Luchino Visconti's high-budget spectacular, called by Georges Sadoul “one of the most beautiful Italian films ever made,” depicts the Risorgimento battle for independence and unification of Italy in Austrian-occupied Venice in 1866. Visconti develops his story on two planes: the private plane, in which a young Countess, increasingly desperate in her love for an Austrian officer, becomes a traitor; and the historical plane. Where the two meet, Visconti “offers... an extraordinary portrait of a decadent and corrupt aristocracy in which...treachery and...cowardice are an inevitable result of...environment” (Sadoul). Similarly, Senso is both an operatic “costume” film (it opens with a tribute to Verdi), and a conscious effort by a Marxist-inspired director to, in the words of André Bazin, “impose on this luxurious, harmonious, and quasi-pictorial decor the rigor of a documentary....” --in “What Is Cinema?”
Because of the obvious parallels drawn by Visconti to recent Italian history - the partisan movement of the 1940s in particular - Senso suffered at the hands of both producer and censors from the start, the result being a re-worked finale and major cuts in the battle scenes. (JB)