Customer Reviews

Luchino Visconti - A Portrait

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The great Visconti ultimately deserves a better tribute than this video which looks as if it had been thrown together on short order for Italian television. There is precious little of the Maestro himself, and much too little of the films and in the end this documentary has been done with little imagination.
This might suffice as a biographical introduction to Visconti, but the viewer would be better off watching the films and reading one of a number of biographies and critical studies available on Amazon.

This is a very disappointing documentary. It barely runs an hour, and surprising, there's hardly any footage of Visconti! There's more footage of the host/director Carlo Lizzani, who is nowhere nearly as interesting as the endlessly fascinating Visconti. It ends up being no different than a superficial, slapdash documentary that you would see on cable TV. It's like the staff read one page or two about Luchino Visconti in a book on cinema, and just went straight into filming their documentary. Considering this was made for Italian TV makes it even more disappointing. You'd think they would do a documentary worthy of one of the greatest, most diverse film directors. The documentary also looks cruddy, shot on bad analog video by the look of it.

This documentary has been included on the new DVD edition of Visconti's masterpiece Ludwig, just issued by Koch Lorber on DVD under a different title. On the Ludwig DVD, it's called "Luchino Visconti: Life as in a Romance" (which is a nicer title, but it's still a crappy documentary). It gets two stars simply because of its subject. There's a better documentary about Luchino out there; it just has to be made.

I SPENT A DELIGHTFUL HOUR WATCHING THIS DOCUMENTARY ABOUT LUCHIANO VISCONTI. I LEARNED THAT MR. VISCONTI "THE MAN" WAS AS GREAT AS THE DIRECTOR AND IT MADE ME WANT TO WATCH HIS MOVIES AGAIN. I DISCOVERED THAT HE WAS ALSO VERY RESPECTED AS A THEATER AND OPERA DIRECTOR... QUITE AN INTERESTING MAN... I WAS ALSO VERY PLEASED TO HEAR WHAT SOME OF MY FAVORITE ACTORS HAD TO SAY ABOUT WORKING WITH HIM (THE GREAT MASTROIANNI, GASSMAN, CLAUDIA CARDINALE, DELON...) IN SHORT: I AM GLAD I WATCHED THIS DOCUMENTARY!

Visconti films are NOT mass media and should not be treated as such. I feel strongly if one cannot grasp this masters work with a level of sophistication required for one of Visconti's standing, let it alone............please. This is a portrait but not one I want to look at.