I saw Visconti's Death in Venice last night. A lovely film, assuredly. I was particularly struck by the tension between the formalist/platonist tension that Gustav (loosely based upon Gustav Mahler) expressed and the expressivist/sentimentalist/empiricist views that Alfred countered with. This disagreement over the proper objective of music was constantly manifest in the dual ideological roles that Tadzio played in Gustav's idealization (on the one hand, he evokes uncontrollable emotion, on the other hand he is aligned with purity and timelessness) as well as the tension between the Cholera infested chaos of Venice with the purified tourism-conducive picture of perfection that the Venetians work to preserve. The tension is particularly manifest in the final scene, where Gustav is overcome by the local dissease while looking upon the vulgarization of the boys purity (made earthly by a fight in the sand with his friend). A great film, one I'd recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it. It makes me particularly excited for the continuing Italian film series, and also leads me to want to read the Thomas Mann book upon which the film was based.
The movie I saw was dubbed by the way. Sorry for the language barrier in the above video.
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