Writer: Thomas Mann, Published:1912, Charcters:1.Gustav von Aschenbach (writer), 2. Tadzio (boy), 3.Tadzio's Family. The name of the novel in the German Language: is Der Tod in Venedig.
Literary Synopsis and Description:
The story involves a cultivated bourgeois artist with the noble qualities of a writer, Aschenbach, who is helplessly alienated from his social background in Germany. Therefore, he retreated to Venice, Italy, to find personal happiness and achieve his formidable artistic creativity. As the novella proceeds, he sees a young boy, Tadzio, on the beach with the divine figure of a Greek mythological statute, and he becomes obsessed with every essence of perfection imposed by the boy's image in his mind. His adoration for beauty as an artist which is metaphorically embodied in terms of homophobia anxiety and erotic impulse leads his intellectual life toward the chaotic delirium which makes him follow the boy and his family through the city contaminated by death. He, as the protagonist, whose self-conscious wanders and moves from the present to the past ended up inevitably to his death which is the outcome of his pursuit of fulfillment.
Socio-Cultural Analysis:
From the earliest story, Thomas Mann was emotionally obsessed with his anxiety about the threatening repressed forces of human nature, specifically in terms of erotic passion and artistic sensuality, which inevitably brought civilization to the climax of its inner corruption. In particular, Mann belonged to the intellectuals and modernist artists whose critical vision of society and history at the beginning of the 20th century characterized their artistic self-reflexivity, the historical complex evolution of industrialization in the societies, and the decadence of European aristocracy emphatically in blooming of Freudian ideas. The aspects of Freudian theories such as the repression of libidinal drives and the individual subconscious condition to express the inner complexes in terms of creating mythological taboos in cultural contexts are considered the pioneering elements to analyze and criticize the artistic perception and political crisis of European cultures in the pre-war period.
Credit:
Director; Luchino Visconti
Source: Thomas Mann's novella, Death in Venice
Director of Photography: Pasquale De Santis
Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni
Costume: Piero Tosi
Scenery: Ferdinando Scarfioti
Music: Gustave Mahler's III Symphony, 4th Movement, and V Symphony, 4th Movement
Producer: Mario Gallo
Actors: Dirk Bogard (Gustave von Aschenbach), Bjorn Anderson (Tadzio), Silvana Mangano (Tadzio's mother), Norra Ricci (Tadzio's governess), Marisa Berenson (Aschenbach's wife)
First Performance: London, U.K., March 1, 1971
Length: 3,688 m
Duration:135 min
Film Synopsis and Description:
The narrative of the film is about the story of Gustav von Ascenbach, a German composer, whose sense of beauty and his artistic perfectionism reinforce him to arrive desperately in Venice to regain his cosmological balance with the chaotic plentitude of surroundings. Immediately after his arrival, he encounters Tadzio, the Polish young boy with an aristocratic backgrounds whose beauty and youth tremendously occupy his mind and lead him to radicalize his aesthetic formalism to alternative representations of beauty and its purity of form. His distorted memories of the past blended with the relevant aspects of the present time invite him as the spectator to enter the hallucinated world of passion and admiration for youth, beauty, and the realm of fantasies. He, who appears to react pathetically toward his attachment to the complexity of this obsession, follows the boy and his family through the Venetian. The spiritual and physical exhaustion of this chase consumes him and leaves him dead at the end of the film on the beach.
Visconti's aesthetic to visualize Aschenbach's state of mind and stream of consciousness provokes him to represent the images through the protagonist's point of view by using of pan, zoom, and sometimes the combination of both as the camera movement. Furthermore, the flashbacks occur through the jump-cutting rather than the dissolve. Of course, the costume, color, and set design offer us as the audience Visconti's obsession to represent the details, and ultimately Mahler's 4th movement as the soundtrack explores and unfolds the protagonist's melancholic passion for beauty and perfection.
Socio-Cultural Analysis:
Visconti's artistic achievement in adapting Mann's novella emerges to some extent as the response to his autobiographical work which constitutes his sexual orientation, social background, and ideological worldview as the Marxist. As the founder of Neo-Realism in Italy after the Second World War was directing Death in Venice (1971) in the historical moments from the 1960s and 1970s during which the post-war generation of European Intellectuals ideologically and culturally were oriented to Marxist theories, Sartre and Heidegerian existential philosophies and Sexual Liberation (Gay Movement). Visconti's self-identification process with Gustave von Aschenbach as an artist can be also considered as the director's attempt toward visualizing the difficult reconciliation between an artist's perfectionism to approach the beauty of reality and his strong confusion with the social oppositions as the environmental forces.
