Screening the Venetian uncanny: Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973)

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 Don’t Look Now (1973) and Luchino Visconti’s Morte a Venezia ( Death in Venice ) (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.