I have always been attracted to Stendhal. I’d have liked to make The Charterhouse of Parma – that was my ideal. If cuts hadn’t been made in my film and if it had been edited as I wished, then it really would have been truly about Fabrice at the battle of Waterloo. Of Fabrice passing behind the battle. And Countess Serpieri modelled on the Duchess of Sanseverina. (…) I gave it a historical slant right from the outset. I even wanted to call it Custoza, naming it after a famous Italian defeat. But there was a cry of indignation: from Lux, the minister, the censors… (Even Senso was rejected in the beginning: the clapperboard bore the name Uragano d’Estate during filming). Hence the battle originally took on much greater importance. I had intended to outline a general background of Italian history and to use this as a context to Countess Serpieri’s personal affairs. However, when it came down to it, this was nothing more than the portrait of a certain class. What interested me was to give an account of a wrong and disastrous war pursued by a single class. The ending was also originally entirely different from the one you see now. I filmed it at night, in a street in Rome’s Trastevere, precisely the one where Livia runs and screams in the second version. But the first did not finish with Franz’s death. Livia could be seen passing among groups of drunken soldiers, and the final sequence showed a small, very young – just 16 years old – Austrian soldier blind drunk. He was leaning against a wall, singing a victory song, the same that could be heard in the town. Then he broke off to sob and sob and sob, shouting: “Long live Austria!” Gualino, old Gualino – my producer, a lovely man – came to watch the filming and he kept whispering in my ear: “It’s risky, very risky.” Perhaps, but that ending attracted me so much more. Franz was left to his own business, nobody took any notice of Franz! Who cared if he died or not! He was ignored after the scene in his room, where he revealed how repulsive he was. Placing him before the firing squad would have been pointless. And so we were left with her running to report him and fleeing along the street. As she weaved among prostitutes, becoming a sort of prostitute herself, going from one soldier to the next.”

Luchino Visconti, Entretien avec Luchino Visconti, edited by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Jean Domarchi, “Cahiers du Cinéma”, no. 93, March 1959

Camillo Boito’s short story (1883) provided Visconti with the material for his best film and one of the masterpieces of Italian cinema (…) The story of Senso tells of two people submerged in their love, which they themselves see as sad and shameful, and which leads to their reciprocal destruction. Each is for the other both prison and executioner. Their entire affair develops alongside History, in which their inaction, their passivity and a kind of social curse obstruct them from taking part. They are impotent but lucid representatives of a world which ispassing away. In them the positive is dead: this is why it is difficult to respond to their intent of melodrama or opera. Obviously opera is the dominant aesthetic reference which accompanies their trajectory, yet it serves as a requiem whose icy and funereal lyricism does not consent to show the least pity in their regard. Visconti views his characters with cold detachment. He shows them in long undynamic scenes abounding in two-shots, and which place between them and the spectator the maximum distance that the mise en scène allows. On an aesthetic level, the success of the film, (despite the difficulties and the obstacles that Visconti encountered) is close to perfection. The two main actors are unforgettable, and Alida Valli develops with profound coherence the role she played in Piccolo mondo antico and those of Isa Miranda in the era of calligrafismo. The same perfection characterises the film’s intimate scenes and the “pictures of war”. The latter figure among the most beautiful of a genre which the cinema, at that time, hesitated to treat in colour. (…)

Jacques Lourcelles, Dictionnaire du cinéma, Laffont, Paris 1992