“I was impelled toward the cinema by, above all, the need to tell stories of people who were alive, of people living amid things and not of the things themselves. The cinema that interests me is an anthropomorphic cinema. The most humble gestures of man, his bearing, his feelings, and instincts are sufficient to make the things that surround him poetic and alive. The significance of the human being, his presence, is the only thing that could dominate the images. The ambience that it creates and the living presence of its passions give them life and depth. And its momentary absence from the luminous rectangle gives to everything an appearance of dead nature.” Visconti (1943).

Luchino Visconti’s broad artistic repertoire encompasses his works as a film-maker (14 full-length films and four episodes) but also, importantly, as a theatre and opera director (approximately 60 staging productions). His work is extensive, analysing the main political events of his country and the social upheavals resulting from these events, while at the same time deeply reflecting his own personality.

Visconti is quite possibly a unique case within the history of film. Born into an aristocratic family in Milan, his decision to become involved in cinema and theatre was purely vocational, lending a very unique perspective to his work. He understood film both as an art form and a form of personal expression, outside the financial stipulations imposed within the film industry. For Visconti, being a film-maker was never simply about exercising a trade or having a means to make ends meet.

A great deal of his work focuses on the nuclear family unit as the principal element responsible for conditioning the individual’s personality. In his films, portraits of family members often cover the walls of the protagonists’ homes, regardless of whether or not they belong to the upper-classes (Conversation Piece (1974), the name given to paintings of high-society families in Britain in the 18th century, is the English title of Visconti’s Confidencias) or more humble families (the family photos in La Terra Trema (1948) and Rocco and his Brothers (1960).

The UGR will hold a film series dedicated to the works of Luchino Visconti during the month of April. Nine of the director’s works will be screened in the UGR’s Cinema Club as part of the series “Masters of classic cinema (IX)”, to mark the 110th anniversary since Visconti’s birth.

Programme: