Death in Venice

Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice (1971) adapts Thomas Mann's novella, and it is among the most sumptuous and elegiac films of its era. It received a special prize at Cannes in the festival's twenty-fifth anniversary year, and it sits at the centre of the director's late, opulent run of literary adaptations.

Dirk Bogarde plays Gustav von Aschenbach with extraordinary restraint. Visconti recast Mann's writer as a composer and filled the role with the music of Gustav Mahler, whose Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony has been inseparable from the film ever since. His Venice is a turn-of-the-century city of faded grandeur, the camera drifting through the Grand Hôtel des Bains and along the misty Lido, while Aschenbach's mute fixation on the beautiful Tadzio keeps pace with the plague creeping through the canals.

Some found it static. Others saw a great film about mood, decay and unspoken longing, and its pairing of Mahler with Visconti's drifting camera changed the way cinema uses classical music, an association that still holds. The film moves like a slow tide, ravishing and mournful by turns, and its subject is beauty, ageing and the artist's surrender to both. Bogarde's mute, devastating performance is among the finest work of his career. No other film has brought Mann's prose and the operatic sensibility of Italian cinema as close together as Death in Venice does.