Luchino Visconti - Biography, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Filmography (Read)

Luchino Visconti - biography, date of birth, place of birth, filmography, clips.
Born November 2, 1906 in Milan. His father, Duke Giuseppe Visconti di Modrone, loved art and earned recognition as a theater patron. His mother, Carla Erba, came from a wealthy family that had achieved dominance in the pharmaceutical industry in Milan.
Seven Visconti children were engaged in foreign languages, sports, music. Their father raised them in strict and firm rules. Lukino studied cello and composition. Shakespeare was his favorite writer. La Scala Theater became another hobby.
In 1936, on the recommendation of Coco Chanel, Visconti got a job as an assistant (according to other sources - a prop) in the group of Jean Renoir, who was filming the film "Country Walk". Renoir's work was the beginning of Lukino's directorial path. Then his rapprochement with the communists began. His first film "Obsession" ("Obsession") based on the novel by James Kane "The Postman Calls Twice", Visconti shot in 1942. This is a story of passion, crime and retribution.
Visconti soon found himself in the ranks of the anti-fascist Resistance. He sheltered people persecuted by the Nazis in his house, helped the soldiers of the allied armies to escape from German captivity. In Rome, Lukino was arrested by the Gestapo and narrowly escaped execution. In 1945, together with other filmmakers, he released a documentary film in memory of the anti-fascist Resistance - "Glory Days". Even before the end of the war, Visconti developed a stormy career as a theater director from January 1945 to February 1947, he staged eleven drama performances on various stages in Italy. In 1946 he formed his own troupe with permanent residence at the Eliseo theater in Rome. His Eliseo lasted twelve years, becoming the first Italian directing theater to stand the test of time. Along with Giorgio Strehler, Visconti became the founder of directing theater in Italy.
Visconti began as the leader of theatrical naturalism. According to Visconti himself, in his illustrious performances of the 1940s, “the audience had a feeling of something completely new, unprecedented. The unusual realism of the staging and performance literally struck them as it happens at school, when everything is erased from the blackboard and rewritten. Nobody imagined that you can play so truthfully. "
Having conceived a new film, in 1947 Luchino Visconti went to Sicily, to the ancient fishing village of Achi Trepescha, where the events retold in Vergi's novel The Malavolya Family took place. Francesco Rosi and Franco Zefirelli became his assistants. There was no script - the film was based on the plot of the novel. Instead of professional actors, the film starred residents of the town of fishermen, girls, farm laborers, bricklayers, fishmongers. They spoke in the Sicilian dialect. Italian in Sicily is not the language of the poor. Visconti made sure that the screen life of his Sicilian heroes was a natural continuation of their real life. Filming lasted six months. Having exhausted the budget, Visconti sold part of the family paintings and jewelry and completed the work ...
In August 1948, the film "The Earth Shakes" was presented to the audience at the Venice Film Festival. The picture impressed everyone with an extraordinary combination of truthfulness and high poetic dignity. The art of neorealism has reached one of its heights in it.
In the 1950s, Luchino Visconti successfully combined theater and film work. The script for the tragicomedy The Most Beautiful (1951) was helped by Francesco Rosi and his new co-author, Suso Cecchi d'Amico, who would become one of the director's closest friends and loyal associates. In "The Most Beautiful" actress Anna Magnani convincingly portrayed herself as a sincere, naive woman.
While making films, Visconti drew inspiration from the theater. Staging Spontini's Vestal at La Scala, he creates the costume film Feeling (1954). This is the story of an insane love passion with a cruel ending from the life of aristocrats. Since then, he has staged a number of successful opera productions at La Scala with Maria Callas. La Traviata (1955) by Verdi has become the largest event in musical life. Visconti will more than once refer to the works of the great Italian composer. Among the director's favorite operas are Don Carlos and Macbeth.
In the drama theater, Viscontian naturalism over time acquired a physiological connotation. A painful passion was imbued with performances based on Miller's play "View from the Bridge" (1958) and "Miss Julia" (1957) by Strindberg, as well as the banned by the censorship for immorality "Arialda" based on the play Testori (1961). The leading role, Rina Morelli, remarkably "conveyed the bitterness, rage, hysterical crises of the old maid, haunted by the memories of the deceased groom, and Paolo Stoppa - the vulgarity and rudeness of her new chosen one."
Once, in a conversation with journalists, Visconti mentioned the idea of ??a film “from the life of young boxers”. The heroes of his new work were the peasants, who came from poor Lucania, who went to look for a better life. Young Alain Delon starred in the role of the forgiving Rocco Parondi. The whole of Italy watched the painting "Rocco and His Brothers" (1960)!
