I have to send Death in Venice back to Netflix. This is another film I really don’t want to let go!

It’s based on Thomas Mann’s novella by the same name. Thomas Mann said the character of Prof. Aschenbach was, in part, based on Gustav Mahler. He had been inspired to write the novella after seeing Mahler break down in tears on a train departing Venice. It was the physical appearance of Aschenbach, not his character, that was based on Mahler. Mahler’s Third and Fifth Symphonies are used in the movie and Gustav von Aschenbach looks very similar to Gustav Mahler in the film. Director Luchino Visconti turns Aschenbach into composer rather than the writer Mann portrayed him as in the novella.

I don’t know who Arthur is, maybe a friend, or maybe the devil’s advocate? There isn’t a lot of dialog in the film, but I did write down the conversation between Gustav von Aschenbach and Alfred on beauty. It seems likely that I’ll want to come back to it after Nausea because it seems to reflect some of Sartre’s thoughts on art….

By aligning himself with Apollo (the god of reason and intellect), Aschenbach has denied Dionysus, the god of unreason and passion (a theme straight out of Nietzsche).

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Alfred: Beauty. You mean your spiritual conception of beauty.

Gustav: But do you deny the ability of the artist to create from the spirit?

Alfred: Yes, Gustav. That is precisely what I deny.

Gustav: So then, according to you, our labor as artists is –

Alfred: Labor, exactly! Do you really believe in beauty as the product of labor?

Gustav: Yes, I do.

Alfred: That’s how beauty is born, in total disregard for your labor or mine. It pre-exists our presumption as artists. Your great error, my dear friend, is to consider life… reality as a limitation.

Gustav: But isn’t that what it is? Reality only distracts and degrades us. You know, sometimes I think that artists are rather like hunters aiming in the dark. They don’t know what their target is, and they don’t know if they’ve hit it. But you can’t expect life to illuminate the target and steady your aim. The creation of beauty and purity is a spiritual act.

Alfred: No, Gustav. No. Beauty belongs to the senses. Only to the senses!

Gustav: You cannot reach the spirit through the senses. You cannot. It’s only be complete domination of the senses that you can ever achieve wisdom, truth and human dignity.

Alfred: Wisdom? Human dignity? What use are they? Genius is a divine gift. No: a divine affliction. A sinful, morbid flash fire of natural gifts.

Gustav: I reject the demonic virtues of art.

Alfred: And you are wrong! Evil is a necessity. It is the food of genius….

Gustav: You know, Alfred, Art is the highest source of education, and the artist has to be exemplary. He must be a model of balance and strength. He cannot be ambiguous.

Alfred: But art is ambiguous. And music, the most ambiguous of all the arts. It is ambiguity made a science. Wait! [Sits down at the piano.] Listen to this chord, or this one. You can interpret them in any way you like. You have before you an entire series of mathematical combinations unforeseen and inexhaustible. A paradise of double meanings in which you, more than anyone else romp and roll about like a calf in clover. [Plays a melody.] Don’t you hear it? Do you recognize it?

….

Alfred: That’s not shame, that’s fear. Shame’s a spiritual distress to which you are immune because you are immune to feeling. You are a man of avoidance, of dislike, the keeper of distances. You are afraid to have direct honest contact with anything! Because of your rigid standards of morality you want your behavior to be as perfect as the music you compose. Every slip is a fall, a catastrophe, resulting in irreparable contamination.

Gustav: I am contaminated!

Alfred: If only you were! To be in debt to one’s own senses for a condition which is irredeemably corrupt and sick. What joy for an artist! Think what a dry and arid ting good health is. Especially if it’s of the soul no less than the body.

Gustav: I have to find my balance somehow.

Alfred: How unfortunate that art is so indifferent to personal morality otherwise you would be supreme, unreachable, inimitable. Tell me, do you know what lies at the bottom of the mainstream? Mediocrity.

Gustav: Stop!

Alfred: It’s yours! It’s all your music!

SPOILER WARNING!!!

Toward the end of the movie, Gustav has a flashback of presenting a composition that angers the audience. He is hissed and booed and retreats to a room where people try to storm him, but his wife pushes them out. Alfred tells him there are people who want to see him, and Gustav asks him to send them away. Alfred says, “Send them away? I will deliver you to them … They will judge you. And they will condemn you.” As Gustav comes back to the present, Alfred’s words continue, “Truth – human dignity – all finished. Now there is no reason why you cannot go to your grave with your music. You have achieved perfect balance. The man and the artist are one: they have touched bottom together.”

At the very end of the movie, upon Gustav’s death, we hear Alfred’s voice again: “Chastity is the gift of purity, not the painful result of old age. And you are old, Gustav – and in all the world there is no impurity so impure as old age.”