Visconti’s retelling of the Electra story starts with Sandra/Electra (Cardinale) returning to her ancestral home in Italy – and reviving an intimate involvement with her brother (Sorel) which troubles her naive American husband (Craig) – on the eve of an official ceremony commemorating the death of her Jewish father in a Nazi concentration camp. As ever with Visconti, he is ambivalently drawn to the decadent society he is ostensibly criticising; and Armando Nannuzzi’s camera lovingly caresses the creaking old mansion, set in a landscape of crumbling ruins, where the incestuous siblings determine to wreak revenge on the mother (Bell) and stepfather (Ricci) who supposedly denounced their father. Something like a Verdi opera without the music, the result may not quite achieve tragedy, but it looks marvellous. The title, culled from a poem by Leopardi, has been better rendered as ‘Twinkling Stars of the Bear’.

Sandra.1965.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 40 min
Size: 	1.54 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x576 ~> 768x576
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.201
Audio
#1:  	Italian 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/9FF9E13FE22F04D/Sandra.1965.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language(s):Italian
Subtitles:English, Italian

The post Luchino Visconti – Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa… AKA Sandra (1965) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Boccaccio ’70 is a four-part anthology film inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s collection of bawdy, limerick-laden farces, The Decameron. The Italian-American brainchild of producers Carlo Ponti and Joseph E. Levine, the film pulls together contributions from four major Italian directors: Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street), Federico Fellini (8½), Vittorio De Sica (Umberto D.), and Luchino Visconti (The Leopard).

Boccaccio.70.1962.576p.BluRay.x264.FLAC.1.0-dps.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	3 h 23 min
Size: 	6.16 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x554 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	4 117 kb/s
BPP: 	0.303
Audio
#1:  	Italian 1.0ch FLAC @ 206 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/27CF52AB1FB5A0B/Boccaccio.70.1962.576p.BluRay.x264.FLAC.1.0-dps.mkv

Language(s):Italian
Subtitles:English

The post Mario Monicelli & Federico Fellini & Luchino Visconti & Vittorio De Sica – Boccaccio ’70 (1962) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A man faces a trial for murder. The court is biased because of his personal qualities.

Luchino Visconti - (1967) The Stranger.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 44 min
Size: 	2.95 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x552 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 883 kb/s
BPP: 	0.286
Audio
#1:  	Italian 2.0ch AAC LC @ 160 kb/s (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/D0FE78912ECF494/Luchino_Visconti_-_(1967)_The_Stranger.mkv

Language(s):Italian
Subtitles:English

The post Luchino Visconti – Lo straniero AKA The Stranger (1967) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
With La Terra trema, Luchino Visconti shows an extraordinary concern and sympathy with the plight of ordinary Sicilian fisher folk. Coming from a privileged aristocratic background, Visconti was so appalled by what the fascists had done to his country that he took up with left-wing politics and Marxist ideology. Whilst this political awareness does make its way into La Terra trema, what is far more striking is Visconti’s genuine compassion for the people he is filming. He conveys their sense of pride and nobility, as well as their extreme hardship and inability to make a better lot for themselves. Perhaps it is the fact that Visconti came from such a totally different world that allows him to engage so forcefully with his subject, to draw out every scintilla of poignancy, not as a complacent distant voyeur, but as someone who is profoundly moved by what he is seeing around him.

And it has to be said that Visconti’s technique is very effective. Whilst the camera work is unashamedly arty, with some breathtakingly beautiful location shots, it also conveys the mood of the film’s protagonists with immense depth and raw simplicity. The characters we see are so engaging that it is hard not to feel their joy when things go well and then their sense of despair when it all starts to go wrong. Like much of Italian neo-realism of this period, the film is hugely effective at engaging the spectator and conveying genuine emotion. Rather like a great piece of opera, watching and hearing this film is an emotionally exhausting experience, one that will taint your waking consciousness for a long time.

Visconti originally conceived La Terra trema to be the first in a series of three films concerned with poor working class people in Italy. When this first instalment failed disastrously at the box office (probably because the film’s protagonists spoke not in Italian but in a local Sicilian dialect), the director was forced to give up making the following two films, one about miners, the other about land farmers. Visconti would return to the neo-realist form with Rocco and his Brothers in 1961, a film which bears striking similarities with La Terra trema , notably in its uncompromisingly bleak portrayal of a poor Italian family struggling to stay together despite some pretty vicious circumstances.

