With the exception of a few repeat screenings in July, the most successful film series in Lincoln Center history—VISCONTI: A RETROSPECTIVE—will conclude this week with LUDWIG (1973), starring director Luchino Visconti’s lover Helmut Berger in the title role.
Wednesday and Thursday, June 27 and 28,
at 2 pm and 6:45 pm.
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street, New York City.
Above: Romy Schneider in Ludwig.
Below: Helmut Berger and his director Luchino Visconti.
DEATH IN VENICE screens this weekend at the Visconti festival at Lincoln Center.
“There is possibly a no more overwhelming death in cinema than the one that ends Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella of homosexual desire. Feted composer Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde), his face smeared with tragically unbecoming makeup, sits on the beach at Venice Lido watching the object of his affections.
“To the unbearably bittersweet strains of the adagietto from Mahler’s 5th symphony, Aschenbach sees the beautiful Polish boy, Tadzio (Björn Andrésen), get beaten up by an older boy, before he himself is carried off in a Wagnerian liebestod.” — Stuart Jeffries *
Sunday, June 17, at 8 pm, and Thursday, June 21, at 4:15 pm.
Walter Reade Center, 165 West 65th Street, New York City.
See Nick Pinkerton on Visconti.
Dirk Bogarde (left) and Björn Andrésen (left) in Death in Venice. Image credit: Warner Bros.
The Luchino Visconti retrospective at Lincoln Center continues with three screenings of his black-and-white, widescreen masterpiece ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS, from 1960.
The film has been beautifully restored by Cineteca di Bologna in association with Titanus, with funding by Gucci and the Film Foundation.
Friday, June 8, at 1:30 pm, Saturday, June 9, at 8 pm, and Wednesday, July 18, at 7 pm.
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street, New York City.
Renato Salvatori as Simone and Alain Delon in the title role in Rocco and His Brothers.
Misunderstood in Great Britain and the States at the time of its release, BARRY LYNDON (1975) has always been appreciated by Europeans as a work of great beauty, director Stanley Kubrick’s journey into a Visconti-like wonderland.
In the film, Lord Bullingdon is played by Leon Vitali, who quit acting to become Kubrick’s right-hand man. Vitali is the subject of Tony Zierra’s new documentary FILMWORKER.
BARRY LYNDON, Saturday, May 19, at 11 am.
FILMWORKER, through May 24.
NUART THEATRE, 11272 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles.
landmarktheatres.com/barry-lyndon
landmarktheatres.com/nuart-theatre/filmworker
FILMWORKER, May 25 through May 31.
LAEMMLE PLAYHOUSE, 673 East Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena.
LAEMMLE FINE ARTS, 8556 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills.
See: dazeddigital.com/why-barry-lyndon-is-stanley-kubricks-masterpiece
Above: Ryan O’Neal and Marisa Berenson in Barry Lyndon.
Below: Berenson.
Luchino Visconti got there first. Ossessione, his unauthorized version of James M. Cain‘s The Postman Always Rings Twice, hit the screens in 1943, and Italian neorealism was born. Hollywood’s noir take, starring Lana Turner and John Garfield, appeared three years later. Postman was remade in the 1980s with Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson, and Stephen Paulus and Colin Graham turned it into an opera in 1982. This year, avant–garde director Ivo van Hove returned to Cain via Visconti, and brought OBSESSION to the London stage.
Jude Law is Gino, a drifter who arrives at a roadside diner/garage and finds himself in a situation of immediate, mutual attraction with the proprietor’s young wife Hanna (Halina Reijn). Dissatisfied with her lot as kitchen slave and wife of a control freak, Hanna and her lover plot to murder her husband (Gijs Scholten Van Aschat).
L.A. Theatre Works (LATW), the premiere Los Angeles screening venue for National Theatre Live, brings this Barbican Centre/Toneelgroep Amsterdam co-production to the James Bridges Theater at UCLA for an encore on Sunday afternoon, June 4.
OBSESSION screening, Sunday, June 4, at 4 pm.
JAMES BRIDGES THEATER/MELNITZ HALL, 235 Charles E Young Drive North, UCLA.
latw.org
web.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/969897
ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk/venues/2021214338-james-bridges-theater-u-c-l-a
(Top) Clara Calamai and Massimo Girotti in Ossessione, directed by Luchino Visconti.
