Luchino Visconti: The greatest director to ever make period movies, according to Robert Eggers
Four movies aren’t usually enough to get a clear idea of what a director is all about, but in the case of Robert Eggers, just two movies would have been plenty.
Starting with 2015’s folklore horror movie The Witch and moving on to 2019’s black and white psychological drama The Lighthouse, Eggers demonstrated a clear pattern. In addition to his preoccupation with religion, folklore, and the occult, he is razor-focused on period detail, ensuring that every one of his films is as authentic to their respective periods as possible.
While period movies might be repetitive in the hands of some filmmakers, Eggers has demonstrated how varied and creative you can be in just four movies. The Witch was set in 17th-century New England, The Lighthouse was set in 1890s coastal New England, 2022’s The Northman was set in 895 Scandinavia, and 2024’s Nosferatu was set in mid-19th century Germany. In all of these films, Eggers went to extreme lengths to provide authenticity on every level.
The dialogue in The Witch was drawn almost entirely from court transcripts and diaries kept during the period, and the furniture was made using the same tools, materials, and techniques that the Puritans in that era used. For Nosferatu, Eggers brought in a Romanian author and academic to recreate the dead Dacian language, which was a specific dialect spoken by the inhabitants of the Carpathian Mountains during the period that the fictional Count Orlok was alive. He also requested that his design team uncover the exact type of embroidery sewn into the hoods of the cloaks worn by people in the Hunedoara region in Transylvania in 1838.
Given this appreciation for period detail in his own movies, it is hardly surprising that some of Eggers’s favourite directors are ones who took a similar approach to their craft. During a visit to Criterion’s closet of DVDs, the Nosferatu director singled out one filmmaker for his devotion to period authenticity – Luchino Visconti. Pulling the 1971 film Death in Venice from the shelf, Eggers said, “Visconti and his collaborators’ attention to detail in creating the period world is something that I, shockingly, really love.”
One film from the Italian auteur that made a particular impression on him was 1963’s The Leopard, a sweeping tale of an ageing Sicilian prince during the mid-19th century. “When they open up the closet at a ball and it’s filled with, like, hundreds and hundreds of chamber pots, I’m like, ‘This is gold,’” Eggers said.
Visconti had an unusual stylistic trajectory. He was one of the unofficial founding members of Italian neorealism in the 1940s, a filmmaking movement defined by its adherence to stripped-back naturalism. In the mid-1950s, however, he began making opulent period movies in luxurious colours. The throughline of all his films was contextual authenticity, whether he was making a film about present-day northern Italy or 19th-century Sicily.
Eggers was quick to highlight the work of costume designer Piero Tosi, who was a pioneer in his field and earned five Oscar nominations, including for his work in The Leopard and Death in Venice. Throughout his career, he worked with everyone from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Franco Zeffirelli. In 2014, he received an honorary award for his contributions to the medium.
