Death in Venice

About

Three lonely existences cross their paths against the backdrop of one of the most famous novellas of the 20th century. The production presents an essay about old age, beauty, and the price paid both by the observer and the observed. It explores what happens where a person turns into an image – and where the image begins a life of its own. Beauty as a power tool and as powerlessness.

Björn Andrésen, “the most beautiful boy in the world”, who portrayed the role of the charming ephebe Tadzio in Luchino Visconti’s award-winning Death in Venice (1971), died in 2025 as a failed actor, a mediocre musician, and a former child star who lost all sparkle. At his deathbed, he cursed the film’s director, who helped him shoot to fame but simultaneously ruined his life, as the actor believed. Luchino Visconti, a magician of cinematography with a penchant for decadence and a pioneer of queer poetics in film, of whom Death in Venice was a masterpiece, died in 1976. Amidst luxury, interiors decorated with baroque frescoes, and hundreds of cigarette butts, holding the hand of his handsome lover (the actor Helmut Berger, who reached global fame thanks to Visconti), he nonetheless dies feeling completely alone and praying in whisper not to end up in hell.

The main character of Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, Professor Gustav von Aschenbach, died in 1911, having banished any love or desire from his life. Dying, he gazes at a beautiful young man to whom he has never spoken, whom he has never touched, yet whom he has loved. His lips, rasping, merely utter the unattainable idol’s name.

The production combines spoken words, film image, and the performer’s body in a single interconnected nervous system of Laterna magika.