Film historian Lawrence J. Quirk wrote , in his study , '' The Great Romantic Films '' ( 1974 ) , " Some shots of Björn Andrésen , the Tadzio of the film , could be extracted from the frame and hung on the walls of the Louvre or the Vatican in Rome . " He says Andrésen did not represent just a pretty youngster as an object of perverted lust , but that novelist Mann and director-screen writer Visconti intended him as a symbol of beauty in the realm of Michelangelo 's David or Da Vinci 's '' Mona Lisa '' , the beauty that moved Dante to " ... seek ultimate aesthetic catharsis in the distant figure of Beatrice . " In 2011 , writer Will Aitken published '' Death in Venice : A Queer Film Classic '' , a critical analysis the film , as part of Arsenal Pulp Press 's Queer Film Classics series . In July 2018 , it was selected to be screened in the Venice Classics section at the 75th Venice International Film Festival
75th Venice International Film Festival
75th Venice International Film Festival
Death in Venice (film)