Shown at the sweeping, epic length Visconti initially intended, and not without some vague parallels to his own life, this stately biopic focuses on the life of wildly eccentric, closeted gay royal Ludwig II. Known for constructing mad fairytale castles dotted across the Bavarian landscape, the king eschewed political power in exchange for his love of art, Wagner and architecture, only to find his idealism wrecked and his mental state edging towards insanity.
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Ludwig belongs to the group of Visconti’s films which I call dynastic. These are films which trace the vicissitudes of a named family – the Valastro in La terra trema, the ‘casa Salina’ in The Leopard, the Essenbecks in The Damned, etc. – culminating usually in the family’s dissolution. Visconti applied this narrative model across the entire social spectrum, though its classical place of application, as in the nineteenth-century novels which he loved so much, is families with property and a reputation to defend. Here in Ludwig he moves away from the world of peasants, proletarians, bourgeoisie or provincial aristocracy to tackle a grander dynastic theme, the collapse of a royal house. And the flawed individual who is at the centre of the film is not someone with the usual blend of strengths and weaknesses such as one might find sitting next to one on the bus, but a king, the bearer of a unique calling, brought up from infancy to believe that he occupies a place apart.
The obvious model for Visconti to have had in mind for Ludwig is Shakespeare’s Richard II. Although this is not a play he ever staged, it is one he almost certainly knew and he probably also knew Marlowe’s Edward II, which treats a similar theme and has a strong homosexual motif. Like Ludwig, Shakespeare’s Richard starts as a legitimate monarch and remains painfully conscious of this fact even as he becomes aware of the way power is being stripped from him. Like Ludwig, too, Richard is an aesthete, who enjoys the notion of kingship in a self-regarding way but neglects the ordinary responsibilities of political life. Finally, both Richard and Edward are depicted, with varying degrees of explicitness, as neglectful of their conjugal duty and the protection of their line.
What is suggestive here is not the narrative coincidences, which on closer inspection are not all that great, but the assumption shared between Visconti and Shakespeare that legitimacy is important but can also be a burden. Everything about Ludwig is different because he is a king. He is not just a temperamental loner whose tastes get in the way of his doing his job. Furthermore the burden that is thrust on him is intrinsically conflictual. If on the one hand it allows him the freedom to patronise Wagner, on the other hand it makes his sexual desires all the more unlawful.
Whatever Visconti’s debt to Shakespeare, however, their political and historical contexts are very different. Shakespeare was a sixteenth-century royalist and apologist of the Tudor monarchy. Visconti was a twentieth-century Marxist and republican. The story of Ludwig II, last King of Bavaria, appealed to him against the grain of his political convictions. As so often in Visconti, there seem to be two stories going on. One is the story of an impersonal social and political process whereby an outdated institution is cast aside in favour of less arbitrary forms of rule. And the other is a more elegiac tale of individuals threatened with the loss of the lifeworld which sustains them. In earlier films such as Rocco and His Brothers (1960) or The Leopard (1963) the two stories are kept in balance. Although the films end badly (Rocco) or ambiguously (The Leopard) for the protagonists, the process of which they are victims is at least some kind of progress. Already in The Damned (1969), however, what replaces the old patriarchal world of the Essenbecks is not progress at all but the cataclysmic disaster of Nazism. And here in Ludwig there is no sense that the world inaugurated by the ministers with their black umbrellas, top hats and frock-coats is in any way preferable to the colourful world of courts and dynasts that it replaces.
Ludwig is a vast film. Not only is it very long, but it is visually and aurally rich, and covers a range of themes. Like the great nineteenth-century novels which provide its narrative models, it is open to a variety of readings, depending on which theme is chosen as the central one. One such theme, for many spectators, is the ‘coming out’ motif and the story of Ludwig’s largely ineffective attempts to come to terms with his sexuality. Another is the historical, the lament for the passing of the old political order. But the film only works as well as it does by allowing its various themes a certain free rein while at the same time holding them together. In my reading of the film, what holds the whole thing together – the dominant, as Eisenstein would have put it – is kingship and the destructive pairing of this with Ludwig’s homosexuality. Each in a sense makes him a man apart and each would be bearable without the other. But, in an order which is, literally, patriarchal, Ludwig’s position as failed dynast is untenable and a tragic ending is the only one possible.
The other things that make the film work well are properties of the mise en scène. In the majority of his films (White Nights and Conversation Piece are conspicuous exceptions), Visconti shows a rigorous dedication to the principle and practice of location filming. Locations may be dressed in various ways, but Visconti’s starting-point is a place where the action would, or could, have taken place. As in Death in Venice, Visconti and his team have used the locations to create an atmosphere that breathes authenticity and where nothing looks studio because nothing is studio. This insistence on authenticity is a characteristic Visconti trademark but it works differently in different films.
