In the Film Death in Venice, Music Is the Narrator

In Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella Death in Venice, the writer and scholar Gustav von Aschenbach decides to take a vacation in Venice and, while there, becomes infatuated with the youth Tadzio. He gradually unravels and loses his sense of decorum, only to succumb to cholera. The novella notably lacks dialogue, so an omniscient narrator does much of the heavy lifting in propelling both the narration and the reader forward.

When it came to transposing the novella into a film, Luchino Visconti...