My Visconti, by Sophie Strohmeier

"Sometimes I feel like Ossessione is the movie I am looking for in all other movies."

This is the fifth entry of Know-It-All, a zine about obsession and fandom. In this essay, Sophie Strohmeier, the brilliant mind behind gaycahiers, writes about her lifelong love affair with Luchino Visconti. Know-It-All zine is best read in print. To order a copy, go here.

Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon in Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963).

I discovered Luchino Visconti around the same time that I became obsessed with opera. I grew up in Vienna, Austria. The opera house was right there. But it was not what my friends or parents considered a cool or age-appropriate fixation for a teenager. I remember how the father of a child I babysat mocked me for the opera CDs I carried around in my disc-man, how the father of a different child I babysat called those CDs “antisocial,” how my English teacher shuddered, how my own father told me of the time he protested a production of Der Rosenkavalier in his youth. “The epitome of Kitsch!” he called it. So I came to associate my visits to the opera house with a kind of shame that deep down resembled a secret pride. Yes, I was often in the company of short-haired, humorless elderly women and tight-lipped young men, and all we ever talked about was who had seen which singer in which roles, and who had sung what beautifully when, in which recording where. I remember that time as a state of perpetual bliss. None of us would acknowledge that we were gay, and yet this was also totally understood, and we were all filled with such extreme exhilaration that after some performances it was impossible to sleep. One older girl and I used to frantically clutch hands during our favorite moments in Werther. Another girl held my hand through the finale of Ariadne auf Naxos. We never talked about it, and I don’t remember their names.

At that time I began to form a not-very-conscious understanding that sometimes powerful political art is not straightforward, that it can be a little twisted. (I didn’t yet know about camp.) The music of Verdi, which is so quintessentially bombastic and romantic, with trumpets and choruses and earworm-inducing melodies that in their era functioned as popular-political slogans, delivered a message you could transmit via a hum or a whistle, without knowing how to read or write. The acronym VERDI was itself a rallying cry during the Risorgimento, the 19th-century unification of Italy. This super-familiar music, first heard in commercials for jams and sparkling water, was not any less sophisticated or psychologically accurate than a movie by Michael Haneke or Ulrich Seidl, nor any less politically conscious than a Michael Glawogger documentary. Maybe opera, with its amplified emotions and ridiculous plots, could come closer to profound emotional and political truths than any other art form. Maybe it could be just as avant-garde as any supposedly edgy contemporary artist. Or so I was thinking as I grasped the delicate hands of my compatriots at the Staatsoper.

It was around the time I saw my first opera that I would have seen, on DVD, my first film by Luchino Visconti. Visconti was one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20^th century. I discovered him via the sweeping epic Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), made in 1962 and depicting the crumbling of Sicily’s aristocracy during the Risorgimento. Gattopardo is the Italian Gone with the Wind, but with politics more on par with a student protest movement. One sequence in the middle of the movie I returned to over and over back then shows the gorgeous offspring of the bourgeoisie, Angelica, played by Claudia Cardinale, lusting after Alain Delon’s character Tancredi, a cruelly pretty nobleman freshly returned from a Garibaldi skirmish with a band across his eye. Tancredi tells a dirty joke. So enraptured is Angelica, her fingers wander into her mouth. This takes place during a key dinner scene in which the Sicilian nobility realize their imminent obsolescence, and the whole moment finds a synecdoche in this single exchange between the two youths. Without taking her eyes from Delon, Cardinale’s fingertips start to play with her teeth. I loved how filthy that was. I loved how an epic movie that could have played like a self-righteous Chekhov tale about the old generation losing their cherry orchards could be imbued with such latent sexiness. I hung a poster in my bedroom of the penetrating three-eyed stare between Delon and Cardinale, and slowly started watching my way through Visconti’s entire filmography. The pursuit of every movie became its own reward. At one point, I resorted to ordering a copy of his most fairy-tale-like movie, Le notti bianche, from Korea. For two other movies—Le vaghe stelle dell’orsa and the forgettable Camus adaptation Lo straniero—I had to travel to Paris to see.

Visconti was cinematically ultimate in a way that complemented the best of opera: a mashup of music, literature, history, politics, and hot actors. These are powerful substances for the socially awkward and impressionable teenager. I was seventeen—at my most intellectual, my most emotional, my most spiritual age. Back then, the name “Dostoevsky” evoked in my chest the sensation of a squealing sound. I was shocked—shocked, as in, achieved a high—by the melodies of Puccini. I memorized whole sentences from Virginia Woolf novels that I transcribed into my journal, the rhythm of the words imparting physical force to my body.

