Word: viscontis
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Visconti's style is extravagant and non-realistic, as you see when green begins to tinge the edges of characters' faces and collect in pools on the Essenbeck mansion's parquet floor. God knows the bedroom scene between power-crazed Ingrid Thulin and her contrite Bogarde employs dialogue no real person ever uttered. Visconti offers us human passions and errors on a grander scale than the realistic. Thus his blocking of scenes, which is heavy and slow, focuses dramatic energy inward onto the relationships of the Essenbeck family. Visconti's mise-en-scene is equally grandiose, incorporating massive interiors...
...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...
...group of traveling tarts, and a lover of men who are unlovable to others. Somewhere along the line, like Greene, she has become a Catholic but, again like Greene, she has a weakness for touching the "untouchable." Her last untouchable is an Italian of fathomless duplicity named Visconti, who has bilked everyone from cardinals to oil sheiks. Now he is on the run, having been classified as a war criminal...
...happening in the nation outside-but that's neither important nor worth thinking about. What is important is the incredible richness of the film visually: blood, transvestism, child molestation and all the rest come together to form a lushly orchestrated grand opera of emotional sickness. To be sure, Visconti has indulged himself to the fullest: he takes his sweet time in depicting each sick ritual of his metaphorical family. But while you may be revolted by it, you might love it-and, God, in either case, there is no chance you will forget it. Ingrid Thulin, Dirk Bogarde...