Der Tod in Venedig, La morte a Venezia

Thomas Mann was obsessed with the ultimate fate of the  Artist. In almost every work of his you will find the effort to establish what “being chosen” means. Adrian Leverkuhn was Chosen, as well as Felix Krull, and in a much more subtle way, similar to Hans Castorp. 

Gustav von Aschenbach is Thomas Mann’s double. His most pessimistic projected self-image. 

Death in Venice was a scandle. The respectable writer, having a wife and children, had published a novella on a highly immoral subject, with homosexual and pedophile explicit content, and with a main character to whom he had attributed his own unfinished works. 

But is Der Tod in Venedig really about homosexuality? We could even ask: is it about sexual lust? 

Visconti thinks so. His film, La morte a Venezia, one of his failures, treats the original subject of Mann’s novella from this perspective. 

I think the film is a failure because:

1. It takes a first-class piece of literature, with multiple bearings and cultural references, and transforms it into a facile story about an outworn composer (Visconti knew that Mann had thought about Mahler when he had written the novella, and by transforming Aschenbach into a composer he believed he would be closer to Mann’s thought. But I think he was wrong) who falls in love with a young skinny boy.

2. The “love story” is flat, monotonous. It is no stairway to climb on, along with the main character, even if we can presume that Visconti, following Mann, would have liked it to be. But the narrative is so obvious (from the first frame in which he appears, Tadzio’s face is sorrounded by heavenly light, turning him into a live Boticelli painting, and shouting at us about how Aschenbach is to be charmed by this apparition), that it can hold no surprises.  Everything is obvious: Aschenbach’s face expresion, his gestures, Tadzio’s gaze, the framing and the movements of the camera, i.e. the way that these movements force us to look at things  in a certain way. 

3. The film lacks subtlety, in every way. Tadzio looks a hundred times into the camera, that is, into the eyes of his admirer, and he always gives us the same gaze (and it seems to me you can see in this fake insinuative gaze that the young Bjorn Andresen didn’t feel quite well inTadzio’s shoes).  Dirk Bogarde builds an anxious, avoidant Aschenbach character. I couldn’t imagine this character being in love with a woman. And yet one of the first scenes and some flash-backs, Visconti’s infusions, tell us that the composer had a family, a wife and daughter. These are irrelevant and sometimes artless details, which I don’t buy.  The camera movement also shows the lack of subtlety. Many times Visconti zooms on Tadzio’s face. This kind of element doesn’t even allow comments, being far too explicit, in a story obssesively focused on a silent relationship between two people. 

 

What the viewer can save from this movie is the beautiful light in some scenes. The artificially created atmosphere of the decadent Venice (some shots seem to have been taken in a studio, but we know they were not). 

Visconti’s movie is a failed movie about sexual lust. Every image in it reiterates the same nauseating story. 

Thomas Mann’s short story isn’t about sexual desire, as we now understand it. It is about the pure Beauty that sometimes appears into this world and can lead one’s spirit up to the sight of the Truth. Mann often reffers to Plato: Aschenbach silently dialogues with Tadzio, calling him young Phaedrus. Is there something in literature that cannot be rendered on screen?  (to be continued…)