EXPERIENCING LITERATURE AND CINEMA

Visconti's literary ideals

Throughout his life Visconti was an avid reader. His first great love was Shakespeare, and having read in The Tempest Prospero's words to Miranda, “Twelve years since, Miranda, was your father duke of Milan,” he wondered whether she might have been one of his ancestors. The next great object of admiration was Stendhal, followed soon by Proust and his A la recherche du temps perdu. Proust's monumental work became a lifelong source of inspiration for Visconti. For years he planned to adapt it for the screen, and it clearly influenced many of his films. Even after losing all hope of realizing his dream, Visconti found great comfort in Proust during his illness in the last years of his life. Like the narrator of the novel, he might have thought: “Life as it passes is but Time lost: but all can be transfigured, found again, presented under the aspect of eternity, which is that of art.” And what André Maurois has written about Proust applies equally well to Visconti: “Proust loved to study … the historical formation of various social environments, and the way in which they grow old and worm-eaten, until at last they break down altogether.”

But there is more to the literary background of Visconti's aesthetics than just Proust. In Guido Aristarco's view, Visconti is the only filmmaker who has truly succeeded in perpetuating literary tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.