Recently I saw Il Gattopardo ( 1963 ) again. With Senso ( 1954) and Gruppo di famiglia
in un interno (1974) this film belongs
to Luchino Visconti’s best work. I was thrilled by the pace (and space ) of the film and charmed by the indifference the
Prince of Salina exhibits towards history.
The life and art of Luchino Visconti — formally known as Count don
Luchino Visconti di Modrone, the son of a flamboyant, bisexual, and neurotic
duke and of the heiress to a pharmaceuticals empire — were characterized by
contradictions, ambiguities and paradoxes. Where there is an ideological gap
between the Marxism and the often conservative views of Visconti’s younger compatriot
Pier Paolo Pasolini, there seems to be a chasm — bridgeable only by dialectics
— between Visconti’s allegiance to the Communist Party and his lifelong fealty
to his aristocratic lineage and pride in its patrician privilege, between his
artistic modernism and his nostalgia for pre-Risorgimento culture. “Politically
progressive,” Phillip Lopate writes, “celebrating in many of his greatest films
the vitality of the working class, [Visconti] was also the supreme elegist of
his own aristocratic world.... Caricatured as the ‘Red Count,’ accused of
‘voting Left and living Right’ because of his taste for caviar and gloved
servants, Visconti was a defiant individualist, a handsome man of royal,
seductive presence, a magnet for controversy.”
There are many other striking parallels between Visconti and Pasolini: central figures of postwar European culture, both were (if biographers are to be believed) guilt-ridden homosexuals with fixations on their mothers, and a taste for getting and giving humiliation. Both had multifarious careers: Pasolini’s poetry and essays, Visconti’s opera and theatre productions were as important as their films. Both were leftists and anti-clericals, revolutionary in their politics even as they were reactionary in their rejection of certain aspects of modern life: they shared an abhorrence of abortion, feminism, and divorce, which they regarded as both symptoms and causes of the collapse of the Italian family, and therefore of the disintegration of Italian society.
Nevertheless, despite all these similarities — and others, including their deployment of Anna Magnani in two of her most rip-roaring performances (in Visconti’s Bellissima and Pasolini’s Mamma Roma) and their worship of Maria Callas, for instance — the differences between Visconti and Pasolini are also marked. The contrast in the directors’ class orientations (the younger bourgeois, the elder aristocratic) perhaps accounts for their sexual proclivities — Pasolini’s attraction to rough trade and peasant boys with bad teeth, Visconti’s to American socialites (e.g., Woolworth heir Jimmy Donahue) and the ravishing, refined young males of the European beau monde — and the respective trajectories of their artistic development.
While both of their film careers were rooted in neorealism — which rejected the chic vacuity and artifice of Fascist cinema in favour of “authenticity” (e.g., location shooting, the use of non-professional or deglamourized actors, and stories that focused on the poor and disenfranchised) — they soon diverged from this tradition, each in his different way. Where Pasolini plunged into stylistic experimentation and a growing identification with what he called “defiled” cultures, Visconti turned towards Verdian melodrama, an extravagant, operatic style, and an emphasis on aristocratic characters. Where Pasolini adopted an increasingly Brechtian approach to performance in his films, Visconti — who, in his lovely essay “Anthropomorphic Cinema,” claimed that “among all my activities in the cinema, my favourite is working with actors” — helped craft a seemingly ceaseless succession of great performances throughout his oeuvre: Clara Calamai in Ossessione, Alida Valli in Senso, Magnani in Bellissima, the entire ensemble of Rocco and His Brothers, Burt Lancaster in The Leopard and Conversation Piece, Marcello Mastroianni in White Nights and The Stranger, Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice. (Though Andrew Sarris claimed that Visconti was “the best director of actresses in the world,” the actors in his films — most obviously his muse and lover Helmut Berger — qualify as divas as much as the women.) The filmmakers’ last works — Pasolini’s scabrous Salò and Visconti’s plush memento mori The Innocent — starkly illustrate the degree of divergence between the two, Pasolini using the Fascist past to scorn a debased present, Visconti turning his back on the present altogether to find refuge in an idealized past.
Descended from a line of tyrants and feudal lords (whose family coat of arms depicted a serpent with an infant clutched in its maw), Visconti was “not a man of our time[:] He was a kind of Renaissance condottiere,” according to his close friend and screenwriter Suso Cecchi D’Amico. John Rosselli called Visconti “a rebel in white gloves…. Luchino had a castle surrounded by a mock-medieval model village whose inhabitants wore specially designed costumes. Communist sympathizer or not, Visconti to the end of his life (but for a brave, rough interval in the Resistance) had meals served on lace tablecloths by white-gloved servants in black and yellow livery.” (One could claim that Visconti rejected Fascism as much for its vulgarity as for its ideology.)
