The Leopard DVD commentary David Forgacs and Rossana Capitano, © British Film Institute 2003 CHAPTER

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0 Pre-credits, on bfi logo

00:59:50 00:10 Introductions

1 Opening credits

00:00:00 02:45 .

In this commentary we’ll be drawing attention to various aspects of The Leopard: camerawork, staging, lighting, editing, costumes, acting and music. And because it’s a film about a controversial period of Italian political history which itself generated controversy when it was released, we’ll also say something about the history and politics in it and around it. The Leopard was filmed almost entirely on location. All the exteriors and most of the interiors were shot in Sicily from May to September 1962. The only non-Sicilian locations were in villas near Rome used for some interior scenes. The final filming was done there in late September, when there were also a couple of days’ shooting in the Titanus studio. It was a hugely expensive Italian production for the time, partly because of Visconti’s insistence on using real places rather than studio sets, partly because of the long shooting schedule and partly because of the director’s extraordinary attention to detail. He insisted on renovating buildings, getting frescoes painted, having fresh flowers flown over, getting the decor exactly right for the period, making streets and houses look as they did in the 1860s. However, these choices give the film a sense of place and an authenticity of look that a studio production couldn’t possibly have had. The critic Sandro Bernardi has suggested that this opening sequence echoes and inverts that of Welles’s Citizen Kane. There a moving camera ‘discovers’ a large house by night and gradually gets nearer to it; here it does the same thing in bright daylight. There it was forbidden to enter, here it roams freely. The house and gardens that we see here are Villa Boscogrande near Palermo. It had become dilapidated and the production team had to restore it inside and out before filming could begin. The credits sequence sets the tone for the film in several ways. First, it establishes the dominant colours of the exteriors: the clear blue of the sky, the yellow of the land, the white and yellow buildings. Second, it establishes the social location, the world of the Sicilian aristocracy. Third, it introduces the music, written by Nino Rota. The music over the credits works like the overture to an opera, introducing some of the main themes that we will hear in the film.

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2 The rosary 00:02:45. 07:33 [00:03:05 WAIT FOR SECOND WINDOW]

The camera continues to discover the place from outside in this tracking shot along the windows as we hear the voices of the Salina household reciting the rosary inside. [WAIT FOR CUT INTO ROOM] As we enter the interior through the cut on the flapping curtain what is immediately striking is the attention to detail. The widescreen format provides a very long rectangle in which to compose each shot. This allows Visconti and his director of photography to fill the frame from left to right and in depth with up to twenty actors in three or more rows. It allows the spectator to attend to details of costume and interior decoration. Within this rectangle the colour and lighting are always carefully controlled. Here we have predominant dark greens, blues, blacks and yellows; the curtain casts flickering shadows in the room. This care over mise-en-scène, including placing of actors in depth and the staging of entrances and exits, reflects Visconti’s long experience as a theatre director. [00:04:10: SHOT OF PRINCE ON HIS KNEES] The sound now becomes important as the shouting from outside the room intrudes on the recital of the rosary inside. We see the effects of a noise off screen on the people on screen. The unseen servants are shouting about the body of a soldier that has been found in the garden. [00:04:31: WAIT TILL PRINCE SAYS ‘AMEN’] Here is the film’s central character, Don Fabrizio Corbèra, Prince of Salina, played by Burt Lancaster. The first sign of emotion in the Prince is when he raises his voice. [00:04:47] The director of photography on The Leopard was Giuseppe Rotunno, who worked with Visconti on seven films overall. His name is listed in the opening credits just before Visconti’s, reflecting the importance of his work on the film. Rotunno also supervised the restoration of The Leopard in 1991 in the Technicolor labs in London and Rome. I went to see him when we were preparing this commentary and he talked through several of the scenes. In this opening scene the key light was thrown from bright arc lights placed outside the window to simulate sunlight, with smaller fill lights on stands and on a ceiling rig to illuminate the corners of the room and pick out individual actors.

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[00:05:32] As the servant Mimì brings the Prince a letter from his brother-in-law we get the first allusion in the film to political events. On 11 May 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi landed at Marsala, on the west coast of Sicily, with approximately a thousand volunteers, and headed towards Palermo. Since the early eighteenth century, Sicily had been incorporated into a joint kingdom with the mainland south of Italy. This kingdom had its court in Naples and was ruled by a branch of the Bourbon royal family. Resentment among Sicilians against Bourbon rule had become increasingly strong during the first half of the nineteenth century, the period known as the Risorgimento. Before Garibaldi landed, a revolutionary movement was already underway in Sicily. Garibaldi’s campaign would quickly succeed in channelling the protests, which had various causes and aspirations, including a demand by peasants for land, towards a movement for the unification of Sicily and the south with the north of Italy. This came to be part of the wider process known as the unification of Italy. In practice this would take the form of an annexation of the other states in the peninsula by the kingdom of Piedmont (otherwise known as the Kingdom of Savoy or of Sardinia), the state with its capital in Turin. Before Garibaldi sailed to Sicily, the King of Piedmont, Vittorio Emanuele II, and his prime minister, Count Cavour, had already annexed large parts of north and central Italy. [00:07:10] Here the Prince’s calm and decisive behaviour is in evident contrast with that of the rest of his family, particularly his wife, Maria Stella, played by Rina Morelli. Morelli was primarily a stage actor who had worked with Visconti in various productions, as well as in his film Senso. [00:07:25] Romolo Valli, who plays Father Pirrone, was also mainly a stage actor. He had founded his own company after the Second World War but he also played in a number of Visconti’s theatre productions. It must be said that Morelli’s part in this film has a rather limited range: she weeps and convulses hysterically, both here and in a later scene, and she doesn’t have much dialogue. But her facial acting is always remarkable. [00:07:58 SYNC WITH ACTION] The Prince’s determined walk – shot from behind, then from above – establishes the fact that he is in control of the space as well as of the situation.

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[00:08:42] It is not made explicit in the film, as it is in the novel on which it is based, that the Prince is the leopard, in other words he embodies the characteristics of the animal which is the symbol of the Salina family. He is tall, fair with side whiskers. He is strong and powerful but his hands have a delicate touch, almost a feline grace, when he puts them on his wife and daughter to calm them. [00:09:13] The Prince stamps off in one of those stage exits we have mentioned. [00:09:53] The short scene of the Prince going to look at the body of the soldier starts with a shot of the gardeners working. As the camera moves to the left and then tracks forward it is clear from the reactions of the other actors that it occupies the point of view of the Prince. This is a Bourbon soldier killed by a Sicilian rebel. The shot is aestheticized and painterly.

3 Visit to Palermo

00:10:18 03:06 [00:10:20] The casting of Burt Lancaster was partly to do with the fact that Twentieth Century-Fox put up some of the money for the film and both Fox and the Italian producers Titanus needed a major bankable star. The idea of approaching Lancaster was that of the film’s producer, Goffredo Lombardo. Visconti initially was not at all happy with the idea. His own preference was Laurence Olivier. However, he warmed to Lancaster and by the end of filming they had formed a friendship and a good working relationship. Lancaster said in an interview that he felt his work on The Leopard was the best he had done up till then. Visconti chose to cast him again in his film Conversation Piece of 1974. [00:11:02] This is one of the few night-time sequences in the film. The chiaroscuro lighting is in stark contrast to the harsh sunlight of the preceding sequences. Father Pirrone acts as a foil to the Prince. They function throughout the film like a comedy duo. The priest is also a bit like the fool in a royal court. He is allowed by his master to speak certain truths and even to criticize him, but within limits. The Prince teases him or cuts him short when he doesn’t want to be lectured. And Father Pirrone bounces back and tries again. [00:11:39] The soldiers in the road block are identifiable as Bourbon troops – they are wearing the same uniforms as the dead soldier that we have just seen. They are respectful and deferential to the Prince. Despite the revolution in progress this is the old regime still in place. [00:12:05] The musical theme that now comes in was introduced in the credits. It will be most fully developed later on in

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the sequence of the journey across the Sicilian interior to Donnafugata. [00:12:24] The verbal comedy and the facial acting between the two men is now followed by a comedy of actions based on repetition and contrast of places. The priest gets out of the coach and goes to the door of a church…, [00:12:56] …the Prince arrives in an area immediately identified with sex and goes to the door of his prostitute. She will greet him with an erotic allusion: ‘my big Prince’.

4 Enter Tancredi

00:13:24 05:19 [00:13:42 WAIT TILL TANCREDI’S FACE APPEARS IN MIRROR] The first appearance of Tancredi, played by Alain Delon, is in the Prince’s shaving mirror. The character has already been mentioned when the Prince, in the coach to Palermo, defended him against Father Pirrone. [00:14:02] This scene establishes the basic terms of the relationship between the Prince and his nephew. The nephew can tease his uncle about his going to a prostitute at his age and the uncle can take it as a compliment. The nephew is the apple of his eye; he likes him more than his own sons. The younger man is secure in his youth but he admires the power and vigour of the older man. Although the film does not make it explicit at this point, it is clear later that Tancredi’s family, the Falconeri, have squandered their wealth and property and the Prince has become in effect his guardian. [00:14:52 PRINCE SAYS ‘DOVE VAI?’] Tancredi is proud to tell the Prince that he is going to join the garibaldini, in other words to fight, so it would seem, against his and the Prince’s class. Politically what this discussion is about is the crisis of legitimacy of the Bourbons in Sicily and the options open to the Sicilian nobility in reacting to the revolutionary crisis. In 1859, as the unification movement was gathering momentum in the north, the Bourbon king, Ferdinando II, had died and had been succeeded by 23-year old Francesco II, derogatorily nicknamed Franceschiello. Francesco rejected Piedmont’s invitation to form a coalition against Austria and he opposed far-reaching reforms in his kingdom. In Sicily his attitudes, and the Bourbons’ repressive policing, served only to fuel the revolutionary movement, which included demands for separation of Sicily from the kingdom of Naples. [STOP TALKING AT 00:15:45] [LEAVE SILENCE AROUND T’S WORDS: ‘SE VOGLIAMO CHE TUTTO RIMANGA COM’E’ BISOGNA CHE TUTTO CAMBI’]

