The argument so far is, to say the least, extremely prejudicial towards Death in Venice, the film in which Visconti reaches the culminating point of his identification with the Hegelian Geist. But Death in Venice, like all Visconti’s films, is highly contradictory, and it is only fair to suspend judgment on the aspect of ‘Kultur’ and to start by examining other aspects of the film which co-exist uneasily with its cultural or culturalist pretensions. For there is a sense in which Luchino Visconti’s Morte a Venezia can be read without reference to Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig of which it is an adaptation and on which it provides a sort of commentary. It is such a reading which we will now attempt, if only to see how far it takes us.
It should be said at the outset that this is in no sense intended as a naïve reading of the film. It is not an attempted reading of the whole film such as might be made by someone who had never heard of Thomas Mann and did not know that the film was an adaptation of a pre-existing literary work. Such a reading could only be subjectivist and quite profoundly false, for reasons which should become clear.¹ What I have in mind is a partial reading, which deliberately abstracts as far as possible from the cultural overtones with which the film is beset and which concerns itself (again as far as possible) solely with the internal correlation of the immediate signifying attributes of the film as contained in the images, the dialogues and the soundtrack, without reference to external cultural determinants. For the purpose of this reading Venice is just a place, Gustav von Aschenbach is just a character, Mahler is just a composer, a look is just a look. Whatever further meanings these names or events may have had for Mann, or for Visconti, or for the spectator moyen cultivé, or for me for that matter, is a question to be integrated into the argument later. It is not a question of preferring a ‘cinematic’ reading to a ‘literary’ one, but a deliberate effort of abstraction in order to determine the precise place of cultural and quasi-literary discourse within the overall structure of the film.
The essential components of the film, on this reading, are a present time and a past time. In the present time there is seascape and townscape, a successful arrival and an abortive departure. There is a hotel with an international clientele, at a short distance from the town. There are relationships between the guests, and there are words exchanged between the particular guest whose arrival we have watched and various people whose job it is to serve him. There is also an exchange of glances between this guest, a middle-aged man, and a fourteen-year-old boy who is also staying at the hotel. At the end of the film we see the middle-aged man die on the beach outside the hotel, facing out towards the sea across which he first arrived. In the past time, represented by a series of flashbacks, we see the same man, younger, in a variety of situations. We learn that he is a successful composer, that he has had a family life, that he has certain ideals both for his life and for his art. There is one seemingly casual link between the two time registers: the name of the prostitute whom he encounters in one of the flashbacks is Esmeralda, which is also the name of the boat on which he arrives in Venice in the main narrative.
It is clear that the scenes from past time are intended to illuminate and explain the significance of the events of the present. Certainly without the key that they provide the events in present time are singularly lacking in depth. But before using this key in order to open up the film and reveal whatever depth may lie behind the surface, it is worth analysing more closely the surface represented in the present-tense narrative.
In the course of the film the guest, Gustav von Aschenbach, is involved in a series of encounters. On the boat he is accosted by a strange drunken old man with a made-up face. Between the landing stage and the hotel he travels by gondola. The dialogue with the gondolier consists of an argument as to whether the gondolier should take him to the Lido or only to the steamboat landing. In the English-language version of the film this dialogue takes place in English. Meanwhile the gondolier is muttering to himself incomprehensibly in dialect. (One may take it that the English, and no doubt the German versions of the film are as authentic as the Italian, in which the same contrast exists, but is less marked.) On arrival at the hotel the guest is received with much bowing and scraping by the maître d’hôtel. He is treated as a rich and distinguished personage but does not seem to be much trusted or liked. Almost all the dialogues in which the guest is involved throughout the present-tense narrative of the film follow the pattern established in the opening scenes. He never speaks with his fellow guests, but only with people who are structurally in the position of servants or cast in a role of service and even servility. But the form of a master/slave relationship does not mean that the master controls the servants: on the contrary they control him. The gondolier takes him after all to the hotel, not just to the steamboat landing. The maître d’hôtel guides his movements and attempts to deceive him about the presence of plague in the city. An English clerk in Cook’s tells him the truth, but in a way that seems more calculated to demonstrate the clerk’s own erudition and the power of his fantasy than to impart useful advice. The barber who cuts Aschenbach’s hair, shaves him, trims his moustache and finally dyes his hair and covers his face with a layer of make-up does so on the basis of no instructions from his client. The constant use of alien languages (at no time does Aschenbach exchange any words in German with fellow German speakers) and the alternation of servility and manipulation in which he is subjected establish a very sharp separation between Aschenbach and the world around him.
