Death in Venice (1971) User Reviews

A haunting piece of cinema, a true emotional experience, a masterpiece

[auberus · 8/10 · 12 July 2004]

Luchino Visconti's 'Death in Venice' is one of the most misunderstood masterpieces of cinema. Based on Thomas Mann's 1913 classic novella of the same name, the film not only capture the quintessential of the novel but also reinforce a powerful questioning through superb visuals. Adapted by Mr. Visconti himself who decided to focus on the Venice chapter only as well as to modify the occupation of the main protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach who becomes a music composer (highly inspired by the composer Mahler), the film was also inspired by other Thomas Mann's novel like 'Doctor Faustus' or by Marcel Proust's writing. Often reduced and presented as a decadent film in which homosexuality and pedophilia are the main themes, the novel like the movie deals in fact with a much more complex and powerful dynamic.

Indeed the film is based on an equation between Death and Beauty as an aphorism for Perfection and in which the results is Time (or the lack of it). Perfection, Beauty is a chimer, pursuing it is pursuing Death as Time is passing by. At first von Aschenbach does not understand why the perfection of the form in his musical composition does not lead to the perfection of his symphony and therefore lose himself in a quest for Beauty following the young Tadzio as not only a symbol for this ultimate Beauty / Perfection but also as the Mask of Death. In this Venice, marked by Death and cursed by the plague, the Time is running out and the fascinating quest for Perfection finally appears to be a dangerous game to play.

All the notions that build up to the main questioning are revealed during this quest for Perfection and this race against Death. The notion of Urgency reinforced by an avoidable sorrow as Von Aschenbach realizes he is getting old in the hair dresser scene. The notion of isolation right from the beginning emphases by the personality of Aschenbach himself and showed by Visconti as someone cold and rigid and therefore alone. The notion of Desire which leads to the understanding of the main questioning: for Aschenbach, Perfection is reached through hard work it is a consequence not a fact. The Young Tadzio blows away this certitude. Does von Aschenbach desire Tadzio or is he fascinated by what he represents: Perfect Beauty?

The challenge of Luchino Visconti was to apply a superb cinematography and a precise narrative method to a film that in nature deals with complex concepts. By succeeding in this task Mr. Visconti delivers a haunting piece of cinema, a true emotional experience, a masterpiece.

Unforgettable romantic drama

[raymond-15 · 8/10 · 18 May 2004]

Set in Venice mainly on the Lido, Visconti's "Death in Venice" is a triumph of filmmaking combining the excellence of Dirk Bogarde's characterisation and expert photography of the resort area in all its various daily moods. For those who love Venice, this is a film to cherish.

Mahler's music frequently heard throughout the film heightens the drama. The mood it creates is not always happy. But then what else would you expect with a title like that?

There is not a lot of dialogue in the film. Rather sparse in fact. It's mainly background noises and chatter and laughter among the hotel guests. The intriguing part is to interpret the exchange of glances between Gustav von Aschenbach a composer of some renown and a slim teenage youth Tadzio who see each other from time to time across the tables of the hotel dining room, on the beach and at odd unexpected places around Venice. They seem to acknowledge each other's presence shyly at first with little more than the suggestion of a smile but later with a strong and riveting and urgent gaze.

Each viewer will have his own interpretation. The composer has lost a child of his own. Is this behaviour an expression of yearning for the child he loved? Is it perhaps a sexual attraction towards this fragile young man with his dazed somewhat girlish stare? Could he be discovering some new inspiration for a yet unwritten musical masterpiece? Who knows?

From beginning to end this film captures the true spirit of 19th Century Venice. The elegance of the ladies, the deck chairs on the sand, the children frolicking in their neck-to-knee bathing costumes, the glow of sunsets and a general feeling of satisfaction with the world. While some may think the pace is rather slow at times, the film has an overall gentle quality, but with a simmering indecision between two repressed human beings. Be prepared for a sad and beautiful ending.

ignores important aspects of the novella

[msultan · 7/10 · 11 June 2004]

I'm not sure where to start with this. In short, it was a disappointing movie. Having taught the novella, I was aware that it would be a hard story to turn into a movie. The movie has a couple of interesting lines (mainly between Alfred and Aschenbach) but it doesn't represent the debate on art that basically shapes the novella.

For one, I was expecting an older Aschenbach and a younger Tadzio. In the book, Tadzio is fourteen, but he is described as pure, ideal, innocent, whereas in the movie he reeks of sexuality and is a tease. He is an accomplice to Aschenbach, he always looks back at him, almost provokingly. In the book, it is Aschenbach who steals glances at the boy. As for Aschenbach, I imagined something closer to the professor-turned-clown in The Blue Angel (based on a story by Thomas Mann's brother Heinrich) than this forty-year old with hardly any gray hair. In all fairness, I do think that Dirk Bogarde did a good job, but either someone else should have done that, or he should have made to look older at the beginning.

I know that the discovery of homosexuality is important to the story, but the movie minimizes the talk about art and the duality between the Apollonian and Dyonisian inspirations and focuses instead on Aschenbach's obsession of Tadzio and does not justify it. I liked the fact that Mahler's music was used, because ultimately he did inspire Mann to write his story. I'm not sure turning Aschenbach into a musician was a particularly good move. Or the creation of Alfred who I don't remember in the book.

And one thing that really got to me was the sound and how it did not match the actors' lips. I was wondering if it was dubbed because I expected it to be in Italian. But then I remembered that each Italian movie I have watched has this problem. It just bothers me because these directors (Fellini is the other person I'm thinking of) are supposed to epitomize perfection in Italian cinema, and here are their characters laughing without sound, then you hear a noise that doesn't correspond to their faces (I'm thinking of the scenes when Aschenbach almost collapses and starts laughing. This scene could/should have been the strongest, but it was annoying instead).

