Content area
Full Text
Those who had the good fortune to know Victoria Ocampo and witness her involvement in the culture of her time can testify to the enormous enthusiasm she had for the cinema. In the last years of her life, when I spent time with her both in New York and Argentina, our conversations often had to do with movies she had seen, and on various occasions, with movies we saw together. One afternoon in January 1976, she suggested we go see "Seven Beauties," Swiss director Lina Wertmüller's most recent film about a Neopolitan mini-mafioso and his misadventures in Nazi Germany. Victoria had already seen this movie twice during her stay in Manhattan, but when a film intrigued her, she could go as often as five or six times. So we went to the theater and sat down in the second row, as was her custom. When the protagonist Pascualino Settebellezze (played by Gian Carlo Giannini) appeared on the screen and tipped his hat rakishly over one eye, she nudged me and whispered with a chuckle, "igual al compadrito nuestro." After the movie was over, we walked back to the Waldorf deep in discussion about the comparative features of machismo in Italy and Argentina, Wertmuller's use of Wagner's music during scenes in a concentration camp, and especially how this female director had mixed the comic and the grotesque in her film but without any real element of human tenderness. Victoria's thoughts that day would become an essay published in the last volume of her Testimonios ("Pascualino Settebellezze").
A few weeks later she insisted we go see "Ludwig," a film by Luchino Visconti based on the life of the young King Ludwig of Bavaria. Victoria had already seen this film several times and liked it much more than "Seven Beauties;" in fact she had written a lengthy essay about it some years earlier in which she had focused on Ludwig's character and his inordinate passion for Wagner's music, a preference she shared with the King. Ocampo knew that most filmgoers were drawn to the splendor of Visconti 's set decorations, but for her and in her words, "a decir verdad, si bien he mirado y admirado con placer esa parte estética, decorativa, tan diestramente manipulada por el inigualado...