Whilst Rocco is an easier film to watch, mainly because it is a more polished work with some great professional actors, it lacks the naked truth that La Terra trema conveys so brilliantly. For its wonderfully effective portrayal of the suffering and aspirations of ordinary men and women, La Terra trema is in a class of its own, a stunning visual poem, charged with a haunting pathos and a searing humanity.

Luchino Visconti - (1948) The Earth Trembles.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 40 min
Size: 	2.96 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	768x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 436 kb/s
BPP: 	0.230
Audio
#1:  	Italian 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/9BA3AA048A1276E/Luchino_Visconti_-_(1948)_The_Earth_Trembles.mkv

Language(s):Sicilian, Italian
Subtitles:English

The post Luchino Visconti – La terra trema AKA The Earth Trembles (1948) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The Leopard is more than a tad too pleased by its own spots, but in this case the source material and its director’s intentions were almost accidentally an appropriate match. The film is based on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 bestselling historical novel, which, all literary credentials aside, probably hit the exact same nerve in Italy that Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind did in America 20-odd years prior. Like the 1939 MGM adaptation of Mitchell’s Civil War soap opera, The Leopard seems more interested in the behavior of textiles and the performance of its own art director than it is with accurately depicting a truly historic national moment.

Director Luchino Visconti’s excessively, well, excessive adaptation tells at great length and expense the tale of Don Fabrizio Corbera, the Prince of Sicily, watching with great resignation the passing of his era and the birth of the successive one. The aristocratic way of life that assured him social prominence no longer applies as the 1860s bring about Italy’s tumultuous Rigorgimento, a situation brought even more harshly into focus when Fabrizio’s nephew Tancredi Falconeri (Alain Delon, Visconti’s flawless muse as ever) announces his intentions to marry the daughter of Don Calogero Sedara, who, as a former pauper-turned-venture capitalist, had to fight tooth and nail to achieve what Fabrizio had handed to him. The arrangement to give Calogero’s daughter Angelica a smashing social debut is emphasized as a cataclysmic but genteel handing over of the reigns from aristocracy to democracy. (In the novel, the irony is that Calogero comes to more closely resemble Fabrizio than vice versa. Whether acquired by nature or nurture, money overrides all.)

Visconti’s stylistic approach to the unwieldy material is to, simply, not wrestle with it at all. Instead, he embraces its novelistic conceits, climaxing with a luxurious rendition of Angelica’s ball that sides rather baldly with the old way. In that sense, Visconti’s internal apparatus also functions as a comment on its own place in movie history. Transpose, if you will, the role of 19th-century aristocracy upon the old-guard, classical narrative tradition of 20th-century filmmaking that Visconti once, as one of Italian neorealism’s founding fathers, worked to unravel. Now consider the revolutions that rock Fabrizio’s increasingly obsolete lifestyle against what was actually going on in the film world during The Leopard’s production—chiefly what was going on in France alone, but even to an increasingly prominent sense what was happening across the Atlantic. (As Michael Gebert once postulated, Old Hollywood died the minute Bette Davis and Joan Crawford’s sags and wrinkles first sent shudders through the crowds that flocked to see What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) Each time Burt Lancaster’s leonine patriarch sighs as Delon (fresh off of the set of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse) lives up his era-straddling moment, it becomes increasingly clear that The Leopard speaks on behalf of the white elephants.

+Commentary by film scholar Peter Cowie
+Commentary by Italian film scholars David Forgacs and Rossana Capitano
+Commentary by Rolando Caputo, lecturer at the Department of Cinema Studies, La Trobe University, & co-editor of Senses of Cinema

6.46GB | 3h 05m | 1024×402 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/5A0D6CD0FC8E472/Il_gattopardo_1963_REPACK_576p_BluRay_AAC2.0_x264-CALiGARi.mkv

Language:Italian
Subtitles:English,French,German,Japanese

The post Luchino Visconti – Il gattopardo AKA The Leopard [4K Restoration] (1963) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A 12-year-old girl, Annarella Bracci, was raped and killed in the popular borough of Primavalle, Rome, one of the age-old cross-roads of Italy, at the time it was going through major construction and road development projects.
In 1951, the Italian Censorship Commission didn’t allow the release of the movie. It was shown in Paris in 1953 and later lost, but a copy is reported to belong to the Cinématèque Royale in Brussels.
Part of “Documento mensile,” a project for cine-journalism started by Riccardo Ghione and Marco Ferreri.