The best possible film of Mann's novella.

[ItalianGerry · 10/10 · 7 June 2004]

Luchino Visconti's "Death in Venice" is a masterpiece of utterly haunting beauty that will capture the imagination of anyone interested in the screen's capacity for breathtaking images. It is a poignant tragedy based on Thomas Mann's classic novella of the same name. Visconti has captured many of the essential qualities of the book and employed a superb visual style (with the assistance of the great cinematographer Pasqualino DeSantis) for a story which is essentially an interior one. It is about the struggle within the soul of a man, Gustav von Aschenbach, a composer vacationing in the Venice of 1911.

In Mann's book Aschenbach was a writer, but Visconti asserted that the book had been inspired by events in the life of Gustav Mahler, whose music, mostly the haunting adagietto of his Fifth Symphony, is used as background (and foreground) music, helping create an almost tactile mood of melancholy.

Dirk Bogarde plays Aschenbach, a man possessed by feelings of failure, haunted by the grief he and his wife (Marisa Berensen) shared over the death of their daughter. He is a man on the precipice of emotional collapse who finds both redemption and destruction in the contemplation of beauty. "The creation of beauty and purity is a spiritual act." God and composers are alike.

In this film beauty becomes incarnate in the form of a young Polish boy vacationing at the same hotel, the Hotel des Bains on the Lido. The boy's stately mother is played by Silvana Mangano. The long-haired blond boy is Tadziu, aged 14, played by the Swedish Bjørn Andresen. Aschenbach is smitten by, then obsessed with, the boy's beauty, in a manner that is more spiritual than sexual, but which must also contain a good deal of sublimated sexual longing.

At first he merely steals opportunities to look at the lad. They never speak. Gradually he starts to seek him out, self-destructively spurred-on by the boy's coquettishness and knowing glances. Bogarde makes the character's longing as tangibly moving as it is ultimately pathetic.

All this takes place in a misty Venice dense with metaphorical gloom and a mysterious plague (cholera) carrying death to its inhabitants. In one horrifying scene a barber "re-makes" Aschenbach's face so that it is both a grotesque parody of youth and an ominous death mask.

Visconti's skill in recreating lush period detail, to paint family-album poses of aristocracy, to make beauty seem dangerous, to underline the complexity of human psychology, are all in evidence here. The color photography by Pasqualino De Santis, and the costumes by Piero Tosi are excellent.

The ending of the film is unforgettable: Gustav languishing on the beach, the Polish folk song in the background, the boy Tadziu in the water turning into an angelic apparition with extended hand. Overwhelming!

I cannot imagine a better film ever being made of Mann's great and essential work.

A visionary masterpiece (but not for those with short attention spans)!

[Zen Bones · 13 April 1999]

Turn-of-the-century Venice is depicted in all its elegance and decay through the eyes of a composer who knows he has little time left to live. The composer is obsessed not just with beauty, but with the ideas behind beauty, and his theories are slowly proved wrong when he finds himself infatuated with a beautiful teenage boy. He becomes obsessed with the boy and amidst the backdrop of a city quietly dying with a plague, he simply observes and ponders, trying his best to keep his desires at bay.

The core of the film is in Dirk Bogarde's performance. As there is little dialogue in the film, he must act with his eyes and through his mannerisms, and he never falters. In the reflection of his eyes we see beauty as it is distinguished in the depths of all of our souls (well, those of us who have souls!). We see the awe, the pain, the fever, the fear, the desire and the ultimate surrender all in that forlorn face.

The music (most of it by Gustave Mahler) also reflects all this, and Visconti's incredible photography of the decaying Venice pinpoints the end of an era in a way that is both dreamlike and unsentimental (despite the romantic quality of the film).

The film is slow and langorous, like the hush of the ocean sweeping the shore. For those who like the visual quality of dreams and the somber romanticism of adagios, this film will be something to cherish forever.

A Study in Beauty and Decay

[Chalker1123 · 7/10 · 12 February 2006]

In Luchino Visconti's film Death in Venice, it is not only the beauty in the surrounding world that decays, but in the pursuit of beauty itself Gustav von Aschenbach decays into a mere shell of a man. To understand the decay, we must acknowledge the beauty which enchants us, it is best described, and explained in a quote from Socrates found in Thomas Mann's version of Death in Venice, "beauty alone, is lovely and visible at once… it is the sole aspect of the spiritual which we can perceive through our senses… Else what…if the divine, if reason and virtue and truth were to speak to us through the senses? Should we not perish and become consumed by love?" We see in the film this very thing happen, the man becomes enveloped by a longing for beauty, which turns into a longing for the boy, Tadzio. Even though the levelheaded part of his mind tells him that adoration of beauty can lead to sensuousness and abandon, he cannot contain himself.

It would be easy to describe this as a beautiful film; early on we see the extravagance of the parlor, and we are treated to a perfect summarization of turn-of-the century upper class life, all captured on film perfectly by cinematographer Pasqualino De Santis. But Visconti does not indulge in the picturesque aspects of Venice. Instead, the glorious and sensuous artistic achievements of the past are based on materialism and sensuous beauty, and these things are relegated to the past. The city we know to be of incomparable beauty and uniqueness is nothing more than a leisure resort with a nosy hotel staff. The streets become exhausting labyrinths filled with disgusting filth and rot, the city decays in step with the protagonist. Only through the flashbacks are we allowed a glimpse of why this famous composer is a frail and innocuous man. The death of his daughter, and presumably his wife, along with the failure of his music allow us to understand why he is destroying himself.

