Visconti’s Sorrow

By chance I have had an opportunity to watch again Conversation Piece, the second-last of Luchino Visconti’s films, and at the same time I have come across an old news cutting from the Age (“Decadent direction”, February 24, 2003—a critical article by David Thomson). This conjunction invites me to attempt a brief appreciation of the film, the director and his oeuvre. It is not decadence that I find here, but, rather, the magnificence of supreme artistry—an artistry which rose again and again like a phoenix out of the soul of this man, easily shedding aside his limitations and prejudices, perhaps even to his own surprise; and ultimately making a statement which many critics, such as Thomson, have failed to see and understand because of their own shortcomings and meanness of spirit.

Count Don Luchino Visconti di Modrone was a great lover and his oeuvre includes a number of outstanding films that testify to that ardour of soul. He loved the aristocratic lifestyle into which he was…