Luchino Visconti: Smrť v Benátkach

Director: Luchino Visconti • Screenplay: Nicola Badalucco, Luchino Visconti • Camera: Pasquale De Santis • Starring: Dirk Bogarde, Romolo Valli, Mark Burns, Nora Ricci, Marisa Berenson, Carole André, Björn Andrésen, Silvana Mangano

In 1911, the exhausted music composer Gustav von Aschenbach arrives in Venice. In the environment of a luxurious Italian resort, he wants to recover, to gain new vitality and inspiration. She comes in an unexpected form and takes the form of the ephebeically beautiful Polish young man Tadzio. Aschenbach gradually realizes that his fascination with the boy is turning into a platonic love for the ideal of beauty that he has been trying to find in music all his life. However, the situation in Venice is no longer safe not only for Aschenbach's feelings, but also for his health. The insidious scirrocco brought cholera into the stagnant waters of the Venetian canals. Venetians living off tourists are trying to keep information about the epidemic a secret for as long as possible at any cost. Death in Venice, which belongs to the highlights of director Luchino Visconti's work, is the second work of the so-called German trilogy. The film is a perfect evocation of the atmosphere of late art nouveau, belle epoque and the old world, which disappeared after the First World War. The prototype of the character of Gustav von Aschenbach was the music composer Gustav Mahler. Therefore, in his adaptation, Visconti changed Aschenbach's profession from writer to music composer. With the help of the perfect scenography and music by Mahler, Lehár and Musogorský, he created a reflection on the essence of artistic creation, beauty and the two forces that govern human life: the power of love and the power of death, from a model that used to be considered unfilmable. (STV)