Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Synopsis The power and fortune of the Von Essenbeck family remained intact even when Germany lost the great war and during the depression that followed. Two little girls recite poetry in the parlor and then play hide-and-seek with their cousin Martin.
Suddenly there is a scream. There are no reviews yet. Be the first one to write a review. In The Damned Visconti shows the failure of liberal democracy and the industrial imperative of capitalism to forge a progressive agenda.
Other major industrial countries France, Britain and the United States at the time had, through a variety of different paths, established liberal democracies albeit with problems.
Germany by comparison did not: the founding moment of the Weimar Republic was a poisoned chalice which was handed over by a militaristic leadership facing defeat in These elites were trying to save themselves and regroup. Consequently the old Prussian elites were never comprehensively defeated. Throughout the time of the Weimar Republic they exerted a strong reactionary influence refusing - unlike the Prince of Salina in The Leopard - to engage constructively with the formation of a new hegemonic social formation which could provide a stable ruling elite.
The inability to become involved in the construction of a new hegemonic order by the older elites in Germany is represented in a very persuasive way by Visconti. The opening scenes of the film follow Friedrich Dirk Bogarde being tempted by the SS into a murderous plot amongst scenes from a family celebratory gathering which ends in murder and mayhem. At the gathering, the head of the Essenbeck family and the overall controller of the steel company, Baron Joachim, clearly displays his dislike of the new order as does one of his vice chairman Herbert the husband of his niece.
A new elite will, if necessary, be created by force and will create a cultural and social order to match. In Italy the previous ruling elites, whether in Piedmont or in Sicily, backed the new constitutional monarchy and the liberal constitutional apparatus which was attached to this.
Joachim went along this collaborative path by sending people - including his own son - and weapons into the front-line. In the first instance this attitude can be compared with the Prince of Salina in The Leopard who, at the expense of his immediate family, recognises the need to play the long game thus supporting Tancredi.
Short term profit ruled over long term political insight for both the elder Krupp in reality and Joachim Essenbeck in the film. The failure of Joachim can also be discerned by comparing his attitude to the rising Bourgeoisie exemplified by Friedrich Bruckmann Dirk Bogarde.
By comparison Joachim is entirely opposed to a similar possibility. That Joachim is murdered by Friedrich could be seen as the outcome of not accepting social change in an ordered way.
His refusal to let change happen disillusions and disarms the new commercial classes and also makes a potential power vacuum into which other social forces such as Nazism can emerge. Thus it can be seen that anthropomorphic cinema is working effectively through individual characters. However, the Weimar state was disintegrating especially between and The breakdown of hegemony necessitated a new power struggle, Aschenbach and Konstantin represent the contenders in the process of re-hegemonising German society.
The Joachims, Friedrichs and Sophies have no sense of historical processes in the way exemplified by the Prince of Salina. Let us take another comparison between the role and function of the marriages in The Leopard and The Damned. In the former marriage symbolises the new vehicle in which the new Italian order will be crystallised. The fabulous ball scene at the end of The Leopard lasts approximately 40 minutes. Visconti shows us a situation in which the officers of the new army will marry into the daughters of the old order who are depicted as interbred and running about like monkeys.
By comparison, in The Damned , the marriage between Sophie and Friedrich has come far to late. There is no possibility of an easy re-formation of the old orders with the new. It is an empty marriage going nowhere, and held in isolation not at the centre of society.
The embittered son Martin has crossed into the camp of the emergent monster which has erupted through a rent in the thin democratic fabric of Weimar society. This was because of the failure of the old elites to combine with the rising mercantile classes.
The Weimar collapsed because of the failure to form a consensus amongst the ruling elites. In reality the economic desires of the industrialists who have supported the Nazis are stymied by with the take over of the economy under the second four year plan headed by Goring.
I have argued that the Essenbeck family around which the film is centred acts as a synecdoche for German society as a whole. This way of looking at the film tends to invert the emphasis that the family is torn apart by the pressures of Nazism which often how critics have seen the film.
