Obsessed: Four Decades with Luchino Visconti
4 Wednesdays, February 11 to March 4, 6:30 pm to 10:00 pm
Instructor: Maurizio Giammarco, Ph.D., Temple University
Called both “the first neorealist” and “the last decadent,” Luchino Visconti was a progenitor of Italian neorealism and a virtuoso of opulent historical dramas, chronicling characters—from fishermen to nobility—attempting to navigate the unrelenting forces of social, economic, and historical change.
Adapted from James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ossessione (1943) is considered the first neorealist masterpiece, blending the noirish source material with an evocation of life in wartime Italy. The Technicolor melodrama Senso (1954) anticipates the large-scale historical spectacles to come, combining theater, opera, and cinema as it follows a countess torn between loyalty to her country and a dissolute Austrian officer amid Italy’s struggle for unification. The Damned (1969) recounts the rise of an industrialist family during the Nazi-era, linking deviance and brutality to the spirit of Hitler’s regime. Visconti’s 1971 adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice is a probing meditation on mortality, sexuality, and beauty, tracing an ailing composer’s escalating infatuation with a teenage boy as a cholera epidemic devours the city.
Join us, then, as we explore the three-decade career of an auteur who combined the humanism of neorealism with the epic sweep of opera to create films global in scope, rich in resonance, and timeless in influence.
$120 for members, $160 for non-members
Schedule