Film and Literature. The Case of "Death in Venice": Luchino Visconti and Thomas Mann
1980; Wiley; Volume: 53; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/405628
ISSN1756-1183
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Literature and Culture
ResumoLike many other great novelists of the twentieth century Thomas Mann took a lively, at times even an active, interest in cinema. His essays, letters, and diaries show that he was fascinated by the new medium and that he reflected seriously, though by no means systematically, on the artistic possibilities and limitations of cinema as an art form.' It seems that he enjoyed films for their naturalistic and sensuous qualities but he also expressed contempt for the melodrama and sentimentality characteristic of much of the cinema of his time. Das lebt aus erster, warmer, herzlicher Hand, he wrote in 1928, das wirkt wie Zwiebel und Nieswurz.2 As one might expect, his attitude toward the new art form was ambivalent. On the one hand he would declare that cinema had not yet developed sufficiently to achieve the status of an autonomous art, on the other hand, and in the very same essay of 1928, he would call for film versions of his own works--specifically of the Magic Mountain! He did so in the expectation and with the proviso, as it were, that film would outgrow its misguided early orientation toward the drama and recognize its true potential as a narrative in pictures. Once film had become an essentially narrative art-emulating the novel instead of the drama-it would no longer have to be sneezed at. Ideally, he thought, film should follow the road of the modern novel to interiorization and address itself to the psychological and intellectual complexities that literature had learned to explore. Without much theoretical ado Thomas Mann believed that film was actually a form of narration, i.e., geschaute Erzihlung, and that das Wesen des Films demjenigen der Erzihlung [... ] verwandt [ist].3 Thus he could write: ich glaube nicht daran, dass ein guter Roman durch die Verfilmung notwendig in Grund und Boden verdorben werden muss.4 Not necessarily, to be sure; but the record of his own works on screen is, on the whole, a
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