Wouldn't such a setting be sexy, though, in a perverse way, especially if the marriage in question were a knot of transition from the declining old social order to the rising new one? Check out _Il Gattopardo [The Leopard]_ (Dir. Luchino Visconti, 1963) -- Cf. <http://www.bfi.org.uk/collections/release/leopard/synopsis.html>.
At 1:29 PM -0400 8/8/03, DoreneFC at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 8/8/2003 5:55:47 PM GMT Daylight Time,
>andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com writes:
>>A recent survey I saw reported that more Americans thought that
>>adultery was always wrong (undifferentiated by sex) no matter whar
>>than any other surveyed act, which didn't, I think, include ant
>>crimes of violence. The figures were in the 95% rabge.
>>jks
>
>Maybe that's because more Americans are tempted about adultery than
>about crimes of violence. So they have to keep reinforcing their
>belief that it's wrong.
>
>DC
The chief source of pleasure in Christian America is to do something wrong that feels right.
BTW, one of the greatest films about adultery is _L'innocente_ (Dir. Luchino Visconti, 1976):
***** In _The Innocent_ the Giannini character is a philanderer who belatedly falls in love with his own wife, only to discover that she is pregnant by another man. He accepts the child in order to keep his wife, but in reality he can't bear the thought of it, and one day he deliberately exposes it to the cold winter air and causes its death. His wife will never forgive him, and he will never stop loving her. In spite of much brave and almost convincing talk about his lack of regret and his contempt for convention and the judgement of others, he realises that his emotional life is over, and shoots himself. The woman walking away through the garden is his mistress, who has already begun to see him as a monster, although a monster one might pity....
It may be that all great movie directors tempt us with the thought that seeing is everything, only to show us that it's not, but in Visconti the seeing is particularly intense and promising: we can't help seeing that we're seeing, and we can't help believing that something will come of it. There is a poignant emblem of this whole situation, a kind of figure for what Visconti's visual style is up to everywhere, in a remarkable sequence in _The Innocent_. Giannini doesn't yet know that his wife is pregnant, but he does suspect her of having an affair and finds her fascinating for this very reason. The two of them visit a house in the country, and as they walk in the garden, the camera closes in on his eyes looking at his wife through a walkway covered in flowers. As he moves, the camera moves with him, the full length of the walkway, his face sharply in focus, then lost behind a cluster of blossoms or a pillar, then clearly visible again, and so on. He is trying to see what can't be seen, the strange alteration that has come over his wife, as if there could be a visual clue that would explain everything. And we are seeing him looking: we know exactly what he is searching for and why he won't find it. The scene is haunting because it insists on vision; because we are seeing so much and he is seeing so little.
<http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/2003_05/visconti.php> *****
At 10:01 PM -0700 8/7/03, joanna bujes wrote:
>If you guys really think that making coversation...is too much trouble
...then, you might at least learn to observe:
***** Visconti once remarked that there is a dining room "in almost all of my films". This is where the family congregates and quarrels and comes unstuck, but it is also, visually, the place where the camera can monitor the whole table, where face after face and gesture after gesture can come into focus and tell their tale, and where the long takes can replicate and reinforce the stately, claustrophobic quality of the scene itself.
<http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/2003_05/visconti.php> ***** -- Yoshie
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