End of an Era is an interactive reading companion to five late films by Luchino Visconti — an Italian aristocrat who spent his career filming worlds that were ending. Moving chronologically through Senso (1954), The Leopard (1963), Death in Venice (1971), Conversation Piece (1974), and The Innocent (1976), the guide reads each film across the same six dimensions — its concept, historical period, key institutions, agents of change, image of time, and locations — then sets all five side by side, so a single theme can be followed as it shifts from the battlefields of the Risorgimento to a shuttered Roman palazzo.
Across these films Visconti asks one question in several registers: how does personal decline become historical form? The aging body, the dying aristocracy, the failed revolution, the invaded interior, the libertine exposed — each is also the story of an institutional order that changes just enough to preserve its power, or is revealed as hollow at its core. The arc moves steadily inward, from public history toward private enclosure, closing with The Innocent — Visconti’s final film — where the old world is no longer merely overtaken but shown to be spiritually bankrupt from within.
Part of the Interactive Reading Guides series, it is meant to be watched alongside the films themselves: a companion to your own encounter with the work, never a substitute for it. It reproduces no film content, and all commentary is original.