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[START AGAIN AT 00.15:58] Tancredi’s words, and the assurance with which he speaks them, have a visible effect on the Prince. Tancredi is astute enough to realise that if the nobility backs Garibaldi they will get another monarchy that will be likely to protect them against the Mazzinians and the left and against the peasantry. During the Risorgimento (which is really a catch-all term for a variety of political movements with different goals) the supporters of Giuseppe Mazzini wanted a democratic republic. Garibaldi had initially been among them, but by 1860 he had come to believe that the Piedmontese monarchy was the only realistic hope for a unification of the whole of Italy. For all his reservations about the appropriateness of Tancredi’s actions, the Prince’s tenderness towards him is evident. [00:16:45] This scene of Tancredi’s departure picks up and develops the second of the musical themes announced in the opening credits. This theme will recur, and be elaborated, at other significant points in the film. It will become associated also with Angelica, and then with Tancredi and Angelica as a couple. It is worth mentioning that the elaborate symphonic music in this film, which contributed to its success and became famous as the music of The Leopard, was not actually conceived and written for the film. Visconti had originally asked Nino Rota, who had written the music for Rocco and his brothers, to write a new score for The Leopard. Rota had difficulty getting into the project and he began playing Visconti some pieces on the piano, among which was the Allegro from a symphony he had originally composed in 1946. Visconti immediately recognized the theme he wanted for the sequence of the journey to Donnafugata. The symphony thus became the basis for the score. Rota had already used the first movement of the same symphony for another film score, for The Glass Mountain, in 1949. Also, the six dance tunes by Rota that we will hear played at the ball in the latter part of the film had already been used in his score for a minor Italian film of 1954, Appassionatamente. This sort of recycling need not surprise us. It is common in music, not only music for films, and it can produce very fine results. Rota often recycled and reworked his own pieces, as did Ennio Morricone in his film scores.

5 The observatory

00:18:43 04:41 [00:18:45] The piles of books and papers and the telescopes establish the Prince’s scientific interests. He is an amateur astronomer, an enlightened man, not a typical aristocrat rooted in the old ways. The scene starts with Father Pirrone meekly suggesting that the Prince should confess his sin of the flesh of the night before. The Prince cuts him short again. But the dialogue will soon turn to the political events. The Prince has thought about Tancredi’s remark ‘if we want everything to stay as it is everything has to change’. He now seems to accept, calmly, that all the apparent revolution will bring is, as he puts it, ‘a barely

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noticeable substitution of ruling groups’. He dismisses Father Pirrone’s own fears for the future of the Church. Unlike human institutions, which are mortal, the Church is destined to last for ever. [00:19:50] It is worth mentioning here that while The Leopard – both the film and the novel – is about the particular circumstances of Sicily in the 1860s, it is also a reflection on the subsequent course of Italian history, and implicitly on similar sequences of events in other countries. The author of the novel, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, writing in the mid 1950s, was looking back at the 1860s with a knowledge of what had happened since. His novel expressed a critical view of Italian history as a series of compromises, at each transition, between successive ruling elites. The most recent transition when he wrote the book was from fascism to the postwar republic, from 1943 to 1948. As in other occupied countries at the end of the Second World War, a resistance movement had developed in Italy against Fascism and Nazism. The Resistance was seen by some of its activists and leaders as a second Risorgimento, one in which the people took centre-stage. The far left in the Resistance had revolutionary aspirations for thoroughgoing social and economic change. Some of them also wanted a radical decentralization of political power. In Sicily there was once again a strong separatist movement. However, these aspirations were defeated and a new centralized political system was formed after the war, dominated by a centre party, the Christian Democrats, who were supported and partly funded during the Cold War by the United States government. The Christian Democrats also became the dominant party in Sicily by 1948, after securing the support of local elites, and the demands for Sicilian autonomy were crushed. This sequence of events was seen on the left, like the events of the 1860s, as a missed opportunity for radical change. The existing class structure had remained in place, the same economic groups still dominated and there were elements of continuity in the form of the state and public administration, not least because the purge of former fascists was half-hearted. Tomasi di Lampedusa’s implicit standpoint, like that of his main character, the Prince, was not that of the left but of someone sceptical about the possibility of history bringing progress. [00:21:56] Visconti’s film also alluded indirectly to these events at the end of the war, but in addition it had another level of allusion that was even more contemporary: to the centre-left coalition, formed in the early 1960s, between the Christian Democrats and the Socialist Party. For Visconti this new political alliance once again strengthened the centre and helped perpetuate the exclusion of the Communists from government. In this case there was no threat of revolution, but the centre-

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left could be seen as in line with previous transformations guaranteeing continuity by means of a compromise between hitherto opposed forces. [00:22:43, PRINCE STANDS UP] This room was the only piece of entirely artificial set built in Sicily. It was constructed high up on wooden scaffolding next to Villa Boscogrande in order to get the right height for an observatory as well as the view through the window towards Palermo and the sea. [00:23:07: START OF LAST SHOT] The observatory sequence ends with a carefully composed shot of the Prince and Father Pirrone, each framed in a differently shaped window with two telescopes, almost in silhouette against the landscape. Rota’ s melody ends and is stridently contrasted by a bugle call: a sound bridge taking us into the next sequence …

6 Battle in Palermo

00:23:24 06:58 …the battle in Palermo. We are immediately thrown into a crowd scene. Garibaldi’s redshirts carrying the Italian tricolour storm a gate into the city. A shot at ground level cuts to a high crane shot reminiscent of the western. This entire sequence was filmed in Palermo itself. Here the gate was made by the set builders, but the streets and houses behind are real and have been modifed to look right for the period. The film’s art director, Mario Garbuglia, did careful visual research and drew on various reliable sources, including some stereoscopic photographs of Palermo taken in 1860 by a French reporter. Parts of the city were still bomb-damaged from the air raids of 1943 and Garbuglia made use of this for some shots. In others the rubble is artificial and has been added. As the sequence unfolds we can identify three different groups: Garibaldi’s volunteers in their red shirts; the mounted Bourbon troups in their dark blue uniforms; and the local rebels, a mixture of citizens of Palermo and peasants, the so-called picciotti or young men who joined up with Garibaldi and swelled the ranks of his army. Here the white walls and period blinds of the houses work like a backcloth against which the action is staged and the colours of the costumes stand out. [00:24:53] This scene of the Bourbons rounding up and then shooting a group of rebels may appear to show them on top of the situation. In fact, as the rest of the Palermo sequence shows, they are being defeated. Their brutal act is typical of that of ruling armies in retreat.

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[00:25:17] The scene of the execution is followed by that of an angry crowd of citizens, including many women, pursuing a member of the Bourbon police, in other words a Sicilian who works for the oppressors, whom they will later lynch. [00:25:33] For an Italian audience watching this in 1963 the echoes of the Second World War and the Resistance twenty years earlier would have been clear: summary executions by the Nazis and Fascists in a last-ditch defence of their power; popular justice by partisans and citizens. [00:25:59] This shot of a priest is the start of a long take which is a perfect example of Visconti’s theatrical mise-en-scène. The camera moves to the right and comes to a halt on a street shot in depth. It will stay still on this street for a full forty seconds as action unfolds within it. A young girl comes forward, stops by a body and leans against the wall. Then the garibaldini enter, shooting. They move the girl out of the way. The set is pale and the red shirts and orange flames stand out against it. Finally the camera moves back with the garibaldini, in an exact reverse of the start of the scene, and briefly picks up the priest again, now on his knees, to the far left of the frame. [00:27:05] The girl and the priest introduce elements of humanity that are otherwise absent in these scenes of violence and retribution. This humanity is underlined in the shot of the Garibaldian volunteer comforting a woman crying over the body of a loved one. Visconti used three cameras for many of these scenes in Palermo and it could take the crew several hours to get the set ups ready. But the advantage was that a sequence could then be shot in continuity. This meant that complex actions could be filmed in real time and it also allowed the actors to work in longer takes than with just one camera. [00:27:48] The film’s costume designer, Piero Tosi, referenced various museum drawings for the clothes here. The real garibaldini had home-made uniforms that they dyed themselves, so Tosi made sure the red shirts for the four hundred actors and extras wearing them were dyed different shades of red, and were made to look used, not new. They were soaked in tea and then dried in the sun.

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[00:28:27] A remarkable feature of Garibaldi’s Sicilian campaign was that a small number of irregulars joined by local rebels managed to overpower a large regular army. One of the ways they achieved this was by surprise. Here the Bourbons marching and firing in regular rows are overcome by redshirts attacking from behind as well as from the front. [00:29:17] Soon after the bugle calls end the fourth movement of Nino Rota’s symphony comes in. [WAIT FOR FIRST NOTES] Bugles followed by music: a symmetrical reverse of the start of the sequence. [00:29:32] Tancredi appears, and it’s almost a surprise to see him. But he has joined the rebels, as he told the Prince he would, and indeed he is leading a group. [00:30:01] Tancredi gets wounded in the head by an explosion and as the Bourbons gain the advantage the garibaldini, including Tancredi, take refuge in a convent. [00:30:14] The transition from this sequence to the next is effected by a cloud of dust that comes to fill the whole screen, almost like a fade to white, and masks the dissolve…

7 On the road 00:30:22 04:06 …to the shot of coaches in the distance picking their way across a barren landscape. This transition is synchronized to the music. This is also like a western: the wagon train crossing the desert. It is one of the most striking sequences in the film. Five shots show these carriages in the distance picking their way across an arid landscape like a short column of ants. [00:30:49] These landscape shots are interrupted by an interior shot of the carriage and some dialogue. Maria Stella wears a veil to protect her from the dust of the road. [00.31.16] The spare landscape compositions have only two basic elements: the yellow of the land that takes up most of the screen and the pale blue of the sky. As the camera gets nearer the coaches we can make out Tancredi riding alongside them on a horse. [00:31:30] The music we are hearing here is the part of Nino Rota’s symphony that Visconti heard him play and knew that he wanted for this sequence. It is the longest musical passage of the symphony in the film and lasts for the whole sequence. There is an epic quality to the visuals here and the epic style of the music works closely together with them.

