41/100

No real way to avoid sounding like a Philistine here, so I'll just resign myself to my fate. Like most stories involving romantic and/or sexual masochism, it's just profoundly uninteresting to me—from the jump, it's clear that Valli's Countess has idiotically hitched her lust-wagon to a scoundrel, and there's no modulation whatsoever thereafter. She just keeps being foolish and he just keeps taking advantage. (I have the same issue with many Fassbinder films, for the record, especially Fox and His Friends.) Their final scene together, in which he drops the pretense and openly humiliates her in front of a hooker, rings especially false to me; it's suggested that his attack is motivated primarily by self-loathing, but that doesn't jibe…

In the midst of a political turnoil between Austria and Italy, a troubled countess starts an affair with a high ranking Austrian officer.

Boy! Talking about a movie with so much interesting behind the scenes. From Tinto Brass actually readapting the story to the cast for the main roles planned for Ingrid Bergman (who was busy with another film) and Marlon Brando, who was ditched for Farley Granger, who producers considered a bigger star than Brando. Yeah, you know, Farley Granger. Y'all heard about him, right?

Another standout, without a doubt, is its stunning cinematography. My God! What a beautiful movie to look at. Now, I don't know if I am kinda cheating as I watched in a new 4K…

Senso. With that word, Luchino Visconti constructed one of the finest cinematic operas of all time. And, I'm afraid to admit, this is my first foray into this immaculate director's work. Man, did I start off with a bang! 

Senso is a classic Greek tragedy, blending and adapting the ideas of doomed love from Romeo and Juliet whilst setting the story in Italy back in 1866. 

We follow Contessa Livia Serpieri (a tour de force performance by Alida Valli) as she is both depressed by the war around her, and longing to get away from her current "Italian nationalist" husband. Well, she successfully does that by falling in love with Austrian Lieutenant Franz Mahler (Farley Granger). The film demonstrates how they…

The adjective that is most often used in conjunction with Luchino Visconti is "operatic". His films are essentially operas with the music left out but the roiling emotion left very much in. The exception to this is The Leopard, which takes a far more sophisticated approach, but Senso is something of a flip-side to that masterpiece in its reliance on high melodrama.

The story takes place in Venice and Verona during the Risorgimento of the 1860s, when a collection of city-states was in the process of becoming unified into the country we now call Italy. Venice is still under Austrian occupation, but the resistance movement is flourishing. Countess Livia Serpieri is aiding the rebels when one of them, her cousin…

→ Part of my Italian Summer Challenge

The operatic and visual grandeur of Luchino Visconti’s third feature is nothing short of spectacular. His vision and scope are immense, framing his characters and their environments with precision, perfectionism and beauty unlike any other of his contemporaries. Every detail in each frame is meticulously thought out, hinting at the characters past, present and future and telling us everything we need to know about them. The landscapes and streets of Venice are just as magnificently rendered, holders of such a mystic allure that the audience is completely transported in time and place. Senso is one of those films that could have absolutely no sound and the story it has to tell would still…

Damn, I loved this. In all of its bitterness, empathy, naivety, loneliness, cruelty and anguish. You know exactly where it's going and it still manages to rip your heart out and trample it. That's all due to both the gorgeous sets and costumes, all of which make you feel like you're watching the stuff fairy tales are made of. And then the strength of the acting from Farley Granger, who I didn't even recognize until half way through the movie somehow, he was just so pretty here, and Alida Valli, who in her most desperate moments reminded me of Joan Crawford here in the best ways.

I like to joke that Visconti movies are about beautiful people in beautiful places…

Glauber Rocha: formalista, modernista e, olha só, precursor do Biette na discussão sobre o que constitui o trabalho específico do cineasta.

DRAMATURGIA FÍLMICA: VISCONTI

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Há que se colocar também a problemática da dramaturgia fílmica, componente do binômio montagem externa-interna ou mais precisamente conflito de enquadramento e composição. No primeiro estaria a montagem como expressão criativa; no segundo, como sistema narrativo.

Se Eisenstein teoriza a montagem dialética, com o sentido nascendo do conflito anterior de dois fotogramas, isso não implica em dogma: foi apenas até hoje o método que mais se aproximou do filme absoluto, não invalidando, contudo, a mensagem linear pregada por Pudovkin, próxima (com ligeiras variações) da corporificação da ideia, que marca o estilo de Luchino Visconti.

Aliás,…

Senso is an absolutely gorgeous film. Luchino Visconti makes so many moments of his film look painterly because of his control of the compositions. There is so much texture in them with the actors in the foreground but the attention to detail doesn't end there as every single frame of the film is just brimming with all sorts of pieces of art which is either a painting, furniture of architecture and even sometimes a splendorous nature beauty. Visconti makes good use of Venice as a setting in which it's singular look enhances the aestitic of the film. He also has such control of color where every frame feels like an interesting mix of the color palette where you aren't quite…

Visconti switched up his milieus drastically from the earlier realist days to work in one he knew intimately. Pictorially, "Senso" glistens with all the immaculate details of the epoch. As a recreation of a place in time, it's beautiful - shot on location, too, so Visconti didn't completely move away from the veracity of setting. I do wish there was more history and a little less of the hothouse melodrama pitched up to the hilt. The story of Countess Serpieri's debasement through love of the wrong person is compelling enough, if not exactly unique. It's all the over-emoting, punctuated by bombastic symphonic swells of Bruckner, and spending this much time with Farley Granger that I didn't love. It was more…