Alfred, with whom Aschenbach has in depth conversations on the meaning of beauty and who can create it; but Alfred is more than a friend, he is Aschenbach's alter-ego, and what Alfred says articulates the composer's own doubts and fears. The scene in which Aschenbach decides to leave Venice is immediately followed by a clip of Alfred telling him that he is weak, alienated and lacks feelings. In the end we might be able to conclude that these flashbacks are not reality at all. It is a decay of memory, rather than objective renderings of the past, these flashbacks become distorted memories. We can say that these are decayed memories because even Aschenbach alludes to it, he declares, "reality distracts and degrades us;" and, following the scene in the travel agent's office we see Aschenbach confront Tadzio and his family and warn them - leave Venice, but directly after the encounter we see him sitting with the clerk again and realize it was all in his imagination, he employs long scenes without dialogue that are framed by the poignant music of Gustav Mahler. He allows the viewer's mind to wander as we watch Aschenbach's life and respectability decay with the beauty around him.

Slowly the viewer realizes that our hero is overwhelmed by exhaustion that is mixed with a growing awareness that the town is suffocating in filth. The crumbling city sets the stage for the middle aged man's attraction to Tadzio, it is romantic longing for something so idealized and ambiguous that it can never be consumed, even in fantasy. The beauty of this Polish boy kindles a fire in him that, at first, makes him glow, then consumes him. The film concludes with von Aschenbach sitting feebly in a beach chair watching Tadzio fight with his friend, we see the black dye from his hair running down on his cheek and it looks like rotten blood, it is a vision of his life's expiring moments, though before his last breath. The final decay has happened, all around him the city is soiled, and with it he has become what he detests. As Aschenbach dies he has the same painted face as the old man on the ferry at the beginning of the film, a man that had disturbed him. It was the pursuit of beauty that initiated his decay, in the pursuit of artistic beauty he could not sense his own demise, and that of the city around him; his sensuality is indulged in, while constantly kept in check by the presence of death and decay. It is these three themes that tie The Damned and Death in Venice together, beauty, death, and decay, these themes are Visconti's art, the beauty of his work is in the decay of beauty itself.

In this film we are treated to the deliquescence of one great man. We see the honored composer Gustav von Aschenbach in the pursuit of true and pure beauty, and it is in the pursuit of this trait that it decays all around him and leads him to a miserable, lonely death watching the target of his affection. I believe that through these movies Visconti is trying to tell us that what is beautiful cannot last. Decay is intrinsic in the world around us, and when we become distracted, it can destroy the splendor. In Death in Venice, it is because of culture and through the pursuit of beauty that all is deleted. Beauty and deliquescence are woven together like thorns in Visconti's works, at once beautiful and destructive, it is these themes that define his art.

Beauty Found and Lost in Venice: Mann + Mahler +Visconti = a Masterpiece

[Galina_movie_fan · 10/10 · 11 December 2006]

I first saw "Death in Venice" 1971) about 15 years ago, found it profoundly moving and often thought about it. Watching it again few days ago, I realized that it is close to the top of the great works of cinema. With hardly any dialog it captivates a viewer with the beautiful cinematography, the fine acting, and, above all, the Mahler's music without which the movie simply could not exist.

"Death in Venice" is a stunning Luchino Visconti's adaptation of the Thomas Mann novella about a famous composer (in the novella he was a writer but making him a composer in a movie was a great idea that works admirably) Gustav von Aschenbach (loosely based on Gustav Mahler) who travels to Venice in the summer of 1911 to recover from personal losses and professional failures. His search for beauty and perfection seems to be completed when he sees a boy of incredible divine beauty. Ashenbach (Dirk Bogard) follows the boy everywhere never trying to approach him. The boy, Tadzio, belonged to very rare creatures that own an enigmatic and inconceivable power which captivates you, enchants you, conquers you and makes you its prisoner. Ashenbach became one of the prisoners of Tadzio spellbinding charms. He became addicted to him; he fell in love with him. Was it bless or curse for him? I think both. He died from unreachable, impossible yet beautiful love which object was perfection itself. The last image Ashenbach's eyes captured was that of the boy's silhouette surrounded by the sea and golden sun light. Nothing could compare to the beauty and charm of the scene and to take it with you to the grave is the death one can only dream about. If he could, Ashenbach probably would've said, "I was able to witness one of the faces of perfection, I could not bear it but I was chosen to learn that it exists here, in this world and I can die in peace now because it did happen to me."

Unforgettable music, Gustav Mahler's haunting adagietto of his Fifth Symphony found perfect use in a perfect movie. It reflects every emotion of a main character - it sobs, it longs, it begs for hope, and it summarizes the idea that once you are blessed to encounter beauty you are condemned to die. I may come up with hundreds movies that use classical music to perfection but nothing will ever compare to "Death in Venice". I dare say that Mahler's music IS its main character - it would change and sound differently depending on what was happening on the screen. It sounded triumphantly when Ashenbach returned back to Venice, to what he thought would be his happiness but turned to be his death. It sounded gloomy when he first entered Venice from the sea. You can hear so many different feelings in it - tenderness and adoration, confusion and self-loathing, worship and melancholy, but always - LOVE that gives the purest happiness and breaks the hearts (literally). The movie for a viewer is similar to what the boy was for the aging composer/writer/Artist. We are enchanted and captivated by its power and beauty as much as Achenbach was by the boy's mysterious charm.

