Ludwig

Keep Him in Mind

Perhaps Visconti's supreme achievement, in its as-close-to-as-intended length of 4 hours 18 minutes. A game of rooms, mansions, castles, a subterranean swan lake, the Neuschwanstein spire, passing through all the major themes of Visconti's oeuvre, such that the film-work itself represents the super-palace of Luchino's ego, so dense with signs made out of the opulent appointments (surely the most singularly lavish film in the history of cinema, outdoing even Kubrick's Barry Lyndon) that were it not for the more overt talkings-to-camera, the picture's Marxist precedents might be perceptible solely in its 'system of things.'

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