The separation between Aschenbach and his human and social context, it should be stressed, implies no metaphysics of alienation. It is specific to Aschenbach and has no echoes in the life around him, which is crowded and gregarious. It also seems to characterise the present only, and not the past. Aschenbach comes to Venice alone and he dies there alone, but the sense of the event is given not by the emptiness but rather by the fullness of what surrounds him. The emptiness is between himself and the world, not in the world itself.
Besides separateness, or non-relatedness, another theme attached to the figure of Aschenbach is age, or rather the problem of ageing and agelessness. As well as the drunken old man who appears at the beginning there is another similar made-up figure in the film. This time it is (significantly) a musician, the leader of a band of strolling players who entertain the guests on the terrace outside the hotel. After he has finished playing and collected his money the musician retreats, facing the guests, singing a song whose vocal line consists entirely of raucous and mocking laughter. Later Aschenbach himself emerges from the barber’s similarly made up and artificially rejuvenated. On his way home he collapses by a fountain and laughs gently to himself while the mask begins to peel and the make-up begins to run on his cheeks. Though the sense of this scene clearly has something to do with his feeling of failure as an artist, its main motif seems to be the incongruity of being both prematurely aged and disguised to look young, particularly in the light of his passion for Tadzio, the boy with whom, or with whose image, he has fallen in love.
Aschenbach’s passion for the Polish boy Tadzio is the core of the film, and, in the way it is portrayed, is clearly inseparable from the representation of Aschenbach’s separateness and from the theme of age and youth. Tadzio is on the verge of puberty; Aschenbach’s condition can be not unfairly described as menopausal. The age gap which separates them is that of the entire time-span of adolescent and adult sexuality. But this difference in age is, if you like, merely a given fact. It establishes certain a priori limits to the kind of relationship possible between the characters, pedagogic or pederastic or whatever, according to taste. It is hardly an absolute barrier to the development of some sort of contact. What is not given a priori but emerges through the unfolding of the narrative is the perpetuation of Aschenbach’s solitude. The same mechanisms which show Aschenbach’s separateness from the ordinary world of the Venetians going about their business operate in intensified form in relationship to Tadzio. The boy is shown constantly surrounded by his family — mother, governess and sisters — or by friends of his own age. Aschenbach listens and observes. But his pleasure is constantly frustrated when, for example, from speaking French with the governess the family revert to incomprehensible Polish, or when from being the inviolate object of Aschenbach’s contemplation Tadzio becomes a participant in a game from which the longing observer is excluded. When this happens Aschenbach can only avert his eyes.
The essence of Aschenbach’s attitude to Tadzio is that it is voyeuristic. Whatever other frustrated desires may be present in the mind of the voyeur, the relationship he sets up with the object of his desire is in the first place one of seeing — of seeing and not being seen to see. Tadzio as the object of contemplation is also the object of a fantasy possession on the part of the older man. But the voyeur can possess his object only in fantasy and only as an object. When Jasciu, Tadzio’s slightly older companion, puts his arm round Tadzio’s shoulder and Tadzio walks off with him, or when Tadzio returns Aschenbach’s gaze with a look of equal intensity, the voyeur’s spell is broken and he is brought face to face with the absurd logic of his own position. He wishes but he wishes he did not wish. However much he may make believe that his contemplation of Tadzio is that of the aesthete before a statue the fact is that he desires the statue to spring to life, that he desires this and yet cannot face the consequences of this happening. He cannot face the sight of Tadzio being the object of active affection for somebody else, nor the idea that Tadzio might return this affection. Nor can he bear any of the possible implications of Tadzio’s smile directed towards himself. In short his desire is by definition impossible.
