Ossessione (multi subs) [1943] Luchino Visconti

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Ossessione (1943)


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035160/

Italian language German French and English subtitles.

Ossessione (Obsession) is a 1943 film based on the novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain. Luchino ViscontiΓΓé¼Γäós first feature film, it is considered by many to be the first Italian neorealist film, though there is some debate about whether such a categorization is accurate.

Clara Calamai ... Giovanna Bragana
Massimo Girotti ... Gino Costa
Dhia Cristiani ... Anita
Elio Marcuzzo ... Lo spagnolo
Vittorio Duse ... L'agente di polizia
Michele Riccardini ... Don Remigio
Juan de Landa ... Giuseppe Bragana (as Juan De Landa)

Acknowledged as the first film of the Italian neo-realist movement, Ossessione (Obsession) (1942) was also the remarkably assured directorial debut of Luchino Visconti. Loosely based on James M. Cain's 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, with the setting moved from California to Italy's Po Valley, Ossessione is a dark melodrama of adultery, murder and betrayal. Gino, an unemployed mechanic, arrives at a shabby inn owned by Giovanna and her much-older husband, Bragana. Gino and Giovanna become lovers, setting in motion an inevitable series of tragic events.

To understand the impact of Ossessione, one must understand the Italian film industry at the time. The Fascist government had established a Hollywood-like studio system, which turned out glossy, superficial, escapist films known as white telephone pictures. Ossessione, with its earthy characters, frank sensuality, and visual authenticity provided by location photography, was a dramatic contrast. Even more extraordinary were the contrasts in the director's own life. Count Don Luchino Visconti di Modrone came from one of Italy's most aristocratic families...and was a dedicated Marxist. Visconti had spent his youth breeding horses, cultivating his interest in art and music, and mingling with Parisian society. Designer Coco Chanel introduced him to French director Jean Renoir, and at the age of 30, Visconti went to work for Renoir as a costume designer and assistant director. It was Renoir who suggested Cain's novel to Visconti for his first directing project. Visconti sold some family jewels to finance the film.

Anna Magnani was slated to play Giovanna, but by the time production began, Magnani was pregnant and had to withdraw from the film. Another established star, Clara Calamai, got the role. Calamai was younger and more glamorous than Magnani, but Visconti didn't want glamour. He wanted realism, which meant no makeup, no permed hair, and drab, grimy clothes. When Calamai saw the first rushes, she burst into tears and threatened to quit. Visconti responded with scathing aristocratic imperiousness. Listen when I talk to you...or go back to your whorehouse! he shouted. He insisted that her co-star Massimo Girotti slap her harder, and forced her to bathe in the icy river. Once, an actor was supposed to knock over a glass so that it fell and shattered. Furious that the glass didn't break in several takes, Viscount threw glass after glass at Calamai's feet, and the splinters flew up dangerously close to her face. Still, Calamai remained in awe of Visconti, whom she called a medieval lord with a whip.

Girotti also suffered under Visconti's direction. In one scene, he had to drink a glass of wine. Visconti shot the scene so many times that Girotti passed out, dead drunk. On the last day of filming, the actor collapsed again, fainting from nerves and fatigue. Visconti later admitted that his cruel behavior was calculated. I'm interested in extreme situations, those instants when abnormal tension reveals the truth about human beings; I like to confront the characters and the story harshly, aggressively.

While Ossessione was in production, Visconti allowed his family's palazzo in Rome to be used as clandestine headquarters for the Communist Resistance. Before the film's premiere, two of its screenwriters were jailed as subversives. Even though the Fascist government was on the verge of collapse, officials began to take a closer look at Visconti's work. At the first screening, the audience gave Ossessione an ovation. But Mussolini's son Vittorio, a film executive, stalked out, shouting that isn't Italy! The Culture Minister called it a film that stinks of latrines. Even a heavily censored version, cut beyond recognition, had a hard time getting bookings. And when it did, local officials usually yanked it after a few screenings.

Ossessione was not shown in the U.S. for many years because of a dispute with MGM over the rights to Cain's novel, and even now it's rarely seen except at an occasional museum or film archive screening. Elusive as it is, Ossessione remains an intriguing and historically important milestone in Italian cinema. And those few who have managed to see it attest to the fact that even after sixty years, it remains a powerful experience.