As a persona pública, Visconti was a contradiction: offspring of Milanese nobility, he was a staunch Marxist and a communist party member. Visconti was also a homosexual antifascist in an era of peak Italian fascism and machismo. As a young man, alongside Roberto Rossellini, he was one of the highly political founding fathers of Italian neorealism. Neorealism is a postwar cinema of the underdog, the belief in making political arguments by literally telling that argument in a quasi-documentary style. In neorealist films, everyday people are just trying to get by. The oppressor is often evil and decadent (see the gay and lesbian Nazi officers in Rosselini’s Roma città aperta) and the oppressed are struggling and pure (see the martyrial father and son in de Sica’s Ladri di biciclete; or the mother and daughter in Visconti’s own Bellissima). On the one hand, it’s gripping, mythic, watchable stuff. On the other, it can be preachy and on-the-nose. As a director of films, plays and opera, what Visconti really knew was melodrama—call it a queer sensibility. Some of the greatest icons of cinema and stage—Franco Zeffirelli, Maria Callas and Romy Schneider—rose to stardom under his tutelage. Of his fourteen major feature films, Visconti’s most well-known works are provocative literary adaptations and historical epics, offering a compass for understanding the 20^th century, by way of the 19^th century. Attentive to the most meticulous details, Visconti used lavish, stylistic excess to call attention to the past as much as gaze into the depth of the human soul.

Visconti’s debut film Ossessione was made in 1943, at the paradigm moment of neorealist cinema, and so were his next films, the most famous of which are La terra trema and Rocco e i suoi fratelli. But what a debut Ossessione is! Beastly and sexy. An erotic thriller with class politics, in which a vagabond seduces the wife of an innkeeper and becomes embroiled in a murder. Sometimes I feel like Ossessione is the movie I am looking for in all other movies. I remember seeing it up on the big screen, sitting way too close in the second or third row, and realizing exactly what this was: an adaptation of the James M Cain novella The Postman Always Rings Twice, the quintessential noir plot. Ossessione, I realized, my head exploding, was not just Neorealismo, but also Film noir, which meant that Visconti’s work was a kind of reflection upon American cinema. Sober and cynical American Film noir, too, was really just melodrama, and opera was also a kind of realism and documentary, and all these genres really existed in political conversation with one another.

Romy Schneider and Alain Delon in Ludwig (1973)

After I had watched my way through all of Visconti’s neorealist movies, I realized that an actress I loved, Alida Valli (I watched her obsessively in The Third Man), also starred in a Visconti movie from before Il Gattopardo that was forebodingly called Senso. The writing credits of this movie went to Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles, two writers who back then elicited in me the same squealing sensation as did Dostoevsky.

The Visconti of Senso was by then, in 1954, a Visconti of opulence and technicolor. Senso is the bridge between the neorealist La terra trema and the epic Il Gattopardo. A historical drama set during the Austrian occupation of northern Italy, Senso shows a Venetian countess fall foolishly for the enemy soldier who will exploit her. Few movies go so deeply and gratuitously into the debasement of a beautiful woman as this one—when you first see Alida Valli, she is dressed in a gown like the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, and by the end, she is running through the streets like a madwoman, her hair disheveled and her eyes wild. I’ve watched this movie with others, sensing them cringing beside me in the dark, uncomfortable at a performance that goes so deep and so fearlessly into places we’d rather never visit. Senso could be a 19^th century opera, in its plot and the scale of its magnificent set and costumes as much as in its over-the-top style. I now see Senso as the movie Visconti made over and over again as variations on the irrepressible erotic tension between the old and the young (the old preying upon the young, the young humiliating the old), the tug-of-war between the powerful and the oppressed, and the degradations of obsessive, life-shattering desire.

In the second half of his career, Visconti crossed the Alps into the German-speaking world, having always held a fascination for German literature, music, and romanticism. (If you squint, you can see this preoccupation scattered throughout his early films: the reference to the Thomas Mann title in Rocco e i suoi fratelli, a Schubert song amid the background noise of Senso.) His final cinematic feat was his “German Trilogy”—La caduta degli dei (The Damned), the Thomas Mann-adaptation Morte a Venezia, and Ludwig. The German trilogy marks the return of the communist to his aristocratic roots. Indeed, his depiction of the von Essenbecks, the Nazi-affiliated German industrial family at the center of The Damned, was apparently autobiographical. Whole characters are designed after his family members. It’s Visconti’s most shocking film: one several-minute long sequence depicts a historical event known as the “Night of the Long Knives,” in which a gay Nazi orgy is gunned down by the SS. The pedophile scion of the von Essenbecks (played by Visconti’s lover, Helmut Berger) enters the film dressed in drag as Marlene Dietrich. Later he rapes his own mother and closes us out with a Hitlergruß. It’s the only Visconti film you cannot accuse of being sentimental or romantic. The Damned’s careful parsing of power and perversion has influenced our cultural understanding of fascism, from the cinema of Bernardo Bertolucci and Rainer Werner Fassbinder to the HBO show Succession. Fassbinder apparently considered The Damned one of the greatest works of dramatic art of all time, up there with Shakespeare, and most critics say it’s the greatest of Visconti’s movies.

