Existentialist Ideas in Luchino Visconti’s Films: Intertextual and Contextual Perspectives

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of the embodiment of existentialist ideas in the cinematic work of the 1940s — 1960s of the Italian director Luchino Visconti. The main attention is paid to the screen adaptation of the novel The Stranger (1942) by the French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus in the 1967 Visconti’s film of the same name. The text of the novel The Stranger reflects the main existentialist ideas of Camus during the period of the ‘philosophy of the absurd’, including the concepts that became philosophical categories of the non-classical aesthetics of the 20th century: ‘boredom’, ‘fatigue’, ‘care’, ‘abandonment’, ‘alienation’, ‘hostility of the world’, and ‘alienation of the world’. In this series, perhaps, in the first place is the problem of the meaning of human existence in the face of inevitable death, which is sometimes sudden, violent and unfair. In modern theoretical discourse, as a rule, this problem is considered at the intersection of a number of areas in the humanities — philosophical anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, art criticism, etc. Given the great role of visuality in the media space of the 21st century, screen forms of understanding the ‘eternal questions’ of human existence are of great importance. In this perspective, the appeal to film adaptations of outstanding philosophical and literary works is relevant, suggesting the use of interdisciplinary approaches in the process of their theoretical analysis. At the same time, the intertextual and contextual approaches to Visconti’s work allow us to identify new important details in the evolution of the artistic style, the visual, sound and editing techniques of the director in the aspect of existentialist issues.

Keywords

• albert camus
• luchino visconti
• novel and film the stranger
• philosophy of the absurd
• “the absurd man”
• ‘the rebellious man’
• history of foreign cinema
• film adaptations