There remains, however, one possible way in which the conflict can be reconciled, and that is for Aschenbach to represent Tadzio to himself as a symbol. In this light Tadzio can represent for Aschenbach a child, and in particular the child he himself is shown in the flashback as having had but who died while still very young. Equally Tadzio can represent youth, basically Aschenbach’s own lost youth, but also the state of transition from innocence to corruption. The presence of the plague, and of the scirocco blowing hot sultry air along the plague routes, contrasted with the implied Nordic purity of Tadzio (and of Aschenbach’s past world), suggests a further, more objective symbolism. For Aschenbach Tadzio is the embodiment of certain ideas and possesses this symbolic value independently of his status as the object of voyeuristic fantasy.
But, but, but. In the film there is in fact a total disjunction between the possible levels of interpretation. If the present-tense narrative alone is taken into consideration, then there is only the voyeuristic relationship. Integration of the flashback suggests further possibilities of explanation for Aschenbach’s obsession. Maybe he is not just a voyeur. Maybe there is some complicated process of sublimation at work. Maybe this tetchy old man has a mental and fantasy life richer and more intelligible than can be deduced from merely watching him lech after a pubescent boy in a provocative bathing costume. The problem is that the symbolic meanings which can be extracted from the interrelation of the two time levels do not succeed in making sense of the crypto-sexual relationship between old man and young boy, which remains, at best, merely pathetic. Nor, conversely, does the phenomenology of voyeurism as displayed in the present-tense narrative function as an illustration of any of the problems touched on in the flashback. The scenes from the past indicate various things about Aschenbach, for example that he is a puritan, that his artistic ideal is a music whose sources of inspiration are somehow spiritual and non-sensual and that the successful pursuit of this supposed ideal has left him dissatisfied. It is also suggested, fleetingly, that Tadzio, whom he appears to fantasise as an image of purity, also represents to him the dangers of sensuality, which, whether because of moral scruple or mere incapacity, he feels obliged to run away from. (This, at least, would appear to be the sense to be extracted from the cut from Tadzio picking out Beethoven’s Für Elise on the piano to the same tune being played by the prostitute Esmeralda in the flashback.) Clearly there are connections of a kind between Tadzio, as symbol or as reality, and Aschenbach’s past life, just as there is a connection of a kind between his crisis as a musician and the parody of himself that he encounters in the form of the strolling player. But there is no way of construing these connections except speculatively, for a very simple reason. None of the themes raised in the film receives any coherent treatment except by reference to the consciousness of Aschenbach, which is their only possible focus. But most of the time the themes are not focused. The style of representation is for the most part objective. The point of view is undiscriminating between the events and does not establish a privileged position for a narrator or even, except rarely, for the central character himself. The symbolic potential of the film is in consequence unrealised. The spectator is made aware that there could be meanings in the events and in the narration, but can never be quite clear what meanings or where to locate them. The film is obviously Art, and the central character is an Artist, so somewhere there must be Thought. But there isn’t. There is, admittedly, pathos. But that is another matter entirely.
It says a lot for Mann’s novella that the pathetic pastiche that Visconti has made of it is still capable of reproducing at least a few echoes of its original subtle discourse. For Visconti’s Morte a Venezia is not merely an empty film but a pretentious film – pretentious and above all parasitic. The existence, alongside the film, of that minor miracle of discursive-narrative prose which is Der Tod in Venedig seems to have dispensed Visconti from any attempt to produce a discourse of his own. In the event (frequent) of a void in the symbolic structure of the film, the spectator can mentally interpolate elements of the original novella. Failing knowledge of the novella there is at least the reassurance contained in the fact that it exists. The enormous ‘art-deco’ construction into which Visconti has inserted the washed-out figure of Gustav von Aschenbach, composer, evokes the world of a kind of decadentist literature which invests the whole enterprise with the Values of Culture. Little matter that these values are not really present.