The analogy between the Adaptation and the Literary Work:
Visconti's Death in Venice is in general faithful and loyal cinematographic adaptation of the literary text in terms of comprehending the social atmosphere, environmental structure of the narrative, and behavioral psychology of the characters. But like any other adaptation of literary work to the film in which the transformation of elements brings particular discourses in a cinematic attempt to visualize the reality of context, Visconti's film suggests and implies his splendid audiovisual realization of his themes in that richly reconstructed work of art such as the representation of historical aristocratic society and the manipulation of mise-en-scene based upon Aschenbach's stream of consciousness. Perhaps more than any other crucial difference related to Mann's protagonist, the characteristic shift in adaptation occurred principally between Mann's artist as the writer and Visconti's alter ego as the composer which raises the ambiguous issues and discussions about Gustav Mahler's personal life. In addition, the opening sequence of the film is the prototype of Visconti's protagonist's presentation whose mind is preoccupied with his existential alienation with dubious moral issues and characteristic function of dominated social class. Therefore, the audience is supposedly considered to view the beginning of the first chapter in Mann's novella including Ascenbach's life in Munich not in the opening sequence of the film but through his flashbacks that help to intensify the character's internal journey to struggle with his moral dilemma about the purity of art and the artist's lifestyle.
Ultimately, by adding some dialectical conversations filled with ambiguity between the protagonist and his best friend in Germany, Visconti seems to manifest briefly his anxieties about artistic creativity and perfectionism.
Film Analysis & Evaluation:
Visconti's Death in Venice has a hypertextual structure in which the provocative leitmotiv of erotic conceptualization is used as the aesthetic metaphor to create an exquisitely ironic image of his homage and critic evaluation of devastated nobility and romanticism of the last decade of 19th-century art in Europe. The inter-textual complexities in Death in Venice, simultaneously; generate Viscontian's self-reflexivity to Ascenbach as an artist to accentuate the aristocratic social circumstances and the repressed homosexuality desire which undoubtedly was an urgent subjective need around 1970. The inter-textuality among cinematic recreation of Mann's novella by Visconti, Mahler's enigmatic paradoxical music, and Marcel Proust's stream of consciousness brings a great deal of attention which has been focused on Visconti's rationality and obsession to tame and control his artistic creativity and personal autonomy as the author.
Death in Venice is an outstanding masterpiece in terms of setting the intellectual metamorphosis over the fragility of the old world, politicizing a symmetrical transformation of the anesthetized world of aristocratic values from Mann's novella to Visconti's adaptation and categorizing the controversial theories of ethical mobilization for pure art and demonic forces of repressed desires and haunting death through the creativity process. According to Carolo Testa:
"If there is one generalization that can be made about philological comments on Luchino Visconti's approach to Thomas Mann, it is that more than a few scholars have viewed Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice) under the puzzling methodological presuppositions that cinematic re-creation is but a crippled younger sister of philology. Yet it seems obvious that the main goal of great artists re-creating other great artists ought to be loyalty not to someone else, but to themselves first and foremost" (Testa, 197).
Visconti protested in his interview with Lino Micciche about his preference to make an artistic work with more personal overtones such as Death in Venice:
"We have got a past behind us, and, in a sense, we have already made the point we wanted to make. I made mine from Ossessione (1943) to The Damned(1969), and when I allowed myself a break, as I did in the case of White Night, it was by no means a demanding one. Now we may well be grappling with more particular and personal themes, but behind us, we have a record of political struggle that can justify his belated and temporary return to a 'privacy' we rejected for years. Will you argue that ours, too, is a crisis, a state of laziness? Let's assume. Still, it took us forty years to get there" (Micciche, 125).
For that reason, Death in Venice is probably Visconti's most personal work in terms of representing the artist's anxieties and obsessions to create an artistic work.
In conclusion, the mythological obsession to depict the purity of beauty can result in the decaying of intellectual self-control on the order of the authoritative and hierarchical structure of the ecstatic dimension of artistic creativity. therefore; Pasquale de Santis' cinematography has the allegiance to conflict between beauty and aging as the dualistic element and Visconti's editing reciprocates between loyalty to Mann's novella and the protagonist's state of mind.
Micciche, Lino. Luchino Visconti: Un Profiol Critico Venice: Marsilio, 1996.
Testa, Carlo. Masters of Two Arts: Re-creation of European Literatures in Italian Cinema Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2002.
By: Morad Sadeghi
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