The Plot of a Riddle. On Luchino Visconti’s Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa

Igielska Anna, Fabuła zagadki. O Błędnych gwiazdach Wielkiej Niedźwiedzicy LuchinaViscontiego [The Plot of a Riddle. On Luchino Visconti’s Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa]. „Przestrzenie Teorii” 32. Poznań 2019, Adam Mickiewicz University Press, pp. 45–75. ISSN 1644-6763. DOI 10.14746/pt.2019.32.2. The article (of an analytical and interpretative nature) is devoted to the literary background of Luchino Visconti’s Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa (1965). The author studies in detail the links to three works, which form, as she claims, the primary points of literary references. What the article discusses, apart from the myth of Electra and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s novel Forse che si, forse che no (1910), are Richard Wagner’s music drama Die Walküre (1870) – absent so far in the Viscontian literature concerning the said movie – and Thomas Mann’s novella Wälsungenblut (1905/1958), which argues with Wagner’s work in a parodistic manner. By demonstrating how Visconti (1) transposes the literary allusions, (2) combines them into an overall structure, and (3) uses them on the plot level to encode the topic of brother- sister incest, the author comes to the conclusion that what we have here is a story in the form of a riddle, which Visconti dubbed for his own use a “crime movie unlike any other”. That riddle appears as a settlement with a romantic myth of love and carries on the poetics of philosophical ambivalence, so proper to Visconti