Morte a Venezia

"Beauty is not asible from the reason"

Based on the novel by Thomas Mann, written in 1911, "Death in Venice" by Luchino Visconti belongs to one of those literary adaptations whose result transcends the original. Without betraying the short story of Mann, the director is emancipated from the typical models that deal with the linguistic translation between the literal and the cinematographic world.

The film starts "in media res", while the writer and musician Gustav von Aschenbach lets himself be carried on the waters of Venice. Unlike the text, the film prefers to arouse interest with the viewer by dosing the information, through intellectual and above all sensory motivations about art, precisely in an effort "in crescendo" to grasp the maximum expression of beauty. The viewer must discover the true reasons for his trip, at the same time that the protagonist is revealing the force that holds him in the Venetian city.

The problem of capturing the inner monologue of Aschenbach on the screen about beauty and its true nature is resolved masterfully by Visconti. For this, it uses the flashback resource to avoid voiceover. A method that in principle may seem more natural to undertake the company to adapt a book narrated in first person, but that once seen the result, it is likely that it would have reduced visual power and suspense. The consequence is a model of transposition that collects the literary pieces, to reconfigure their position on the board without altering the essence of the novel.

Each flashback contrasts with the contemplative and silent Venetian panorama. It is a radical and recurrent dialogue between the protagonist and a character / conscience with which he polemizes. In this way, the director at the same time clears the intellectual position that Aschenbach keeps fixed on art, and indirectly reveals the conflict that occurs in the present time his tormented thought.

Net visual film. The camera / eye of Visconti invites you to walk the narrow streets of the Italian city and observe the tourists in first person. The use of the panoramic and the zoom reveals the uncontainable attraction of Aschenbach by an ephebe of androgynous complexion, whose delicate and forbidden beauty leaves the composer without rational arguments and plunges him into a sensory journey that fails to classify in his orderly world of moral perfection . This will cause an uncontrolled illusion to discover that gravitational force around the adolescent.

Aschenbach is unable to break the psychological barrier of what he understands by beauty and morality (concepts very close in classical Greek thought), maintaining distance without ever trampling the mud. Your observer / observed relationship with the adolescent Tadzio will be definitive for you to experience the emotional and plot change.

To understand the isotopic essence of the film, one should reflect on the theories that governed the art world in the middle of the 20th century. The American Rosalind Krauss, critic and art theorist, thanks to her inquiries about the "optical unconscious" was the person who pushed the theory of the multiplicity of the looks. A new look, a new eye from which to observe and absorb. Following the previous work of Jaques Lacan, Krauss will be able to define the "me" built from oneself, which configures the personal "backpack" that we all wear. Art and the beautiful is no longer seen in a disinterested way, but the works we look at also look at us, just as the famous photographs of the essayist and art historian Didi-Huberman distilled.

The Lacanian mirror of Aschenbach (unbearably interpreted by Dirk Bogarde) works as the voyeur reconstruction of his own image. This is projected onto the "other", and unconsciously subverts Aschenbach's own moral estates, in order to reinstate a furtive gaze that plays to possess that which is irresistible to him. An obsession reminiscent of the plane / sequence of "Vertigo" (Alfred Hitchcock), when in the restaurant, James Stewart, astonished, pursues with his eyes the ghost of Madeleine (Kim Nobak), also the paradigmatic "The indiscreet window", in which the camera is installed in the pupil of the protagonist. In this way, the public is also a participant, and will have the same rules of the game.

With these elements magnificently captured on the screen, Visconti also adds the idea of ​​a labyrinthine search to nowhere. The Italian director manages to imbricate the embrace to Eros that has been born in the character in a swampy road that disappears under his feet. Concept reflected in the desire towards a real character that vanishes intangibly in his hands. The scene in the brothel serves as an enhancer of this idea, in which Aschenbach fails to grasp the aesthetic pleasure of an obsession that slips into the Platonic terrain, and whose nature does not allow it to be tainted. Hence the disappointment and disenchantment of what is not substitutable in any case, and that for the protagonist belongs to a world that can not be earthly.

The magnificent music of Gustav Mahler is the perfect ingredient that accompanies Aschenbach's anguish. So much so that Thomas Mann himself was inspired by him for his character. In this way, in the Visconti film a triptych symbiosis is formed between Mahler, Thomas Mann and Visconti himself, each of them providing certain autobiographical features in the character of Gustav von Aschenbach. The melancholic landscape of Venice fits perfectly with Mahler's post-romantic tones. As the plot progresses, the musical atmosphere seems to foreshadow the worst fears that plague the Italian city.

Death looms in a sick city. Metaphor of irremediable decomposition of the main pillars that supported the irreducible ideals of Aschenbach and that did not allow him to progress. The pain of breaking that essence becomes physical. The time in which the Eros and the Thanatos converge at the end of the road will irremediably reach the protagonist. Visconti power for this decadent images (The musical group that entertains, while untimely to people) and generates an uncertainty in the characters, where time begins to play against him. Not even the shadow of death is capable of dissuading the will of a character already delivered to his destiny.

The outcome points a new parameter to the main theme of the film. The perfect beauty embodied by the ephebe Tadzio, to which Aschenbach has already surrendered fully is contaminated by an unexpected event (the fight on the beach) that acts as an intruder in the idyllic microcosm imagined by him.

Visconti draws a splendid twilight of the story, perfectly underlining in Aschenbach's gesture, at the moment in which he notices the unacceptable alteration of perfection. The labyrinth seems to finally glimpse a door in which the reunion with Tazdio already belongs to the metaphysical world, out of all earthly impurity.