Ossessione

Luchino Visconti - 1943
Shot on clearly pretty filthy stock, in filthy locations. Air of unwashed laundty, dirt, portray the houses and dustbowls. This is all exacerbated by getting pretty close in, avoiding a lot of establishing shots, where we get a real sense of dirt, sweat, the dark parts of the human body, quite literally. The faces are shadowed, dark hair, stubble.
The camera moves are really very baroque, in this early piece of neo-realism as it is called. The camera does a lot of panning, perhaps proportionally more on the track / pan scale than later Visconti. It is fine to pan with someone moving very far away until they walk up pretty close to the camera; it doesn't always use the same length on people.
Nevertheless, their are early examples of Visconti's distinctive very long, grand shots, panoramas almost, dusty bowls and so on. And their are some extremely elaborate tracks, around corners, circling in not at all precise circles around people. What is Visconti doing? Trying to get a better look, trying to establish the space.
The lack of ellipsis in the montage is the most obvious neo-realistic, as is how we watch the people, with some almost Wellman-esque shuffling about, hanging around, doing a bit of work, eating and that sort of thing.
The plot is perhaps the modern Macbeth; 'The Postman Always Rings Twice'. Here it is filthy sexual tension, with the critics right about the broiling, seething. There is a sense of desire at once confused, with clear homoerotic undertones (constantly noticeable in Visconti).