In his Visconti biography The Flames of Passion (as bad in most ways as its title), Laurence Schifano claims that “In many of his opinions, [Visconti] was more the middle-class moralist than the libertine aristocrat, a puritan whose values included those of the family and of a traditional patriarchal society”; tellingly, Visconti’s most obvious alter egos in his cinema are Helmut Berger’s mad king of Bavaria in Ludwig and Burt Lancaster’s proud Sicilian prince in The Leopard, both of whom incarnate a dying aristocratic order. (Lancaster famously modelled his performance in The Leopard on Visconti and repeated this approach in Conversation Piece, in which he plays a professor who also clings to a fast-disappearing past.)
History and Family are the twin, intertwined themes that govern Visconti’s cinema from first to last; indeed, several critics interpret the divide in Visconti’s career between his early masterpieces (La Terra Trema through Rocco and His Brothers) and his more problematic late films (e.g., Conversation Piece) as a separation between an objective cinema (History) and a subjective one (Family), in which he grapples with his “inner demons and family scars,” in the words of Phillip Lopate. Visconti’s obsessive focus on family has been interpreted as compensatory, given the conflict between his staunchly traditional view of the institution and his homosexuality; according to Schifano, the director was tormented by his inability to become father and patriarch, bastion and progenitor of the Visconti dynasty. In a 1991 lecture sponsored by TIFF Cinematheque (then Cinematheque Ontario), Geoffrey Nowell-Smith illustrated how this inability to sustain the family line manifested itself in Visconti’s films: there are few small children in Visconti’s cinema, he observed, and those who do not end up dead (e.g., The Innocent) have dull parents who simply do not register as characters. (Nowell-Smith perhaps overlooked Bellissima, which features a vibrant young child who survives to the end, and whose parent — Anna Magnani, as the mother of all stage mothers — “registers” so vividly that Rome seems imperilled.)
The other strand of Visconti’s thematic helix, History, has proven more problematic to critics — especially Italian critics, who have long debated the issues of the director’s conflicted politics, his “decadentism,” his seemingly contradictory dedication to historical materialism and to operatic aestheticism. The debate began with the opulent Senso, which some critics saw as a betrayal of Visconti’s neorealist heritage. How to square the mannerist poet of cultural decline and mortality — the aristocratic aesthete who worshipped D’Annunzio, consorted with Proust, Chanel, and Cocteau, and emphasized the Romantic agony of artistic creation and nostalgia for pre-modern times — with the committed leftist who, having previously apprenticed to Jean Renoir and served as a partisan in WWII, dedicated himself to a documentary about the war of liberation against the Germans (Days of Glory) and then a diptych addressing urgent economic and social issues facing a rapidly changing postwar Italy (La Terra Trema and Rocco and His Brothers)?
The dispute continues still, with scholars such as Guido Aristarco and Giorgio Bertellini arguing about the excess of Visconti’s art, whether there is indeed the sharp divide in his career that others have discerned and, if so, where that cleavage occurs. These issues can seem immaterial, though, when the emotional and visual riptide of Visconti’s cinema carries all before it. A traversal of Visconti’s oeuvre is a wade in glory, an experience whose richness will not soon be equalled or forgotten.
Days of Glory: Luchino Visconti’s Cinema of Contradictions. By James Quandt. TIFF , July 20, 2018.
Visconti’s eye and noble lineage made it inevitable that he would eventually move on to depicting the lives of Italy’s upper classes. Sure enough, with the colorfully operatic doomed romance Senso (1954), he was accused of betraying the neorealist cause. But perhaps more importantly, he seemed to betray the conventional mythology of Italian history. In Senso, a Venetian noblewoman (Alida Valli) falls for an Austrian soldier (Farley Granger) in 1866, during the Risorgimento, the long independence struggle aimed at unifying and liberating Italy. She winds up compromising her ideals for love, though the love appears to be one-sided; the Austrian is using her to flee military service, and she as a result exacts revenge. Senso was criticized by politicians on both sides not because of its main romance plot, but because Visconti dared to show the Italian army refusing the help of volunteer guerrillas, and because he depicted Italy’s defeat at the hands of the Austrians during the disastrous Battle of Custoza.
