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Cinema's greatest period started in post-War Europe with Italy's Neo-Realist movement. During the next 2 or 3 decades that followed, France's New Wavers caught everyone's attention, and there was always Bergman up there on his desolate Scandinavian island somewhere, making bitter masterpieces. But in 1971, Luchino Visconti brought the art-form to full circle, geographically speaking, with his miraculous work *Death in Venice*, which might as well be called *The Death of Europoean Cinema*. After the Sixties wound down, so did the great European filmmakers, who, with some exceptions, generally grew exhausted and passed the torch to a new American generation of Movie Brats (Coppola, Scorsese, & Co.). This movie absolutely feels like a grand summing-up, not just of Visconti's particular obsessions, but of the general attempt of European filmmakers to achieve the aesthetic ideal in movies. And rest assured, you will find no sterner task-master than the Visconti revealed here. He's not playing to the crowd, folks: either you get behind him and follow along, or you get left behind. The pacing is a challenge: slow, but never without emotional weight. "Incidents" are few and far between, but each seems loaded with symbolic significance in a sturm-und-drang cosmos.
We will probably never be in such rarefied company again, in terms of the movies: one of the century's great writers who inspired the tale (Thomas Mann), one of the greatest filmmakers directing it (Visconti), one of the greatest actors in the lead role (Dirk Bogarde), and swelling almost ceaselessly in the background, Gustav Mahler's 5th Symphony. Taking full advantage of Mahler's ability to inspire Romanticism in even the most cynical breast, Visconti changes the main character, Aschenbach, into a decrepit composer from his original persona as a writer, even making Bogarde up to LOOK like Mahler (geeky mustache, specs, shaggy hair, duck-like walk). Bogarde, by the way, delivers what is probably greatest performance of an actor in the history of movies: it's a largely silent performance, and the actor has to deliver reams of meaning in a gesture or a glance -- a difficult trick without mugging like Chaplin or merely acting like an animated corpse.
Cinema just doesn't get better than this. I'll ignore the complaints from the Ritalin-addicts out there who say that it's too slow, but even the more legitimate gripe concerning some of Aschenbach's flashbacks with that antagonistic friend of his is misplaced. The flashbacks fit neatly within the movie's thematic concerns (i.e., which is the better path to aesthetic perfection: passion or discipline?), and the suddenness and shrillness of these interruptions serve to prevent sleepiness among the viewers. (Of course, some viewers will sleep through this movie, anyway.) A nonstop stream of Mahler and beautiful, dying Venice would be nothing more than a pretty picture; but this movie is actually about something. And what it's mostly about is suffering: Romantic (capital R) suffering, in particular. As a suffering Romantic himself, Visconti knew whereof he spoke.
[SPOILER . . . I guess] If for nothing else, see *Death in Venice* for its portentous opening credits . . . and for its unforgettable ending, with Bogarde's jet-black hair-dye dripping off of his sweaty, dying head and onto his chalk-white face. Meanwhile, off in the distance, young Tadzio, the object of Bogarde's dying desire, stands in the ocean and points toward the horizon like a Michelangelo sculpture. The climatic sequence sums up with agonizing economy everything that the movie is about: love, lust, beauty, loss, the ending of a life set against the beginning of another life, and cold death in the midst of warm, sunny beauty. *Death in Venice* is a miraculous work of art.
[DVD tip: as with the simultaneously released Visconti masterpiece *The Damned*, I recommend that you turn the English subtitles ON while watching this movie. It's ostensibly in English, but the DVD's sound seems muddy and there's a lot of Italian spoken during the film, anyway.]



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