Sensitive as well as thoughtful flick about a composer and his quest for beauty and splendor

[ma-cortes · 7/10 · 3 April 2015]

This is an adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel , avant-garde composer Gustave Aschenbach (Dick Bogarde) , loosely based on Gustav Mahler character , being well portrayed in this brooding as well as slow-moving classic movie . The celebrated story of a man obsessed with ideal beauty written by prestigious Thomas Mann is magnificently brought to the screen , concerning about desire , homosexuality , children lost , plagues and adult situations throughout .

Thought-provoking character studio of a reputed artist , his mishaps , digresses , loves his homosexuality and continuous search for beauty and perfection . this is the second part of Luchino Visconti's German Trilogy also including The damned (1969) and Ludwig (1972). It deals with Gustav Mahler lookalike whom Dick Bogarde is made up to resemblance . However , the film results to be overlong , it seems longer than its 130 minutes running time . Colorful as well as visually absorbing cinematography in Panavision by Pascualino de Santis . Impressive and immortal musical score by Mahler , in fact his Third and Fifth Symphonies were adapted as background music for the film ; being excellently conducted by orchestra director Fanco Mannino.

This studied as well as slow motion picture was masterfully directed by Luchino Visconti . Visconti was a director and writer, considered to be one of the best Italian filmmakers . At the beginning his career he developed the movement of "Italian neo-realism" together with other directors such as Vittorio De Sica or Roberto Rossellini in the 1940s and 1950s such as ¨Bellissima¨ (1952) , ¨La Terra Trema¨(1948) , and ¨Ossessione¨ (1943) was based on James M. Cain's 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' . Luchino is especially known for Rocco and brothers (1960), "Il Gattopardo" or "The Leopard" (1963) , ¨The damned¨ (1969) , ¨Ludwig¨(1972) , "The Innocent" (1976) and , of course , this Death in Venice (1971). His sense of visual style was equally impressive in his film work, never better demonstrated than through his masterpiece Senso (1954).

The Death of European Cinema.

[FilmSnobby · 10/10 · 3 April 2004]

Cinema's greatest period started in post-War Europe with Italy's Neo-Realist movement. During the next 2 or 3 decades that followed, France's New Wavers caught everyone's attention, and there was always Bergman up there on his desolate Scandinavian island somewhere, making bitter masterpieces. But in 1971, Luchino Visconti brought the art-form to full circle, geographically speaking, with his miraculous work *Death in Venice*, which might as well be called *The Death of Europoean Cinema*. After the Sixties wound down, so did the great European filmmakers, who, with some exceptions, generally grew exhausted and passed the torch to a new American generation of Movie Brats (Coppola, Scorsese, & Co.). This movie absolutely feels like a grand summing-up, not just of Visconti's particular obsessions, but of the general attempt of European filmmakers to achieve the aesthetic ideal in movies. And rest assured, you will find no sterner task-master than the Visconti revealed here. He's not playing to the crowd, folks: either you get behind him and follow along, or you get left behind. The pacing is a challenge: slow, but never without emotional weight. "Incidents" are few and far between, but each seems loaded with symbolic significance in a sturm-und-drang cosmos.

We will probably never be in such rarefied company again, in terms of the movies: one of the century's great writers who inspired the tale (Thomas Mann), one of the greatest filmmakers directing it (Visconti), one of the greatest actors in the lead role (Dirk Bogarde), and swelling almost ceaselessly in the background, Gustav Mahler's 5th Symphony. Taking full advantage of Mahler's ability to inspire Romanticism in even the most cynical breast, Visconti changes the main character, Aschenbach, into a decrepit composer from his original persona as a writer, even making Bogarde up to LOOK like Mahler (geeky mustache, specs, shaggy hair, duck-like walk). Bogarde, by the way, delivers what is probably greatest performance of an actor in the history of movies: it's a largely silent performance, and the actor has to deliver reams of meaning in a gesture or a glance -- a difficult trick without mugging like Chaplin or merely acting like an animated corpse.

Cinema just doesn't get better than this. I'll ignore the complaints from the Ritalin-addicts out there who say that it's too slow, but even the more legitimate gripe concerning some of Aschenbach's flashbacks with that antagonistic friend of his is misplaced. The flashbacks fit neatly within the movie's thematic concerns (i.e., which is the better path to aesthetic perfection: passion or discipline?), and the suddenness and shrillness of these interruptions serve to prevent sleepiness among the viewers. (Of course, some viewers will sleep through this movie, anyway.) A nonstop stream of Mahler and beautiful, dying Venice would be nothing more than a pretty picture; but this movie is actually about something. And what it's mostly about is suffering: Romantic (capital R) suffering, in particular. As a suffering Romantic himself, Visconti knew whereof he spoke.

If for nothing else, see *Death in Venice* for its portentous opening credits . . . and for its unforgettable ending, with Bogarde's jet-black hair-dye dripping off of his sweaty, dying head and onto his chalk-white face. Meanwhile, off in the distance, young Tadzio, the object of Bogarde's dying desire, stands in the ocean and points toward the horizon like a Michelangelo sculpture. The climatic sequence sums up with agonizing economy everything that the movie is about: love, lust, beauty, loss, the ending of a life set against the beginning of another life, and cold death in the midst of warm, sunny beauty. *Death in Venice* is a miraculous work of art.

[DVD tip: as with the simultaneously released Visconti masterpiece *The Damned*, I recommend that you turn the English subtitles ON while watching this movie. It's ostensibly in English, but the DVD's sound seems muddy and there's a lot of Italian spoken during the film, anyway.]

Italian art-house

[SnoopyStyle · 7/10 · 17 June 2017]

Composer Gustave Aschenbach is sick with stress. He goes to a seaside resort only to obsess about a beautiful young boy who is on vacation with his family. The vacationers discover that a cholera outbreak in the nearby city of Venice has been kept from them.

