‘A bright façade put on for show’, Daphne du Maurier's Venice in Don't Look Now is a city of shifting and shimmering intangibility, ambiguity and contrast, both ‘glittering by sunlight’ and, in its ‘dark stillness’, ‘rather sinister’. Her short story posits Charles Dickens's ‘strange Dream upon the water’ as a psychological space, yet the city is configured not simply as a place of reverie, a means of imaginative and emotional escape, but as a bleak prison of haunting insecurity, disturbance and disorientation, ‘the lights everywhere blending with the darkness’. Du Maurier's language is consequently shadowed by threat and ambivalence, as she constantly constructs and then deconstructs ‘the magic’ and romance of Venice, breaking Henry James's ‘Venetian spell’ in Don't Look Now (1971) and her earlier work, Ganymede (1959); in both short stories, her meditation upon death and murder realizes, to unsettling effect, James's illustration of Venice as ‘the most beautiful of tombs’. Above all, du Maurier highlights and yet challenges the propensity to idealize and aestheticize ‘this most improbable of cities’ through the act of gazing, signified by the very title Don't Look Now.

As Tanner contends, ‘Venice seen is “Venice” lost’. In this, it would seem that filming ‘the enchanted city’ becomes intrinsically problematic. Constructed as a picture by the camera lens and imprisoned within its frame, visualizing Venice arguably both succumbs to cliché and fails to realize its enchantment, its elusive and ethereal quality; rather than ‘seeing’ the city, for example, Nietzsche proclaimed that in seeking ‘another word for music, I always find only the word “Venice”’.