WHITE NIGHTS (LUCHINO VISCONTI, 1957)
LE NOTTI BIANCHE 
Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
6:30 PM
Sunday 03 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
6:00 PM
Sunday 10 May
Rating: Unclassified 18+
Duration: 102 minutes
Country: Italy, France
Language: Italian with English subtitles
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Maria Schell, Jean Marais, Clara Calamai, Dirk Sanders, Marcella Rovena, Maria Zanoli
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
6:30 PM
Sunday 03 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
6:00 PM
Sunday 10 May
Rating: Unclassified 18+
Duration: 102 minutes
Country: Italy, France
Language: Italian with English subtitles
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Maria Schell, Jean Marais, Clara Calamai, Dirk Sanders, Marcella Rovena, Maria Zanoli
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4K RESTORATION – AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
‘A crucial turning point, the link between Visconti’s early neorealist manner and the obsessive stylization of his late films.’ – Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
‘The city of Visconti’s film is a palimpsest in which postwar modernity … is superimposed on the ruins of the city’s gothic past.’ – Michael Sooriyakumaran, Bright Lights Film Journal
In a Tuscan port city, young drifter Mario (Marcello Mastroianni) passes a woman, Natalia (Maria Schell), in tears on a bridge. Over the following evenings, they meet in the same place, and she confides the reason for her vigil: she is waiting for a man whose promise to return has not been kept. Although he is developing feelings of his own, Mario offers to act as her intermediary, bringing ever closer the inevitable moment that they must part – or, perhaps, fall into one another’s arms.
An adaptation of a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Luchino Visconti’s nocturnal fantasy evokes classic French films of the 1940s in his use of studio sets and high-contrast lighting – a far cry from the Neorealism that had dominated the Italian cinema of the past decade. Yet, amid this heightened artificiality, the aching of human longing shines through.
Introduced by Ivan Cerecina at Ritz Cinemas and Adrian Danks at Lido Cinemas.
Presented with the generous support of L'Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Sydney and L'Istituto Italiano di Cultura Melbourne.
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‘A crucial turning point, the link between Visconti’s early neorealist manner and the obsessive stylization of his late films.’ – Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
‘The city of Visconti’s film is a palimpsest in which postwar modernity … is superimposed on the ruins of the city’s gothic past.’ – Michael Sooriyakumaran, Bright Lights Film Journal
In a Tuscan port city, young drifter Mario (Marcello Mastroianni) passes a woman, Natalia (Maria Schell), in tears on a bridge. Over the following evenings, they meet in the same place, and she confides the reason for her vigil: she is waiting for a man whose promise to return has not been kept. Although he is developing feelings of his own, Mario offers to act as her intermediary, bringing ever closer the inevitable moment that they must part – or, perhaps, fall into one another’s arms.
An adaptation of a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Luchino Visconti’s nocturnal fantasy evokes classic French films of the 1940s in his use of studio sets and high-contrast lighting – a far cry from the Neorealism that had dominated the Italian cinema of the past decade. Yet, amid this heightened artificiality, the aching of human longing shines through.
Introduced by Ivan Cerecina at Ritz Cinemas and Adrian Danks at Lido Cinemas.
Presented with the generous support of L'Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Sydney and L'Istituto Italiano di Cultura Melbourne.
FILM NOTES
By Scott Murray
By Scott Murray
| Scott Murray is a writer-director. |
A Whole Minute of Bliss
Don Luchino Visconti di Modrone (1906-1976) was born into an aristocratic Milanese family. By age 40, he was an internationally famous director of theatre, opera and film. A Marxist, he became a pioneer of Neorealism, acclaimed for his poetic and harrowing film about poor Sicilian fishermen, La terra trema (1947). However, the acclaim was short-lived. Visconti’s operatic melodrama Senso (1954) and theatrically stylised Le notti bianche (White Nights, 1957) confused and angered his comrades, who felt he had abandoned the poor. Visconti would never be forgiven, even though he momentarily calmed his critics with Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and his brothers, 1960). Complex masterworks such as Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963), Vaghe stelle dell’orsa(Sandra, 1965), Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece, 1974) and L’Innocente (The Innocent, 1976) were regularly dismissed for being inappropriately concerned with the wealthy and powerful. Today, Visconti is universally regarded as a giant of European cinema.