This is good controversial Italian art-house. It's a tale of desire but not simply a sexual desire. The boy often looks angelic. His beauty is ethereal as well as sexual. Gustave's struggle is palpable in the sweat of his brow. This is not a film of plot. Director Luchino Visconti incorporates a lot of classical music in a study of this man. The demeanor of his pale sickly haunted face is a story in itself.

A Surfeit of Overripe Beauty

[JamesHitchcock · 5/10 · 17 June 2013]

Thomas Mann's novella "Death in Venice", published in 1912, was one of the earliest mainstream literary works of to deal with the subject of homo-erotic desire. Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous German author, travels to Venice, where he meets and becomes obsessed with Tadzio, a beautiful teenage boy whose Polish family are staying in the same hotel. Aschenbach discovers that cholera has broken out in the city but that the authorities, fearful of losing income from tourism, are trying to keep the outbreak a secret. Despite this discovery, Aschenbach neither leaves the city nor warns his fellow-guests, as either course of action would mean his being separated from Tadzio, with whom he has fallen in love.

Mann was himself bisexual, and the story is based upon his own experiences while visiting Venice the previous year, when he had also been fascinated by a handsome young Polish boy. The depiction of Aschenbach also draws upon Mann's memories of the composer Gustav Mahler, whom he had known and who had died in 1910; he shares the same first name and Mann's description of his physical appearance would also have fitted Mahler. This may be the reason why, for the purposes of this film, Luchino Visconti made Aschenbach a composer rather than an author and made use of Mahler's music; the famous Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony is passed off as a composition by Aschenbach. Visconti made other changes to the story to strengthen the identification with Mahler. In the book Aschenbach is a childless widower whose wife died many years earlier and who has never remarried. In the film Aschenbach's wife is shown in flashbacks and although she does not accompany him to Venice there is no indication that she has died. (Mahler's wife Alma did not predecease him- indeed, she survived him by more than fifty years). They are, however, shown mourning the death of a young daughter, just as Gustav and Alma Mahler lost a daughter some three years before his death.

I first saw this film in the late seventies, a few years after it was made, when I was a teenager studying Mann's book for my German A-Levels. I remember being impressed by it at the time, but then I was a very impressionable young man and probably thought that any art-house film based on a work of classical literature, shot against the background of a famously beautiful city with plenty of classical music on the soundtrack must be a great classic of the cinema, especially if (a) it deals with a controversial subject and (b) nothing much happens except long conversations about Art and the Meaning of Life.

Since then my admiration for Mann's novella, a book with a well-deserved reputation as one of the major works of twentieth-century German literature, has grown, whereas my regard for Visconti's film has decreased. Mine is not the normal complaint of the "loved the book, hated the film" brigade, namely that the film-makers have altered the story too radically. Apart from the few changes to Aschenbach's circumstances mentioned above, and the omission of the opening scenes set in Munich, Visconti has kept fairly faithfully to Mann's plot. There are, however, some works of literature which do not lend themselves to a cinematic treatment, and "Death in Venice" seems to be one of them.

There are some good things about the film. The photography of Venice is certainly beautiful, reminiscent of some of Turner's paintings of the city and rivalling that in "Don't Look Now", another film from the early seventies set in the same location. Dirk Bogarde was normally a talented actor and the young Björn Andrésen, with his prettier-than-any-girl beauty, certainly looks the part as Tadzio. (Andrésen, who is heterosexual, became something of a gay icon following this role, causing him some embarrassment). The Adagietto is certainly a beautiful piece of music, although I sometimes wonder if its association with this film has done Mahler's long-term reputation any good, leading people to associate him with decadence and morbidity.

The problem with the film is that its good looks are all on the surface. Mann's novella contains little in the way of action and not much in the way of dialogue; the two main characters, Aschenbach and Tadzio, never exchange a single word. Its significance lies beneath the surface, on the psychological and philosophical levels. On the personal level it is a character-study of a man who has striven to live an ascetic life, governed by discipline, restraint and reason, but who finds his world- view shattered by the sudden realisation of his own powerful sexual desires for a boy. On the philosophical level it is an examination of two contrasting attitudes to life, the Apollonian life of reason and the Dionysian life of passion, a concept derived from Mann's study of the philosopher Nietzsche.

Visconti, who was an intelligent man, doubtless understood the complexities of Mann's work, but it is these very complexities which make it difficult to adapt for the screen. The contrast between Apollonianism and Dionysianism is not a naturally cinematic subject, and the complicated inner life of an intellectual writer or musician, unaccompanied by some dramatic outward action, is equally difficult to dramatise. Visconti is never able to find a substitute for Mann's ideas. The lengthy debates between Aschenbach and a fellow-composer about musical aesthetics do not add much interest; they simply help to make a lengthy and tedious film even more so. The film may be beautiful, but it is also dull and long-winded, and in such a context its beauty becomes something excessively rich and cloying. In Mann's story Aschenbach dies after eating an overripe strawberry, and this becomes an appropriate image for an overblown film in which Dirk Bogarde appears to die of a surfeit of overripe beauty. Too much Venice, and too much Mahler, can be bad for your health. 5/10

A monument

[The_unemployed_cynic · 10/10 · 27 October 2002]

Death in Venice is a movie I need to see once every ten years. It is always different, because I am always at a different stage of life.

The movie is about art, beauty, longing, death. Some scenes are painfully slow, others simply annoying to watch, especially if you have seem them before. Yet I would not want to miss a single frame. The music is repetitive, the main theme of the adagietto from Mahler's fifth is used again and again. Yet I would not want to miss a single note. When the last image fades, the last note dies, I am left numb and exhausted.