48.84MB | 05m 03s | 608×464 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/F75FC7E809F3CE4/Appunti_su_un_fatto_di_cronaca.avi
https://nitro.download/view/B718A8EB0AD14FA/Appunti_su_un_fatto_di_cronaca.Eng..srt

Language(s):Italian
Subtitles:English

The post Luchino Visconti – Appunti su un fatto di cronaca (1951) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The year is 1972. Master Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti is struck down by a stroke, rendering him, one would think, unable to continue making films—and this just two years after hitting a late-career high point with Death in Venice. But like many artists kept alive by their muse, Visconti heroically persevered, managing to complete two more films before finally succumbing to a heart attack in 1976. Adaptability being a key ingredient to any sort of artistic longevity, Visconti took his ailments not as hindrance, but as a challenge toward the realization of a new project. Taken by a story written by past collaborator Enrico Medioli and intrigued by the cinematic restrictions afforded such an intimate character study, Visconti—now very limited in his physical movements and activity—saw both personal and logistical promise in this tale of aging, nostalgia, and generational divide, which was entitled Conversation Piece after an illustrated novel of family portraits of the same name by Mario Praz. And the finished product, which indeed found Visconti working on just a few sets and stages and with only a handful of actors and longtime collaborators, while lacking the grandeur of such celebrated works as Senso and The Leopard, ultimately found inspiration in its limitations, and to this day stands as one of Visconti’s most personal, if necessarily least dynamic, works.

The perceived inability for an aging man to connect to a younger generation or even simply the outside world is a conceit that Visconti denied as reflective of his own situation at the time, yet Burt Lancaster—wisely playing his character of “The Professor” in direct correlation with the man he’d come to know so well over the prior decade—quickly identified the familiar traits that Visconti, Medioli, and co-screenwriter Suso Cecchi d’Amico imbued in this character. Resistant to change, the Professor has it instead foist on him when a divorced, hedonistic noblewoman rents the upper room of his old-style Italian duplex, her and her entourage—which includes her new lover, daughter, and her daughter’s boyfriend—upending the old man’s routine and convictions with their decadent displays of consumerism and sexuality.

Death looms large over Conversation Piece. And not just Visconti’s, but also, not coincidentally, the Professor’s; small glimmers of past lives (his wife, played by Claudia Cardinale, and his mother, by Dominque Sanda, both feature in brief flashbacks) and extracurricular interests (homosexuality is hinted at obliquely via a small hidden room where the Professor allows the marchesa’s young lover to spend the evening with him) are purposefully thwarted by his prized art collection which seemingly works as a salve against his discontent. The final scene brings with it a glimpse of realization on behalf of the Professor, one which Visconti himself may very well have never achieved. But Conversation Piece, as a “last will and testament” (as many have come to indentify it), feels both like a stylistic and thematic reconciliation on the filmmaker’s behalf, and as such a work of important insight into one of the cinema’s great anomalies.

2.49GB | 2h 01mn | 1024×436 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/99DD61C3D836E37/Luchino_Visconti_-_(1974)_Conversation_Piece.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/9B2FD435A7DB6B9/Conversation.Piece.1974.srt
or
https://nitro.download/view/9D92745E7E2F190/Luchino_Visconti_-_(1974)_Conversation_Piece.part1.rar
https://nitro.download/view/86A5B8C17EA176B/Luchino_Visconti_-_(1974)_Conversation_Piece.part2.rar
https://nitro.download/view/884FD0AAD329702/Luchino_Visconti_-_(1974)_Conversation_Piece.part3.rar
https://nitro.download/view/9B2FD435A7DB6B9/Conversation.Piece.1974.srt

Language(s):English,Italian
Subtitles:English

The post Luchino Visconti – Gruppo di famiglia in un interno AKA Conversation Piece (1974) first appeared on Cinema of the World.