Conversation Piece

The director was a great connoisseur of literature, which is why Visconti’s films cannot be completely understood without first learning the “literature lessons” that were important to him.For his whole life, he dreamt of adapting Search of Lost Time for the screen but it never came to fruition.The time dimension was important to him:Visconti knew how to materialise the flow of time in his films - just look at, say, the finale of Death in Venice. Visconti’s debut in cinema was unique, as it became a prelude to a new movement in cinema called neorealism, which soon rejuvenated film throughout the world.The Obsession (Ossessione), created in 1942 was a free-form adaptation of a novel by an American writer James M. Caine published in 1934, called The Postman Always Rings Twice.