This movie is a monument to film making. As with most really good movies, the saturday evening crowd should stay away from it. And this is simply the best movie ever.

Lacking plot

[bertin-14342 · 6/10 · 12 July 2020]

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind watching films with no plot, they're nice, but usually they have something else that compensates for it. A fixation on a little boy that does noting, but a 45° turn with his head and looks at you is so lacking. Also the subplots about the epidemic and his former life with a wife and child had brought a little more interest, but filled only a very little part.

Nonetheless I liked the cinematography, there was some really pretty stills, (even though they didn't fully exploit being in gorgeous Venice), the music was captivating and the dialogues with Alfred was interesting.

I can't believe the positive reviews

[Tardis101 · 2/10 · 6 June 2018]

This film is terrible, it completely misses the point of the book, and destroys any of the philosophical discussion the book created. It's honestly just some not very well done scenes of a guy following a child around Venice. Unlike in the book there is no internal monologue describing why this man feels this way or why he is doing this. The few flashback scenes were pointless and the philosophy discussed in them isn't anything intellectual. A huge disservice to the beauty and tragedy of the novel. I can't believe the number of people raving over this film. It turns a book about beauty, idolization, decay, obsession, and aestheticism into a pretentious 2 hours of a creepy guy following s boy around.

More and more beautiful as the years pass by

[Patatino · 29 October 2004]

"Slow", "slow", "slow"... I read many people complain "it's slow"... slow what? This movie takes its time. All the most beautiful things in life take time. When you make sex with your girlfriend would you try to make it last five minutes? No you would like to make it last the whole night. When you eat good food in a good restaurant would you like to finish it in two minutes? No, you sit down, enjoy the place, the food, the company and the wine. When you visit an art museum, would you rush through the rooms? No, you would move slowly, pay attention, and stop at the artworks that mean more to you. So why should a movie be different?

If you want speed, then eat at McDonald's, rush in the tube, watch TV commercials, and pay a prostitute for a 5 minute work.

If you are looking for real emotions, deep feelings and thoughts that will last in your memory and heart for a long time, then you don't want to miss this movie.

One caveat: don't go watching it for the gay theme. This movie isn't about gay love, if you look at it through this point of view, it will let you down completely. This movie is symbolism from beginning to end, it does not speak of what you see. It speaks of the struggle of the artist to reach the beauty, so close, always unreachable, and, like another reader perfectly commented, so inevitably connected with death, because the only perfection that a living being can ever attain, is in the death. If you look at the movie from this point of view, it will show to you for what it is: a complete masterpiece, from beginning to end.

Love It Or Hate It But Try To Watch More Than Once Even If Hating It

[Rodrigo_Amaro · 9/10 · 25 June 2010]

Definitely one of the most difficult, artistic, powerful and discussed films ever made "Death in Venice" had an almost impossible mission: Put blood on the veins of a story in which almost nothing happens and yet have a statement to made. If you consider that's quite difficult to read the book (I abandoned after 10 pages thinking that Thomas Mann took too long to told the story only pointing views on art and similar things which I felt very close to other book of his called "Tonio Kroeger" a very good book) you're gonna think that this cannot be filmed. Luchino Visconti tried, conquered and made an important film. But I must say this film entered in my list of one the most hated movies I ever watched and it only got out of it this year after 6 years of my first view.

By the time I watched I didn't care much for it, I was expecting a more developed story, a few more movements than it doesn't have and at the end I didn't get it all. A few years later, and much more older, finally I found "Death in Venice" an more complete film than it was years ago and thanks to the brilliant and unique performance of Dirk Bogarde I think I went further on my notions of perception of what's the story and what's the point of it. Still has some doubts about the excessive use of artistic licenses used by the screenplay and some never answered questions but still is a great movie.

Bogarde plays Gustav Von Aschenbach a famous composer that travels to a Venetian seaside resort in search of repose after a period of artistic and personal stress that includes the death of his son. His heart is weak, his emotional state is a completely mess, and he's desperate to achieve something great with his music. To make his travel worst (perhaps better depending on your view) he meets a beautiful young boy named Tadzio (Björn Andrésen, good actor with a magnetic presence almost without saying any lines) a teenage boy traveling with his parents. Gustav can't stop looking at Tadzio and vice-versa but the meaning between the look they gave to each other is very different.

Alternating with the trip to Venice Visconti shows us some flashbacks of Gustav's life while he was married; the conversations about the notion of art and real beauty with his friend Alfred (Mark Burns), and Gustav's breakdown which led him to Venice. Pay attention very closely to the conversations between Alfred and Gustav about beauty, and what a real artist is. These moments always get something to say about what Gustav is doing in Venice searching for Tadzio in all places even knowing that there's a epidemic of Cholera coming to town.

I don't know if the movie follows the book exactly but I think some notions of the main character were drastically changed. For instance people always say that Gustav is a cloistered homosexual, but in the film if you really pay attention Gustav is a little bit far of it, he was married with a women, and his supposed sexual interest in Tadzio comes from his thoughts about pure beauty, something that really makes him feel complete (along with his music) and that's what he really sees in Tadzio. Of course, there's the enigmatic and provocative look that Tadzio got in his eyes: "You must never smile like that. You must never smile like that at anyone." says Gustav to himself in one scene (best quote of the movie). Before you start to think that he's a pedophiliac, calm down and see Gustav's trying some approaches but doing noting except look and think about the boy. The book is one focus (Gustav's point of view) and so does the movie. If it wasn't we would be able to know what Tadzio had on his mind with such gestures.

