Friday | June 1, 2018 7:00 pm

Death in Venice
(Morte a Venezia)

Recently Restored

Directed by Luchino Visconti.
With Dirk Bogarde, Romolo Valli, Mark Burns.
Italy/France/US, 1971, DCP, color, 130 min.
English, Italian, Polish, French, Russian and German with English subtitles.

Death in Venice is Visconti’s most faithful Thomas Mann adaptation. While perhaps a quieter affair than The Damned, its source material attests to Visconti’s continued fascination with the Germanic. Dirk Bogarde gives a phlegmatic turn as Gustav von Aschenbach, a composer on holiday who becomes increasingly obsessed with a young boy of features unseen outside classical sculpture. A return to the labyrinthine canals of White Nights, the difference between dream and nightmare becomes less clear as an unidentified plague bears down on Venice.