Among the major auteurs who emerged during Italian cinema’s mid-century heyday–a pantheon bright with such international superstars as Rossellini, Fellini, De Sica and Antonioni–Luchino Visconti is arguably the most underseen, or overlooked, at least in these parts and days. Often described as a filmmaker at odds with his compatriots’ defining tendencies–embracing artifice and opulence over the guileless naturalism of his fellow neo-realists, for example, or luxuriating in the operatic pomp of 19th-century melodrama despite the era’s high-modern predilection for alienation and absurdism–Viconti produced too many films, in too many modes, over too long a stretch of time to be defined by these not-exactly-wrong reductions. Need evidence? This summer, thanks to our ever-blessed neighbors at the Harvard Film Archive, you can feast your eyes on it!

6/1-7/15 Luchino Visconti, Architect of Neorealism
Harvard Film Archive
Carpenter Center
24 Quincy St.
Cambridge, MA
02138