, the visual vocabulary and the pictoriality of Visconti’s films come?’ In addressing this question, he moves through an ambitiously varied succession of approaches and perspectives. This is appropriate given the breadth and richness of visual culture that Visconti brought to his films from painting, theatre and cinema, and which constantly informed his attention to costume, sets and framing. Blom’s multifaceted exploration of Visconti’s imagery sets out to encompass each of these aspects. The book’s first half is concerned with pictorial citations, art direction and costume design and puts an emphasis on the influence of painting and, to an extent, still photography. The second half turns its attention to staging, framing and mirroring with more attention given to cinematic references. Throughout, Blom’s handling of his subject could be compared to the restless use of a zoom lens, moving between up close scrutiny of specific elements of Visconti’s films and wide vistas of the cultural contexts that informed it so broad that Visconti sometimes almost gets lost. In following a non-chronological thematic progression comprised of specific areas of investigation, Blom produces a rather fragmented study that nevertheless contains much of value. It coheres better in some sections than others, proving in turn informative, intriguing and sometimes frustrating.
The opening chapter focuses on pictorial citations in Visconti’s first historical drama, Senso (1954), and most specifically on its reference to Francesco Hayez’s 1859 painting Il Bacio. It is the best example of Blom’s method operating at its full potential. In his introduction to the book, he takes issue with the idea of ‘influence’ as being exerted by older works of art on artists that follow and proposes instead that it is the artists of successive generations that add their influence to older artworks through appropriation and reinterpretation. The nod to Il Bacio in Senso is a good example of this, particularly because the passage from the painting to the film is not a direct one. Blom outlines how Il Bacio’s reimagining in Senso represents a stage in an ongoing process of transmedial migration that the original image has been subject to. Hayez’s painting of an embracing couple was initially created to symbolize a particular historical moment, the Italo-French union and Lombardy’s liberation from Austria. With time, the political message of this hugely popular image was forgotten and it became simply an emblem of impossible romantic love. It has been associated with the story of Romeo and Juliet, used as the model for the logo of a popular brand of chocolates since 1922 and, according to Blom, quoted in cinema at least as recently as Star Wars III: Return of the Sith (2005). Blom weaves a satisfyingly dense web of resonances and connections between the painting, its history, the film and Visconti himself. As an example of historical painting of its time, it smuggles political meaning into an image that suggests theatre or opera in its arrangement of figures. Visconti’s nod to it in Senso is in a shot of Livia (Alida Valli), an Italian countess, embracing the fickle Hapsburg officer with whom she is having an adulterous affair and for whom she will betray her country and destroy herself. The filmmaker’s decision to evoke Il Bacio at this pivotal moment at once draws on its romantic mood and parodies it, as the romance it depicts is a doomed folly. Yet Blom also argues that the mood of the Risorgimiento was self-consciously theatrical and operatic, and that stepping into her ill-fated romance would likely have been experienced by Livia as consciously stepping into the realm of melodrama, of entering an operatic image such as Il Bacio. It is quite possible that Livia herself might even have been aware of Hayez’s painting. This example of a shared culture between character and filmmaker, in which we see not only Visconti dramatize and comment upon a character’s actions and feelings through a pre-existing image but also the character in question perhaps also self-consciously projecting herself into such an image, is a richly suggestive indication of the extent to which Visconti’s sensibility was immersed in the artistic traditions of the nineteenth century.
Born Count Luchino Visconti di Modrone to a prominent Milanese aristocratic family, Visconti was a man straddling two centuries. His cultivated eye for detail contributed greatly to his filmography and perhaps especially to his remarkable historical dramas that include The Leopard (1963), Death in Venice (1971) and Ludwig (1973). Although Blom’s book focuses on Visconti’s films, the director had equally distinguished parallel careers in theatre and opera. Beyond this cross-pollination, Visconti’s knowledge of and interest in painting, music, literature and history were exceptionally broad and intense, and palpably enriched his cinema. This in itself would be enough to justify Blom’s emphasis on the transmedial in Reframing Visconti, but he approaches Visconti’s work from a perspective loose enough to interweave it with parallel cultural tangents that intersect with it. The Hayez chapter, for example, deftly dovetails a history of the painting Il Bacio and the art historical context from which it emerged with the biographical details of Hayez having painted subjects from the lives of Visconti’s ancestors and Luchino Visconti’s friendship with art historian Emilio Cecchi (who was an important advocate of Hayez’s work). This chapter also includes in-depth studies of other paintings referenced in Senso and interviews with Senso costume designer, Piero Tosi. Although it would be too much to expect that every chapter would have such a rich concentration of material, Blom by and large manages to keep close to the high standard his opening chapter sets throughout the book’s first half. Shifting perspective from chapter to chapter, discussion hones in on case studies within Visconti’s oeuvre, exploring images within the films’ diegeses and then elements of design within the frame.