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[00:32:00] The sequence of the road block was filmed at Piana degli Albanesi, south of Palermo, with an artificial lake in the background. From the short shadows we can see that it was filmed in the middle of the day. [00:32:30] The sequence is essentially about Tancredi’s opportunism and careerism. He rides up on a horse, past a long line of peasants who want to get through the road block. Tancredi will use his newly acquired identity as a garibaldino to gain advantage for his own class. The Garibaldian soldiers have orders not to let anyone past. But Tancredi is going to tell them he is a Garibaldian captain and he will bark an order to let the Prince and his family through.The soldiers will be intimidated into complying. [00:33:20] Alain Delon was 26 when the film was made. He had worked twice already with Visconti, who appreciated his range and subtlety as an actor as well as his physical beauty. He had cast Delon as Rocco in his film of 1960, Rocco and his Brothers. Delon had also acted, with his partner at that time, Romy Schneider, in Visconti’s 1961 Paris stage production of the Jacobean tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. [00:34:18] The visible irony here is that the peasants, who in theory should have benefited from the revolution, and who also want to get through, are not allowed to pass.

8 The inn 00:34:28 03:12 [00.34.30] This short night-time sequence at the inn is one of the most beautifully constructed and lit in the film. It starts with a long take. Moving from the sleeping Tancredi, the camera picks out bits of social detail: the top hat of a nobleman, the woman scrubbing a pot, the other kitchen implements. And the camera then comes to rest on Father Pirrone talking to a group of peasants. [00.34.57] This piece of dialogue was in fact transposed by the screenwriters from a later chapter of the novel, one of three chapters that they discarded in adapting it for the screen. That chapter was a kind of short story in which Father Pirrone returns to his village and settles a family feud. The dialogue works very well in this place because it has the priest, himself from a peasant family, explaining to other members of his class some of the strange things the Prince has said to him recently, as well as making some general remarks about the peculiar ways of the nobility.

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[00:35:35] The long take allows the viewer to look at two planes of action: the foreground with the dialogue, the background with a group of peasants eating and drinking. [00.35.50] The subsequent shots are equally striking in their composition, lighting and use of space. Rotunno said that one of the visual references here was Caravaggio. [00.36.27] The camera follows the servant girl carrying a bucket. She cuts through the middle of the room and will take us upstairs. [00.37.03] The sequence comes to an end on two slow tracking shots of the sleeping Salina family, one from right to left, the other from left to right. A scene was scripted and filmed here, and was included in early release prints but then cut, along with an accompanying portion of Nino Rota’s score, of the Prince dreaming, as he lies next to his wife and scratches an insect bite on his neck. He dreamed first that Father Pirrone is reprimanding him about his sins of the flesh and then that he is in the bedroom of the prostitute, Mariannina, in Palermo.

9 A picnic 00:37:40 05:26 [00.37.42] The transition out of the sequence at the inn is effected by a shot of a large white cloth filling the camera’s entire field of vision. The music changes. The cloth is being spread for a picnic for the Salinas on the next stage of their journey. [00:37:56] The whole sequence is very attentive to small details of social behaviour and to the differences between aristocrats and servants, things that Visconti knew at first hand, having grown up with them. The servant class, whom we saw looking relaxed and dignified at the inn, are now rushing to get the picnic ready. As the noble family walk down the hill towards the shade, the servants stay in the sun, walking the horses in a circle to exercise them out of harness. [00.38.40] As Tancredi and Concetta cool themselves with water from a trough, a servant stands and holds a horse by its bridle. The social rules prevent him from helping himself to water. At the same time, the rules on gender behaviour allow Concetta, her face covered in white dust from the road, only to dab herself with the handkerchief, whereas Tancredi as a man can wipe his face and arms. [00.39.24] Concetta is happy to be with her cousin. Her expression and gestures make clear that she believes she is being courted.

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[00.39.53] As the family eat the picnic we can see a group of servants behind the trees to the left of the frame. The man is using a technique of cutting bread typical of the peasantry, holding the loaf to his waist and slicing towards his body. The servant speaking to the Prince in dialect expresses surprise and relief at the fact that he and his family have managed to get away from Palermo safely. The Prince’s reply changes to a voiceover, a sort of internal voice, which will narrate one of a few short flashback sequences in the film. [00.40.37] These three men staring at the camera appear to be staring at us. But the camera is in fact representing the Prince’s point of view in a subjective shot. The effect of this is to merge the spectator’s viewpoint with that of the Prince. We see this again when Tancredi turns and speaks an aside to ‘us’, in other words to the Prince. These point-of-view shots are like the shot of the dead soldier earlier on, but here, with the addition of the voiceover, the Prince briefly becomes a narrator and involves us in his vision of events. In an early version of the script there were several points where the Prince’s thoughts were to have been expressed in voiceover, imitating the narrative technique of Lampedusa’s novel. This is the only sequence that really preserves that phase of the film’s evolution. These frescoes took twenty artists two weeks to paint. The whole classical pantheon is mobilized to praise the Salina family, represented by its heraldic emblem, at the centre of the shot. [00.42.06] The return to the flashback is cued by the sound of the Garibaldian general, played by Giuliano Gemma, singing an aria from La sonnambula by the Sicilian composer Bellini in homage to their Sicilian hosts. In fact this flashback is largely about the mutual ingratiation between the Garibaldian officers (invited by Tancredi) and the Sicilian nobility. The fusion of the two orders is beginning. In this continuation of the flashback we no longer seem to be seeing through the eyes of the Prince. Rather the camera here appears to take up a more objective position, picking out the faces of different characters. [00.42.47] This part of the flashback is also about Concetta’s desire for Tancredi and the interest taken in her by Cavriaghi who will reappear later in the film. A dissolve will now take us into the next sequence, the arrival at the Salinas’ country residence at Donnafugata…

10 Arrival in Donnafugata

00:43:06 07:09 [00.43.09] Visconti had wanted to locate the sequences at Donnafugata in Palma di Montechiaro, near Agrigento, a town that had been founded by the Lampedusa family and where they had a large house. However, for a

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number of reasons he had to abandon that idea. Newspaper reports at the time claimed the local Mafia had demanded control over the building contracts for these scenes but, although this story is plausible, the director of production Pietro Notarianni said the real reason was that the town was unsuitable. Apart from anything else there were no hotels or clean drinking water. [00:43:45] The town that was used and that we are seeing is Ciminna, up in the hills about 30 miles from Palermo. According to Mario Garbuglia it was chosen ‘because its square with the church at the end corresponded almost exactly to that of the imaginary town of Donnafugata’ in Lampedusa’s novel. There was one major difference: there was no large noble house there, so a façade had to be built. As in Palermo for the battle sequence, here too they had to remove the modern accretions – television aerials, electricity cables, telephone wires – and to cover the asphalted road with dirt and cobblestones. [00:44:42] Some new characters are introduced here. First, the grey-bearded Don Onofrio, the loyal administrator of the Prince’s house. Then, and in contrast, the more important figure of Don Calogero Sedara, the mayor of the town, prominently wearing a tricolour sash to declare that he stands with the new order, and who welcomes Tancredi as a fellow supporter of change. [00.45.15] Finally, there is Don Ciccio Tumeo, the church organist and hunting companion of the Prince, with whom he will later have an important dialogue. [00.46:00] Accompanied by the town band, playing a somewhat mangled version of the gypsy girl song from Act II of Verdi’s La traviata, the Salinas walk in procession in front of the townspeople towards the church; the men have removed their hats in respect. [00:46:35] As they enter the church, Don Ciccio strikes up another piece of La traviata, Violetta’s aria ‘Amami, Alfredo’. It is sometimes believed that Verdi’s music was always associated with the patriotic values of the Risorgimento, but this view is not really historically accurate. It is true that for a time during the Risorgimento, particularly in the cities after the failed revolutions of 1848 when the ruling dynasties were restored to power, parts of Verdi’s operas were co-opted by patriots as nationalistic anthems. An example of this is represented in the famous opening scene of Visconti’s Senso (1954). There ll trovatore is being performed at La Fenice in Venice in the last years of Habsburg rule and the meaning for the Italians is clearly political, so much so that the performance becomes the occasion for a patriotic protest against the

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Austrian officers in the auditorium. But this is far from being the case here in this small town where it is unlikely that the playing of these pieces implies any criticism of the nobility. Apart from anything else, Don Ciccio, as we see later, is staunchly loyal to the old regime. [00:47:41] We remember that the film began with the recital of the rosary in front of the family altar at the house outside Palermo. Now the family’s safe arrival at Donnafugata is also marked by a religious ceremony, with Father Pirrone leading the recital of the Te Deum. This does not mean that the Prince is a devout Catholic. As his conversations with Father Pirrone and his scientific interests make clear, he is also something of a freethinker. However the film does show accurately, as the novel did, the centrality of religious observance in aristocratic families. This was also true of Visconti’s own family. His mother Carla Erba attached great importance to religious rituals in the family home. [00.48.30] The shot of the Salina family in the choir stalls shows them all with white faces, from the dirt tracks on which their coaches have been travelling, and with immobile postures and expressions. They look like statues, or ghosts, or corpses. [00:49:39] The film’s costume designer, Piero Tosi, said that Visconti took the idea of these corpse-like figures from the chapel of the Capuchins in Palermo, where skeletons hang dressed in everyday clothes. The English translator of The Leopard, Archibald Colquhoun, who visited the set during production, said he watched Visconti here puffing talcum powder from a bellows over the actors and muttering ‘Death, death…This symbolises the start of the death of a class’.

