Word: visconti
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...preference for miniskirts because "my office is in the basement and all I ever get to see around here is legs." Women's Wear Daily, the fashion trade's newspaper that is pushing the Longuette,* jokingly called the new look "the damned length"-a reference to Luchino Visconti's successful movie The Damned, which displays not only Brownshirts in drag but women in 1930s skirts. The influential daily has, as a result of its campaign, become a prime target of the miniforces. "Women's Wear influences Seventh Avenue because it comes out every day," complains...
...Damned has so much style. That's what makes it strong, Visconti's not afraid to use new techniques, about which he knows more than a thousand Peter Yateses, in a way that gives them some meaning. He builds a strong narrative with character development-ponderous and inevitable, but development all the same. His zooms are extra-ordinarily solid in framing and speed. His telephoto panning shots, for example in the birthday-party sequence, have the selective impact of cuts from person to person...
...Visconti puts devices to work instead of displaying them on the surface. Yates and such assume that the simple presence of pretty colors and zooms is the end, not the means, of their work, thereby showing themselves to be the slaves, not the masters, of their craft. Damned stupid slaves...
...theoretically insufficient, though, to argue that Visconti's extravagance is justified by its strong and constant significance. That argument would end by calling for greater economy of means than Visconti used. As a means to intended significances, Visconti's pacing and visual style are slow and luxurious, his dialogue and acting excessively explicit. Fortunately, cost-benefit analyses do not apply to works of art, which justify their means by appealing to our sense of internal order and formal beauty...
Every one of The Damned's details and artistic decisions clearly indicates the intentions of a strong-willed artist. The very presentation of the film's material shouts out Visconti's moral and political position on Nazi Germany. If the Damned have ever existed, they were the industrial aristocrats who brought Hitler to power. Visconti's weighty melodrama of almost impersonal passion was the only just way to describe their self-destruction...