The German trilogy’s final installment, Ludwig, however, left its audiences and critics confounded. Ludwig, bearing the English-language subtitle“The Mad King of Bavaria,” is most easily described as a biopic of Ludwig II, but it is really a tragedy of thwarted creativity: the young gay monarch (Helmut Berger again) believes that a legacy of art and poetry is the greatest gift a king can make to his people. An early fanboy, Ludwig is so besotted by the music of Richard Wagner that he bankrupts Bavaria to finance the flamboyant composer’s all-encompassing opera projects. Ludwig also builds several castles, including Schloss Neuschwanstein (the physical model for the Disneyland castle), replete with a grotto for cosplaying Wagner’s Lohengrin. He refuses to submit himself to the political mechanizations and scheming that comes with his status, and consequently he avoids marriage, disastrously loses a war, lusts after his male servants, loses his sanity, and dies under mysterious circumstances. There is no way a film about such ideological misguidedness and emotional lack of restraint could be anything but off-kilter. Ludwig is my favorite of Visconti’s movies, probably because it’s a little trashy. Visconti suffered a stroke before he was able to finish Ludwig, and so the movie mingles what really should be the pinnacle of his career with his career’s denouement. Two more movies would follow, but they’re just nothing quite like Ludwig, where the political righteousness and willpower of Visconti’s early work has become fetish and obsession; like the Countess in Senso, he has lost his moral compass in pursuit of an almost four-hour artistic vision. (The film’s duration, determined by distributors, now stands at 173 minutes.) Still, the acute eye for subversion remains intact: in the role of Ludwig’s first cousin and confidante, the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Visconti cast none other than Romy Schneider, who had risen to teenage stardom and sexist pigeonholing by playing that same Empress in the quasi-propaganda Sissi movies. In casting her, Visconti facilitated an act of cinematic vengeance for his female star. More than that, he’s forcing us to engage with our own relationship to watching movies and reckoning with the past.

I rewatched Ludwig during a trip home to Austria two years ago. It was late autumn, and I was staying at my father’s house outside Vienna. My mother had just died. I was so sick with grief that it felt as if my whole body had been sprained. I think my father and I agreed to watching Ludwig because it resembled something comforting—after all, it had been my father who, nearly twenty years earlier, had encouraged me to watch Il Gattopardo, and had explained the 19^th-century formation of European nation states via the Risorgimento. Since then, Visconti had been something we shared. I retrieved, from the attic, my German Arthouse-issued DVD boxed set of Ludwig with its three discs of content (Ludwig is the only major Visconti movie yet to rise to the echelons of the Criterion Collection), and as I waited for my father to return from the kitchen with some chocolates and wine, I listened to the DVD menu loop the Ode to the Evening Star from Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser. The soundtrack of Ludwig consists of the greatest hits from the real Ludwig’s favorite Wagner operas, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, speckled with Schumann’s Kinderszenen, and the primary cinematic theme is this Ode to the Evening Star, a mystical cello-and-harp arrangement, a hug of death, a lullaby over the loss of idealism. Like Visconti, I had over the past decade swapped the Verdi of my youth for Wagner—something that would have likely stunned and appalled my past self, who had once equated Wagner simply with German nationalism. Since moving to the US, I had begun to parse the nuances of the music and listened to little else, occasionally finding myself engulfed in a kind of addiction that I believe is common among Wagner fans. This, too, was the result of the immensely personal reach of Visconti’s work, how Visconti had accompanied me from youthful ardor to the awakening of my political consciousness, shaping my taste and affinities, and followed me now into a pit of grief and darkness. Visconti’s movies have for me served the same role as my longest and closest friendships: intertwined with other art forms, they have brought me closer to literature and music and other movies. Visconti had indulged me, and challenged me. Now, at last, he was consoling me.

Sophie Strohmeier is from Vienna, Austria and lives in New York City. Her Substack is gaycahiers.