Visconti had a complex character. "The spirit of contradiction", "intransigence", "constant challenge to oneself" - this is how Suso Cecchi d'Amico defined his features. He compared the art of working with an actor to the ability to find underground waters. “Lukino actually replaced the actors, explained the lines for a long time, set the intonation, recited and replayed the episodes himself,” Michelangelo Antonioni said in an interview.
Visconti gave full freedom to Anna Magnani, and Mastroianni shouted at Marcello and quarreled with him. He spent filming days with Dirk Bogard in complete silence and kindly joked on the set with Romy Schneider. With Paolo Stoppa and Rina Morelli, he had complete mutual understanding and like-mindedness, not only in work, but in life in general. Michelangelo Antonioni said that "Visconti's films are distinguished by the strength and fluidity of the narrative, he has an amazing ability to develop the character of the character in the process of the story." These words can be fully attributed to the director's film "The Misty Stars of the Big Dipper" (1965), in which Visconti addresses a modern theme, brother and sister avenge the murderer, who became their stepfather, and mother, the accomplice of the crime, for their dead father. At the same time he staged Chekhov's Cherry Orchard (1965) for the Morelli - Stoppa troupe. Visconti said that this will be a performance about the crisis of one family, moreover, between his last film "The Misty Stars of the Big Dipper" and "The Cherry Orchard" there is a lot in common; it is the theme of the family crisis that unites them. “Only the plot of my film is tragic,” the director specified, “and the plot of Chekhov's play is quite the opposite, although everyone in the theater thinks differently. Even Stanislavsky did not understand Chekhov in this regard ... I will adhere to the instructions given by the author in letters to the first stage director ... For Chekhov, this last play was not so much a drama as a comedy. "
After "The Cherry Orchard" Luchino Visconti practically said goodbye to the theater. In the last period of his life, he increasingly turned to German literature, music, history, and even made a trip to Bavaria and Austria. The fact that Visconti perfectly knew and understood German culture is convincingly evidenced by the films The Death of the Gods (1969), Death in Venice (1971), Ludwig (1973) created over the course of five years. Critics have called them Visconti's "German trilogy".
First, he turned to events in Germany immediately after the establishment of the Nazi regime. The film was named after Wagner's opera The Death of the Gods. “I am making this picture for generations who do not know what Nazism is,” said the director. - Young people must learn that non-resistance to evil leads to its absoluteness. The Nazi orgies of mass murder were monstrous and I wanted to convey the truly apocalyptic horror of what was happening. "
The second film, Death in Venice, was based on the famous novel by Thomas Mann in 1971 and was awarded the Cannes Film Festival Prize. The "German trilogy" ended with the film "Ludwig" - about the King of Bavaria, who became the personification of futile attempts to create a "kingdom of Beauty". Visconti loved to tell stories of defeat, to describe lonely souls, destinies destroyed by reality.
Visconti brought the filming to a close when he suffered a stroke on July 27, 1972. Before that, Lukino felt the way a person feels after a normal day at work, taking into account the unbearable heat that was in Rome, and the fact that an extremely large number of cigarettes were smoked. As a result of the stroke, his body was partially paralyzed. Visconti was taken to Zurich, but without completing the course of treatment, he left the clinic with the consent of the doctors to work on editing Ludwig at his sister's villa.
The director dreamed of turning the "German trilogy" into a tetralogy, filming "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann, and thus ending his cinematic career. But first, he directed a chamber film with few characters. The main roles were played by Bert Lancaster, Helmut Berger and Sylvanas Mangano. In the fall of 1974, "Family Portrait in the Interior" was completed, and the same words, film-testament, sounded in responses to it. His hero is an intellectual, an old Professor who withdraws into himself, preferring collecting paintings to communication with people.
Visconti was forced to quit his job after falling and breaking his hip. Again the inability to move, again a wheelchair. Relatives and friends were constantly in his apartment, and here, next to him, there were favorite books and musical records. A violent cold hastened the end. Luchino Visconti passed away on March 17, 1976. He managed to shoot "Innocent" based on the novel by D'Annunzio. “It was a film by Luchino Visconti,” his friends finished the picture with such an inscription. The great director wanted his tombstone to be inscribed "He adored Shakespeare, Chekhov and Verdi."

All Information About: Luchino Visconti - Biography, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Filmography.
Author: Jane Watson