In this post I'd like to continue the cinema/costume thread I started yesterday, focusing this time on Luchino Visconti's Senso (Livia or The Wanton Countess, 1954).
A restored version of the film was presented yesterday at the Cannes Film Festival, so it seems rather apt to briefly analyse this film and its connections with art and costumes.
Visconti had called to work with him on this film the great costume designer Marcel Escoffier.
The Italian director wanted him to transform main actress Alida Valli into a sophisticated foreigner, almost "de-Italianising" her: her style and elegance had to be highlighted through what she worn and she had to turn into the focal point of the film, shining through all the scenes with their backgrounds inspired by the paintings from the Italian Impressionism.
Often Visconti used precise paintings as the inspirations for particular scenes in his films, but for Senso, he used paintings not as references or mere quotes, but as tools that could transform the cinematographic message and create a new language.
This is why each scene and each sequence in Senso was inspired by a precise painter, from Silvestro Lega and Michele Cammarano to Vito D'Ancona and Luigi Gioli, Telemaco Signorini, Giovanni Fattori, Giuseppe Abbati, Anselm Feuerbach, Alfred Stevens, Asher Brown Durand and Francesco Hayez.
Lega’s paintings and in particular Il canto dello stornello (1867) and Una Visita (1868) inspired the colours and silhouettes of the costumes for the female characters, such as Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli) and Laura (Rina Morelli); Anselm Feuerbach’s works inspired the hairstyles for the female characters and Alfred Stevens' paintings were the main inspirations for the costume worn by Alida Valli in the final scene, while Hayez's The Kiss (1859) turned into a passionate kiss between Livia and Franz (Farley Granger).
The Verona-based flat of Lieutenant Franz Mahler and the apartment of the Austrian soldiers were inspired by Signorini's paintings such as La toilette del mattino (1898).
The entire scene about the battle in Visconti's film was instead taken from Fattori's military paintings, in particular those made between 1860 and 1870, such as Il campo italiano dopo la battaglia di Magenta (1861) that was almost entirely “pilfered” by Visconti.
Young and talented Piero Tosi was chosen to design the costumes for the secondary characters such as soldiers, peasants and middle class characters.
In the end, Tosi's job revealed itself as the most difficult: the costume designer gave great importance to minor characters as he used to conceive them as fundamental for the film plot.
Tosi claimed indeed that secondary characters kept together a film and their costumes were the ones that gave the greatest satisfaction to a clever and skilled costume designer as they could be easily adapted and changed, while the costumes for the main characters had often to take into account the tantrums of the celebrities starring in the main roles.
Tosi didn't have any assistants at the time so he would wake up at dawn and start working on the outfits for the extras, real soldiers grouped in a school in Rome's Mincio, taking care of their uniforms and make up. To design their costumes Tosi had carried out a meticulous research on historical images and was inspired by the colours of the Italian painters as Visconti had suggested.
As usual the director would check that the costumes were perfect, making sure the weapons were historically correct, the soldiers' backpacks were in order and their blankets were accurately rolled up. Visconti also used to pay great attention to the peasants' costumes checking that their colours were the exact shades he had originally chosen with Tosi.
Senso was released in February-March 1955. At the time Tosi was already working as costume designer for Bellini’s La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalker) directed by Visconti, featuring Maria Callas and staged at Milan's La Scala, but this is another story and I will concentrate about it in another post.
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