In general the earlier (and black and white) films are sparser than the later (colour) ones. This is partly a function of context, as Visconti moves his attention up the social scale from the proletarian environments of Ossessione, La terra trema and Bellissima to the faded haut-bourgeois and aristocratic opulence of Senso and The Leopard. But there is also, in the later films, an interest in the decorative in its own right and in the potential of colour film to render visual surfaces in different ways. In Ludwig, unlike Death in Venice, the colour is mostly naturalistic. Insofar as the film attempts to draw the audience into a strange world, this strangeness is objective. It reflects what Ludwig is, rather than, as in Death in Venice, what Aschenbach feels. If Death in Venice is all about illusion, Ludwig, even at its most extravagant, is about reality. While in Death in Venice we are led into Aschenbach’s illusions and watch them crumble with him, in Ludwig the view is unsparing, inviting pity and terror nonetheless.
Extracted from Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Luchino Visconti (third edition, BFI Publishing, 2003) Reproduced by kind permission of Bloomsbury Publishing. © Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
LUDWIG
Director: Luchino Visconti
©/Production Company: Mega Film
Production Companies: Cinétel, Dieter Geissler Filmproduktion, Divina Film
Executive Producer: Robert Gordon Edwards
Producer: Ugo Santalucia *
Production Manager: Lucio Trentini
Unit Managers: Giorgio Russo, Federico Tocci, Klaus Zeissler, Albino Morandin
Production Administrator/Cashier: Angelo Saraco
Production Secretary: Federico Starage
Assistant Director: Albino Cocco
2nd Assistant Directors: Giorgio Ferrara, Fanny Wessling, Luchino Gastel, Louise Vincent
Script Girl: Renata Franceschi
Story and Screenplay by: Luchino Visconti, Enrico Medioli
Script Collaborator: Suso Cecchi D’Amico
Director of Photography: Armando Nannuzzi
Camera Operators: Nino Cristiani, Giuseppe Berardini, Federico Del Zoppo
Key Grip: Umberto Torriero
Stills Photography: Mario Tursi
Special Effects: E. Baciucchi, G. Baciucchi
Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni
Editorial Assistants: Lea Mazzocchi, Stefano Patrizi
Art Director: Mario Chiari
Associate Art Director: Mario Scisci
Set Decorator: Vincenzo Eusepi
Costume Designer: Piero Tosi
Assistant Costumer: Gabriella Pescucci
Costumes: Tirelli
Wardrobe Mistress: Maria Fanetti
Supervising Make-up: Alberto De Rossi
Miss Mangano’s Make-up: Goffredo Rocchetti
Make-up: Eligio Trani
Hairdresser: Grazia De Rossi
Miss Mangano’s Hairdresser: Maria Teresa Corridoni
Music: Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, Jacques Offenbach
Piano Solos Played by: Franco Mannino
Music Performed by: Orchestra Dell’Accademia di Santa Cecilia
Orchestral Music Conducted by: Franco Mannino
Sound: Vittorio Trentino
Boom Operator: Giuseppe Muratori
Dialogue Director: Mario Maldesi
Dialogue Coach: Louise Vincent *
English Translation: William Weaver
Cast
Helmut Berger (Ludwig II)
Trevor Howard (Richard Wagner)
Silvana Mangano (Cosima von Bülow)
Gert Fröbe (Father Hoffman)
Helmut Griem (Colonel Durckheim)
Isabella Telezynska (Queen Mother)
Umberto Orsini (Count von Holnstein)
John Moulder-Brown (Prince Otto)
Sonia Petrova (Sophie)
Folker Bohnet (Joseph Kainz)
Heinz Moog (Professor von Gudden)
Adriana Asti (Lila von Buliowski)
Marc Porel (Richard Hornig)
Nora Ricci (Countess Ida Ferenczy)
Mark Burns (Hans von Bülow)
Maurizio Bonuglia (Mayr)
Romy Schneider (Elizabeth of Austria)
Alexander Allerson
Bert Bloch (Weber)
Manfred Fürst
Kurt Grosskurt
Anna Maria Hanschke (Ludovica)
Gérard Herter
Jan Linhart (Massimiliano)
Carla Mancini
Gernot Möhner (Hesselschwerd)
Clara Moustawcesky (Helene)
Alain Naya
Alessandro Perrella
Karl-Heinz Peters (Washinton)
Wolfram Schaerf (Crailsheim)
Henning Schlüter
Helmut Stern (Osterholzer)
Eva Tavazzi (Maria)
Louise Vincent
Gunnar Warner (Carlo Teodoro)
Karl Heinz Windhorst (Dr Müller)
Rayka Yurit (Matilde)
Clara Colosimo (sister) *
Hans Elwenspoek (Dr Rumpler) *
Berno von Cramm (Torring) *
Alberto Plebani *
Italy-France-West Germany 1972
237min + interval
35mm
*Uncredited
35mm courtesy of Cinecittà
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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