11 The Prince’s bath

00:50:15 05:39 [00:50:31, MIMÌ SAYS ‘SUBITO’] The scene where the Prince is taking a bath will be another occasion, the last in the film, for humorous interaction between him and Father Pirrone. [00:50:41] It is full of comic business: Father Pirrone’s embarrassment at seeing the Prince naked, his having a door slammed in his face, his nervousness as he rubs the Prince down, the Prince sniffing and telling the priest he should take a bath himself, the Priest’s verbose style when he begins to talk, and the Prince’s impatience with him. [00:51:32, FATHER PIRRONE SITS DOWN] But the scene also has a serious side. It is the first time that the Prince is confronted with his own ageing and

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hence his mortality. It is thus a pivotal point in the story. Father Pirrone has come to tell the Prince that Concetta has confided in him that she is in love with Tancredi and that she is certain he is in love with her. This is the culmination of what we have seen in the preceding sequences. Like most of the scenes that are largely conversational this is edited in a fairly conventional way, with an alternation of medium shots of the two actors. But it is interesting to see how the Prince’s changed perception of himself is visually reinforced. He is naked at first, then wrapped in a bathrobe. His body is powerful, but he becomes aware that there is now a generation below him old enough to fall in love. [00:52:25, PRINCE SAYS ‘VEDETE PADRE’] The camera tracks in to a close-up of his face as the recognition of his ageing begins [00:53:44, PRINCE SAYS ‘NON VI PREOCCUPATE, PADRE’] The Prince is perceptive enough to realize that if Tancredi has not explicitly declared his love to Concetta it means he is not interested and that she is simply harbouring romantic illusions. [00:53:55] It is also clear once again that Tancredi is his favourite and that he has ambitions for him. It is more important for Tancredi than for his own children to make a good match. Tancredi needs a marriage that will make him wealthy and help advance his career in the new society. [00:54:50] The Prince’s pragmatic views on marriage are combined with his cynicism about romantic love, a cynicism he justifies to the celibate Jesuit by citing his own experience. [00:55:16, PRINCE SAYS ‘CHE NON SONO SOLO ROMANTICHE FANTASIE’] In this carefully positioned shot Burt Lancaster walks onto a mark that allows his image to be trebled by being reflected in two mirrors. There are three scenes where mirrors are used to reflect the Prince and these mark out, in the course of the film, the changes in his self-image. The first was the scene with the shaving mirror when Tancredi appeared and the Prince was full of his own vigour. The second is this scene when he has been faced with the sense of his own ageing. The last is the scene near the end, during the ball, when he stands in front of a mirror and a tear rolls down his cheek.

12 Lunch and Angelica

00:55:54 11:31 .

[00:55:58, WAIT FOR FRANCESCO PAOLO: ‘FRACK’] The sequence of the lunch at Donnafugata is about the reception in the aristocratic household of the bourgeois Don Calogero and his daughter Angelica. The respective ways in which the two are received could not be more different. Don Calogero is an object of barely concealed scorn on the part of the men of the

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family whereas Angelica will be welcomed for her beauty. [00.56.24 WAIT FOR FIRST SHOT OF DON CALOGERO] The character of Don Calogero is immediately communicated by his costume and body movements. Accompanied by the same burlesque military tune by the composer Delle Cese that was used in the flashback to the Garibaldian general’s visit, he arrives wrongly dressed, walking clumsily. He has come in the daytime wearing evening dress: tails, a top hat, white gloves, white bow tie. He has been to a cheap tailor. The suit is not well cut. The trousers are too short, the shoes are wrong. The scene also shows the merciless snobbery of the three men for whom the right dress codes are second nature. [00:57:00] Paolo Stoppa, who plays Don Calogero, was married in real life to Rina Morelli, who plays Maria Stella, the Prince’s wife, and like her he had a long stage career. Stoppa and Morelli were two of the founding members of the theatre company that Visconti set up in 1946 and they acted together in many of his stage productions. Visconti was one of a handful of theatre directors who revolutionized the staging of plays and operas in Italy after the Second World War. We have already noted how his attention to staging, props and costumes in the film reflects his theatre work. Later on we’ll say something about the way his use of the musical score reflects his work as an opera director. [00:57:46, CUE ON TANCREDI COMING INTO SHOT] The entrance of Angelica is marked in several ways: the sudden change of expression in Concetta, then a reverse shot in which we see what she sees, then another reverse onto Tancredi, highlighted by the dolly into his face, and the reactions of the Prince, …Angelica again ….and Don Ciccio. Angelica’s entrance is also cued by the recurrence of the musical theme first played in the scene of Tancredi’s departure and which now starts to be associated with her. [00.58.20] Claudia Cardinale was twenty-three when she acted in The Leopard and although she had already been in about twenty films, including Rocco and his Brothers, it was The Leopard that made her a major star. The press described her as the latest Italian screen goddess after Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren. [00.58.38] Just as the film elevated Cardinale, so was she crucial to its pre-publicity, with a spate of articles about her in glossy magazines showing her in the palatial settings and in her costumes and hairdos for the film. An example was the cover of Life magazine of August 26, 1963. [00:59.13] Angelica’s luminous white dress stands out against everything else in the room: against the silver grey

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dresses of Concetta and her mother, against the dark clothes of the men, including the priest, and against the dark furniture, the hangings and paintings on the wall. Costume is probably the element of the film that strikes the spectator most immediately, above all in the interior scenes, and it is an important part of the pleasure we derive from the film. Piero Tosi had been Visconti’s costume designer on nearly all his films from Bellissima in 1951 to his last film L’innocente of 1976. In designing costumes he always worked both with the description of the character and with the build of the particular actor. It was during his work on Bellissima that he first realized that, as he later recalled, ‘a piece of clothing cannot be just a costume; it must be something that belongs to the character, both their outer skin and their intimate self.’ [01:00:14] The lunch is served and the Prince himself cuts the first course, timballo di maccheroni: pasta, meat and truffles baked in a sweet pie crust. [01:00:40] Most of the scenes set inside this house, including the lunch, were filmed in Palazzo Chigi near Rome. This was a very large seventeenth-century house which the set designers adapted to make it look like a Sicilian noble house of the mid nineteenth century. [01.01.12] At this point in the story both the bourgeois Don Calogero and the aristocrat Tancredi are enthusiastic supporters of Garibaldi. By the end of the film this support will have collapsed as they both seek to make their own careers in the new Italy. [01:01:50] The meal ends with the serving of an elaborate layered cassata, the Sicilian dessert made with sponge, ricotta and candied fruit and coated in marzipan. [00.02.15] One example of Visconti’s obsession with accuracy of detail is that he had plates made for this scene with the coat of arms of the Salina family, the leopard inside a shield, and the food was served on these. However in the film we never actually see the plates closely enough to make out the design. [01:02:55] The camera keeps circling the table and tracking along the guests. This was filmed with a table made of several sections that could be taken apart to let the camera get near and then put back together again for the more distant shots. [01:03:28, TANCREDI SAYS ‘ORA GLIELO DICO’]

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As the lunch has progressed we notice that the shots have come increasingly to focus on three characters: Tancredi, who is showing off with stories of his Garibaldian adventures; …Angelica who is following him with a mixute of trepidation and excitement as well as some carefully calculated seductive looks; ….and Concetta, who is ever more anxious and irritable. Tancredi here is spinning a lewd yarn, embroidering the scene we glimpsed at the end of the Palermo battle sequence, and suggesting that the nuns in the convent both feared and desired to be sexually assaulted. The Prince is also involved in the relay of looks. As Tancredi talks, Angelica glances at the Prince and he, clearly listening to Tancredi’s story, reacts. [01:04:58 A’S LAUGH] Tancredi’s overtly sexual remark to Angelica oversteps the limits of decency, as does her loud laugh. The laugh and the reaction of the other characters was in the script, but Claudia Cardinale later recollected that the length of the laugh was her own improvisation. [01:05:29, JUST AS CONCETTA COMES INTO SHOT] The staging of the last shots of this sequence is significant. Concetta, distraught, faces Tancredi and Angelica who already look like a couple. At first he is holding both her arms, but then, reproached, he lets go. [01:06:27, P STARTS TO WALK TOWARDS WINDOW] This short sequence is a kind of appendix to that of the lunch, and we may assume it takes place shortly after it, perhaps the following day. The Prince has been reading in his study. He goes over to the window. In a point-of-view shot, cued in the conventional way by a shot of the actor looking, we will see what he sees. This reproduces a moment in the novel when the Prince sees Tancredi walking in front of a servant carrying a basket of peaches as a gift. He is going to pay a visit to Angelica. Actually, in the film it is only the burlesque musical theme, used in the preceding sequence with Don Calogero, and the Prince’s remarks ‘I’ll help him’ and ‘One can’t deny it’s a little ignoble’, that identifies this as a shot of Tancredi going to call at the Sedaras’ house. His active courtship of the young woman from a lower social class has begun.

13 The plebiscite

01:07:25 07:03 [01:07:30] It is the morning of the plebiscite that was held all over Sicily and the mainland south of Italy on 21 October 1860. The plebiscite was to return an overwhelming majority in favour of the union with Piedmont. A tricolour has been placed in the hands of a statue. The song the men are singing, ‘La bella Gigogin’, originated in the north where it was a popular patriotic song during the wars of unification in 1859-60. It has been reworked into a Sicilian musical style. A part not sung here made clear allusions to the war against Austria. The young woman Gigogin (a dialect form of the name Teresina) may stand allegorically for Italy or the neighbouring states courted by Piedmont. The camera tracks along the faces of these men, inverting the earlier tracking shot of the statuesque faces of the Salinas in the church. Where the latter appeared death-like, these men are depicted as energetic and alive, but in a way that also seems ironic. They are too fresh-faced, too eager, and the whole scene is reminiscent of popular patriotic prints of the unification period.

