Venice "Sadness rises in me like the sea" WINTER LIGHT

“You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose;
But sadness in me rises like the sea,
Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lips morose,

Salt with the memory of the bitter flood.
In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o’er,
That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate
By woman’s tooth and talon; ah, no more

Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate.
It is a ruin where the jackals rest,
And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay
A perfume swims about your naked breast!

Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way!
With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared
Burn up these tatters that the beasts have spared!”

Lines from The Eyes of Beauty, Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil

In Greenwich Park, London two lovers stroll and talk about love, their relationship and the making of a film in Venice.  The Venice film is shot on 16mm. Venice at dawn is empty and a protagonist sits at the empty San Marco Piazza, it glides in a detached manner from the grand sights and facades and interiors of Palazzos into the backstreets.  In guilded interiors and painted ceilings, as the winter afternoon light weakens in a soporific atmosphere,  she lays in dark interiors with frescoes of Antiquity. Like the Risen, at twilight she walks the alleyways and into the dark to meet the Devil at dawn.  Featuring the actor Pietro Fanelli – the Devil makes a fleeting but impactful appearance, the protagonist offers herself to his gaze and touch.  The film follows a path via the remnants of Romanticism and  Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil  in search of beauty, opulence, exotic pleasure and lovers, exemplified by Venice.  The Gothic atmosphere creates a trope of detachment and interiority that suggests the unconscious, dream and repression of desires.   It follows the bohemian idea of escapism as an act of sensuality updated to a feministic resistance to the logic of obligation to the social sphere in the Director’s own cinematic female gaze.  The film returns to the pulsating liminal electronic trance psychedelia of London night life seeking rapture in a de profoundis.

Nina Danino
©2026