Death in Venice

source: Death in Venice

Set in Venice mainly on the Lido, Visconti's "Death in Venice" is a triumph of filmmaking combining the excellence of Dirk Bogarde's characterisation and expert photography of the resort area in all its various daily moods. For those who love Venice, this is a film to cherish. Mahler's music frequently heard throughout the film heightens the drama. The mood it creates is not always happy. But then what else would you expect with a title like that? There is not a lot of dialogue in the film. Rather sparse in fact. It's mainly background noises and chatter and laughter among the hotel guests. The intriguing part is to interpret the exchange of glances between Gustav von Aschenbach a composer of some renown and a slim teenage youth Tadzio who see each other from time to time across the tables of the hotel dining room, on the beach and at odd unexpected places around Venice. They seem to acknowledge each other's presence shyly at first with little more than the suggestion of a smile but later with a strong and riveting and urgent gaze. Each viewer will have his own interpretation. The composer has lost a child of his own. Is this behaviour an expression of yearning for the child he loved? Is it perhaps a sexual attraction towards this fragile young man with his dazed somewhat girlish stare? Could he be discovering some new inspiration for a yet unwritten musical masterpiece? Who knows? From beginning to end this film captures the true spirit of 19th Century Venice. The elegance of the ladies, the deck chairs on the sand, the children frolicking in their neck-to-knee bathing costumes, the glow of sunsets and a general feeling of satisfaction with the world. While some may think the pace is rather slow at times, the film has an overall gentle quality, but with a simmering indecision between two repressed human beings. Be prepared for a sad and beautiful ending.

Death in Venice is a movie I need to see once every ten years. It is always different, because I am always at a different stage of life. The movie is about art, beauty, longing, death. Some scenes are painfully slow, others simply annoying to watch, especially if you have seem them before. Yet I would not want to miss a single frame. The music is repetitive, the main theme of the adagietto from Mahler's fifth is used again and again. Yet I would not want to miss a single note. When the last image fades, the last note dies, I am left numb and exhausted. This movie is a monument to film making. As with most really good movies, the saturday evening crowd should stay away from it. And this is simply the best movie ever.

Death in Venice has nothing to do with sexuality - hetero, homo, or otherwise. It's about God, man, beauty and creation. Man loses. End of story.

I'm not sure where to start with this. In short, it was a disappointing movie. Having taught the novella, I was aware that it would be a hard story to turn into a movie. The movie has a couple of interesting lines (mainly between Alfred and Aschenbach) but it doesn't represent the debate on art that basically shapes the novella. For one, I was expecting an older Aschenbach and a younger Tadzio. In the book, Tadzio is fourteen, but he is described as pure, ideal, innocent, whereas in the movie he reeks of sexuality and is a tease. He is an accomplice to Aschenbach, he always looks back at him, almost provokingly. In the book, it is Aschenbach who steals glances at the boy. As for Aschenbach, I imagined something closer to the professor-turned-clown in The Blue Angel (based on a story by Thomas Mann's brother Heinrich) than this forty-year old with hardly any gray hair. In all fairness, I do think that Dirk Bogarde did a good job, but either someone else should have done that, or he should have made to look older at the beginning. I know that the discovery of homosexuality is important to the story, but the movie minimizes the talk about art and the duality between the Apollonian and Dyonisian inspirations and focuses instead on Aschenbach's obsession of Tadzio and does not justify it. I liked the fact that Mahler's music was used, because ultimately he did inspire Mann to write his story. I'm not sure turning Aschenbach into a musician was a particularly good move. Or the creation of Alfred who I don't remember in the book. And one thing that really got to me was the sound and how it did not match the actors' lips. I was wondering if it was dubbed because I expected it to be in Italian. But then I remembered that each Italian movie I have watched has this problem. It just bothers me because these directors (Fellini is the other person I'm thinking of) are supposed to epitomize perfection in Italian cinema, and here are their characters laughing without sound, then you hear a noise that doesn't correspond to their faces (I'm thinking of the scenes when Aschenbach almost collapses and starts laughing. This scene could/should have been the strongest, but it was annoying instead).

