When great directors consciously set out to create masterpieces, it always seems to end badly. The result is lifeless and remote, and often a throw-back to some old abandoned manner…. It has now happened to Luchino Visconti in Notti Bianche…. (p. 249)

This conte, for it is little more, survives only as a basis for an uneasy attempt—in aesthetic rather than human terms—to fuse a new, enclosed, and formal mise en scène with an old, irrevocably lost nostalgia. Exquisite in gesture, marooned in time, Notti Bianche has had a great number of the most studied simplicities and elaborate fabrications of the pre-1925 avant-garde lavished upon it…. In its stylised, artificial settings, its consistently beautiful camera-work and effects of chiaroscuro; its arabesques of movement; its emotional bric-a-brac and abstract, idealised passions; above all in its disenchanted expression of the illusory nature of love—Notti Bianche is a...