◭ Culture Portoalready happened

Luchino Visconti Cycle

date23-31 Jul

placeCampo Alegre Cine-Estúdio

price€5.50

about the event

Ciclo Luchino Visconti / - Teatro Municipal do Porto

Synopsis

Medeia Filmes

Ciclo Luchino Visconti

July

2026

Thu

—

Fri

Synopsis

This year marks the 120th anniversary of the birth and the 50th anniversary of the death of one of the great geniuses of cinematic art, Luchino Visconti (1906-1976), and at Teatro Campo Alegre we return to his work with a cycle of 7 of his films (over the course of his life, Visconti made 14 films and some segments of anthology films).

Visconti, who was born into an aristocratic family in Milan and grew up among the stages of theatre and opera, and who from a very young age mingled with the great opera singers and writers, on one of his many trips to Paris, where he met and became friends with Bernstein and Coco Chanel, and with the writers André Gide and Jean Cocteau, also began to frequent the world of cinema and would become an assistant to Jean Renoir on *Une Partie de campagne* (1936). At the beginning of the 1940s, he moved to Rome (his mother, with whom he had a very strong bond, died in 1939 and his father shortly after, in 1941), and drew close to the young intellectuals of the magazine *Cinema*, which was a focal point of opposition to the fascist regime and to which he would contribute several key texts.

Around that time he began working, with the collaboration of several friends, among them Antonio Pietrangeli and the writer Alberto Moravia, on a screenplay loosely inspired by James Cain's novel *O Carteiro Toca Sempre Duas Vezes*, which Renoir had introduced him to, and which would lead to his first film, *Obsession | Ossessione* (1943), which premiered with several censorship cuts and was vilified by Benito Mussolini's son. *Ossessione*, until then commercially unreleased in Portugal, would also come to be regarded as the first Italian neorealist film.

During those years of the Second World War and the Resistance, Visconti drew closer to the Italian Communist Party. He devoted himself passionately to the theatre, staging, among others, works by Cocteau, Hemingway, Sartre, Dostoevsky and Tennessee Williams. He would return regularly to his productions. At the end of the decade, and from a commission that would later take another direction, he made the seminal *La terra trema | La terra trema* (1948), centred on the struggle of Sicilian peasants for the land and premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won an award.

*Senso – Sentimento*, from 1954, is one of his masterpieces, in which he in a way *rewrites* Camillo Boito's novel: *“The streets of Venice (whoever has never seen*Senso*has never seen Venice), the granaries of Lonedo (whoever has never seen*Senso*has never seen Palladio), the squares of Verona (whoever has never seen*Senso*has never seen Sanmicheli) were, in 1954, the excessive, exacerbated and exorbitant settings for the most ghostly presence of the most ghostly of voices.”*[João Bénard da Costa]. In 1957, he made *As Noites Brancas*, based on Dostoevsky, Silver Lion in Venice, an extraordinary reflection on diction and décor, working with Maria Schell, Marcello Mastroianni and Jean Marais.

The 1960s began with *Rocco e os seus Irmãos*, with Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon, with whom he would work again, a novelistic and family drama (*it is the story of a mother and her five sons*, Visconti said), and which, despite some censorship cuts, was his first major critical and box-office success, after the Special Jury Prize in Venice.

After a prolonged hospitalisation due to a thrombosis at the beginning of the 1970s, he would still give us two absolutely extraordinary films: *Violência e Paixão* (1974), again with Burt Lancaster, Helmut Berger and Silvana Mangano, a summation masterpiece of his obsessions and ghosts and perhaps his most personal film, and, finally, another masterpiece, *O Intruso*, a story of infidelity and betrayal within the Italian aristocracy of the 19th century, adapted from the novel by Gabriele D'Annunzio, whom he had known since childhood. Visconti died in March 1976, before its premiere in May at the Cannes festival, which this year celebrated him with the screening of a new restoration of the film.

As we know, many of Visconti's films were subject to censorship cuts, and many of them also never had a commercial release in Portugal. We will see these seven, from 23 to 31 July at Teatro Campo Alegre, in their entirety, and in all their splendour, as they deserve, in restored prints. — Medeia Filmes

Info about schedule and tickets

Thu

23.07

21:30

Fri

24.07

21:30

Sat

25.07

15:30

18:15

21:15

Sun

26.07

15:30

17:45