Le Notti Bianche is Luchino Visconti’s 1957 adaptation of Dostoevsky’s short story “White Nights”, newly released by the Criterion Collection. One of the things that has always impressed me about Visconti is the breadth of his visual language. Where Death in Venice was painted in roseate pastels, and The Leopard in the unforgiving brightness of the Sicilian sun, Le Notti Bianche is cut with the sort of engraver’s knife that an Impressionist like Fritz Lang would use. It is a style that goes well with Dostoevsky’s hopelessly romantic tale, in which Maria Schell’s character and that of her soldier lover are, like the background, drawn so starkly as to seem unreal. Romantic, yes, but no more sentimental than the blinding white light into which Mastroianni wakes each morning. Like the tragic hero of any film noir, Mastroianni is relentlessly drawn into his attraction, and forced to pay the cost of love.

I have occasionally argued that the detective story, reaching its apotheosis in film noir, is the quintessential modern art form. Its heros are strong, unsentimental, and above all convinced that the truth is accessible, whether to reason, intuition, or good ol’ American common sense. But a dark element hovers at the edges of these stories, at first as a sort of madness that has to be shut out in order for the detective to see clearly. Yet even for Holmes, that poster child for Cartesianism, the madness begins to assume an uncanny resemblance to the face in the mirror. What is Moriarty, after all, but another Holmes? By the time the image of the detective finds its way into films, the bête noir has become central: no longer an external madness, but a seed of destruction carried in the heart of the Modern dream. Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe stumbles about like a blind man from fight to fight, solving his puzzles not so much through reason or insight, but because of who he is, The Detective. Evil is blinded by its fear of him: but good is no less blind or afraid.

By the 1950’s this metaphor was being stated explictly, as in Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly where the detective quite literally becomes “death, destroyer of worlds”. There is a tendency for artistic movements, once they become self-conscious (aware of their defining metaphors), to rapidly become moribund as well. Film noir did not survive much past the 50’s, except as one of Hollywood’s “genres”. But in Visconti’s hands it acquires a certain luminance, by which we can see that at least some of its roots run back into Dostoevsky, Romanticism, and the deep awe with which the 19th century looked on the power of love. It was a power both desired and feared, and it is no accident that the madness and irrationality that almost invariably brings down the (always male) hero of a noir is not evil, but Eros.

Thomas Mann writes in The Magic Mountain that there is a great danger in attempting to separate (in the mind or the heart) life from death, for by doing so death achieves a positive existence, and a great power to attract and fascinate. The same must be said of love and suffering, for love that avoids suffering becomes monstrous, demanding, and ultimately evil. Selfish love is a far greater horror than the atom bomb: what the intensely painful ending of Le Notti Bianchi says is that for love to remain good it must be willing to suffer.

(cdm | LeNottiBianche )