Le notti bianche is based on Fyodor Dostoevesky’s 1865 short story Belye nochi (White Nights), which begins: ‘It was a wonderful night, the sort of night that can only occur when you are young.’[i] The unnamed narrator has ‘been living in [Saint] Petersburg for eight years and barely managed a single acquaintance. [It is spring and] ‘all Petersburg abruptly packed up and left for the country. I felt terrified of being left alone.’ Late one evening, the narrator wanders aimlessly around the city ‘where not a living soul is to be encountered’, his path ultimately taking him along the embankment of the Yekaterinsky (now Griboedov) Canal: ‘All at once, I become caught up in a most unexpected adventure. Just to the side of me, leaning against a canal railing, stood a [young] woman.’ He hears ‘the sound of muffled weeping.’ The woman is Nastenka and, to protect her from a pestering man, the narrator suggests she take his hand to make them look like lovers and he safely walks her home. This hauntingly melancholic tale famously ends with: ‘My god! A whole minute of bliss. Isn’t that enough, even for a human lifetime?’[ii]
Apart from its sensitivity and power, Dostoevesky’s short story has the rare distinction of having been adapted by two of cinema’s finest directors: Luchino Visconti as Le notti bianche (White Nights, 1957) and Robert Bresson as Quatre nuits d’un rêveur (Four Nights of a Dreamer, 1971). Visconti’s film is set not in Saint Petersburg but Livorno, an industrial harbour city with canals and bridges to the south of Pisa. Five other versions have been made: two from Russia, one each from Iran and the US, and another in the Tamil language. Visconti’s film was first to appear in cinemas but has been largely unseen ever since.
Le notti bianche was co-scripted (like much of Visconti’s best work) by Suso Cecchi d’Amico and brilliantly shot by Giuseppe Rotunno. However, by eschewing neorealism for a highly stylised aesthetic (the entire film was shot on a studio set), Le notti bianche ‘encountered a hostile reception almost everywhere […] Ergo, [Visconti] was no longer a serious director’, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith notes in his Visconti (Secker & Warburg, 1967).
Dostoevesky’s unnamed dreamer is now called Mario (Marcello Mastroianni). He has a job but little money and no friends. When he sees a woman crying on a bridge above a canal, he approaches. Her name is Natalia (Maria Schell), and she will later tell him of her great love for a former tenant (Jean Marais) in her grandmother’s apartment. But he has been gone for almost a year, and Natalia is desperately awaiting his promised return. The ages of Mario and Natalia are not stated, but Mastroianni and Schell were both in their early thirties. Le notti bianche is a more adult-centred telling than that found in Dostoevsky and Bresson, even though Schell plays Natalie with an almost teenage vivacity and innocence.
Schell is extraordinary and Visconti films her exquisitely, as he will another Austrian actress, Romy Schneider, in Boccaccio ’70 (1962) and Ludwig (1973). Not that Schell managed to win over Nowell-Smith, who labels Natalia ‘a nymphomaniac’ and ‘hysterical little bitch.’ Surely it would be more accurate to say that Natalia is an anxious young person trying her best to deal with the distress of a long-absent lover and a deep uncertainty about whether she could be happy with the kind man who wishes to protect her.
Visconti has long been accused of deserting the proletariat, but how could his detractors have failed to notice in Le notti bianche the director’s great love and concern for what Dostoevsky called the ‘humiliated and insulted’ (in Unizhennye i oskorblyonnye, 1861)?
In one of the film’s most devastating moments, Mario takes a rowboat to row Natalia to a romantic spot, only to find the embankment crowded with the poor, huddled around a tiny fire that looks incapable of ever giving them warmth. Visconti conjures an almost transcendent beauty as he tenderly embraces them all.
