The Cinematheque

Luchino Visconti’s The Damned operates as a cinematic archaeology of decadence, excavating a civilization already functionally dead—its institutions moving with the eerie persistence of a corpse animated by habit, violence, and self-preserving rot. The film exposes late-stage structural decadence not merely as spectacle but as a philosophical condition in which our deepest contemporary fear is no longer human extinction but cultural extinction: the dread of surviving ourselves, condemned to inhabit the ruins of a hollowed humanistic tradition. Visconti’s lush, sumptuous images preserve these ruins with embalming clarity, turning decadence into a visual archive of cultural doom. In this sense, the imagined replay of The Damned becomes a necessary artwork: few, if any, artists could have rendered the trajectory of fascism’s rise in Europe, and Visconti’s operatic reconstruction fills this absence. The film’s approach parallels the dilemmas faced in photography, where the artist must negotiate between the documentary present—the observed reality—and the imagined real, the existential event horizon that lies beneath or beyond what is visible. Like the photographer deciding when to linger on the present and when to construct a vision that reveals hidden truths, Visconti moves from witnessing lived conditions to crafting allegorical fictions that make structural and moral decay perceptible. His work embodies a political warning: revolutions, however idealistic, calcify into coercive orders. The Damned thus becomes a portrait of power devouring itself and a necessary act of imaginative observation that confronts the thresholds of history, morality, and cultural extinction. —Stephen Waddell

In English and German with English subtitles

The Damned will be introduced by artist Stephen Waddell.