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[01:08:45] This sequence is about the plebiscite but it is also about class and the manners and behaviour associated with class. Some of the local people are carrying tricolours and shouting ‘Viva l’Italia’. Others stand up and once again doff their hats when the Prince passes. The new values and the old are not really in conflict here. The winds of change are blowing and the Prince says this prevents stagnation. [01:09:38] Don Calogero is confidently controlling the plebiscite (and, as we will find out later, rigging it). The Prince ironically describes him in an aside as the Cavour of Donnafugata, in other words the little man who aspires to be the great builder of the new liberal order. However, Don Calogero calls the Prince ‘Excellency’ and, after the Prince votes in favour of union with Piedmont, Don Calogero interrupts the ballot for a few minutes and takes him to a side room to drink a toast. [01:10:37] On the back wall we see the portraits of Vittorio Emanuele and Garibaldi. The drinks are another example of Don Calogero’s vulgar taste. Small glasses of sweet fortified wine in the three colours of the Italian flag. [01:11:00] Don Onofrio, the administrator of the Salina house of Donnafugata and evidently a loyalist, doesn’t want to drink to the new order and makes an excuse, to Don Calogero’s annoyance. Father Pirrone also declines. [01:11:35] The Prince, ever in control, graciously accepts, but his expression reveals his disgust at the drink. [01:12:25] The announcement of the result of the plebiscite is handled in an ironic and humorous style reminiscent of René Clair. The town band keeps coming in at the wrong moments. Don Calogero, who is again wearing his tricolour sash, will get flustered, the wind will blow out the candles. The Prince is amused. We will also see a significant relay of looks between the Prince and Angelica.

14 Hunting with Don Ciccio

01:14:28 14:59

[01:14:31] A dissolve from the night scene takes us to a sequence of landscape shots. As day breaks and the sun rises higher in the sky the Prince and Don Ciccio set out on a hunting trip. This is an interesting case of diegetic sound being used to create a scene: for over a minute there is no dialogue or music. Instead we hear the sounds of birdsong, feet crunching on the dry grass, church bells, crickets, then finally gunshots and birds squawking in reaction to them.

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[01:15:44] The sequence then settles into a dialogue as the two men take a break. This begins with a long take lasting nearly a minute in which the rabbit hanging from the tree divides the frame into two halves. To its left are Don Ciccio and the dogs, on the right and closer to the camera is the Prince. [01:16:15, PRINCE: ‘INFATTI È VERO’] It is a long piece of dialogue which has two main topics. The first is the plebiscite and the significance of the result. The second is the rise of Don Calogero and the background of his family. [01:16:55, DON C: ‘MA CICCIO TUMEO È UN GALANTUOMO’] The Prince learns from Don Ciccio that the results of the plebiscite were rigged. Although there were not any official ‘no’ votes in the count, Don Ciccio voted ‘no’ and it can be assumed that others did as well. Don Ciccio is an interesting example of the servant class which identifies more strongly with the old regime than the ruling class itself. As he says, he owes his position as a church organist to the musical training he was given with the help of Queen Isabella. His family also received cash benefits from the Bourbons. Later in the scene, when they are discussing Tancredi’s engagement to Angelica, it is Don Ciccio who expresses the view that it would have been acceptable for Tancredi to seduce Angelica but that to marry her is a betrayal of his class. Don Ciccio is played by Serge Reggiani, Italian-born but a French actor. He played among other roles the lover in Jacques Becker’s Casque d’or and he later had a parallel career in France as a singer. [01:18:10, PRINCE ‘LE VITTORIE DI QUESTO GARIBALDI’] There is a significant difference from the novel here. In the novel the Prince’s realization that the results had been so blatantly rigged makes him sceptical about the new Italian state; here in the film the Prince’s judgment is essentially positive. The plebiscite was necessary as a lesser evil. A clear majority of ‘yes’ votes in Sicily was needed in order to legitimate the new monarchy and prevent the anarchy that might otherwise have resulted from the wave of popular enthusiasm for Garibaldi. [01:19:27, DON C: ‘MI MANGIO CU’ CAFFÈ IO I SAVOIARDI’] Don Ciccio puns on the word ‘Savoyards’. The name of the Piedmontese monarchy is also a finger biscuit. [01:19:47] Now the second part of the dialogue begins. The Prince wants to know from Don Ciccio what the people in Donnafugata think about Don Calogero and his family. [01:20:10, DON C: ‘INTELLIGENTE COME U’ DIAVOLO D’ALTRONDE’] As Don Ciccio begins to talk about Don Calogero for the first time in this scene we get some music: the

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burlesque theme by now associated with Don Calogero. Visconti in an interview said he hoped the audience might see in Don Calogero the echo of a literary figure, Mastro-don Gesualdo, the protagonist of the novel by the Sicilian writer Giovanni Verga first published in1888. He is a master builder who becomes a rich landowner and entrepreneur. Like Don Calogero, Don Gesualdo is a smart operator who buys up land from the declining nobility. Don Gesualdo marries an impoverished noblewoman in an attempt to legitimate his rise and gain acceptance by the aristocracy. In Don Calogero’s case it is his daughter’s marriage to an aristocrat that will help his own advancement. [01:21:22] The Prince now asks about Don Calogero’s family. We learn that his wife, Bastiana, is very beautiful but we also learn the real reason why he doesn’t bring her to public occasions. She is, according to Don Ciccio, almost like an animal: illiterate, innumerate, good only for sex. The implication here for the Prince is that his nephew is going to get engaged not only to a woman of a lower class but to the daughter of an illiterate woman whose own father, a peasant in one of the Prince’s estates, was so filthy that he was nicknamed Peppe Mmerda: Joe Shit. [01:22:10] The whole dialogue is staged against a landscape that starts to become significant. The land we see in the background was once all the property of the Salina family. Don Ciccio will point into the distance indicating where Angelica’s grandfather lived and worked. But this is the same land that is now being bought up by Don Calogero. So landscape is not just background or decoration. Work, wealth and patterns of ownership and control are inscribed on it. [01:22:54] It is interesting that this scene in the bedroom is inserted into the middle of the dialogue with Don Ciccio which will resume in a few minutes. For the audience who see the film for the first time it seems to be a transition forward into a later scene. But in fact it must be a flashback to an earlier moment. [01:23:20] Maria Stella, the Princess, is almost hysterical when she hears the news that Tancredi wishes to marry Angelica. It is obvious that she doesn’t share her husband’s partiality for Tancredi and that she considers the bourgeois Sedara family utterly unsuitable for a match with an aristocrat. [01:24:00] The scene shows once again the dynamics of the relationship between the Prince and Stella. She badmouths both Tancredi and Angelica and questions her husband’s judgment. He defends his choices. She whines and weeps. He gets angry but then calms her down. [01:24:54] The scene is essentially a piece of comedy but it shows nicely the functioning of this marriage, which the

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Prince has already described to Father Pirrone, and this is conveyed by the actions of the two characters more than by what they say. [01:25:25] Sex and desire, which was there in the past, at least on the Prince’s side, has disappeared from this bed some time ago. Stella is a religious woman who, before she goes to sleep, counts her rosary beads and crosses herself. But there is still tenderness, on both sides, despite the wife’s dissent from her husband’s views and despite his assertion of authority over her. He slaps his knee too hard and hurts himself, but then he leans over and kisses his wife on the forehead. Stella’s childlike weakness brings out a caring side in the Prince and this then soothes her and binds her to him. [01:26:48] The return to the hunting scene sees Don Ciccio and the Prince resume their dialogue and the topic now changes to Angelica. [01:27:00] Don Ciccio will be the first to know that the Prince is about to ask Don Calogero for his daughter’s hand for Tancredi. [01:27:13] There is a bit of a fairy-tale quality to this: Don Ciccio will have to pay for this privileged knowledge by being shut up in a room until the news is made public. [01:28:10] Just as the Prince shouted at his wife for questioning his judgment, here he threatens violence to Don Ciccio for daring to speak his mind. The Prince is well known for his fiery character but this time the violence seems to betray a degree of insecurity. He would like to believe that he is doing the right thing in approving Tancredi’s choice and the alliance with the new class. [01:28:50] As the Prince walks off, the music comes in. It is the only time, apart from the brief musical illustration of Don Calogero, that music is used in this dialogue sequence. The themes picked up are a mixture of ones we heard earlier, those of the coach journey and picnic.

15 The marriage contract

01:29:27 06 :57

[01:29:36: DON CAL ‘CERTO, CERTO, MA..’] We are into a key moment in the story here: the marriage contract. This is the scene in which Paolo Stoppa really demonstrates his skill in constructing the character of Don Calogero. He is suitably obsequious to the Prince, but as soon as he fully takes in the news of Tancredi’s marriage proposal he will be immediately in control of the details of the contract, confirming what Don Ciccio has said about his astuteness. Note Stoppa’s timing here, for instance his ability to use pauses, and the

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effectiveness of his gestures and postures. [01:30:53, WAIT TILL AFTER DON C SLUMPS BACK IN CHAIR AND CUT TO THREE-SHOT] The scene as a whole is played essentially as comedy. There is this little piece of slapstick where Burt Lancaster picks up Stoppa, kisses him on both cheeks and drops him back in the chair. Romolo Valli is a third presence in the scene whose function is also comic. [01:31:12] After congratulating the two men he will remain at the back or the edge of the frame, listening in eagerly to all the details of the contract but pretending not to hear. [01:31:44, PRINCE, AFTER ‘SANTIAGO’] As the Prince tells Don Calogero that Tancredi’s fortune, despite his ancient lineage, has been squandered by a prodigal parent, we can see not only his affection for Tancredi but also his admiration. The very fact that Tancredi has not been privileged and pampered like his own children makes him fascinating to the Prince. [01:32:55, DON C: ‘CARTE IN TAVOLA’] Don Calogero’s response to the Prince’s list of Tancredi’s illustrious ancestors is a list of the property that he will give the couple. The irony is that he has acquired this land from noble families, including the Salinas, whose ancient estates are displayed in the painted scenes around the walls. [00:33:19] These tempera paintings were made by the set artists in the style typical of this kind of picture. Their purpose was not simply to represent the landscape but to show it as property. In the picture of Donnafugata the Salinas’ house dominates the hilltop town and the ownership of the estate is marked by the prominent heraldic crest on the right. [01:34:00: WAIT FOR START OF FLASHBACK INSERTED INTO DIALOGUE WITH DON CALOGERO] This is a kind of reverie by the Prince during his conversation with Don Calogero, in which he recalls Don Ciccio’s earlier remarks about Don Calogero’s wife and visualises the scene that Don Ciccio had described. In other words, it is another example of a series of subjective shots ‘owned’ by the Prince, but in this case it is not a memory (since the Prince was not present at this scene) but a fantasy. Don Calogero’s wife is recognisably played here by Claudia Cardinale and this identification is underlined by the music, since the motif we hear is the one associated in the film with Angelica and Tancredi. [01:35:03] Don Calogero’s closing remarks to the Prince reveal the hidden aspiration of the nouveau riche not to

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overturn the aristocratic system but to join it. The man who supported Garibaldi when he was on the winning side now informs the Prince that he was granted a minor noble title by one of the Bourbon kings. The Prince’s reaction, and Father Pirrone’s, is one of patronising amusement. [01:35:46] After the painful experience of having swallowed his aristocratic pride in the marriage contract with Don Calogero, the Prince goes back to release Don Ciccio from his temporary prison. The Prince’s earlier anger at Don Ciccio for speaking his mind has now disappeared and here too, as with his wife, there is evident tenderness. He apologises for having shut Don Ciccio in and offers to let him go out through the door first. But the Bourbon loyalist, ever observant of the traditional patterns of deference, lets the Prince go before him.