Let us, however, turn to the novella and note some of its features. First Aschenbach is a writer, not a musician, and moreover a writer who has idealised and come to represent publicly certain models of culture and cultivated, restrained behaviour. Secondly the narrative structure allows for a constant interflow between Aschenbach’s interior discourse, so obviously at odds with his infatuation with Tadzio, and the Mannian discourse which situates it and makes its significance explicit at a more general level. Thirdly Tadzio is very obviously the object of a projection on the part of Aschenbach. He represents almost before he exists. Aschenbach’s story is, in the novella, the story of a cultural crisis, or, more accurately, of a crisis in ideology. The voyeuristic aspect of his attitude to Tadzio is an almost accidental by-product of the narrative technique, while the repressed pederastic element, so far from being the content of which voyeurism is the form, is merely the means through which Aschenbach becomes conscious of his own ideological limits and of the failure of his life-work. Right to the end of the story, however, Aschenbach remains a prisoner of Culture, of the same Culture of which he was a leading representative and which he himself had set up as a systematic defence against the real. Even the dream which reveals to him the erotic basis of his infatuation with the figure of Tadzio is cast in cultural terms, as a conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac as modes of representation.
This imprisonment within a cultural, or culturalist, ideological problematic is typical of a number of Mann’s characters, and can indeed be seen as characteristic of Mann himself. But the author is always that bit wiser than the characters he has created. It is not in the nature of his art to create characters who precisely express his own consciousness. Rather he poses problems (which are his own problems) through the creation of characters who express some or other aspect of the general problematic. These characters are constantly grappling with phantoms which are the consequence of their own ideological mode of representing reality to themselves. But they are not phantoms which can be easily exorcised, and Mann is no exorcist. His great strength as a writer lies in his awareness of the power of these phantoms, which collectively constitute the ideological universe of bourgeois society, and in his ability to manipulate them in a way which demonstrates both the coherence and the contradictions of the entity which we call culture. Basically Mann, unlike Musil,² is an idealist, who sees culture as an essence and who aspires to explain the world through its realisations in the realm of the Idea rather than to challenge the genesis of ideas in terms of their contradictions. At the same time, however, he does see that the contradictions exist. As an artist who writes about art he both criticises ideology and constantly reconstitutes it at a higher level. The Mannian character is unable to live his existence except soulfully and in the end is either paralysed or actually destroyed by the soul he has himself created for himself. The author presents this act of self-destruction sympathetically and yet ironically, proposing as a remedy to the mystified self-consciousness of the character only a higher degree of consciousness of his own limitations within the given cultural framework, not a dissolution of the mystified cultural consciousness itself.
