Luchino Visconti

Luchino Visconti was a count descended from the lords of Milan and a member of the Communist Party, and made films about the class he came from decaying. He grew up in wealth, bred racehorses, and went to Paris in the 1930s where Coco Chanel introduced him to Jean Renoir; he worked as Renoir's assistant and came back a Marxist. Ossessione in 1943 was an unauthorised adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, shot in the Po valley with real poverty in the frame, and the Fascist authorities had the negative destroyed - a copy survived because Visconti hid one. It is usually called the first neorealist film. La Terra Trema used Sicilian fishermen speaking their own dialect, unsubtitled. Then he turned the other way: Senso, The Leopard and Death in Venice are operatic, enormous and obsessed with aristocratic decline, filmed with real silk and real palaces. He directed opera as well, and made Maria Callas a stage actress. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and nearly executed. The Leopard was cut by an hour and dubbed for its American release, and the full Italian version was not widely seen abroad for decades. He financed Ossessione partly himself and the estate of James M. Cain blocked the film outside Italy for years, since no rights had been bought. Rocco and His Brothers follows a southern family into Milan and was cut by the censor. He suffered a stroke in 1972 and directed his last two films from a wheelchair. He never hid that he was homosexual, in a country and a period where that was unusual for a public figure.

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