16 Tancredi returns

01:36:24 06:43 [01:36:33, PRINCE READS ‘NELLA SUA MORTA QUIETE’] The sequence of Tancredi’s return is interesting in its use of the interiors of the house. The narrative of events works with this space, using for the first two minutes almost entirely medium-long shots. It starts with a composition similar to that of the rosary scene at the beginning of the film: a room filled with characters left to right as the Prince reads a story aloud. [01:36:58: CUT TO MIMÌ RUNNING] Then as Tancredi arrives we switch to shots that work on a front-to-back axis, starting with this wonderful deep-staged shot of the servant Mimì hurrying away from camera through three rooms and opening a door to the fourth, where the Prince and his family are. [01:37:26, TANCREDI AND COMPANIONS WALK TOWARDS CAMERA] Then Tancredi and his companions arrive in a movement from back to front and enter the room where, as on a stage set, the greetings take place and the action unfolds in front of a static camera. [01:38:10] Again a series of movements across these interior spaces. The now familiar household population are all reassuringly present: the servant Mimì; Father Pirrone; the Princess, seated, who welcomes the guests; the governess, whose role throughout the film consists of talking, usually crying out, in French, the language in which she instructs the children and the language of nineteenth-century European and Russian courts. [01:38:55, CAVRIAGHI GOES UP TO CONCETTA] We have already seen Count Cavriaghi, whom Tancredi brings with him, in the flashback during the picnic when he and Tancredi were wearing the red uniforms of the garibaldini. He has come back now to fulfil his aspiration of courting Concetta. [01:39:30, WAIT FOR TANCREDI TO REPLY ABOUT UNIFORM] The dialogue about uniforms now is significant. The Prince is genuinely surprised that Tancredi and his friend have come back wearing these dark blue uniforms when he last saw them in red ones. Here for the first time

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in the story the Prince seems not to be in control in dealing with public events. He doesn’t understand, and Tancredi has to explain to him, that these are the uniforms of the royal Italian army. He explains that when Garibaldi’s army was disbanded they had the choice of going home or enrolling in the Italian army. But the important thing to notice is the judgement that Tancredi and Cavriaghi, both aristocrats, express about the Garibaldini. Their former comrades-in-arms are now rabble, dangerous, almost bandits. Tancredi and Cavriaghi have chosen the path of military and political normalization. [01:40:49, WAIT FOR TANCREDI TO SHOW RING TO CONCETTA] The action now works on a parallelism between Tancredi’s engagement to Angelica and Cavriaghi’s courtship of Concetta. Both have brought gifts. Tancredi pulls out and shows off to the assembled company, including Concetta, the ring he has bought for Angelica with his uncle’s money, telling him in an aside that with the change he has managed to buy some time with prostitutes in Naples. [01:41:17, WAIT FOR CAVRIAGHI TO APPEAR IN DOOR] Cavriaghi has a book of poems by Aleardo Aleardi, a patriotic and sentimental poet of the early nineteenth century, inscribed with a dedication to Concetta. [01:41:55, CUE = AS CAVRIAGHI FINISHES SAYING ‘SORDA AI MIEI SOSPIRI’, ON CUT TO ANGELICA] Angelica arrives and again she breaks the stylistic codes that regulate the household, and in this case also those of the film. She rushes in soaking wet, her hair loose, panting and wearing a dark patterned dress open at the neck. The musical theme of the two lovers strikes up. Suddenly we’re into a scene from Gone with the Wind. Tancredi kisses Angelica. In a Rhett Butler-like gesture he throws away the box and puts the ring on her finger. [01:42:35: PLENTY OF TIME TO SAY THIS:] The passionate kiss is filmed over Tancredi’s shoulder so that we see Angelica prominently wearing her new ring and can study her face. Her desire for Tancredi is clear. But her expression also communicates that she has got the man she wants. She will bring to the marriage the money that he needs, but in exchange she will get the status and the symbolic benefits that only marriage to an aristocrat can give her.

17 Upstairs rooms

01:43:07 10:22

[11:43:10] The cut from one kiss to another in which Tancredi and Angelica appear in different costumes marks the beginning of a long sequence in the upstairs rooms of the house at Donnafugata. This was also a long episode in the novel. The sequence works at several levels. Firstly, the rooms, away from the rest of the house, are a place where Tancredi and Angelica can indulge in a form of play which is sexual but also childish. There is an atmosphere of the fairy tale: Angelica’s expression and gestures at first are those of a child discovering an enchanted place. This atmosphere is reinforced by Rota’s sweet and melodic musical theme.

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[01:44:03, ANGELICA WALKS PAST CANVASES] Secondly, the rooms communicate to the spectator, through the paintings and the furniture, the past history of this aristocratic house. [01:44:25, ANGELICA RUNS AWAY FROM CAMERA THROUGH SUCCESSIVE ROOMS] Thirdly, this seemingly endless space allows Tancredi to show Angelica the world into which she will marry: it is rich in history and traditions even though, like his branch of the family, it is in decay. [01:44:55, T ENTERS ROOM WITH LARGE WARDROBE] Both characters’ costumes are communicative. Tancredi’s uniform from the preceding scene is replaced by an elegant three-piece suit. [01:45:09, A ENTERS SAME ROOM THROUGH ANOTHER DOOR] Angelica’s black dress is replaced by a red one. [PAUSE 2 SECONDS] As with all Angelica’s dresses, the characteristic shape, typical of the period, is created by the tight corset, which pulls in the waist, and the wire hoops and crinoline, which round out the hips. There is an interesting discussion of the corset in Stella Bruzzi’s book Undressing Cinema. She notes that, despite the negative view expressed by some women in the twentieth century that it was a garment that had oppressed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women by confining them, there is evidence from Victorian women’s magazines that tight lacing was actually ‘a popular ... erotic pursuit’ at the time and that many women derived ‘pleasure from narcissistic contemplation of themselves in restrictive undergarments.’ [01:46:05, CAVRIAGHI WALKS INTO FRAME] The men’s clothes here, by contrast, are marked by a sobriety of style typical of the bourgeois dress of the nineteenth century, and very different not only from the exuberance of the eighteenth-century aristocrat and dandy, but also from the uniforms that these two men were wearing in the last scene: bright blue tunics, shiny buttons, epaulettes and swords. This was a period when the bourgeois style became dominant. It’s a functional, utilitarian style, associated with the work ethic, and its widespread adoption caused the eroticism of clothing to be largely displaced away from men to women. [01:47:25, WAIT FOR GOVERNESS TO CALL A] As the French governess calls out again for Angelica and Tancredi he whispers to her and they run away. Here the coming together of eroticism and play is repeated. [01:48:11, WAIT FOR T AND A TO ENTER THE ROOM WITH SUNLIGHT] There are two sections in the film where one has a sense of time being stretched or dilated. This sequence in the upstairs rooms is the first. The long section at the ball is the second. In this case, the stretching of time is to do with the discovery of this seemingly endless space but it is also to do with Angelica and Tancredi being

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away from the normal times and places where they are under surveillance. This unmarried couple are not supposed to be here, the governess is responsible for keeping an eye on them; they are running away in order to find a space for their desire. [01:49:45, CHEVALLEY ARRIVES] Inserted here into the sequence with Tancredi and Angelica we have the first of two short scenes of the arrival at Donnafugata of Chevalley, who has been sent as the representative of the new Italian government in Turin to offer the Prince a seat in the Senate. [01.55.00] Chevalley is played by the English actor Leslie French and the Prince’s eldest son, Francesco Paolo, who goes to meet him, by the French actor Pierre Clementi. Clementi would later appear in two films by Bernardo Bertolucci: Partner, in which he stars, and The Conformist, in which he plays the chauffeur Lino. [01:51:07, ANGELICA ENTERS ROOM WITH 2 BEDS] Again on the eroticism of Angelica’s dress, we can quote here a passage from James Laver’s history of fashion, reproduced in Stella Bruzzi’s book, in which he says the combination of small corseted waist and open neck ‘emphasized the impression of something very precious emerging from a complicated wrapping, as a flower emerges from the paper which encloses its stalk’ [p. 42]. [01:51:39, WAIT FOR T TO SAY ‘CREDI CHE NON TI AMO PIÙ’] The suggestion here of pent-up desire, in both characters, which is then contained by the force of social convention, is similar to the eroticism and containment of the clothing. [01:52:40] At the back of the shot Chevalley arrives at the house as Concetta and Cavriaghi watch. In a moment the camera will pan away over the rooftops and we will hear again the romantic theme by now associated with the couple Tancredi and Angelica. This may seem in conflict with the shot of the non-couple Cavriaghi and Concetta. However, the music may have other meanings. It may anticipate Cavriaghi’s impending departure after his failed courtship, just as the theme accompanied Tancredi’s departure near the beginning. Or it may simply mark the end of the long sequence of Tancredi and Angelica in the upstairs rooms.

