Le notti bianche: Visconti films Dostoevsky in Rome

In 1957, Italian director Luchino Visconti brought White Nights to the cinema. He called the film Le notti bianche, and to film it he didn't go to Russia, nor did he choose any Italian city to represent it. He built the entire city inside a studio in Rome.

A Livorno that never existed in a real port

Visconti transposed the story from Saint Petersburg to Livorno, at the end of the 1950s, with a script written by him and Suso Cecchi d'Amico. In the cast, Marcello Mastroianni, Maria Schell and Jean Marais. But it is necessary to immediately correct a common mistake: the film is not set in Rome. Rome is where it was built, not where the story takes place.

This Livorno was completely rebuilt inside Teatro 5 at Cinecittà, the work of set designers Mario Chiari and Mario Garbuglia. Bridges, canals, an entire port, all built under a roof, under artificial light, at a safe distance from any real street. The film won the Leone d'Argento in Venice in 1957, and the following year brought three Nastri d'Argento, with Mastroianni named best actor in Italian cinema.

The artifice as a response to the book

Here's why this choice isn't just a production curiosity, but the heart of this article. White Nights is Dostoevsky's most interior book. His city is a limbo between the day that insists on staying and the night that is reluctant to begin, the exact scenario of a man who lives more inside his own head than in the world. The dreamer in the novel inhabits a world of his own making, which seems more real than reality.

Visconti did not illustrate this idea. He repeated it in his own working method. By building an entire Mediterranean port inside a Roman studio, he did with the camera what Dostoevsky's dreamer does with his imagination: he built a world that replaces the world. The bridge between the film and Rome is not the city depicted on the screen, because the screen does not show Rome. It is the factory of illusion, the very craft of Cinecittà, which becomes a mirror of the book.

Two cities, two silences

It is worth noting the contrast between the two cities. The Saint Petersburg of the book is almost empty, silent, intimate, a city of few characters and many pauses. The scene built by Visconti is something else: a port of Mediterranean life, busy, almost theatrical. Neither is a real city filmed on the street. One exists only in Dostoevsky's prose, the other only within a studio theater in Rome. And it is precisely because they are not real that both manage to be so faithful to what the story demands: a space that belongs more to the dream than to the map.

Continue: White Nights, by Dostoevsky · The White Nights Dreamer · Dostoevsky in 1848, before the tortured genius · Why is Macbeth "the Scottish play"?
Source class (YouTube): Noites Brancas, de Fiódor Dostoiévski (NousCast)