Skip to content
1981
Volume 13, Issue 4
  • ISSN: 2047-7368
  • E-ISSN: 2047-7376

Abstract

This article argues for a spatial and materially rooted understanding of the uncanny by looking at two contemporaneous yet seldom compared Venice films: Nicolas Roeg’s (1973) and Luchino Visconti’s () (1971). Situated in Venice’s multi-faceted cultural historical legacy, an intermedial and image-based uncanny emerges from the interplay between cinematic form and the films’ overdetermined setting. The figure of the interstice, in turn, materializes the uncanny’s own conceptual indeterminacy. Drawing on paracinematic moments in both Freud’s (1919) essay and contemporary reflections from the Venice-based architectural theorists Manfredo Tafuri and Aldo Rossi, this article revisits the tendency to read Visconti and Roeg’s films through a purely psychologizing lens and explores instead how, through the modality of the uncanny, these cinematic representations recursively remediate the political and environmental material realities of Venice during the 1970s.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1386/jicms_00320_1
2025-08-23
2026-04-22

Metrics

Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Aristarco, Guido (1988), ‘Luchino Visconti: Critic or poet of decadence?’ (trans. L. Bohne), Film Criticism, 12:3, pp. 5863.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Bachelard, Gaston (1994), The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places (trans. M. Jolas), Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Benjamin, Walter (1968), ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (trans. H. Zohn), New York: Schocken Books, pp. 21752.
    [Google Scholar]
  4. Bondanella, Peter and Pacchioni, Federico (2017), A History of Italian Cinema, 2nd ed., London: Bloomsbury.
    [Google Scholar]
  5. Butler, Judith (1988), ‘Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory’, Theatre Journal, 40:4, pp. 51931, https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893.
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Byron, Lord (1860), Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt, London: Murray.
    [Google Scholar]
  7. Cixous, Hélène (1976), ‘Fiction and its phantoms: A reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The “uncanny”)’, New Literary History, 7:3, pp. 52548.
    [Google Scholar]
  8. Deleuze, Gilles (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image (trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta), Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  9. Dempsey, Michael (1974), ‘Reviews: Don’t Look Now’, Film Quarterly, 27:3, pp. 3943, https://doi.org/10.2307/1211357.
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Derrida, Jacques (1987), Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, Paris: Galilée.
    [Google Scholar]
  11. Freud, Sigmund ([1905] 1942), ‘Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie’, in A. Freud, E. Bibring, W. Hoffer, E. Kris and O. Isakower (eds), Sigmund Freud: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5, Frankfurt: Fischer, pp. 27145.
    [Google Scholar]
  12. Freud, Sigmund ([1919] 1947), ‘Das Unheimliche’, in A. Freud, E. Bibring, W. Hoffer, E. Kris and O. Isakower (eds), Sigmund Freud: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, pp. 22768.
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Freud, Sigmund (1925), ‘The uncanny’, in E. Jones (ed.), Collected Papers (trans. A. Strachey), vol. 4, London: Hogarth Press, pp. 368407.
    [Google Scholar]
  14. Freud, Sigmund (2003), The Uncanny (trans. D. McLintock), London: Penguin.
    [Google Scholar]
  15. Galerstein, Carolyn (1985), ‘Images of decadence in Visconti’s Death in Venice’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 13:1, pp. 2934.
    [Google Scholar]
  16. Ghosh, Amitav (2016), The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  17. Howard, Deborah (1997), ‘Venice as dolphin: Further investigations into Jacobo de’ Barbari’s view’, Artibus et Historiae, 18:35, pp. 10111, https://doi.org/10.2307/1483541.
    [Google Scholar]
  18. Hunt, Leon (1992), ‘A (sadistic) night at the opera: Notes on the Italian horror film’, The Velvet Light Trap, 30, pp. 6575.
    [Google Scholar]
  19. James, Marie-Louise (2021), ‘The erotic gaze of the Italienreise: Wilhelm von Gloeden and Der Tod in Venedig’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 90:3, pp. 22952, https://doi.org/10.1080/09593683.2021.1999611.
    [Google Scholar]
  20. Jentsch, Ernst (1906), ‘Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen’, Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift, 22&23, pp. 195–98, 203–05.
    [Google Scholar]
  21. Kilbourn, Russell (2015), ‘Adapting Venice: Intermedial relations in Visconti, Sebald, and Kafka’, Mosaic, 48:3, pp. 5774.
