STUDIES
Doubles and Duality (a few words about Luchino Visconti and a few more about Conversation Piece)
Visconti’s next to the last
film Conversation Piece was created after three of the
director’s films that reflected his absorption with German
topics and the German culture in general, as well as his
tendency towards a »baroque« directing technique, as in
The Damned, Death in Venice and Ludwig. As a chamber piece,
made entirely in the studio (and only with a few actors),
this film represented a certain reaction to the previous
ones with its orientation towards Italian topics as well
as a more stifled directing technique. Above all the film
has been repeatedly considered within the context of Visconti’s
permanent preoccupation with the family as another of Visconti’s
contributions to showing its dissipation, but also as a
film that, together with Death in Venice, talks about the
unsuccessful wish for renewal, reconstruction of the family.
No sooner than in the first frames, images and overviews
of different group pictures (family pictures) and portraits
in an interior illustrate the title and at the same time
the topic of the film is prefigured. In the process the
problems of presentation and reproduction, problems inherent
in films, are almost casually pointed out.
The film goes
on to develop this relation to the genre of painting with
compositions of frames which, by arranging the characters,
manifest themselves as quotations, doubles of the painted
group portraits in the interior. As far as space is concerned,
the film is based on the interrelation of two premises,
the labyrinthine flat of the Professor, stuffed with old
furniture, books, paintings and antiques, and the renovated
flat that he has rented to Bianca Brumonti which is designed
in a contemporary impersonal style. However, the Professor’s
flat itself is also specifically doubled when the so far
unknown premises of the small hidden room as a place of
ultimate security is introduced. The film also stands out
when it comes to the doublings of time, which are achieved
with three short retrospections that, as a whole, form
an opposition to the present. The plot is also based on
a series of oppositions that is doublings. The Professor
is juxtaposed to the family/group of the marquise, but
at the same time parallels between him and Konrad are developed.
The relation between the Professor and Konrad acquires
characteristics of the relation between an original and
its double as well as, for that matter, metaphorical implications
of a father-son-relation. Among other character dualities
it is important to recognize the characters of the Professor’s
mother and wife as, semantically, one.
The Professor in Conversation Piece is another of Visconti’s
characters of melancholy, a state which Visconti continually
returned to in many of his films, especially from The Leopard
on, also a state that largely corresponds to the dualities
of the characters and clefts. Conversation Piece itself,
as a whole or partly, relates as a double to some other of
Visconti’s films, and the roles of Burt Lancaster, Silvana
Mangano and Helmut Berger offer opportunities for comparison
with their earlier appearances in Visconti’s films. The series
of structural and character dualities (doublings, oppositions,
contrasts and parallels) which Conversation Piece is permeated
with doesn’t represent an exception in Visconti’s work. Namely,
Visconti’s films often reflect dichotomies, doublings and
oppositions on a character, world-view, narrative as well
as visual level.
Bruno Kragiæ |