Of all this, needless to say, barely a whiff in Visconti’s rendering of the story. Culture is present, particularly in the flashback (which incidentally leans heavily on Mann’s treatment of a musician hero in his Dr Faustus), but it is not seen problematically, only as a passively assimilated ‘value’. By abolishing the structured discourse of the novella, with its twin foci in the mind of Aschenbach and in Mann’s commentary on his cultural and sexual dilemma, Visconti has in a sense brought the story out of the clouds and down to earth and exposed the material, or rather the pseudo-ontological, content of Aschenbach’s obsession. But this vulgar-materialist reduction of discourse to a level of landscape with figures does not demystify. It merely demonstrates incomprehension. To give but one example of the crassness of the adaptation, in the book the account of the spread of the plague is not given in direct speech but is part of the commentary. The clerk’s words are rephrased, in a typical Mannian way, so as to express not only what has been said but also the possible overtones of cultural significance which the particular listener, in this case the writer Aschenbach, or some other cultured person might attribute to them. They are also, very definitely, Mann’s words. They represent an intervention of the author in his material, uniting what has been said and heard into the cultural discourse which the author wishes to share with his readers. In the film, pronounced by the clerk in the Cook’s office, the words lack these resonances. They sound like a private culture-trip which frightens Aschenbach because of its strangeness and lack of relation to his own concerns. The words are there, but they might as well not be since destroying their original context has deprived them of their original meaning without creating an alternative, except at the most trivial level. Homage is paid to the literary genius of Thomas Mann, and, in its self-negating way, the scene is quite effective, but the reason why Mann’s discourse as opposed to that of some other writer should be important and worth reproducing is totally and irrevocably lost. The film trades upon, and helps to perpetuate, respect for the values of Art while offering no reason why this Art should be taken even remotely seriously.
I am very conscious, as I write, that a few years ago I would not have expressed myself in this way about any Visconti film. If he had produced Death in Venice at the time when I was writing the first edition of this book I would undoubtedly have treated it more indulgently. I would probably have stressed Visconti’s continuing technical mastery of the medium and the recurrence of auteur features familiar from the earlier films, the use of laughter, for example, or the assertion of the values of high culture against those of popular entertainment. But I no longer feel that technical and imaginative control (obtained, often enough, by the use of good actors and a good lighting-cameraman) or even authorship are values to be sought for in themselves. Recognised, yes: but not necessarily defended. Far more important, it seems to me, is the question of what meanings, and what order of meanings, can be conveyed in a work of art, and what basic choices an artist can make in relation to the linguistic material at his disposal. Questions of this order have been raised in the past five or six years with a frequency unprecedented in the history of the cinema. They have not been raised by Visconti. What Visconti has done has been to wander, blindfold, into areas being actively explored by other, maybe lesser, directors with their eyes open. Historically, Visconti’s place in the cinema pantheon seems to me secure, though I would not define it quite in the same way as I did five years ago. But his reputation, I suspect, will continue to depend on his first four films and hopefully also on the last film to be included in the first edition of this book, Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa, which I am more and more convinced is his greatest single work. As for his latest work, it would be worse than unjust to regard it as the product of senile decline. Rather it represents an involution, brought about by an inability to resolve theoretical questions of what the film is supposed to do at a time when his imaginative ability to achieve certain practical effect is in no way impaired. Death in Venice is no product of babbling amateurism. It is, at times and in its own way, quite a brilliant movie. Unfortunately this brilliance is suspended on a void. Much of the abuse to which it is treated in the foregoing pages is due to the fact that it is brilliant and not to be lightly dismissed. If, instead, it has been heavily demolished, this is in part at least a sign of respect. The Fall of the Gods is not easily accomplished.
Notes
1. The simplest way of summarising the case is to say that what matters first is what is in the film, not what A, B or C gets out of it. We all bring our own cultural background to the interpretation of a film, and we all react differently. But what the film means is not the sum, or the mean, of all these subjective readings. This is not to deny people a right to their own opinion; just to assert that the critic’s job is something other than acting as a mediator between the film and all the various opinions that may be formed of it. If the critic succeeds in showing that the film of Death in Venice is incomprehensible without reference to the book, this is, needless to say, a criticism of the film, not of the unprepared spectator.
2. The extraordinary thing about Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, a book which can justifiably be compared with Mann’s more ponderous oeuvre, is that it moves exclusively and one might almost say shamelessly within the realm of ideology, without the slightest pretence that this world of ideology is expressive of any historical essence. This lucid materialist position earns for it the spluttering ire of Lukács (The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, London: Merlin Press, 1963, p. 31).
Geoffrey Novell-Smith, Luchino Visconti [Third edition], BFI Publishing, 2003, pp. 158-170