The use of paintings within The Leopard is the subject of the second chapter, and it focuses on Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Le Fils puni (1778). This work is contemplated in a key scene by the central character of Visconti’s film and the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa upon which it is based. This is followed by a particularly fascinating study of the set design of Conversation Piece (1975), a film which takes place almost entirely within the confines of a reclusive professor’s apartment in which, as the film’s title implies, paintings are a crucial element. An analysis of portraits within Visconti’s films follows in a chapter that focuses on the use of photographs and photography within his films. Photography was the principal source of visual research for Death in Venice and the highlight of this chapter is Blom’s examination of the use of photography and the camera within that film.
The following chapter returns to Senso and centres on the use of costumes in that film. Painting is again the central focus and lengthy backgrounds are provided to nineteenth century painters Franz-Xaver Winterhalter and Alfred Stevens, as several artistic contexts are considered. Rich as this material is, Blom’s imbrication of it with oral testimony from costume designer Piero Tosi and discussions of costume in film theory doesn’t quite cohere as powerfully as his first chapter on Senso. And the final chapter of the book’s first half, dealing with the intriguing subject of veiling and unveiling in Visconti’s films, is where Blom’s method first starts to run into trouble. It shows the first signs of the problem that will bedevil the book’s second half, where the threads Blom weaves into his work don’t always pull together.
Reframing Luchino Visconti: Film and Art’s closing section, entitled ‘Iconographic Tradition’, provides a series of examples of the representation of veiled women stretching back to antiquity. In it, Visconti is barely mentioned, which is not in itself a problem. However, a typical example of where his work is referred to in this section comes at the end of a short paragraph that moves from mentioning the abundance of veiled women in certain nineteenth century cemeteries to the ostensible evocation of this nineteenth century funerary tradition in Jean Epstein’s film of The Fall of the House of Usher. Discussion then touches on painterly representations (citing Bouguereau) and finally informs us that women wear black veils fully covering their faces in Visconti’s The Damned. Several pages later, Blom links The Damned to Josef von Sternberg’s series of 1930s films starring Marlene Dietrich with the statement ‘The veil is slightly reminiscent of Ingrid Thulin’s in The Damned…’ Blom is under no obligation to link every reference he uses to Visconti or to always prove direct influence. His fine opening chapters already demonstrated how the interweaving of sometimes apparently tangential strands of cultural reference can result in a satisfying concentration of understanding. But unfortunately, as the book moves into its second half, ‘slightly reminiscent of’ becomes an increasingly prevalent reason for citations. As in the list of funerary representations of the veil, there is often little more at play than matching like with like.
This is regrettable as Blom’s choice of subjects for the book’s second half is promising. There is much of value in his descriptions of the specifics of staging, framing and the use of mirrors in Visconti. Yet whereas in the book’s first half the leaps and tangents he often indulges in can have a cumulative force, here they wear very thin, at worst coming close to random free association as scattershot bursts of thinly connected citations follow each other. A large part of the problem might be that while the paintings, photographs and costumes that are discussed in the first half naturally provide connections to modes of imagery and historical moments outside the given film and its times, the examples of film technique examined in the second half work differently. A shot in a film, unlike a photograph or painting, is part of an unfolding continuum of imagery. It is therefore experienced in a situation that is very different from a still image. Admittedly, in describing the scenes and shots from Visconti’s films that he takes as examples, Blom is thorough in situating them within the movies they are part of. And his choice of moving between examples of a particular type of shot as it recurs in different films, rather than contextualizing them within the development of Visconti’s work as a whole, is a legitimate way of analysing certain directorial signatures. However, when Blom moves outside Visconti’s films, things get fuzzy. Beyond superficial resemblances at a shot to shot level, it is often hard to follow his associations beyond the probability that Visconti might have seen the film in question. An example of this at its worst is the page Blom devotes to a shot from F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1926) in a section on Visconti’s use of doorways in his framing. Murnau’s shot is used to show that in the 1920s such framing was already being used and that it was part of (to use Blom’s expression) ‘cinematic tradition’. We might ask: what ‘cinematic tradition’? Murnau was a prominent innovator – how common were such shots in the 1920s outside of his work? Or even outside of this particular shot? How did they fit into the overall scheme of his work and how did this relate to Visconti’s? What are the relative positions of Murnau and Visconti in film history? All Blom does is gratuitously inform us that he spotted a single shot from a 1920s movie that happened to use a doorway in a way that looked similar to Visconti’s use of doorways. Without firmly rooting his examples within the context of the film histories from which they emerged – or without discussing his examples beyond shot resemblances – Blom’s approach often comes close to the popular internet craze among cinephiles for posting two film stills side by side simply because the images resemble each other. Beyond the ‘wow!’ of recognition this produces, there is often not much to these juxtapositions. The frustrating thing about Blom’s book is that there is probably a good deal more to his comparisons. Rather than developing them through solid argument, he is content to surf distractedly from one unrooted example to the next in a wooly collage.