There’s not enough space here to do justice to the singularly tactile cinema of Luchino Visconti (1906-1976), but a quick comparison between La Terra Trema (1948) and White Nights (1957) — both of which are screening as part of Cinematheque Ontario’s month-long retrospective — speaks to the remarkable versatility of his art.

Produced in 1948, in the heyday of Italian neo-realism, La Terra Trema (****, July 23, 7pm) unfolds in a seaside Sicilian village where the local fisherman are exploited by ruthless wholesale merchants; the plot pivots on the decision of one family to go into business for themselves, much to the dismay of the wholesalers — and, eventually, the rest of the villagers. Shot on location and populated almost entirely by non-professional actors (the cast is listed collectively, as “Pescatori Siciliani,” which translates as “Sicilian fishermen”), the film’s visuals are modest in comparison to subsequent Visconti films (including the similarly themed Rocco and his Brothers). But there’s still grandeur here, in the finely detailed shots of men at work and boats at sea, and a keen sense of social outrage (occasionally made florid by the director’s voice-over).

Where La Terra Trema subordinates style to subject matter, White Nights (****, Aug. 1, 7pm) finds Visconti at his most lyrical; this adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s oft-adapted short story suggests a series of precise chiaroscuro strokes. There’s a thrilling contrast between the plangent, direct emotions of the characters — a damaged, ever-wandering woman (Maria Schell) and her sadly patient suitor (Marcello Mastroianni) — and the grandly artificial nature of their environs: a psuedo-Venetian backdrop erected (or seemingly sketched, one inky alleyway at a time) on a Cinecittà backlot. There’s a dreamlike quality to the proceedings (heightened by the presence of Orpheus himself, Jean Marais) but the film is more than an urban fairy tale; its melancholic (but never miserable) account of a new love stifled by an old one speaks to the hopelessly conjoined feelings — intimacy and loneliness, love and loss — with which we cannot help but identify.