18 An emissary from Piedmont

01:53:29 05:33 [01:53:54, WAIT FOR TRACKING SHOT, PRINCE BEGINS TO WALK] This is the first of two successive scenes involving Chevalley. The Prince and his family are amused by his fears of bandits and the fact that he is not used to the oily Sicilian cooking. Chevalley is impatient to carry out the business he has been sent to do, namely invite the Prince to become a senator in the new Italian Parliament, and then get away as quickly as possible. The Prince however imposes his authority as host and head of the household but he also teases Chevalley and plays on his fears with the line about holding him hostage.

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[01:54:35] The game of whist here is one of the details in the film that define the world of aristocratic and high bourgeois culture. Unlike the indigenous card games played by all social classes in Italy, contract whist was a game imported from England and in nineteenth-century Italy it was the preserve of those classes who had access to an international cultural currency of games and pastimes. [01:55:09, AFTER CHEVALLEY SAYS ‘FINITO QUAGGIÙ’] Chevalley is relieved to find a fellow northerner ‘down here’, as he puts it – Cavriaghi is from Milan – but he is surprised to see that he is so at ease in these surroundings. This is a comic scene but it is making an important point about the mutual perceptions of northern Italians and Sicilians in the post-unification period. In this way it prepares the ground for the next scene, the long dialogue between Chevalley and the Prince. [01:56:10] Francesco Paolo takes pleasure in telling Chevalley lurid stories of local lawlessless and violence. It will be Tancredi’s turn next. The Italian government in Turin rapidly became aware, after the annexation of the south, of problems of banditry, brigandage and organized crime there. In December 1860 Cavour described Sicily and the mainland south in a letter to Vittorio Emanuele as ‘the most corrupt and weakest part of Italy’. He said unity would have to be imposed on it by moral force and, if that wasn’t sufficient, by physical force. These views guided the actions of the new Italian administration in Sicily. They saw the island as a recalcitrant law and order problem. They made little attempt to understand its particular cultures and traditions. The northerners remained convinced that their mission was to bring enlightened government combined with firm policing and that this would eradicate the weeds of organized crime and corruption. This is not the place to get into a discussion of the nature of the criminal activities being described, but it may be worth noting that it was just after unification that the problem of organized crime in Sicily started to become visible in Italy and the term ‘mafia’ first started to be used and known outside Sicily. In his first scene with Tancredi the Prince had described the rebels in the mountains that his nephew was running off to join as ‘mafiosi’. There the term ‘mafiosi’ meant little more than ‘bandits’. It was used in this loose sense until the first descriptions and investigations of mafia bands appeared, from the mid 1860s to the 1870s.

19 Chevalley and the Prince

01:58:02 12:16 [01:58:19, WAIT FOR CUT TO FIRST SHOT OF CHEVALLEY] Now Chevalley and the Prince are alone in the study. This is a long dialogue scene which closely follows the novel. It’s quite static visually, particularly at first, when the men are both seated, but it’s interesting verbally both for what they say and in the way they match each other in their eloquence and conviction. [01:58:47]

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The main point the scene makes is about the mutual incompatibility of the two men’s political outlooks. Chevalley is offering the Prince a position as a nominated senator, in other words one of the non-elected members of the upper house of the new Italian Parliament. The Prince will decline the offer on the grounds that he belongs to an old world that doesn’t want to be roused from its torpor by the new political system. [01:59:23] The Prince will give two reasons for the immobility of the Sicilians: their long history of being colonized by rulers from outside the island and the hot climate, which he says makes them resistant to change. He will add that they are a proud people who consider themselves already perfect. [01:59:51, PRINCE: ‘SENTITE, CHEVALLEY’] Behind such views was the long tradition of Sicilian separatism. Since the end of Norman rule in the middle ages and during the long period of Spanish rule, Sicily had in fact had a separate status from the mainland. This status had only been removed in the 1730s with the imposition of Bourbon rule. By the early nineteenth century there was a strong feeling among Sicilian elites, reinforced by nationalist ideas and by the fact that the British had recently occupied the island, that Sicily was a nation in itself. [02:00:35] As in the other dialogue scenes the editing here is quite conventional with a series of reverse shots between the two characters. However the scene is also carefully lit to highlight the faces against the dark red and brown backgrounds. And the flickering shadows thrown by the fireplace give visual interest [02:01:07] This is an appropriate place to say something about the critical debate that arose in Italy when the film was first released in 1963. Many critics on the left, particularly those to the left of the Communist Party, which Visconti supported, were hostile to it because they saw it as reproducing the conservative standpoint of Lampedusa’s novel. In other words the film and its director appeared to them to be closely identified with the character of the Prince, this rather cynical Sicilian aristocrat who at first adapts to the new order for his own survival but then declines to take an active part in it. The Prince is also a mouthpiece for a view of history as either static (‘a barely noticeable substitution of ruling groups’) or degenerative: as he will put it later to Chevalley, the aristocratic lions and leopards are succeeded by bourgeois jackals and hyenas. [02:02:00] These left-wing critics were bemused that Visconti should have made this film, or made it in this way, after the more radical treatments of politics and society, and of the south of Italy, in his earlier work. These included his film of 1948 La terra trema, also made in Sicily, about poor fishermen who revolt against their own exploitation, and his last feature before The Leopard, Rocco and his brothers, which had dealt with the plight of a family of migrants from the south trying to make a living in Milan. [02:02:38]

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Visconti had not done what many of these critics had expected him to do, namely use Lampedusa’s novel as a springboard for his own reworking, as he had done with most of his other adaptations of literary texts. Instead, he had in their view been excessively faithful to both the letter and spirit of the book. Among those who took this position was the influential Marxist film critic Guido Aristarco, who up till then had championed Visconti’s films. [02:03:10] Visconti defended his way of making the film. In an interview with his friend, the Communist intellectual Antonello Trombadori, he conceded that the film was, like the novel, pessimistic. But he said that whereas Lampedusa’s pessimism was simply based on a regret for the passing of the old order, his own pessimism was radical because it implicitly postulated a new order, by which he meant not the liberal parliamentary state but a future revolutionary alternative. [02:03:42] But actually it is hard to see any evidence of allusions to a new revolutionary order in the film itself. It may certainly be taken as a critique of the liberal notion of the Risorgimento as progressive, and as showing how the new state formed in 1860, and implicitly subsequent Italian governments, worked by an accommodation between old and new ruling groups to the exclusion of radical and democratic alternatives. This was the also the view of the former Communist leader and theoretician Antonio Gramsci, by whom Visconti was influenced. But this is not the same as postulating a new order. [02:04:35] In his interview with Trombadori, Visconti said that the peasants were the film’s ‘subaltern protagonists, faceless but no less present for that’. In reality the peasants and the lower classes are only intermittently visible in the film and they may hardly be said to be its indirect protagonists. They appear on the edges of the aristocratic world, serving their masters, trying to pass a road block, working the land. They are usually placed at the back or to the edge of a shot or at the opening or closing of a sequence. [02:05:20] It is interesting to note, however, that in the early treatments and drafts of the script, there was a less literal adaptation of the novel, and there was to have been a much more explicit representation of the contradictions of Garibaldi’s short period of rule in Sicily. The film was in fact going to start with the crushing of the insurrection at Bronte, in eastern Sicily – a famous case of Garibaldi’s interim administration intervening to repress peasant seizures of land. An early version of the script also included scenes towards the end dealing with the poverty of the peasants and their continued land hunger after 1860. But in the finished film the peasant movement is not represented at all, just as it is not represented in the novel. [02:06:20] So Visconti’s film might have been, but turned out not to be, a different kind of film on the Risorgimento, more explictly left wing. What it actually became was a film that focussed, very much as the novel did, on the

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waning of the Sicilian nobility and the rise of the bourgeoisie. [02:06:50] But the film did become something else that the novel was not. It became a film that dwelt centrally, using different means and a different structure from those of the novel, on the spectacle of the swansong of the nobility. It did this by expanding the ball episode of the novel into the long and complex section of the film that will start in a few minutes from now and by the way it focuses the ending on the Prince’s decline towards death, merging his own demise with that of his class. [02:07:54] As the Prince and Don Ciccio accompany Chevalley to his coach at dawn, we have one of those scenes in which the lower classes appear on the margins. We will see the two men pause as they walk past a group of poor women feeding their children. On the wall behind are the already peeling posters for the plebiscite and against the Bourbons. It is a very eloquent little scene. The Prince glances at Chevalley. Chevalley shakes his head. For him this is an example of the legacy of bad Bourbon government that his administration will seek to put right. For the Prince it is a perennial problem that the Piedmontese have inherited and will not be able to solve. [02:09:48: COME IN RIGHT AT END OF DIALOGUE, CHEVALLEY: ‘NON HO SENTITO’] The last words between the Prince and Chevalley need to be seen in the context of their recent encounter with poverty. Chevalley is confident that his administration will improve the condition of Sicily whereas the Prince’s cynicism is now total.

