🎬 The Damned

The power and wealth of the von Essenbeck family remained untouched, even though Germany lost the war and depression followed. Now it is 1934 and the baron has summoned his family to dinner. This occasion will bring to his house a cousin who is just entering the Nazi party. She is accompanied by the manager of the baron's company. Two little girls in the salon recite verses and then play hide-and-seek with their cousin Martin. Suddenly a scream rings out. The baron has been shot with a pistol by their father and the father flees... In this world there is no one positive. Dark in history, when money no longer means power and cannot protect people from the cruelty of German fascism. In the film Twilight of the Gods, director Luchino Visconti addresses one of the central themes of his work: the moral decline of the upper social strata and the disintegration of the family. On the eve of World War II, the family of steel magnates the von Essenbecks must face a new social situation. Their wealth and influence mean nothing without proper political orientation. Baron Joachim von Essenbeck summons the entire family on the occasion of his birthday celebrations. He wants to announce that despite his antipathy toward national socialism, for the good of the family business it is necessary to cooperate with the new power. Therefore, he removes the left-wing democrat Herbert from the leadership of the company and appoints his older son Konstantin, a member of the SA, in his place. The ambitious daughter Sophia also senses an opportunity and hopes that in the new era she will be able to rise to the head of the company together with her fiancé Friedrich. That same night Sophia persuades Friedrich to shoot the old baron in such a way that suspicion falls on the dismissed Herbert. Thus begins within the respected and influential family a ruthless struggle for power, which foreshadows the steep fall of all its members. Twilight of the Gods is a brilliant historical study of the rise of Nazism with the support of the elite, but it is also a timeless depiction of destructive human passions: ambition, lust for power, jealousy, domineering, and cruelty. The film is the first work of the loose, so-called "German" trilogy (Twilight of the Gods, Death in Venice, Ludwig), which is among the last peaks of Visconti's filmography.