'Death in Venice' can only be termed 'experimental,' and offers viewers a nasty, fatalist thesis (We become what we deplore) and an icky storyline about an aging failure's obsession with an adolescent boy. There is at least as much in the movie that indicates he wants a carnal relationship with the boy, as there is to support that he's undergoing a chaste, parental paean to lost youth and fleeting beauty. Twenty minutes into this (the longest 20 minutes of your life) 'Death in Venice' has staked out some pretty dire territory: dwelling on the obvious / remaining in an undeveloped holding pattern. Visconti's gloss on the book could only be described as 'salacious-minimalism.' The whole thing is pretty much destroyed by its inability to move beyond its instantly grasped premise, and the decision to practically eliminate scripted utterances; save for 3 or 4 poorly acted & inserted purple speeches about beauty, truth, etc. Technically, it has very ugly camera-work straight out of the 70s. Visconti apparently rejected all of his previous refinement, and aggressively futzes with the brand-new 'zoom' button on his camera. He uses it with no subtlety whatsoever. Apparently he wanted to be seen as an early adopter for the now-abandoned camera innovation. Beyond that, the imagery is all too well-lit and flat. It feels like an episode of 'Three's Company.' Dirk Bogarde gives a poor, schematic performance of an uptight sad-sack who looks more than a little like Percy Dovetonsils. The low quality of this movie is pretty shocking. I mean Visconti made The Leopard, for god's sake. All of Death in Venice resembles that movie's indulgent, climactic ballroom sequence, which receives uniform critical raves, but which is too long, overstates points already made in better portions of the film, and brings things to a complete standstill.

Death in Venice is a must see for all of those interested in "great" film-making. I regard the film as essential watching. The final scene, in which the lovesick middle aged man watching a beautiful boy as his absurd makeup runs and he dies of the plague is one of the most horrific and sad in film history. Featuring the music of Gustav Mahler, we are visited by the dark, amber strains of his Fourth Symphony as we visit Venice, which has been beset with the plague. A middle aged man falls in love with a teenage boy, and is heartsick from afar. This is sumptuous, heartbreaking film-making. A must see.

This is the only movie that ever put me to sleep. And I've watched some real snoozers before. Just to let you know that I'm not some typical Hollywood speed freak (which is the immediate, predictable assumption made about anyone who calls a film "boring"), I want you to know that my favourite films include "Werckmeister Harmoniak" (which features an 8-minute scene of a boy eating soup), "Dong" (which features an equally long scene of a girl mopping the floor) and "Fitzcarraldo" (which features interminable scenes of Klaus Kinski's face). In other words, I have nothing against slow movies...when they have something to say. This, on the other hand, is quite obviously a mediocre director's self-indulgent attempt to act like the big boys. It has all the length and banality of the artistic masterpieces but none of the art. In addition, it is extremely juvenile in presentation--the way my homemade movies were when I was 16. For example, there's a scene where the lead character is getting dressed. He pauses at the mirror, picks up a photo and kisses it. The camera feels the need to zoom in on this action abruptly as if it say "LOOK! HE'S KISSING A PICTURE! WHO'S PICTURE IS IT? HMMM?" Several minutes later he picks up a different photo and kisses it. Again, the camera jerks us into tightframe as if to say "LOOK ANOTHER ONE! SEE? WHO IS IT THIS TIME?" This is just one example of the director's juvenile and heavy-handed approach to what should have been a subtle film. Other examples include cameras abruptly zooming in on trivial background action, as if trying to emphasize the serendipity of an interesting moment. For example, the camera will latch on to & relentlessly follow a bird in flight, a brigade of men marching or a passing cloud. It makes me feel as if the director has a severe case of ADHD and cannot focus on one thought without flying off to whatever incongruous and distracting spectacles catch his eye. The camera movements are rather clumsy and awkward, which is OK if that's the director's gimmick (à la Lars Von Trier) but not if it is unintentional. This is a film whose story, setting and music call for equally elegant and graceful camera motion; yet we get something akin to a African nature documentary instead. All of this lumped with the obvious lack of dialogue and acting adds up to boredom. The director fails to assert his theme. And a themeless movie is nothing but a MTV video without the music. Don't be suckered by the bloated rating from IMDb's pseudo Euro-intellectuals. These are the same people who think Godard is a great director. Werner Herzog (a genuinely talented filmmaker) called Godard "intellectual counterfeit money". I'm sure he would have said the same about the obscure loon who directed this waste of film. If you want to see some true artistic films, check out the list I've posted in my profile page--or as I like to call it "Artsy movies that don't suck wind". I give "Death in Venice" 2 stars, only because I reserve the 1-star badge of shame for movies that have live animal killings.

