Venice in Film: The Postcard and the Palimpsest

The popularity of Venice as a film location is unremarkable. Venice offers a setting synonymous with the architectural and cultural achievements of western civilization. For this reason Venice is also a cliche-a museum without walls that no one needs to visit. But of course everyone does visit Venice; it has always been a city of visitors and will remain so until floods, fires, and the final corruption of its foundations overwhelm it. In the meantime, the physical vulnerability of Venice only adds to its quasi-mythical status as city and symbol, place and metaphor. While numerous general and author-specific studies have been published that explore literary Venice, less attention has been paid to cinematic portraits of this "queen of cities" or, indeed, to the significance of Venice to the broad concerns of film adaptation studies.1 Venice offers a fascinating context within which we can explore many of the cross currents that flow between literary and filmic representations of '. places and cities. This essay examines the configuration of generic modes and aesthetic forms in the work of various American and European directors in relation to this and other issues. Needless to say, many of these filmmakers have themselves discovered that screening Venice involves an encounter with the most formidable fictions and fantasies of western civilization. The cinema has responded to the peculiar "improbability" of Venice in a variety of ways. There is a touristic vision of Venice, a vision that lingers adoringly on the luminous elegance and majesty of the quintessential European city of culture. This is usually the Venice of the Hollywood romance: a magical, musical Utopia of heterosexual happiness and harmless irony. There is also a cinematic representation of Venice that derives its forms and thematic concerns from the ambiguities, excesses, and transgressions of a very different sensibility. Within this category, Venice's opulence disintegrates amidst spiritual decadence and death; its cathedrals and languid canals, piazze and palaces, are transformed within a narrative structure and Gothic mise en scene that serves to annihilate light, movement, space, and possibility. Finally, the cinema also has offered a more modernist vision of Venice; this is the Venice of Orson Welles's Othello (1952) and Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice (1971). In these films, Venice ceases to exist in any denotative sense, becoming instead a state of mind: not so much a place as a cinematic palimpsest of desire, decay, and death. In Othello and Death in Venice the location loses its locality as the modernity of the cinema subdues the recalcitrant antiquity of the lagoon city. Within popular cinema, Venice, like Paris and Rome, has often signified a theatre of romantic possibility and cultural sophistication. American romantic dramas and comedies like Tonight or Never (LeRoy, 1931),Mambo (Rossen, 1954), The Honey Pot (Mankiewicz, 1967), Blume in Love (Mazursky, 1973), and even Woody Alien's Everyone Says I Love You (1996) and Rob Reiner's The Story of Us (1999), deliberately deploy Venice as little more than visual shorthand for an en passant, picturesque Europe. One of the more interesting examples from this genre is David Lean's Summertime (also known as Summer Madness, 1955), a film that depicts a "brief encounter" between a naive Ohio spinster-Jane Hudson (Katherine Hepburn) -and a suave, disingenuous, Venetian antique dealer-Renato de Rossi (Rossano Brazzi). Hudson's fantasy of a romantic ("European") liaison that will last forever is as uncomplicated as it is unattainable, and Summertime freely disassociates the psychological complexities of its narrative from the impressionistic unreality of its mise en scene. If Summertime exemplifies anything, it is surely David Lean's fatal weakness for compositional excess, a disposition that is emphasized in this particular film by the kitschy Eastman-coloring of Jack Hildyard's cinematography. …