This page is to obtain access to the Sands Films Cinema Club presentation ONLINE
To attend in person, please CLICK HERE
White Nights, based on the same Dostoievski story that Robert Bresson would film as Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), was considered at the time a letdown.
What Visconti described as “Neo-romanticism” resembles French poetic realism. But atmosphere, the correlative to European fatalism as Nazism threatened and devoured the continent in the real world, no longer is the repository of the film’s urgency; this has shifted to Natalia and Mario (Maria Schell and Marcello Mastroianni, both tremendous), who meet on a canal bridge one night and begin to bond, on their date, the next night.
The romance is doomed from the start. Natalia haunts the bridge, awaiting the return of her lover, who failed to keep their rendezvous a year after his departure. Ironically, Natalia tries to duck her date with Mario in an unconscious replay of what her lover has done to her—an indication of how deeply her spirit remains embedded in the past with the man who has apparently ditched her. At first, Mario contests the unreality of Natalia’s persistent hope for her lover’s return but is then drawn into it, helping her compose a letter to him, just to keep her in his life. But Visconti’s Marxist side lets us see another barrier between the two; Mario is a lowly clerk, while Natalia is a bourgeois whose family has devolved into genteel poverty.
Exquisite artificial sets, the painted sky, the voluminous darkness of Giuseppe Rotunno’s superb black-and-white cinematography: all these shift reality to the young pair and to Natalia’s oblivious joy when her lover returns at last, shattering Mario.
This page is to obtain access to the Sands Films Cinema Club presentation ONLINE
To attend in person, please CLICK HERE
White Nights, based on the same Dostoievski story that Robert Bresson would film as Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), was considered at the time a letdown.
What Visconti described as “Neo-romanticism” resembles French poetic realism. But atmosphere, the correlative to European fatalism as Nazism threatened and devoured the continent in the real world, no longer is the repository of the film’s urgency; this has shifted to Natalia and Mario (Maria Schell and Marcello Mastroianni, both tremendous), who meet on a canal bridge one night and begin to bond, on their date, the next night.
The romance is doomed from the start. Natalia haunts the bridge, awaiting the return of her lover, who failed to keep their rendezvous a year after his departure. Ironically, Natalia tries to duck her date with Mario in an unconscious replay of what her lover has done to her—an indication of how deeply her spirit remains embedded in the past with the man who has apparently ditched her. At first, Mario contests the unreality of Natalia’s persistent hope for her lover’s return but is then drawn into it, helping her compose a letter to him, just to keep her in his life. But Visconti’s Marxist side lets us see another barrier between the two; Mario is a lowly clerk, while Natalia is a bourgeois whose family has devolved into genteel poverty.
Exquisite artificial sets, the painted sky, the voluminous darkness of Giuseppe Rotunno’s superb black-and-white cinematography: all these shift reality to the young pair and to Natalia’s oblivious joy when her lover returns at last, shattering Mario.