Luchino Visconti lives large over the Italian cinema landscape. To be remembered and recognized as a genius in a nation that has produced so many genius filmmakers, a director really has to be at the top of their game all the time. Visconti, the creator of such films as 'Death in Venice', 'Ludwig', 'La Terra Trema', 'The Leopard', 'The Damned', and 'Rocco and His Brothers', rarely put a step wrong, putting some of the most memorable images of Italian cinema to film. But in his private life he led the kind of adventures that, even today, would have seen him branded a heretic in the puritanical USA. An open homosexual, an avowed Communist, and a silver-spoon-fed aristocrat, his films echoed his life in ways that were rarely complimentary, but always stunning.