Access Art and Fundacion Pro Crea invites you this Thursday night to the presentation of “Le Notti Bianche” by the renowned Italian director Luchino Visconti.

This will continue our series on Luchino Visconti, which will include some of his most significant films but also some of the lesser-known gems.

Aristocrat and Marxist, Count Don Luchino Visconti Di Morone was born on 2 November 1906 in Milan, " as the curtain went up at la Scala", he said.

He was born into an aristocratic family, one of the seven offspring of the Duke of Modrone and had a highly privileged upbringing.

During his youth he mixed with luminaries such as conductor Toscanini, composer Puccini and the novelist Gabriele D'Annunzio. Not surprisingly

he had an early interest in music and theatre, but also a passion for horses. He bred racehorses for eight years, thinking of little else. When this interest began to fade, he went to Paris in the 1930s to escape the stifling culture of Fascist Italy.

In Paris he was befriended with Coco Channel and she introduced him to Jean Renoir. Visconti worked briefly as his assistant on " Une Partie de campagne" (1936). which turned his attention towards cinema.

Returning to Italy he took part in Resistance and became a convinced Marxist, which he remained until his death.

A leading light of the neo-realist movement in the 40s, he also acquired a reputation as an innovative theatre and opera director.

The focus of almost all his films is families, either the disintegration of large families or the breakdown of couples, with betrayal - whether of marriages or of political causes - a recurring motif.

Although his films usually end unhappily, in the earlier ones some hope is expressed for the future. But in his later films his vision becomes darker as he chronicles the collapse of dynasties and his personal focus turns inward on to themes of sadness, ageing and death.

An autobiographical strain emerges, first in The Leopard (1963), but also in Death in Venice (1970) and even more powerfully in the sublime Ludwig (1973).

Visconti nonetheless commanded the greatest respect from his actors. Despite his famed ill treatment of Burt Lancaster on the set of The Leopard, the actor still felt that Visconti was " the best director I've worked with...an actor's dream"

During making of Ludwig he suffered a severe stroke, from which he never fully recovered.

In all his films, regardless of period of subject matter, visual splendor is combined with meticulous realism and deep historical and psychological insight. Although he put a lot of himself into his films, he did not make them for himself, but always for an audience. Famous as the embodiment of art cinema, films such as The Leopard and Rocco were also hugely popular at the box office, particularly in Italy but also worldwide.

At the same time, however, Visconti never compromised his art. He was fanatical about detail, but even more so about the integrity of his vision, which he expected the audience to be able to share.

Like Pasolini and Fellini, despite his pedigree, Visconti was conversant enough with the hardscrabble life of the working class Italian to seem virtually a part of it; Like Fellini, he would eventually drift far from his early work, moving from the grit and grimness of the poor and oppressed to more self-indulgent visions, in his case an ongoing chronicle of the decadence of the upper classes.

First published in 1848, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s early short story White Nights lacks the depth and experience of a man who, after facing a firing squad and spending four years of penal servitude in a Siberian prison camp, would go on to write some of the greatest works of Russian literature in Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The House of the Dead and Notes From The Underground. But although the sentimentality of White Nights’ love story is untypical of Dostoevsky, it operates within that same area that fascinated the writer and would be explored in many of his works – self-destructive characters in emotionally imbalanced states of mind, trying to cope under extreme stress. This is the type of character that would soon dominate many other works by the great Italian film director, Luchino Visconti.

Le Notti Bianche is a curious but important stage in the career of Luchino Visconti, moving away from the neorealist roots of Ossessione, La Terra Trema and Senso, into romantic idealism or, as the director himself termed it, neo-intimismo. In the light of Visconti’s subsequent work and its recurrent theme of characters on the verge of destruction either through affairs of the heart or though social and political upheaval (or both), the attraction that the self-destructive Dostoevskian anti-hero holds for Visconti is understandable and Le Notti Bianche, for all the faults that are inherent in any adaptation of a literary text to the big screen, is nevertheless a fascinating and extremely beautiful film.

Starring Marcello Mastroianni (in one of his first important parts) and Maria Schell.

101 minutes –in Italian –with English subtitles.

Long dismissed as a footnote to Visconti’s career, this 1957 film now seems to be a crucial turning point , the link between Visconti’s early neorealist manner and the obsessive stylization of his late films.

Date: February 1, 2007

Time: 8:00 pm

Place: Access Art Gallery

This will also be a great opportunity to view the new exhibit “New Horizons” By Grace Ashruf in Access gallery.

A donation to the Pro Crea Foundation will be highly appreciated.

Remember that it is now possible to grab a bite at the Access café ”Café al Fresco” before the film presentation.(For more information call : 5887837)