There wasn’t nearly as much controversy when Visconti came around to making The Leopard; the film was a massive international hit, though it was initially butchered upon U.S. release. Many critics at the time were perplexed by the sight of the macho Lancaster playing an aging Sicilian nobleman, but this remains his greatest performance (despite the fact that he’s dubbed into Italian). The actor’s athletic grace somehow translates into the ideal embodiment of a reserved, conflicted patriarch at odds with his times. (Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by his regal bearing: What is a movie star, after all, if not a modern-day aristocrat?)
Like Senso, The Leopard is also set during the Risorgimento. While Lancaster’s Prince of Salina tries to keep his distance from the turmoil around him, his nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) goes off to fight alongside the Nationalist forces of Giuseppe Garibaldi and the redshirts — despite the fact that other members of the family are terrified these revolutionaries will destroy their way of life. But the impulsive and romantic Tancredi soon proves himself a social climber par excellence. His ability to latch onto the key political movements of his day winds up saving the family, as the newly emerging social order — corrupt and petty in its own ways — comes to look to the Prince for guidance.
“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change,” Tancredi says at one point, and it’s a sentiment Visconti depicts in all its complexity, hope, and horror. Social change arrives slowly, and progress is sometimes brought about by disreputable people. The Prince knows the past — with its iniquities, its hierarchies, its injustices — is gone forever. But he also laments the passing of a way of life: “We were the leopards, the lions. Those who take our place will be jackals and sheep,” he observes. “And the whole lot of us — leopards, lions, jackals, and sheep — will continue to think ourselves the salt of the earth.”
The Prince sees the death of his class in the face of his own nephew. And in the film’s most heartbreaking scene — a quiet moment of solitude in the middle of a bravura, 45-minute-long ball sequence that would go on to influence everyone from Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese to Bertrand Bonello and Alexander Sokurov — the melancholy Prince reflects on his own mortality as he observes a Jean-Baptiste Greuze painting of a deathbed scene. (The film tells us the painting is called The Death of a Just Man. Ironically, it’s actually called The Father’s Curse — The Son Punished.)
There are many historical films, but The Leopard is, to my mind, one of the rare movies that is genuinely about history. That is to say, it depicts, through its drama, its character interactions, and its visual style, an actual historical process, in all its messiness, contradiction, and ridiculousness: the replacement of one class by another, the consolidation of a scattered land of fiefdoms and nation-states into one country. Even the most intimate scenes seethe with a sense of change, of a society transforming before our very eyes.
Another indelible moment: The breathtaking entrance of Claudia Cardinale. Playing the mysterious daughter of a local official, she hesitantly walks into a dinner party, and every head in the room turns — including that of Tancredi, who will eventually marry her and cement his place in the emerging new class, a nobleman marrying down to preserve his status. But here, in this instance, as Cardinale enters and captures Delon’s eye, we see, expressed with the full force of cinematic style and star power, the promise of an onscreen couple presented as if it were the realization of a historical process: These are two of the most beautiful humans on Earth, and it’s inevitable that they will find each other in this room. Delon will meet Cardinale. The nobleman will meet the middle-class girl. Wealth will preserve itself. The Italian idea will survive.
Such films were a far cry from the gritty tenements and the throbbing, teeming streets of neorealism — and people like Lancaster and Delon and Valli and Granger were the diametrical opposite of the nonprofessionals who populated movies like Shoeshine or La Terra Trema. But Visconti’s restless search for authenticity was rooted in the same ideals that powered neorealism, which had its roots in French cinema and the work of Jean Renoir, as well as the literary naturalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Visconti had been Renoir’s assistant in the Thirties; from that director, I suspect, he learned the value of establishing a milieu and using it to develop his characters. By capturing true behavior in authentic settings, Visconti not only conjured a reality that both characters and audience could inhabit — he also portrayed the individual’s relationship to the world around him.
On Luchino Visconti :
Luchino Visconti. By Jeremy Carr. Senses of Cinema, June 2018
Where to begin with Luchino Visconti. By Christina Newland. BFI , March 17, 2016.
Visconti: Art and Ambiguity. Essay by Pasquale
Iannone. March 17, 2016. Vimeo
4-Minute Video Essay Explores The Ambiguity Of Art
In Luchino Visconti’s Films. By Samantha
Vacca. Indiewire, March 22, 2016.
On Il Gattopardo :
Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard and Those Who Are Not Rich in A Country of Arrangements. By by Daniel Garrett. Off/Screen , July 2012.
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