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Venice - Mohamed Hashem Abdelsalam
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The demographic composition
of the city of Venice is unique and has been open for many
centuries to all races and ethnicities, due to its unique location and
connection to the world, its attractive beauty, and its commercial
strength. It was not content with being an incubating and receiving city
or republic, but rather it created and produced for the world much, in
architecture, plastic art, music, expeditions, printing, and other things that
made it unique globally, without any other. Venice was also an important
center for various arts throughout the ages, and an inspiration for many
writers, especially between the 13th and 18th centuries. Venice
presented the world with the most prominent and brightest names
in many fields, which still resonate to this day. In music, there is
Giuseppe Tartini and Antonio Vivaldi. Visually, there is the ancient
“School of Venice”, Jacopo Robusti, known as Jacopo Tintoretto, Paolo Cagliari,
known as Paolo Veronazzi, and Tiziano Vecellio, nicknamed Titian.
Throughout its history, the city,
with its unique architecture and design, has appeared in discreet artistic
works by major writers, from the Englishman William Shakespeare to his
contemporary compatriot Ian McEwan. And of course, in “Across the River
and into the Trees” (1950) by Ernest Hemingway, where many of the events take
place in Venice and its surroundings. Hemingway lived in Venice for long
periods, and wrote about it based on purely personal experience.
In exchange for Western artistic interest
in Venice, the Italians did not care much. In literature, for example,
not many Italian writers worked on it in their texts and works, with the
exception of Carlo Goldoni and Italo Calvino. While Shakespeare
immortalized it in the plays “Othello, or The Swamp of Venice” (1604) and “The
Merchant of Venice” (1605).
“Othello,” an inspiring and
imaginative work, has been adapted cinematically many times. Most notably
by Orson Welles and Franco Zeffirelli, who made an operatic version of it in
1986. Welles’ 1952 adaptation won him the “Grand Prix”, shared equally, at the
50th Cannes Film Festival. An adaptation that took three years to film,
and two restored versions have recently been released: one photographed by
Welles. There was another in which the producing company intervened,
modifying or revising it, or rather “distorting” it.
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Although “The Merchant of Venice”
is a very deep and funny comic drama, it has not been adapted often for cinema,
compared to “Othello.” Although “The Merchant of Venice” has been adapted
cinematically since the 1920s, the most successful version is the one directed
by British Michael Radford in 2004 with the same title, starring Al Pacino in
the role of “Shylock.” Orson Welles also adapted the play, and about half
of the film was filmed, but financial difficulties prevented the project from
being completed. Later, Wells allegedly stole the photographic
negative. However, what remained of it did not exceed 36 minutes, which
was restored and shown in 2015 at the 72nd Venice Film Festival, on the
occasion of the first centenary of the birth of Orson Welles.
Despite all this, the most famous
meeting between literature and cinema concerned with Venice, and the most
successful to date, is represented by the German Thomas Mann’s masterpiece
“Death in Venice” (1912), which Visconti adapted in 1971, after minor
modifications to the novel. In the end, its cinematic treatment did not
match the original. The most notable modification was the transformation
of its hero, the writer Aschenbach, into a musical composer. Of course,
the events of the novel and the film are known. But what is striking about
them is that it is rare for a novel to take place in Venice and move away from
the historical and touristic heart of the city. Likewise, no cinematic
works were filmed on the Lido, or on other islands of Venice.
At the Hotel de Panne in Lido,
where Aschenbach spent his vacation quietly contemplating life, art, and his
life in general, Visconti filmed his film. No one imagined what would be
the fate of the ancient hotel, which received many stars who were guests of the
Venice Film Festival, as it has been closed for many years due to its endless
restoration. It is noteworthy that the hotel, which is one of the island’s
historical landmarks, was used to film many scenes in “The English Patient”
(1996) by the British Anthony Mangella - based on the novel of the same title
by the Canadian Michael Ondaatje, published in 1992 - as the “Shepherd Hotel”
in Cairo, which burned down. In January 1952, during what is known as the
“Cairo Fire.”
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In short, it can be said that
cinematically, and perhaps this is due to the relatively short history of
cinema, the approach to Venice has not been profoundly cinematic, aesthetic and
artistic, but rather touristic, spectacle and spectacle, more than anything
else. Although most cinematic genres took the city as their background, or
the city itself was a “place” in which some or most of the events took place,
whether in spy, thriller, suspense, and adventure films, as in the James Bond
series, for example, or love, romance, and comedy films by many Western
directors, such as Steven Spielberg, Anthony Mangella, Steven Soderbergh, Paul
Schrader, Woody Allen, and Luc Besson.
Although it is difficult to
enumerate all the artistic works that dealt with the city of Venice, or used it
as a scene for their events, what is striking is that a great historical
figure, such as the traveler and explorer Marco Polo, for example, who was born
and died in Venice, did not attract major directors to address and present his
life, or even writers, with the exception of Italian Italo Calvino in
“Invisible Cities” (1972). To a lesser extent, this applies to Giacomo
Casanova, about whom not much has been made. Rather, the scandalous side of his
life was dealt with, and his person was reduced to his female relationships,
despite the unique treatment that Federico Fellini adopted in his treatment of
this rich, cultured, and unique dramatic character, who speaks languages. She
did many jobs, lived in different countries, and died as a stranger to her
homeland.
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