Be patient and try to watch more than once because this is one of those films when you don't get the general idea by watching one time. It grows with you and the more you see, more the vision of what you think this story is it changes. Dirk Bogarde has the performance of a lifetime here and I can't imagine another actor playing Gustav. His last and moving scene is the most impacting and powerful scenes ever filmed: his character sitting in the chair, dying of the cholera, looking for the last time Tadzio running in the beach. Very well photographed. Gustav Mahler's music are well played in a good synchronized scenes. One of the forgotten films at the Academy Awards of 1972 it was nominated for best costumes (it lost for "Nicholas and Alexandra"). The costume designs are beautifully made and it is a key part for the film; notice the first time Gustav sees Tadzio dressed in white with some blue lines on the shirt, almost like if he was an angel to Gustav. What a vision! 9/10

A Movie with Some Great Sequences that Is Ulimately Pretentious and Empty

[bob-790-196018 · 6/10 · 4 March 2011]

There is much to love in the first half of this film. The opening sequence, where Dirk Bogarde as Gustav von Aschenbach is shown in closeup aboard a boat headed for Venice, with glimpses of the city looming in the background, is masterful and helps us to focus on his isolation. This sense of being outside the mainstream of life becomes dramatically clear in the subsequent ensemble scenes at the grand resort hotel on the Lido.

These are great scenes, giving us a portrait of resort life among the haute bourgeoisie in the years just before World War I, a way of life that never survived that war. Visconti creates a crowded, busy canvas, full of life, and then uses his camera searchingly, showing us life as viewed by von Aschenbach, the lone traveler from Germany. We see masses of people enjoying before-dinner refreshments in a great hall of the hotel; then watch them on the beach; and then--in a strange and wonderful scene--see them on the terrace being entertained by a ragtag Italian minstrel group.

During these scenes, von Aschenbach is increasingly attracted by the beauty of the androgynous boy Tadzio. At first this is intriguing. The boy is with his mother, governess, and siblings. He is aware of his attractiveness to von Aschebach and cannot help showing this awareness, though at the same time it is clear that there is a limit to how far this well-brought-up and strictly supervised boy will lead him on.

And that's where the movie becomes slow and even tiresome. Over and over we see von Aschenbach trailing after Tadzio and his family, longing for him and indeed in love with him. To give the second half of the movie a sense of direction, we are made to become increasingly aware that a plague has reached the city, and before long we understand that von Aschenbach will fall victim to it. And so he does. If the plague has some symbolic value, it never becomes clear.

The greatest flaw in the movie is the series of abrupt interruptions of the story with flashbacks showing von Aschenbach back in Germany, involved in fierce debates with a colleague about "art" versus "life," "spirit" versus "the senses," and so on. Clearly these are meant to inject some thematic sense into the main story in Venice, but the debates are almost ludicrously simplistic and the interruptions for them are at best distracting.

Is this a film about an aging man's longing for youth? An intellectual's plunge into the realm of the senses? A respectable man's descent into pederastry? Who knows? I'll have to re-read Mann's novella, which I last read a long time ago, to find out the real story.

A unique achievement

[barryrd · 9/10 · 21 June 2017]

I saw this movie in 1971 when I was very young. All I recall is a very sad story about an artist who was very ill when visiting Venice where he spent time furtively seeking out a boy he was attracted to. It was sad and depressing and a bit creepy. I watched it again 45 years later on TCM and it seemed to be a much more powerful statement about a tragic life and death that reaches its climax in Venice during a sweltering summer in 1911 when the city is overtaken by a cholera epidemic. The main role is played by Dirk Bogarde, a British actor, who is making the best of his last days longing for a love he can never achieve.The background music by Mahler is very sombre and fits the tragic ending. The city is being scrubbed to stop the spread of disease and no one wants to frighten away the tourists, who are the city's economic lifeblood. Again, the symbolic conflict between dreams and reality. The acting is superb. The period costumes are stunning. The photography is powerful and sweeping with seas, sunsets and the skyline of Venice. This movie is not entertainment but a work of art. I couldn't take more than one of these works at a time but it is worth seeing as a unique achievement.

Slow As Molasses

[donwc1996 · 6/10 · 13 July 2014]

You haven't seen slow until you have seen this film. And I thought Barry Lyndon was slow. This film makes Barry Lyndon look like a runaway train. And since Mann's book was actually a novella this film is probably longer than the book it is so drawn out. But it is riveting in its own way. Visconti is never dull that's for sure. And his films are always visually stimulating. His eye for detail is unmatched, although he did overlook a couple of TV antennas in one scene, but I doubt anyone would have noticed them. Dirk Bogarde is as always absolutely wonderful and clearly exhibits what makes a star and it's making things happen without lifting a finger. He is in virtually every scene and the scenes are very long so he's on camera forever yet he manages to keep your interest because he is so interesting. The film is really about him and he does carry it brilliantly. But the original story is just too abstract for a film and they should have never made it.

This is how I'd like to die...

[rancid_man85 · 10/10 · 3 June 2003]

Philistines beware, especially American ones! This has all the elements you'll hate - a langorous approach to film language, a painterly sense of composition, an intense homoerotic focus to its elegant narrative, a wonderful and unusual use of music and, even worse, it's based on a story you'd probably hate as well... If, however, you do feel that films don't to have derivative plotlines, be full of action and crappy dialogue, don't need the visual grammar of MTV/TV Commercials, then watch this. It's one of my favourite films, and is perhaps Visconti's most perfectly formed piece of work. It's sublime, like the movement of Mahler he uses insistently throughout the film.

A man's furtive quest for idealized beauty of youth...

