A retrospective of a key artist of the Italian cinema, who combined the profound humanism of neorealism with the drama, beauty, and epic sweep of opera to create films rich in resonance and throbbing with life.
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Visconti is in an unusually comic mode for this satire on urban life and movieland ambition. The incomparable Anna Magnani plays a mother trying to launch her young daughter in show business.
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BAMPFA Student Committee Pick
With a deft mixture of authenticity, narrative suspense, and ambiguous passions, Visconti transposes James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice to a Po Valley trattoria.
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Following the struggles of impoverished Sicilian fisherfolk, Visconti “makes compositions of the most down-to-earth reality as if they were scenes from an opera or a classical tragedy” (André Bazin).
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Marcello Mastroianni stars in a romantic, sublimely artificial adaptation of the Dostoyevsky story about people drifting along crossing, doubling paths.
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The lives of a southern Italian family who move to Milan mirror the transformation of postwar Italian society. Starring Alain Delon, the film has “the emotional sweep of a Verdi opera and the narrative density of a nineteenth-century novel” (New York Times).
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The lives of a southern Italian family who move to Milan mirror the transformation of postwar Italian society. Starring Alain Delon, the film has “the emotional sweep of a Verdi opera and the narrative density of a nineteenth-century novel” (New York Times).
Digital Restoration
Alain Delon, Claudia Cardinale, and Burt Lancaster (in one of his greatest performances) star in this tale of an aging Sicilian aristocrat who watches as his life—and lifestyle—fades into the past. “Even the most intimate scenes seethe with a sense of change” (Village Voice). “A mellow and melancholy feast” (New York Times).
A ravishing elegy to the mortality of all things: buildings, cities, art, and desire. Dirk Bogarde plays the hero of Thomas Mann’s novella, a man enthralled by a young boy’s beauty in a Venice consumed by disease.
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Alain Delon, Claudia Cardinale, and Burt Lancaster (in one of his greatest performances) star in this tale of an aging Sicilian aristocrat who watches as his life—and lifestyle—fades into the past. “Even the most intimate scenes seethe with a sense of change” (Village Voice). “A mellow and melancholy feast” (New York Times).
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This somber mood piece is an Elektra story of madness and incestuous passions in a family haunted by secrets and the shadow of the Holocaust.
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An unhappily married Italian countess embarks on a doomed love affair with an Austrian officer in Visconti’s operatic, meticulously detailed tale of nationalism and destructive passion. “Visconti here moves his camera as if it were a conductor’s baton” (Artforum).
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A rare opportunity to see this adaptation of the great existentialist novel, with Marcello Mastroianni as Camus’s archetype of alienation. Visconti vividly re-creates 1930s colonial Algiers.
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An unhappily married Italian countess embarks on a doomed love affair with an Austrian officer in Visconti’s operatic, meticulously detailed tale of nationalism and destructive passion. “Visconti here moves his camera as if it were a conductor’s baton” (Artforum).
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Visconti gives the tragic life of the mad king of Bavaria an epic treatment, dazzling in its historical detail. “Ludwig is a passion play: a mass” (Film Comment). “An opulent, trance-like biopic” (Artforum).
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When aging professor Burt Lancaster rents the upper flat of his palazzo to a Roman matron and her gigolo, his life’s denouement is invaded by la dolce vita.
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Giancarlo Giannini in Visconti’s final work, a sumptuous, sensuous adaptation of the d’Annunzio novel. “One of Visconti’s most beautiful films [and] one of his most terse, most dramatically economical” (New York Times).