Perhaps Visconti’s critics had been distracted by his experiments in post-modern storytelling, as when Natalie tells Mario about her first meeting with the tenant and the camera pans around the room from where she is sitting and we observe (without a cut or dissolve) that very meeting. A flashback has been embedded in the present, as they are in all our lives.
Throughout, Visconti perfectly captures Dostoevsky’s melancholic tone and Nino Rota’s score is haunting. I see no abandonment of any style or ideology, only a delight in experimenting with new ways of storytelling. In Le notti bianche, Visconti has begun his great journey towards Il gattopardo and the masterpieces that follow. The film’s re-appearance in a peerless restoration is a precious gift.
[i] All Belye quotes bar one are from White Nights: A Sentimental Novel (From the Memoirs of a Dreamer), trans. Alan Myers in A Gentle Creature and Other Stories (Oxford University Press, 1995).
[ii] Translated by Alissa Tanskaya.
Don Luchino Visconti di Modrone (1906-1976) was born into an aristocratic Milanese family. By age 40, he was an internationally famous director of theatre, opera and film. A Marxist, he became a pioneer of Neorealism, acclaimed for his poetic and harrowing film about poor Sicilian fishermen, La terra trema (1947). However, the acclaim was short-lived. Visconti’s operatic melodrama Senso (1954) and theatrically stylised Le notti bianche (White Nights, 1957) confused and angered his comrades, who felt he had abandoned the poor. Visconti would never be forgiven, even though he momentarily calmed his critics with Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and his brothers, 1960). Complex masterworks such as Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963), Vaghe stelle dell’orsa(Sandra, 1965), Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece, 1974) and L’Innocente (The Innocent, 1976) were regularly dismissed for being inappropriately concerned with the wealthy and powerful. Today, Visconti is universally regarded as a giant of European cinema.
Le notti bianche is based on Fyodor Dostoevesky’s 1865 short story Belye nochi (White Nights), which begins: ‘It was a wonderful night, the sort of night that can only occur when you are young.’[i] The unnamed narrator has ‘been living in [Saint] Petersburg for eight years and barely managed a single acquaintance. [It is spring and] ‘all Petersburg abruptly packed up and left for the country. I felt terrified of being left alone.’ Late one evening, the narrator wanders aimlessly around the city ‘where not a living soul is to be encountered’, his path ultimately taking him along the embankment of the Yekaterinsky (now Griboedov) Canal: ‘All at once, I become caught up in a most unexpected adventure. Just to the side of me, leaning against a canal railing, stood a [young] woman.’ He hears ‘the sound of muffled weeping.’ The woman is Nastenka and, to protect her from a pestering man, the narrator suggests she take his hand to make them look like lovers and he safely walks her home. This hauntingly melancholic tale famously ends with: ‘My god! A whole minute of bliss. Isn’t that enough, even for a human lifetime?’[ii]
Apart from its sensitivity and power, Dostoevesky’s short story has the rare distinction of having been adapted by two of cinema’s finest directors: Luchino Visconti as Le notti bianche (White Nights, 1957) and Robert Bresson as Quatre nuits d’un rêveur (Four Nights of a Dreamer, 1971). Visconti’s film is set not in Saint Petersburg but Livorno, an industrial harbour city with canals and bridges to the south of Pisa. Five other versions have been made: two from Russia, one each from Iran and the US, and another in the Tamil language. Visconti’s film was first to appear in cinemas but has been largely unseen ever since.
Le notti bianche was co-scripted (like much of Visconti’s best work) by Suso Cecchi d’Amico and brilliantly shot by Giuseppe Rotunno. However, by eschewing neorealism for a highly stylised aesthetic (the entire film was shot on a studio set), Le notti bianche ‘encountered a hostile reception almost everywhere […] Ergo, [Visconti] was no longer a serious director’, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith notes in his Visconti (Secker & Warburg, 1967).
Dostoevesky’s unnamed dreamer is now called Mario (Marcello Mastroianni). He has a job but little money and no friends. When he sees a woman crying on a bridge above a canal, he approaches. Her name is Natalia (Maria Schell), and she will later tell him of her great love for a former tenant (Jean Marais) in her grandmother’s apartment. But he has been gone for almost a year, and Natalia is desperately awaiting his promised return. The ages of Mario and Natalia are not stated, but Mastroianni and Schell were both in their early thirties. Le notti bianche is a more adult-centred telling than that found in Dostoevsky and Bresson, even though Schell plays Natalie with an almost teenage vivacity and innocence.