[Doylenf · 6/10 · 7 January 2007]

Art film lovers would probably rank this much higher on their scale of appreciation, but I found DEATH IN VENICE, while sumptuous to look at and listen to (the music of Gustav Mahler fills the soundtrack with his symphonic music), as beautiful and empty as a multi-colored seashell. It assails the senses with sensuous shots of Tadzio's youthful beauty as seen by DIRK BOGARDE, but fails to give us a narrative strong enough to sustain over two hours of story.

Furthermore, it moves at a snail's pace while exploring the beauty of the seashore in Venice, spending far too much time on close-ups of Bogarde as he sinks deeper and deeper into despair over never possessing the creature he so desires. SYLVANA MANGANO, the great Italian actress, is fine as the boy's mother and the fair-haired Italian boy himself (BJORN ANDRESEN) is merely seen and glimpsed from afar and remains an enigma until the very end.

Based supposedly on composer Gustav Mahler's personal life (although never actually proved), it's the kind of film that could fill art houses in the '80s with high approval from the pseudo-intellectuals who claimed to have read Thomas Mann's novel and approved of the film's tasteful rendering of a difficult and, at that time, taboo subject.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder--for some, this film is a masterpiece of its kind--for others, beware the tranquility of the whole piece. It may put you in a dreamlike trance.

Pretense on top of pretending

[tim-john-mead · 1/10 · 27 September 2014]

In DIV, Visconti overstates the Mahlerishness of Aschenbach to the point of confusion, and worse, does the same to the 'boy-ogler' interpretation of Aschenbach to the point of insult. The result ends up feeling like an horrific parody - or even fictional bio - of the great composer / conductor.

Mann, upon whose work the film is apparently based, much admired Mahler, and, learning of his death, gave Aschenbach Mahler's first name and (apparently), his appearance - but unlike Visconti, Mann cast him as a writer, not a composer. Mann's written work was already mostly finalised when these 'honours' were bestowed at any rate. But more importantly, Mann is widely thought to have drawn from a number of different sources for his main character; different traits from different people, and to specific ends. In short, the clumsiness of the film's choice of visuals, seems to lecherise Mahler himself through a 'little boy obsessed' Aschenbach, and insinuate something of Mahler himself which has no real basis. The overplayed likeness left the feeling that what was going on was really nothing to do with the novella, but instead a 'secret revealed' about Mahler. And so the story lost all philosophical meaning immediately, and became something more like slander or gossip, leaving the perhaps less studied Mahler-appreciating audience to be misled into supposing all sorts of things - even trying to extrapolate something of the historical relationship between Mahler and Schonberg (as if Mahler's helping of Schonberg required any more motivation than memories of his aspiring composer / musician younger brother, Otto!)

But aside from this terrific complaint which I might at least be able to (unreasonably!) write off to misinterpretation, the film's slow broody stillness - and labored sincerity - cannot reach a shadow of the way to the effortlessly profound music which it misappropriated.

Way back in the day (July 19, 1971), Alan Rich did a great review of this movie in the New York Magazine. "...the insult to Mahler doesn't like in any imputation about homosexuality, not even in the way this element is luridly underlined in the movie. It lies, rather, in the cheap, uncomprehending niggle-naggle about the arts that Visconti puts into the mouths of Aschenbach-Mahler and Alfred [-Schonberg]..."

It's easy enough to find on googlebooks. That review pretty much says it all - other than one more comment which desperately need to be made, and that being, that the film's lack of subtlety pushed it Aschenbach firmly into 'little boy ogler' territory, which was simply creepy, but which also obliterated much of the intelligent introspection and 'longing for the lost days of youth' that the film might have otherwise evoked. Someone likes it I guess. Not me. Tacky. Slow. Self-serious. Overblown. Self-important. Failed art- house bordering on mockumentry bordering on defamation.

"Death in Venice" is Luchino Visconti's mood masterpiece

[robertdav · 10/10 · 11 February 2005]

From the time I first saw this film in East Berlin in the 1970's with my lover, Lutz, till now-the magic of this film never fades. It is a dream, a mood , a beautiful image. Dirk Bogarde is well suited as the repressed artist Aschenbach who visits Venice and finds ideal beauty in the young boy, Tadzio. Luchino Visconti took Thomas Mann's famous novel and brought it to life. Silvana Mangano is more enchanting than ever as the boy's mother. The haunting musical score of Gustav Mahler is a feast. This film is a superb delight. To those who complain that it is slow moving, I feel that it is a film to be enjoyed in that way. One can only praise such a beautiful work of art in Italian film and shudder at the vile crap being produced by Hollywood.

Odd Coloration

[gavin6942 · 6/10 · 17 September 2015]

In this adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel, avant-garde composer Gustave Aschenbach (loosely based on Gustav Mahler) travels to a Venetian seaside resort in search of repose after a period of artistic and personal stress. But he finds no peace there, for he soon develops a troubling attraction to an adolescent boy, Tadzio, on vacation with his family.

What strikes me about this film is the odd coloration. Some have said it makes the film look like a moving painting. I can see that, but I also think it looks muted. A step up from Technicolor, but a far cry from other methods. I wish I knew more about cinematography so I could express the thought more clearly.

There is a bit of a scandalous subplot, as it suggests pedophilia or something similar. Strange how many films (or books) have heroes (or protagonists) afflicted with this. What are we to make of them? Are they evil or just flawed? The cholera epidemic plays a major part in the story, and it is interesting that the film seems to be known less for that than the "romance" angle. Not many films have cholera in them, which seems odd considering its deadliness. Everyone in old movies seems to die from tuberculosis!

Beautifully photographed and scored

[mls4182 · 3/10 · 24 February 2021]

That's it. There is no real plot, just a gross pedophilia premise. People who rave about this film have more pretense than taste. Why couldn't he have his stroke at the beginning of the film? We wouldn't have missed anything.