In his twilight years, before he feels that his life is about to come to an end, the artist often wants to create a brilliant work, which not only expresses his death, but also expresses a summary of himself. This "brilliant" work can be a magnificent masterpiece or a deeply self-thinking work. "Death in Venice" should be said to belong to the latter category of works. To be more specific, it is Visconti's reflection on himself, art, and life before he heard that cancer was about to take his life. Precisely because he is a realist, "Death in Venice" is not a memory of how much he has contributed to art and his attachment to life, on the contrary, he is lamenting that he can no longer leave behind in art, even though he is in Previously, he had also made efforts to try to make his artistic life shine a little more.
Dying in Venice is an adaptation of Visconti's novel of the same name by the German author Thomas Mann, but, like his adaptations of Rocco and His Brothers and The Panther, he never sticks to Reproducing every word of the original work, but according to his own understanding of things, society, and life, he made additions, deletions or changes.
In Thomas Mann's original work, the protagonist of "Death in Venice" was a writer, but Visconti changed him to a musician. Obviously, in Visconti's view, although music and literature are listed as art, music can more directly express the author's feelings and psychological changes. It is expressed in the combination of a note, and it is easy for others to comprehend and sense it. Secondly, Visconti did not copy the lower theme of the original work, that is, limited to the painful thinking of death, on the screen, but gave the film a more positive connotation, that is, to show an artist who wants to make a painting while dying. The final struggle with life, but he is doomed to fail, because the inevitable death makes him no longer able to complete his own art, and no longer able to stop and stop the violence's attack and destruction of beauty and art. Therefore, "Death in Venice" can be regarded as Visconti's spiritual performance and last words before his death.
In fact, as in "Rocco and His Brothers" and "The Leopard", Visconti always tries to combine the themes of his works with the real environment in which the characters live, so that the works themselves always have a A strong sense of sociality and the times.
In "Death in Venice", Visconti actually divides the protagonist's "remaining life" into two stages: the first stage shows that he came to the beautiful Venice alone after learning of his illness. He sought to obtain creative inspiration and the power to create from the beauty of Venice itself, until he discovered the young Dazio and found the beauty he asked for in him. This is his limited life from low to high performance stage. Visconti tries to show that the artist finally draws a power from the incarnation of beauty; this power is undoubtedly the positive result of his self-struggle; he finally overcomes the desperate and dying self and becomes another self . This is a kind of ego sublimation, so far, Gustav is a winner. But after moving to the second stage, Gustav faced another opponent that hindered his new creation, that is, cholera, the infectious disease that represents death. In order to save the incarnation of beauty he finally found, he was willing to sacrifice himself to inform Dazio to flee. This move is not a special "heroic feat" for the protagonist Gustav. In Visconti's view, it was originally just an inevitable extension and development of Gustav's victory over himself. The problem was that when Dazio was being pinned down and beaten by so many people, he couldn't save him. It's not that he doesn't have the courage and desire, it's that he doesn't have enough physical strength to save Dazio. At this point, the musical melody of the life, which had already tended to be excited, had to drop again, from being excited and excited to being depressed and sad.
Visconti seems to have made this conclusion on Gustave's relationship with the rest of his life and art: In the final struggle, victory over self can only be achieved by one's own efforts, but in defeating objective confrontation Power, when it comes to restraining forces designed to destroy beauty and art, is much more difficult, even hopeless, to conquer, because his life itself is dying.
Therefore, Visconti, like a philosopher, made a deeper exploration of the value of life: he seemed to find that people always alternate between self-confidence and doubt in the contradiction between aging and new life; he also likes Like a musician, he uses the ups and downs and variations of the melody to express the last moment of his life, which makes people think of the "Death of a Swan" in "Swan Lake". If in "Rocco and His Brothers" Visconti dissects a society and a family; in "The Leopard" he dissects history, then in "Death in Venice" he dissects Life and death have been explored, and Visconti's boldness in film creation seems to be self-evident.
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