Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and Decay (Volume 0)

In this study, the first to consider Luchino Visconti's entire oeuvre, Henry Bacon examines the films of one of Italy's preeminent filmmakers against the cultural, historical, and biographical contexts in which they were made. Through analysis of his achievements, Visconti also emerges as a twentieth century inheritor and renewer of the nineteenth-century narrative tradition, especially that of the novel and the opera.

"This readable, rich study of Luchino Visconti's 14 feature adn three short films grew out of the author's dissertation. Shrewdly attuned to the range of cinematic expression, especially the effects of music, Bacon provides the best study to date of this major stylist, who uniquely extended 19th-century narrative traditions of opera and the novel into the new aesthetics of cinema and the radical disintegrations of the 20th century. All collections." Choice