Masque(s) et cinéma européen

Mask(s) and European Cinema The aim of this study is to question the links between Mask, Cinema and Europe. The five films selected are Three Colours: Blue from Kieślowski, Crazy Pierrot from Godard, Strada from Fellini, Death in Venice from Visconti, Wings of Desire from Wenders. These movies exhibit a particular type of mask: the mask without mask. Mask obtained by light or make-up, it seems to express the character’s aspiration for an elsewhere.

Bodily Transformations: Goethe and Mann in Venice

Using material ecocriticism, this essay considers how Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Italian Journey portray the experience of Venice’s watery boundaries as transformative of both one’s sense of the body and of body itself. Mann obsessively presents bodies in Death in Venice, including the impact of cholera on the body of his protagonist, Aschenbach, and the idealised form of the Polish boy Tadzio; yet his text also eludes portraying Aschenbach’s death in any graphic detail. In other words, bodies matter in Death in Venice but there appears to be an inappropriate and less bodily gradient for the impact of disease such that the bodies of the workers who succumbed to cholera are portrayed in horrific detail while Aschenbach just quietly falls asleep, transformed visibly only by cosmetics. Goethe, in turn, also embraces both a bodily focus in his Italian writings, and one that similarly looks away from gritty embodiment. His journal depicts more abstract and scientific details of non-human bodies that later shape his writings on botany, optics, and morphology. However, Goethe’s text presents a proto-ecological sense of natural bodies immersed in an animated, lively, and disturbing world of water and life, one clearly inspired by his study of the ocean and lagoon in Venice.

Performance as Transformation: The Laughing Songs of “Death in Venice” in Literature, Film, and Opera

This paper takes as its starting point a scene from the fifth chapter of Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1912). While Venice is threatened by an outbreak of cholera, a group of Neapolitan street musicians plays in front of Aschenbach, Tadzio, and the other hotel guests. The leader of the band—a buffonesque guitarist-singer with red hair and a wrinkled, emaciated face—is an ominous figure whose facetious, sexually charged performance eventually turns into blatant mockery of the audience, whom he infects with his contagious laughter. Using the concept of “performance as transformation” (Erika Fischer-Lichte) as a lens through which to investigate the filmic and operatic adaptations of the scene in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1970) and Benjamin Britten’s eponymous opera (1973), I focus on the various renditions of the laughing song to trace the particular transformative power it unfolds across media. Both adaptations use music to ironically comment on Aschenbach’s infatuation. Yet, their approach to the scene at large is distinct from one another: While the opera turns the performance into an interiorized space of moral interrogation, the film evokes the sound of the past through the insertion of pre-existent popular songs from the time, including Berardo Cantalamessa’s Neapolitan laughing song “’A risa.” As I argue, the latter served as a model for the uproarious comical number described by Mann which thus constitutes a “phono-graphic” adaptation itself. Finally, I discuss the recurrences of demonic laughter throughout the film as part of Visconti’s intertextual strategy to create motivic relationships between Death in Venice and Doctor Faustus (1947).

When Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Death in Venice turns fifty in 2021. The moment of the pandemic may be one reason to look back at this film about cholera in Italy. The release of the documentary The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (2021), about Bjorn Andrésen who starred as Tadzio, is another. But what is most enduring is Visconti’s engagement with the family, and above all with the mother. This calls for reflection in the present moment when maternal eroticism and its relation to maternal subjectivity are newly illuminated in feminist writing. Through extended analysis of Silvana Mangano’s presence in the film, her wardrobe, and her gestures, this article argues that Visconti opens a space for feelings of heartbreak, love for the mother, and grief at her desire. In its vision of madness in the family, beyond its images of cholera in Venice, this is a pandemic film unafraid to look into the vortex.

Contemporary Icarus: Gustav von Aschenbach’s Journey towards the Sun

The point of departure for the reflections contained in this article is the motif of the sun in Tomasz Mann’s Death in Venice. Analysing the presence of the sun in the work turns out to be fruitful for distinguishing and connecting several symbolic planes, on which the issues of Death in Venice and the drama of the main character are depicted: the relationship between contemporary times and antiquity, the cultural North-South axis, the destructive power of beauty as well as the individual fate of the artist marked by decadence. The figure of the sun seems to provide material for the interpretation of the figure of Gustav von Aschenbach as an incarnation of contemporary Icarus and allows the reader to see the path which the protagonist of Death in Venice follows in a new light.