    [Google Scholar]
  22. Lippe, George B. von der (1999), ‘Death in Venice in literature and film: Six 20th-century versions’, Mosaic, 32:1, pp. 3554.
    [Google Scholar]
  23. Mann, Thomas (1919), Der Tod in Venedig, Berlin: Fischer.
    [Google Scholar]
  24. Maurier, Daphne du (2017), Don’t Look Now, London: Penguin.
    [Google Scholar]
  25. Morton, Timothy (2018), Being Ecological, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  26. Mulvey, Laura (2006), Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion Books.
    [Google Scholar]
  27. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (2003), Luchino Visconti, London: British Film Institute.
    [Google Scholar]
  28. O’Rawe, Des (2005), ‘Venice in film: The postcard and the palimpsest’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 33:3, pp. 22432.
    [Google Scholar]
  29. Palmer, Paulina (2012), The Queer Uncanny: New Perspectives on the Gothic, Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  30. Palmer, James and Riley, Michael (1995), ‘Seeing, believing, and “knowing” in narrative film: Don’t Look Now revisited’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 23:1, pp. 1425.
    [Google Scholar]
  31. Peucker, Brigitte (1994), Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  32. Pfister, Manfred and Schaff, Barbara (1999), ‘Introduction’, in M. Pfister and B. Schaff (eds), Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 114.
    [Google Scholar]
  33. Roeg, Nicolas (1973), Don’t Look Now, UK and Italy: British Lion Films and F.A.R. International Films.
    [Google Scholar]
  34. Rossi, Aldo (1981), A Scientific Autobiography (trans. L. Venuti), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  35. Rossi, Aldo (1993), Aldo Rossi: Drawings and Paintings (eds M. Adjmi and G. Bertolotto), Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  36. Ruggiero, Guido (1985), The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  37. Sanderson, Mark (1996), Don’t Look Now, London: British Film Institute.
    [Google Scholar]
  38. Scappettone, Jennifer (2014), Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice, New York: Columbia University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  39. Shakespeare, William ([1622] 1883), The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, London: W. Swan Sonnenschein & Company.
    [Google Scholar]
  40. Simmel, Georg (2007), ‘Venice’ (trans. U. Teucher and T. M. Kemple), Theory, Culture & Society, 24:7–8, pp. 4246, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276407084468.
    [Google Scholar]
  41. Standish, Dominic (2012), Venice in Environmental Peril? Myth and Reality, Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
    [Google Scholar]
  42. Tafuri, Manfredo (1980), ‘L’éphémère est éternel: Aldo Rossi a Venezia’, Domus, 602, pp. 711.
    [Google Scholar]
  43. Tafuri, Manfredo (1987), The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (trans. P. d’Acierno and R. Connolly), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  44. Tafuri, Manfredo (1995), Venice and the Renaissance (trans. J. Levine), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  45. Vidler, Anthony (1987), ‘The architecture of the uncanny: The unhomely houses of the romantic sublime’, Assemblage, 3:3, pp. 629, https://doi.org/10.2307/3171062.
    [Google Scholar]
  46. Visconti, Luchino (1971), Morte a Venezia, Italy and France: Alfa Cinematografica and Productions Editions Cinématographiques Françaises.
    [Google Scholar]
  47. Walley, Jonathan (2020), Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  48. Webber, Andrew (2001), ‘Mann’s man’s world: Gender and sexuality’, in R. Robertson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 6483.
    [Google Scholar]
  49. Wilson, Michael (1998), ‘Art is ambiguous: The zoom in Death in Venice’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 26:2, pp. 15356.
    [Google Scholar]
  50. Binotto, Johannes (2013), Tat/Ort: Das Unheimliche und sein Raum in der Kultur, Zürich and Berlin: Diaphanes.
    [Google Scholar]
  51. Nies, Martin (2014), Venedig als Zeichen: Literarische Bilder der unwahrscheinlichsten der Städte 1787–2013, Marburg: Schüren.
    [Google Scholar]
  52. Webber, Andrew (2008), ‘Introduction: Moving images of cities’, in A. Webber and E. Wilson (eds), Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis, New York: Wallflower Press, pp. 113.
    [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.1386/jicms_00320_1
Loading
/content/journals/10.1386/jicms_00320_1
Loading

Data & Media loading...

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a success
Invalid data
An error occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error
Please enter a valid_number test