Whenever people say contrasting things about a film or a place, you feel curious to see it for yourself. As for cities, the ones I have probably heard the most mixed opinions on are Saint Petersburg, Amsterdam and Venice. It’s not only canals that they have in common. As for Saint Petersburg, I first visited it (and apparently declared my love for it in public) when I was a seven-year old child. My grandma used to say afterwards that I’d exclaimed ‘it’s the best night of my life’ when they took me out to see bridge lifting over the Neva river, much to the amusement of numerous locals and tourists watching the world-famous white nights. Seventeen years later I found out that I’m with those who are fascinated by Amsterdam. It was in June 2014, when I actually flew there two times in a row – one of them in the cockpit of a cargo Boeing 747, incidentally. As for Venice, I saw it in January 2019 and fell in love at once, and ever since then I’ve thought that it was probably the most beautiful day of my life – so far.
A few years before going to Venice I came across a tv programme made by Konstantin Ernst in 1995 and broadcast as part of a retrospective of Channel One shows. It somehow attracted me with its distinct melancholy tone and slow-paced retro style, even though the author’s impression of the city later turned out to be very different from mine. Among other things, he mentioned a film called Morte a Venezia, which is based on the novella Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. The film was on my never-ending and ever-increasing list for a while, and last September I finally had a chance to watch it in a cinema. The screening was preceded with a talk by the conductor Teodor Currentzis, who said that Gustav Mahler’s music, the Fifth Symphony in particular, is one of the main characters in the Luchino Visconti film. A couple of days later I realized that my favourite figure skating ice dance pair, the Canadians Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, had set their stunning Olympic free programme to the same music, winning gold in Vancouver in 2010.
And speaking of Venice in films, last spring I was lucky to watch two beautiful new documentaries: ‘Tintoretto. L’artista che uccise la pittura’, which showed me how many more places there are in the city waiting to be seen, and ‘Molecole’, which felt much more than a documentary to me.
12/21/2021
/Photo made by me on 24/01/2019/