foto: miabuelanoloentiende

In the first scene we can see Lord Shingen, his brother and the peasant thief who is going to become Shingen’s shadow, his “kagemusha”. They are dressed the same, and they could stand for the three freudian levels of the soul: Nobukado- the I, Shingen- the Over-I (controlling all his brother’s moves) and the peasant- the It, primitive and rebellious. But this freudian construction goes only for the first scene. I believe from now on the jungian perspective is more appropriate.

The peasant is to become Shingen’s double, his shadow. And he starts by seeming an authentic shadow: he is reckless, grobian and ignorant. As the story goes on, the shadow slowly gets filled with the characteristics of the original. When Kagemusha discovers the dead body of his master, of the one he impersonates, the world as he knew it goes to pieces. He now realizes that he will have not only to pretend, but truly to BE Shingen.

The shadow comes to take the place of the light. Kagemusha’s dream could stand for the anguish induced by this unnatural inversion.

The darkness identifies with the light of the consciousness, it understands its stability (“a mountain doesn’t move”). It also understands the rules that configure the bright world of the consciousness and conforms to them. In order to show us this world of stillness and of continuous contact with and respect for the unmoved, Kurosawa’s gaze is itself immobile. The frames are symmetric, the movements are gentle and flowing.

The question rises: if the shadow was really to be a shadow, could it fit so profoundly into a world that isn’t its own? Kagemusha had inside him the real qualities of a warrior. Otherwise, he could never have replaced Shingen with such dignity.

The imposture is accidentally uncovered and Kagemusha is banished. People that would bow to him a day before, are now casting stones at him. Wearing his rags, he returns into his primitive world, but we know that by now he is a different man. Kurosawa makes of this a most touching scene.

And then, we learn with surprise that we were wrong. Kagemusha managed not only to almost perfectly impersonate Shingen , but also to hold Shingen’s world together, by doing as he would have done. The real double, the real shadow of Shingen is his son. Drawn by his frustration, he disobeys his father last wish. He doesn’t manage to understand the importance of stillness and he leads his army into battle. This is the end of the Takeda clan and of Shingen’s world. The double, his son, has taken over and this has lead to destruction and death. This is the only possible end for such a story.

The real shadow can never live into the light. Coming into the light, the shadow brings along its contrary, the darkness. Death and destruction. Kagemusha’s death is the second death of Shingen. And his body is carried away by the water just like the first time.

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…)