In DIV, Visconti overstates the Mahlerishness of Aschenbach to the point of confusion, and worse, does the same to the 'boy-ogler' interpretation of Aschenbach to the point of insult. The result ends up feeling like an horrific parody - or even fictional bio - of the great composer / conductor. Mann, upon whose work the film is apparently based, much admired Mahler, and, learning of his death, gave Aschenbach Mahler's first name and (apparently), his appearance - but unlike Visconti, Mann cast him as a writer, not a composer. Mann's written work was already mostly finalised when these 'honours' were bestowed at any rate. But more importantly, Mann is widely thought to have drawn from a number of different sources for his main character; different traits from different people, and to specific ends. In short, the clumsiness of the film's choice of visuals, seems to lecherise Mahler himself through a 'little boy obsessed' Aschenbach, and insinuate something of Mahler himself which has no real basis. The overplayed likeness left the feeling that what was going on was really nothing to do with the novella, but instead a 'secret revealed' about Mahler. And so the story lost all philosophical meaning immediately, and became something more like slander or gossip, leaving the perhaps less studied Mahler-appreciating audience to be misled into supposing all sorts of things - even trying to extrapolate something of the historical relationship between Mahler and Schonberg (as if Mahler's helping of Schonberg required any more motivation than memories of his aspiring composer / musician younger brother, Otto!) But aside from this terrific complaint which I might at least be able to (unreasonably!) write off to misinterpretation, the film's slow broody stillness - and labored sincerity - cannot reach a shadow of the way to the effortlessly profound music which it misappropriated. Way back in the day (July 19, 1971), Alan Rich did a great review of this movie in the New York Magazine. "...the insult to Mahler doesn't like in any imputation about homosexuality, not even in the way this element is luridly underlined in the movie. It lies, rather, in the cheap, uncomprehending niggle-naggle about the arts that Visconti puts into the mouths of Aschenbach-Mahler and Alfred [-Schonberg]..." It's easy enough to find on googlebooks. That review pretty much says it all - other than one more comment which desperately need to be made, and that being, that the film's lack of subtlety pushed it Aschenbach firmly into 'little boy ogler' territory, which was simply creepy, but which also obliterated much of the intelligent introspection and 'longing for the lost days of youth' that the film might have otherwise evoked. Someone likes it I guess. Not me. Tacky. Slow. Self-serious. Overblown. Self-important. Failed art- house bordering on mockumentry bordering on defamation.

The opening of MORTE A VENEZIA resembles a Duran Duran music video with classical music and this is the highlight of the movie " In terms of what Theo ? " In terms of everything , but especially excitement . I doubt if there's ever been a more sluggish slower moving movie than this one . Yeah okay it's a European art house movie so I wasn't expecting Charles Bronson to massacre hordes of bad guys but even so I did expect some substance if not an actual plot The film revolves around Professor Gustav Von Aschenbach visiting Venice . Gustav visits Venice and goes on a gondola , Gustav eats in an expensive restaurant , Gustav looks out of his hotel window and if it's excitement you want Gustav has a flashback Bad enough if this was the entire movie but it gets worse because Gustav notices a pretty boy teenager . So you've got a middle aged academic lusting after some teenage boy he has seen , some old queen is becoming obsessed with a stranger . Great idea for a movie ? I don't think so either and thank gawd it remained a yawn fest instead of some sleazy precursor to gay * I notice a lot of people who praise this movie have tried to intellectualise it . I can only be monosyllabic and unpretentious in my view and say that the only subtext I could relate to was the physical and emotional disintegration of Gustav but it wasn't caused by the effete beauty of the teenage boy - It was caused by watching such a boring and ostentatious movie