The Damned
Apr 03 - Apr 07, 2009
(Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1969, 35mm, 156 min)
The Damned is a devastating account of the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany. Visconti (The Leopard) captures the political cowardice, moral dissolution and sheer social insanity of the period through a series of grandly conceived set pieces, each more nightmarish and sexually perverse than the last. Fassbinder has called this film "Perhaps the greatest film, the film that I think means as much to the history of film as Shakespeare to the history of theater."