Working under the censorship of the Fascist Italian government, Visconti encountered problems with the production even before filming commenced. He had initially planned to adapt a story by Giovanni Verga, a renowned Italian realist writer and one of his greatest influences, but it was turned down almost immediately by the Fascist authorities due to its subject matter, which revolved around bandits. Around this time, Visconti uncovered a French translation of CainΓΓé¼Γäós novel which, famously, had been given to him by French director Jean Renoir while he was working in France in the 1930s.

Visconti adapted the script with a group of men he selected from the Milanese magazine Cinema. The members of this group were talented filmmakers and writers and played a large role in the emerging neorealist movement: Mario Alicata, Gianni Puccini, Antonio Pietrangeli and Giuseppe De Santis. When Ossessione was completed and released in 1943, it was far from the innocent murder mystery the authorities had expected; after a few screenings in Rome and northern Italy, prompting outraged reactions from Fascist and Church authorities, the film was banned by the Fascist government reestablished in the German occupied part of Italy after the September 1943 armistice. Eventually the Fascists destroyed the film, but Visconti managed to keep a duplicate negative from which all existing prints have been made. After the war, Ossessione encountered more problems with mass distribution, this time in the United States. As a result of the wartime production schedule, Visconti had never obtained the rights to the novel and e
Metro-Goldwyn Mayer began production on another version of the film, directed by Tay Garnett (The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946), while the Fascist ban on ViscontiΓΓé¼Γäós work was still in effect.

Due to the copyright issues, the film didnΓΓé¼Γäót gain distribution outside of Italy until 1976. Despite limited screenings, it gained acclaim among moviegoers who recognized in it some of the same sensibilities they had grown familiar with in neorealist films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Puccini and De Santis, among others.


For the most part, Visconti retained the plot of the novel. He made changes such as tailoring the script to its Italian setting and adding a character, but the main departure from the novel and the defining characteristic of the film is the manner in which it confronts the realities of life. In one particularly memorable scene that anticipates a major theme of neorealism, OssessioneΓΓé¼Γäós central female character enters her wildly messy kitchen, serves herself a bowl of soup and sits down with a newspaper only to fall asleep, slumped over wearily in the midst of the confusion. At several moments like this one, Visconti slows the pace to give the viewer an even more penetrating glimpse into the routine of his characters, and in doing so, roots the narrative squarely in the life of his characters. In another scene, a man rushes into the inn where the tramp is seated at supper with the innkeeper and his wife. He informs them that another landowner has been shot from behind by a worker. Bregana fetches his gun and leaves. Shortly after his exit, as the adulterous lovers huddle close by the window, gunshots sound through the night. At once, Visconti foreshadows BreganaΓΓé¼Γäós death and illuminates the study of class tension that is woven fluidly into the film.

The landscape itself is realistic, and Visconti takes great care to situate his characters in a rural Italy that remains for the most part unromanticized. Nearly the entire story is told using medium and long shots, with Visconti choosing to employ close-ups only at moments of intense emotion. Characters are depicted interacting with and moving around within their environment; to this effect, Visconti favors long and ponderous shots while making use of depth of focus to highlight the variety of action occurring throughout the space of the frame. He resists identifying solely with one character and prefers instead to maintain a distance, taking them all in with his viewfinder as independent but irrevocably tangled components of a larger cast, which includes the sets, scenery and landscape as well as what goes on outside of the frame. Shots of the landscape largely consist of the dusty road winding into the distance and the interior shots are just as bleak; the kitchen muted under a nearly tangible film of dust and grime and the dingy hotel room that speaks, with each detail, of the rebellious freedom cherished by those who share it. The shift of focus from the novel is clear even in ViscontiΓΓé¼Γäós decision to change the title. Whereas the novelΓΓé¼Γäós title alludes to the final retribution exacted upon the adulterous couple, ViscontiΓΓé¼Γäós header bespeaks the focus of his filmΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥obsessive passion.

