Quote:
Originally Posted by David
I’m not crazy about a lot of the movies with gay texts or subtexts that draw everyone’s attention, like Visconti’s Death in Venice,
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DEATH IN VENICE (Luchino Visconti, 1971)
What makes a “gay film” anyway? The career of Luchino Visconti complicates all of the connotations of that phrase, which suggests today’s gay ghetto distribution-exhibition model. He always connects desire and society, history and commerce with a luxurious—gay—attentiveness to masculine beauty and feminine mystery even in in the hetero milieus of his masterpieces (La Terra Trema, Bellissima, Senso, White Nights, and Rocco and His Brothers). These qualities combine with a cruel sense of fate to negotiate Visconti’s Marxist dialecticism and aristocratic nostalgia—which meet to angle his unorthodox approach to gay portraiture and queer sociology in his later work (The Damned, Conversation Piece, and Ludwig). Visconti's most overt contribution to gay cinema is his adaptation of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. With it, Visconti changes the medium (novella to film) and that of its artist-protagonist (author to composer). Doing so, he reconciles—and transcends—the aesthetic-philosophical debate (Apollo vs. Dionysus) articulated in the dialogue and plotting through the musicality of imagery (reinvigorating period films along with 70s landmarks McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Barry Lyndon, and The Story of Adele H.). A master at portraying sexual repression, Dirk Bogarde plays composer Gustav who calls for purity in art—a grieving father’s plaint—and mastery of the flesh. Gustav embarks to Venice from Germany to recover from a blow to his health and to his art philosophy. In cholera-ridden Venice, blond-haired blue-eyed waif Tadzio (Björn Andresen) fulfills Gustav’s aesthetics but rocks his philosophy by giving flesh to an ideal. He extends Plato's cave to the Christian revelation of the West's art heritage. Hence, I think the ending is misunderstood. Visconti affords equal beauty and grandeur to Gustav’s pathetic sacrifice—scored to Mahler—as his sublime last look at Tadzio, an unconsummated openness to passion realized in Gustav’s final stunted gesture. Through this film’s visualization of gay rapture—Gustav watching Tadzio wrestling on the beach—Visconti redeems the contingency of flesh. That is what makes a “gay film” a great film.