The Essenbeck quarrels represent key conflicting currents and strands amongst the Weimar German elites. The first section of The Damned shows events leading up to, during, and after an important family dinner taking place on the night of the Reichstag fire. This is probably the case although there is no discovered direct evidence linking the Nazis to the fire according to Richard Evans It also meant the taking over of the political institutions at local and regional level once total control at the centre had been achieved.
Cinematically there is a useful comparison to be made between the way in which family dinners are handled in The Leopard and in The Damned which features two dismal dinners. Tancredi first sees an adult Angelica Claudia Cardinale and is smitten.
After the full accession to power by Hitler in March and the take-over of the constitutional institutions by a carefully contrived fait accompli the SA were in the forefront of the fight against the Communists, Social Democrats and Trade Unionists who tried in the early days to offer some resistance to Hitler.
They also played an integral role in the harassment of Jews, informally before April 1st , and in an increasingly organised way afterwards, starting with a boycott of Jewish businesses on this date.
The presence of the German Army and its leader von Blomberg at the Nuremberg rally was symbolically immensely important for Hitler. By Hitler against the desires and advice of most capitalists and his economics minister and governor of the central bank Schacht was determined to pursue economic policies of rearmament.
Overy argues that these policies were being carried out with the express intention of preparing Germany for a total war in which it could survive for up to 15 years. It can now be seen that that Visconti has been very precise in the historical moment that he has chosen to represent. Nowell-Smith is surely right to note that the film operates on three levels of history, drama and myth. Instead they focus too closely upon the literary and the critical influences within the film at the expense of the historical process which is being represented.
As a result they both tend to glide over an essential feature which Visconti certainly wished to represent. It is also important to note that the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis was itself an operatic trajectory in real life and it was intensely melodramatic. It is worth bearing in mind that Hitler was obsessed with Wagnerian opera. After defeat at Stalingrad in Hitler then eschews Wagner. For Visconti opera in such films as Senso could be represented as progressive liberal Italian nationalism albeit undermined by the ruling elites.
Wagner by comparison was infused with a regressive Germanic 19th century romantic mysticism. Wagner was also intensely anti-Semitic. However discussion of this is beyond the scope of this entry. The first dialogue of Aschenbach the SS officer and Friedrich Dirk Bogarde gives rise to a hint of something about to happen, in the entrance hall Aschenbach even more strongly signals that on this night in particular it will be important for Friedrich to act.
It is clear that Aschenbach is in possession of some a priori knowledge. This is an invitation to murder Joachim the head of the family and the steel company. The prizes for Bogarde are Sophie and effective control of the company. The time for personal morality is dead states Aschenbach.
The question at this stage is will Bogarde accept this Faustian pact? The culprit in reality was captured on the site of the Reichstag trying to set alight yet more curtains. Van den Lubbe was not however a communist. He was an unemployed fairly deranged anarchist with bad visual impairment who had several years ago been flung out of the Dutch communist party for promoting arson and other acts of sabotage.
As yet there is no precise historical evidence to definitively link the fire to a piece of agent provocatuerism on the part of the Nazis. However, we are asked to believe that this character in his physical state was easily able to break into the Reichstag without discovery only a few days after being released from a police force which was already thoroughly infiltrated by active Nazis as well as being controlled by the Nazis at the top.
In reality the Nazis immediately arrested hundreds of Communists in Berlin and this carried on in the following days and weeks leading up to the election.
By not banning the Communists outright Hitler ensured that their votes were unlikely to go to the Social Democrats. This fire effectively sealed the fate of Germany which Visconti was clearly well aware of. The melodramatic themes of the film are carefully interwoven with a clever analysis of real events. This was a crucial moment in the rise to power of the Nazis. If Hitler was to take the final step to power then he was going to have to purge his party of these elements and reconfigure the basic ethos of his party.
Reichenau made the agreement with Himmler to keep the army confined to barracks during the Rohm Purge. After the event Reichenau even issued a statement justifying the murder of General von Schleicher. It was effectively the last major act in the reformation of the ruling elites but a formation that was now on the road to an even worse fate than befell Germany in the First World War. That was also a war which the Prussian military elites had encouraged.