Despite arguments about how to define neorealist cinema, certainly one of OssessioneΓΓé¼Γäós most poignant aspects is its stark realism. Despite being popular actors of Italian cinema, the stars of the film, Massimo Girotti and Clara Calamai, deliver breathtaking performances that are anything but glamorous. The lovers, Gino and Giovanna, played by Girotti and Calamai, first meet in the kitchen of the inn that Giovanna runs with her husband, the fat and dim-witted Bregana. It is in the symbolic and literal center of the family sphere, before they ever touch, that the two make a silent oath. Their love, tainted as it is by lie, is difficult for either of them to bear and the tension is only exacerbated by BreganaΓΓé¼Γäós overwhelming presence.

Unable to continue the affair under such pretense but genuinely in love, Gino tries to persuade Giovanna to leave with him. She is clearly tempted, but knows of the power the road has over Gino, a relationship that Visconti executes nearly as palpably as that between him and Giovanna. She ultimately refuses Gino, opting for the security and stability that Bregana has to offer, and he sets out once again unencumbered. When they cross paths some time later, it is in the city and Bregana is extremely drunk, engaged in a singing competition. Against the backdrop of the drunken and foolish Bregana, the couple plans his death, an act they carry out in a car crash. Rather than granting them the freedom they so desperately seek, however, the murder only heightens the need for deception and makes more acute the guilt they had previously been dealing with. Despite GiovannaΓΓé¼Γäós attempt to construct a normal life with Gino, BreganaΓΓé¼Γäós presence seems to remain long after they return to the inn.

Their already crumbling relationship reaches its bounds when they go to collect the money from BreganaΓΓé¼Γäós life insurance policy. They have a very hostile argument and Gino retaliates by engaging Anita, an attractive young prostitute. Though Giovanna is pregnant and there seems to be some hope for the couple, Gino is left alone to deal with the law when Giovanna is killed in the filmΓΓé¼Γäós second car crash.

The character of lo Spagnolo (the Spaniard), ViscontiΓΓé¼Γäós main textual departure from the novel, plays a pivotal role in the story of Ossessione. After failing to convince Giovanna to flee with him, Gino meets lo Spagnolo before boarding a train to the city and the two of them strike up an instant friendship, subsequently working and living together. Lo Spagnolo is an actor who works as a street vendor and serves as a foil to GiovannaΓΓé¼Γäós traditionalism and inability to let go of the material lifestyle. In contrast to the other main characters, who come across as very real and thoroughly developed, Spagnuolo operates chiefly on a symbolic level. He represents for Gino the possibility of a liberated masculinity living a life successfully separate from societyΓΓé¼Γäós impositions, an alternative to the life he is drawn toward in his relationship with Giovanna.

Both Giovanna and Gino are tragic characters in their inability to comfortably find a space in which to situate themselves. The limited roles made available by society prove to be insufficient in providing narratives for their lives that bring them closer to happiness. Giovanna is pulled away from the security of her marriage to the repulsive Bregana by a desire for true love and fulfillment, whose potential is actualized with the appearance of Gino. Her attempts to hold onto the fortune which came with marriage, however, ultimately lead to the failure of their relationship and perhaps, by extension, her death. GinoΓΓé¼Γäós situation seems to be just as distinct, if not more so, as the force pulling him away from Giovanna is his fear of a traditional commitment. From the first time they sleep together, after which Giovanna shares with Gino all of her deepest problems while he listens to the sound of waves in a seashell, it is clear that he answers only to the open road, identifying it as his alternative to becoming an active part of mainstream society. Spagnuolo is the road manifest, masculine freedom in opposition to GiovannaΓΓé¼Γäós femininity, love and family values. Caught in between the two conflicting ideals, Gino ends up violating both of them and dooming himself in the process.

ViscontiΓΓé¼Γäós approach to filmmaking is very structured and he provides several pairs of parallel events, such as the car crashes. Gino meets Spagnuolo as they sit side by side on a wall, a scene that is repeated at the end of their friendship; similarly, Gino angrily leaves Giovanna by the side of the road and is later abandoned by Spagnuolo in a parallel scene. Cinematic techniques, such as the instances in which Visconti foreshadows major plot twists or the introduction of Spagnuolo as a counterweight, demonstrate ViscontiΓΓé¼Γäós formalist streak and technical virtuosity, but his realist vision and taste for drama are truly what breathe life into Ossessione.