by SIMONE KUSSATZ
This is a film review I wrote about Luchino Visconti’s film Sandra (Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa...) from 1965, which I saw during a major Luchino Visconti retrospective hosted by the UCLA Film and Television Archive at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood. After a brief scene of a party given by Sandra (Claudia Cardinale) and her husband Andrew (Michael Andrew), with an international crowd of people conversing in different languages and mingling in front of a grand piano played by a classical pianist, the viewer witnesses a long sequence of a fast ride in a convertible, traveling through Geneva, the Alps in northern Italy, Florence and Tuscany, and finally to the small city of Volterra. During the ride, the camera is positioned inside the car, so that we do not see the occupants, but only their view as they pass freeway signs, bridges, building facades, and everything else that surrounds them. Volterra is where Sandra grew up. It is the place where her childhood home stands, where her mother betrayed her father and later became mentally ill, where her father was taken by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz, where he died, and where Sandra's husband Andrew discovers the incestuous relationship between Sandra and her brother Gianni. It is also Gianni's final destination, where he commits suicide, and the place where Sandra wishes to pay homage to her father through a bust placed in the garden. As much as the events in Sandra (1965) are gloomy and mysterious, so is the aesthetic of the film. Shot in black and white, many scenes take place at night or in dimly lit rooms. In one scene, for instance, Sandra walks alone through a completely dark garden on a windy night toward the bust of her father, which is covered with a white piece of cloth. As she embraces the bust and the white cloth rises into the air, one might think that she is embracing a ghost. The fast ride in the car toward Volterra seems symbolic. It is a journey from the present into the past, a dive into the subconscious, where the tragedy is imprinted in Sandra's mind. The reference to Sophocles' Electra is obvious, although slightly modified. There is Sandra as Electra, and Gianni as Orestes; their dead father evokes Sophocles' Agamemnon, who was killed by his wife's lover. Although Gianni, like Orestes, becomes mentally unstable, in Visconti's film, he does not kill his mother but himself. In Visconti's version of Electra, the Trojan War becomes World War II, and the ancient site of Delphi becomes Volterra. The film does not go into detail about World War II or Auschwitz. Therefore, it does not serve, as many war films do, as a means of confronting or overcoming a traumatic past. Instead, the war and the Holocaust provide the film with another layer of complexity and a particular perspective on the characters and their relationships. The interaction between the characters is more visual than verbal. Their eyes and body language tell us more than their words. Although furnished with antiques, Sandra's home seems to contain a void. The large rooms, which have remained unused for a long time, express a profound sense of loneliness. The monotonous sound of a ticking clock, interrupted only occasionally by classical piano music, such as a nocturne by César Franck, adds to the sadness that accompanies the characters' lives.
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