The final step to power for the Nazi party was based upon a compromise between, on one side, Hitler and his closest allies in the Nazi party underpinned by the rise of the SS as an elite corps answerable only to Hitler. This dishonourable political marriage to gain power was made with the most powerful of the German industrialists many of whom were members of, or sympathetic to, the Nationalist party, which was small but highly influential amongst the upper classes of Germany.
A prominent leader of this party was Hugenberg who not only took over UfA after its near bankruptcy but also became the Minister of Finance when the Nazis first won a majority in the Reichstag. Bondanella would probably not subscribe to a reading of this nature for he asserts that Visconti did not intend the film to be taken as a serious sociological or psychological reading of German culture in Weimar Germany. That the film is loosely based upon the Krupp family is important.
However it is important to note that the whole of the capitalist class was forced to do this as well. If the Essenbecks are seen as representative not just of the Krupp family but as industrial capital within Germany in general then the perfidy, confusion betrayal and counter-betrayal makes more sense. It is important to note for example the example of Thyssen below and compare that with a brief outline of the Krupp family.
In the film Martin can be seen as being close to the character of Alfred Krupp see box below. The role of Herbert is more difficult to assess.
Perhaps he should be seen as a portmanteau character who represents those in the ruling elites who recognise the fate which awaits Germany and leave.
That Herbert reappears briefly because his family has been held hostage is also significant. Recent work on the Nazi Terror shows how the Gestapo went to great efforts to track down communists who left the country in the early s, even those who were not especially important. These people were often used as sources of intelligence because their families were threatened with torture and the camps [i]. In reality the ruthlessness of the Nazis against former supporters is shown when the leading industrialist Thyssen and Schacht , the architect of early Nazi economic success both end up in concentration camps.
As much as anything this contributed to the rise to power of the Nazis when they achieved electoral success in A critique of this nature would not have served Visconti well thus the working class as a class force in a Marxist sense disappear from view. Instead this is replaced by the bitter incestuous infighting in the grab for power by the elites. By taking this artistic route Visconti was able to focus his critique upon the false hopes of redemption promoted by populism. Populism fails structurally to be a historical force able to liberate the socially excluded.
The populists in the SA, like the working class nationalists in The Leopard meet their comeuppance. In The Leopard the bourgeoisie can still be seen a social force moving society forwards - in Marxist terms achieving their historical role. By comparison, at a time when modernity has become strongly installed in Europe and when the Weimar Republic represented one of the most advanced constitutions in the world the liberal bourgeoisie are forced out by a failure to connect socially or politically with the masses.
Liberalism is subject to betrayal by unenlightened members of their own class who have tied their fortunes to Nazism as a mythological force doomed to failure. Bondanella, , p The greatest success of Aschenbach was the winning over of Gunther the cello playing son of Konstantin to the evil of Nazism.
Gunther can be seen as a synecdoche for the institutional liberal cultural establishment within Germany which makes its accommodation to Nazism.
The likes of von Karajan for example spring to mind. Richard Evans gives a useful review of the cultural turn in post-Weimar Germany discussing some of these concerns. Bacon turns to George Steiner to try and provide some insight into this seeming cultural paradox.
For Steiner the paradox which arises it that there may be a desire for barbarism and also an indifference to barbarism. This, for Steiner, explains the capability of those in charge of the camps being able to play the cultural classics very, very well. It is seen by all the observers as a culture of decadence which leads into perversion.
It was born in our factories, nourished with our money! Sign In. Play trailer Drama War. Director Luchino Visconti. Nicola Badalucco story and screenplay Enrico Medioli story and screenplay Luchino Visconti story and screenplay. Top credits Director Luchino Visconti. See more at IMDbPro. Trailer Official Trailer. Photos Top cast Edit. Helmut Griem Aschenbach as Aschenbach. Florinda Bolkan Olga as Olga. Nora Ricci Governess as Governess. Wolfgang Hillinger Janek as Janek. Nelson Rubien.
Luchino Visconti. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. The power and fortune of the Von Essenbeck family remained intact even when Germany lost World War I, and during the depression that followed.
Now it's , and the baron has summoned his family to a dinner that also brings a cousin rising in the Nazi party to the great house accompanied by a rising manager at the baron's company. Two little girls recite poetry in the parlor and then play hide-and-seek with their cousin Martin Helmut Berger.
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