Visconti's Death in Venice

Abstract

Writing in 1928, Thomas Mann mockingly dismissed films as too “primitive” to be art. Instead of dwelling in art's cold, intellectual realm, films “present two young people of great beauty, in a real garden with flowers stirring in the wind, who bid each other farewell ‘forever’ to a saccharine musical accompaniment.” Of course, in the silent era, some of these lovers on the silver screen had the stature of the great Lillian Gish, or Richard Barthelmess, or John Barrymore, or Charlie Chaplin, or Greta Garbo; in the early years of the “talkie,” they included the likes of Marlene Dietrich, or Gary Cooper, or Greta Garbo (again), or Katharine Hepburn, or Cary Grant, or Ingrid Bergman. And film music was not always saccharine. In any case, Mann's mocking tone strikes me as more than a little self-satisfied, or, perhaps more precisely, more than a little defensive. But there is an ambiguity in Mann's disdain for film: Is the problem the fact that movies happened to be made by and for people who must have appeared vulgar to a European of Mann's cultured sensibility, or does the problem lie in the nature of cinematic representation itself – the fact, or alleged fact, that film traffics in the realm of the concrete, the sensory, the individuated, not art's realm of ideas and ideals? I suspect that Mann would not have mocked Luchino Visconti's aspirations or achievements as an artist.