Visconti. History and Myth. Beauty and Death

Luchino Visconti, at the beginning of his career, became one of the ideologists of neorealism, and later went far beyond this direction. Film critic and film scholar Andrei Plakhov speaks of Visconti not only as a paradoxical director but also as a myth-maker — a 'leopard' of world culture at the dawn of its decline. At the same time, the book about Visconti, who became the author's favorite director back in his student years, is an extremely personal statement: Plakhov refers to the texts of his teacher, one of the leading film critics of the 1960s, Vera Vasilyevna Shitova. Plakhov and Shitova's reflections on the Italian director create a dialogue in which, thanks to Visconti, the past, present, and future are interconnected.