OSSESSIONE (1943)
Ossessione (1943) was Visconti's first feature and a forerunner of post-war neo-realism. Ossessione is a film about the destructive power of sexual passion. A man turns up by chance at a roadside country inn, stays on as a labourer and falls in love (or in desire) with the innkeeper's wife and she with him. Tragedy ensues.
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LA TERRA TREMA (1947)La Terra Trema recounts the struggle of a fishing family to escape from poverty and exploitation. In 1947, Visconti went to Sicily, with a small amount of capital advanced by the Communist Party, to make what was initially to have been a short documentary. He stayed there for six months, and the project gradually expanded in scale until what was proposed became a mammoth epic on the conditions of the poor workers and peasants and their struggle to liberate themselves from oppression.
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SENSO (1954)In Senso (1954), Visconti turned his attention to the problem of divorce - a particularly contentious subject in Italy - where state law was the same as that of the Church. Countess Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli) is a patriot, her husband is a collaborator. But she abandons both her husband and her cause in the pursuit of a love affair with an Austrian officer. The style of the film is itself an operatic re-creation of a human drama.
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LE NOTTI BIANCHE (WHITE NIGHTS) (1957)The story of White Nights (1957) is basically the same as that of the Dostoyevsky novel from which it is adapted. A lonely man meets a lonely girl. She is in love with a man whom she does not expect ever to return to her but who continues to occupy her life to the exclusion of any other possible relationships. The lover does return, she is vindicated, and the man who had befriended her and had hoped for her love is left behind, more isolated than before.
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ROCCO E i SUOI FRATELLI (ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS) (1960)The story of Rocco e i Suoi Fratelli (Rocco and his Brothers) (1960) unfolds as a series of episodes, merging into each other, in which each of Rosaria Parondi's five sons moves in turn to occupy the centre of the stage. Each brother in a crude sense represents a certain kind of solution to the problems facing a Southern immigrant in a Northern urban environment. The film was a huge popular hit, particularly with working-class audiences, though critics were divided.
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IL GATTOPARDO (THE LEOPARD) (1963)Taken from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's best-selling novel, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) (1963) tells the story of an aristocratic Sicilian family threatened by the political upheavals of the Risorgimento. The House of Salina is directly involved in the process of transformation and it is political and economic cunning which enables it to survive.
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LO STRANIERO (THE STRANGER) (1967)Lo Straniero (The Stranger) (1967), Visconti's adaptation of Albert Camus's novel "L'Etranger", received mixed press on first release and has rarely been seen since. A man, a pied noir living in Algiers, hears the news of his mother's death in a home out in the country. While visiting a friend he points a revolver at and shoots dead an Arab who in a vague way is threatening his friends; he is arrested and condemned to death for murder. This action does not cohere as a plot but merely a succession of events, and the significance, in so far as they are significant, lies in their discontinuity.
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MORTE A VENEZIA (DEATH IN VENICE) (1971)Taken from Thomas Mann's novella, Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice) (1971) is exactly what its title claims it to be: a film about Venice and a film about death. Gustav von Aschenbach arrives in Venice in search of spiritual refreshment. But everything disturbs him, including - and especially - the vision of a beautiful young boy on holiday at the Lido with his mother and sisters. There are two deaths in the film, that of Aschenbach, crumbling away under his mask, and that of Venice itself, crumbling into the lagoon.
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LUDWIG (1973)The Ludwig of the film's title, Ludwig (1973), is Ludwig II, King of Bavaria, sometimes known as the Mad King and sometimes known as the Virgin King. The film tells the story of his reluctant assumption of the duties of kingship, his love of art, and his tormented discovery of his own homosexuality, with all the consequences this had for the survival of his dynasty in the new order dominated by Bismarck's Prussia.
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L'INNOCENTE (THE INTRUDER) (1976)L'Innocente (released in the UK as The Intruder, in the US as The Innocent) (1976) takes place among the social class to which Visconti belonged, but in the 1890s, ten years before he was born. This was to be Visconti's swansong, and he died just as the editing was being finished. The film tells the story of Tullio Hermil, a man whose pose is at odds with the society in which he lives. When his wife gets pregnant by a rival his world collapses around him and his emptiness is revealed.