Luchino Visconti was an Italian theatre, opera and cinema director, as well as a screenwriter. He began his filmmaking career as an assistant director on Jean Renoir's Toni (1935) and Partie de campagne (1936), thanks to the intercession of their common friend, Coco Chanel.

With Gianni Puccini, Antonio Pietrangeli and Giuseppe De Santis, he wrote the screenplay for his first film as director: Ossessione (Obsession, 1943), the first neorealist movie. In 1948, he wrote and directed La terra trema (The Earth Trembles), based on the novel I Malavoglia by Giovanni Verga.

Visconti continued working throughout the 1950s, although he veered away from the neorealist path with his 1954 film, Senso, shot in colour. Based on the novella by Camillo Boito, it is set in Austrian-occupied Venice in 1866. In this film, Visconti combines realism and romanticism as a way to break away from neorealism. However, as one biographer notes, "Visconti without neorealism is like Lang without expressionism and Eisenstein without formalism". His other successful films were The Leopard, Death in Venice, Ludwig, The Innocent...