Unaffectedness and Rare Eurythmics: Carl Koch, Jean Renoir, Luchino Visconti and the Production of Tosca (1939/41)

Tosca (1941) is a curious and intriguing case in film history. It was originally begun by French director Jean Renoir, but finished by his German screenwriter-turned-director Carl Koch. Koch’s wife Lotte Reiniger and the young Luchino Visconti contributed to the film, while its producer was the grand old man of Italian silent film, Arturo Ambrosio. While Visconti was always open about his French experience with Renoir as his aesthetic, moral and political revelation, he always denigrated Tosca afterwards. However, visual analysis of the film reveals striking similarities with his films, particularly Ossessione (1943). Moreover, reception research shows Tosca had a critical but not entirely unfavourable reception in Italy and in Germany, too easily overlooked in Italian and German post-1945 historiography. Additional sources from the Lotte Reiniger archive and the Federico Patellani photo archive deepen the research.