Yukio Mishima on Visconti’s “The Damned”: Dangerous Decadence

In its Wagnerian manner, its German grotesquerie, its transvestitism, its nervous insanity, its ponderousness, its symphonic sense of psychological danger, its worship of the body, its unceasing dramatic tension, its excesses, its obsession with hurling every single character toward tragedy and death, its ostentation, its sensuality, its love of ritual and ceremony, its intoxication, and its shattering dark lyricism which is like a blue sky suddenly cloaked by clouds, “The Damned” recreates the hate-filled beauty of the Nazis so faithfully that it virtually becomes the thing it depicts.

Yukio Mishima