Le notti bianche (Weiße Nächte)

The space is artificial, like a dream. Time is undefined. The gestures are stylized, as if the melodrama had been transformed into an oniric ritual. A special case, an exception in Visconti's work. The director of Ossessione as metteur en scène of the artificial. Art, according to Visconti, is never a copy of reality; it is a reinvention of reality. What is invented in Le notti bianche is the border zone between dream and wakefulness, a realm of the familiar with the quiet yet violent breath of the unreal. Visconti built Livorno in his studio, a hermetically enclosed no-man's-land of bridges, canals with light reflections, shadows, lamps, and neon letters in the fog. This nocturne culminates in a nighttime studio snowfall, in whose white-on-black the magic of the past, the dreams of lovers, and the escape from the world finally triumph. (H.T.)