visconti’s opulent melodramatic style is perfectly suited to this material. central to both this particular novella, and to the rest of mann’s work that i’m familiar with is a close engagement with the details of bourgeois life, which visconti irreverently observes to a point where it becomes satire. i was really caught by the work that his zoom is doing in this film, constantly moving in and out on bogarde sitting in his fancy hotel, in his neat little outfits. the central performance is the real key to what makes this film work: it’s a character study, told with extremely minimal dialogue. aschenbach comes across as a perfectly realized little prissy boy via all of bogard’s snooty, minuscule little facial expressions. it’s a combination of great acting, yes, but also great direction.
a lot of aschenbach’s backstory as a composer (rather than a writer, as in the novel), and the conversations about art with his buddy, seem to be lifted from elsewhere in mann’s corpus & life (particularly, Doctor Faustus). it’s interesting to make that connection between the homoeroticism of the film’s primary theme, with the autobiographic elements taken from the novella and from mann’s work in general. i thought the camera which recurs, and which is present in the foreground of the crucial climactic shot of the film, might be trying to draw some kind of parallel between visconti and mann.