Schell is extraordinary and Visconti films her exquisitely, as he will another Austrian actress, Romy Schneider, in Boccaccio ’70 (1962) and Ludwig (1973). Not that Schell managed to win over Nowell-Smith, who labels Natalia ‘a nymphomaniac’ and ‘hysterical little bitch.’ Surely it would be more accurate to say that Natalia is an anxious young person trying her best to deal with the distress of a long-absent lover and a deep uncertainty about whether she could be happy with the kind man who wishes to protect her.
Visconti has long been accused of deserting the proletariat, but how could his detractors have failed to notice in Le notti bianche the director’s great love and concern for what Dostoevsky called the ‘humiliated and insulted’ (in Unizhennye i oskorblyonnye, 1861)?
In one of the film’s most devastating moments, Mario takes a rowboat to row Natalia to a romantic spot, only to find the embankment crowded with the poor, huddled around a tiny fire that looks incapable of ever giving them warmth. Visconti conjures an almost transcendent beauty as he tenderly embraces them all.
Perhaps Visconti’s critics had been distracted by his experiments in post-modern storytelling, as when Natalie tells Mario about her first meeting with the tenant and the camera pans around the room from where she is sitting and we observe (without a cut or dissolve) that very meeting. A flashback has been embedded in the present, as they are in all our lives.
Throughout, Visconti perfectly captures Dostoevsky’s melancholic tone and Nino Rota’s score is haunting. I see no abandonment of any style or ideology, only a delight in experimenting with new ways of storytelling. In Le notti bianche, Visconti has begun his great journey towards Il gattopardo and the masterpieces that follow. The film’s re-appearance in a peerless restoration is a precious gift.
[i] All Belye quotes bar one are from White Nights: A Sentimental Novel (From the Memoirs of a Dreamer), trans. Alan Myers in A Gentle Creature and Other Stories (Oxford University Press, 1995).
[ii] Translated by Alissa Tanskaya.
THE RESTORATION
Source: Cristaldifilm
The restoration by Cinecittà was carried out from the original 35mm negative (4K scan) and from a mono 35mm optical negative soundtrack.
A few sections affected by severe decay of the original negatives were replaced with frames and sound from fine grain master and positive soundtrack materials.
Director: Luchino Visconti; Production Company: Cinematografica Associati, Intermondia Films, Vides Cinematografica, Cinecittà; Producer: Franco Cristaldi; Screenplay: Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Luchino Visconti; based on “White Nights” by Fyodor Dostoevsky; Photography: Giuseppe Rotunno; Editor: Mario Serandrei; Music: Nino Rota; Production Design: Mario Chiari; Costume Design: Piero Tosi // Cast: Marcello Mastroianni (Mario), Maria Schell (Natalia), Jean Marais (L’inquilino).
Italy | 1957 | 102 mins | 4K DCP | B&W | Italian with English subtitles | Unclassified 18+
The restoration by Cinecittà was carried out from the original 35mm negative (4K scan) and from a mono 35mm optical negative soundtrack.
A few sections affected by severe decay of the original negatives were replaced with frames and sound from fine grain master and positive soundtrack materials.
Director: Luchino Visconti; Production Company: Cinematografica Associati, Intermondia Films, Vides Cinematografica, Cinecittà; Producer: Franco Cristaldi; Screenplay: Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Luchino Visconti; based on “White Nights” by Fyodor Dostoevsky; Photography: Giuseppe Rotunno; Editor: Mario Serandrei; Music: Nino Rota; Production Design: Mario Chiari; Costume Design: Piero Tosi // Cast: Marcello Mastroianni (Mario), Maria Schell (Natalia), Jean Marais (L’inquilino).
Italy | 1957 | 102 mins | 4K DCP | B&W | Italian with English subtitles | Unclassified 18+