![]() ![]() This semiautobiographical short story about a writer’s trip to the city of Venice, which uses symbolism and employs Mann’s meticulously written prose, also presents themes relating to modernity. Cavani breaks the filmic taboo of finding Nazi perpetrators among the victimized Austrians in her film Il Portiere di notte (The Night Porter) (1974) and articulates the memory of the Nazi era and post-war repression in Vienna, seeking to represent a wider European experience. Death in Venice is Thomas Mann’s most famous and widely read literary work. Visconti’s Austrian in Senso (1954) and his ‘Austrianization’ of the German in Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice) (1971) have added a ‘topos Austria’ to Italian film, which is deconstructed by Fellini’s abstraction of the ‘Habsburg mythos’ at the onset of the First World War in E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On) (1984). Austria is thus a viable stand-in for Italian cinema’s examination of its own historical trauma. Giacomo Lichtner’s view that Italian film ‘absolved’ its society for the myth of the brava gente (the good or ‘better’ people) parallels Austria’s avoidance of dealing with its Nazi past until sparked by national discourse. Rossellini’s seminal image of the Austrian deserter in Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) (1945) has continued to shape Austrian characters and their difference from the German in Italian auteur film. ![]()
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