In anticipation of our complete Luchino Visconti retrospective this summer, we present two special screenings of one of the Italian maestro’s great late films, the rarely screened Sandra.

Chilling to the bone, Sandra perfects a cinema of haunting. The specter of the holocaust looms as the title character returns with her new husband to her family villa for the unveiling of a statue memorializing her father’s death in a concentration camp. With an eye to ruins, dilapidation, and crumbling earth, Visconti induces a gothic atmosphere rife with apocalypse. As asphalt flies beneath the camera in the bravura of the title sequence—shot on the road to Tuscany as if by Valkyrie—the viewer is borne down modern highways to confront the sins of an archaic past. – Hugh Mayo