20 Ball in Palermo

02:10:18

15:52 [COME IN RIGHT AT START OF SHOT] The camera pans and picks up peasants hoeing the fields as we hear the waltz from the ball: the music is a sound bridge into the next scene but it’s also an ironic counterpoint to what we are looking at. [02:10:35] We are into the long section of the film set at the ball in the house of the Prince of Ponteleone in Palermo. The waltz we are hearing was a hitherto unknown piece written by Verdi. The manuscript, scored only for piano, had been bought in an antiquarian bookshop by the editor of the film, Visconti’s long-time collaborator Mario Serandrei. Nino Rota scored the piano part for a whole orchestra. The film’s producers made a big issue out of the discovery and use of this unpublished work by Verdi, which is also mentioned in the opening credits, but musicologically it is not considered to be of major importance. Apart from the waltz, the six other dance tunes played at the ball were written by Rota. They were recorded at a rehearsal in Palermo by an orchestra working under a temperature of forty degrees and the quality of the performance suffered accordingly. However, Visconti liked the rather rough and ready rendering of the pieces because it conveyed an authentic sense of how a dance orchestra would sound in this kind of setting. [02.11.42] WAIT DURING GREETING OF GUESTS

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Tancredi has already arrived, before the Prince and his family, and it is clear that his main concern has been to stage-manage the début of Angelica in Palermo society. He has got his aunt to invite her and her father and he has made sure that this time Don Calogero is appropriately dressed. In fact, as we shall see later on, he has not quite succeeded. When he finds Don Calogero asleep on a chair towards the end of the night, we’ll see that he has long white underwear poking out of his trouser legs. [02.12.12] The ball sequences were filmed inside a large aristocratic house, Palazzo Gangi, in Palermo. Altogether they last forty-five minutes. This is a very long time considering that the ball begins over two hours into the film, when average feature films have ended. One might expect this to put excessive demands on the spectator’s attention. But Visconti’s decision was very deliberate and the long duration is necessary to his intentions. The ball in Lampedusa’s novel takes up less than ten per cent of the text. By expanding it into over a quarter of the film Visconti wants to make the viewer feel its duration, observe the manners of the aristocracy and experience the increasing weariness of the Prince. In fact the ball section is not only central to the telling of the story in the film; its overall rhythm is very important too. It is subdivided into several narrative units, and it alternates between scenes of dancing guests, dialogue scenes among smaller groups, and scenes of the Prince alone or with others. [02:13:22] Some commentators on the film have seen the ball section as echoing Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, in its close attention to manners and behaviour, in the way that various characters and conversations weave in and out of it, and above all in its its long duration, like the parties that take up long stretches of Proust’s text, and the consequent sense of expanded and slowed-down time. [02:13:47] Pallavicino arrives with his fellow officers, in the uniforms of the Piedmontese army. He is one of the key characters in the ball section. The old Palermo nobility are delighted to welcome the representatives of the new State which has annexed them but now offers them security from further revolution. Pallavicino is equally delighted to be fussed over by the ladies and will charm them with his stories of soldierly prowess. [02:15:00] Again on Proust, it is worth remarking that Visconti loved Proust’s novel and he told Trombadori in his interview that he would have been very pleased if audiences saw Proustian echoes in his film. In 1965 Visconti would be invited to make a film of Proust’s novel by the French producer Nicole Stéphane who had acquired the rights.Visconti got as far as getting a screenplay drafted, doing recces in France and drawing up a wish list of actors to play in it. But the project ran into funding difficulties and in 1972, by which time he had become tied up in another expensive and lengthy film project, Ludwig, Stéphane cancelled the contract and she took it to Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter instead. The Losey-Pinter version never got made either. Visconti’s biographer Gianni Rondolino reflected that it may have been as well that Visconti never actually

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made his Proust film since he had already in a sense distilled what he wanted from Proust into his other films. [02:16:30. WAIT TILL TANCREDI GREETS ANGELICA] Fourteen rooms of Palazzo Gangi were used in the filming and again three cameras were used. This meant that a variety of angles could be shot and actors could move between rooms and stay on camera. [02:16:53] In all, the filming of the ball took just over a month, lasting throughout August 1962, and by all accounts it was a gruelling experience. Shooting was done in the evening and at night, partly to avoid the daytime heat and partly to get the right lighting. A school nearby was used for dressing rooms and make-up. The actors would start to get dressed and made up in the mid-afternoon and shooting would start around 9 pm, with long pauses, finishing towards dawn. [02:18:06] The young man introduced here as Gioacchino Lanza really is called Gioacchino Lanza. He was in fact the adopted son of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of The Leopard. He was present on the set during much of the filming and this inclusion of him as a character is a kind of in-joke. Many of the other people in these ball scenes were real Palermo aristocrats, whom Visconti conscripted into acting with his usual zeal for authenticity. Tancredi’s possessiveness is shown by the fact that he has already filled up Angelica’s list of dancing partners with his own name. The two will start dancing to the waltz, one of the six dances written by Nino Rota and used for the ball. [02:18:50] The hundreds of candles in these scenes had to be replaced frequently. They are the ostensible light source but the Technicolor film speeds and movie camera lenses of the early 1960s were too slow for interiors like this to be properly lit without additional lights. So a lighting rig had to be put above the chandeliers. The breakthrough film for the use of natural lighting in interiors was Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon in 1975, which used a very fast Zeiss lens developed for space satellite photography. The heat of the lights rapidly melted the candles, so filming had to be interrupted while they were replaced. Also, the white gloves worn by all the guests became stained with sweat and Visconti insisted that they should also be replaced. A laundry room was set up nearby for this purpose. [02:19:48] At this point we begin to see the Prince getting tired. In contrast with his confident stride across the room that we saw at the start of the film, or even the confident manner in which he behaved during the plebiscite, here his body shows signs of fatigue. Burt Lancaster’s acting is very remarkable in this whole latter part of the film. As the character becomes more introspective the actor communicates through gestures and slight changes

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of facial expression as much as through dialogue. In fact his words often belie what he is thinking. Here his acting in front of the mirror conveys weariness and a sense of his own ageing. But he hides this and puts on his old confident mask when an acquaintance asks him if he is bored. [02:20:41] Here the reference to a zoo couldn’t be clearer. The Prince is also commenting on the degeneration of the nobility through intermarriage. His acquaintance will in a moment pick this up and compliment the Prince on Tancredi’s betrothal to Angelica – which is implicitly a renewal of the blood. [02:21:33] We are about to see the last of the handful of shots in the film representing the Prince’s literal viewpoint. The camera shows him sitting on the chair and then the shot is reversed to show what he sees: the gaggle of young women chatting animatedly on a large pouf. The subjective shot helps communicate the increasing introspection of the character. It will return for a second time in a few moments. [02:22:25] The cutting of the film here is different from what we conventionally expect. The camera dwells on the Prince’s face for a long time after his friend leaves. The facial expression changes as he makes an effort to overcome his tiredness, stiffens his neck, then gets up and walks with renewed determination. [02:22:50] Similarly the camera dwells on his figure for a long time after he walks across the room to a door. [02:23:16] This is a high-angle shot in which nothing of narrative significance happens and no significant character is in frame. The same camera set-up will be used in a moment for a dance, but here its function seems to be to create a pause and again to convey the dilation of time. [02:24:12] The actors were given dance training and were choreographed by Alberto Testa, whose name however does not appear in the credits. [02:24:22] In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the ball was central to the social life of the aristocracy. Dance had long been associated in European courts with a training of the body and mind that helped develop military discipline as well as a grace and elegance appropriate to courtiers. But balls were not just about dancing. They took place in various rooms and they were also an occasion to conduct courtship, make conversation, consolidate friendships or enmities, make political and diplomatic contacts.

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[02:24:58] Don Calogero is true to his nature, remarking that palaces like this can’t be built nowadays with the current price of gold, and the Prince deflects his materialistic remark onto the value of Tancredi and Angelica as a beautiful young couple. Here it appears that he is viewing them unselfishly, but the complexity of his feelings will come out in the next scene. The visual emphasis on the Prince’s face is heightened by the out of focus background, unusual in this film.

21 The library 02:26:10 06:40 [02:26:12] This is the first of two scenes during the ball in which the Prince withdraws to be on his own. For the first two minutes the scene is a piece of silent acting by Burt Lancaster with the music off in the background. Archibald Colquhoun noted on the set the considerable effort that Lancaster put into creating the role. He wrote: ‘He has absorbed local atmosphere, visited the city’s monuments, read background books on the island….His knowledge of the text of The Leopard is extraordinary… He has lived The Leopard, until as filming develops he is coming to represent more and more the spirit of the book’. [02:26:55] After drinking a glass of water, the Prince sits down, rubs his brow, then notices a painting on the wall and gets up to look at it. [02:27:12] It is a copy of a didactic moral painting of the late eighteenth century, ‘Le fils puni’ (The Son Punished) by Jean-Baptiste Greuze in the Louvre. From the Prince’s reaction here, and from what he says later in the scene, it is as if he comes face to face with an image of his own future death. In a sense he is looking into a mirror again, but one which gives him back an image not of how he is now but of how he might be. The painting reinforces the sense of his own ageing and his declining power. [02:27:55] This scene is another example of Rotunno’s skill in obtaining chiaroscuro lighting effects. The ostensible light sources are the candles and the small oil lamp. Rotunno had to use a key light to illuminate Lancaster’s face and he had to throw some extra light into the back of the room, otherwise it would have looked too dark. At the same time there is enough black behind the actor to show up the smoke from his cigar. [02:28:30] After Tancredi and Angelica enter the dynamics of the scene changes. [02:29:01] The contrast between the older and the younger generation is foregrounded, both because the Prince draws attention to it with his references to death and because of the anxious reaction of the young couple.

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[02:29:28] Tancredi’s tenderness towards his uncle is evident. He seems here to be still a boy. [02:29:50] We need to remember that only two years have passed since the beginning of the story. That was 1860, this is 1862. There the Prince mentioned in the dialogue with Father Pirrone that he was 45. So now he is 47. And Burt Lancaster was also 47 when he played this role. So the Prince’s ageing is a psychological process more than a physical one. However, it is a process that affects his physical behaviour. The character, and the actor, now look older. [02:30:57] When Angelica makes her seductive approach to the Prince and invites him to dance the dynamics of the scene change again. [02:31:07] The sequence of gestures is erotically powerful. Angelica puts her hand on the Prince’s shoulder; then he takes her hand and kisses it. [02:31:18] Tancredi is visibly disturbed. The oedipal rivalry between the two men is at its most explicit. [02:31:27] Next the Prince strokes Angelica’s hand against his face. [02:31:48] Finally Angelica kisses the Prince. Her seduction and her touch bring the Prince back from the contemplation of death and he regains his sense of his own sexual power. This will culminate in the next scene when he and Angelica dance the waltz together.

22 Dance with Angelica

02:32:50 03:42

[02:33:25] The waltz had spread across Europe from the late eighteenth century. It was associated with greater intimacy than the older courtly dances such as the minuet, where men and women did not touch one another. Indeed the waltz was at first considered vulgar by the courts, since bodily contact was a characteristic of peasant dances. In the waltz the man’s arm is round the woman’s waist and her hand is on his shoulder or arm. His right leg stays pressed against hers so that he leads her steps. It became a favourite dance among young people for this reason and became associated with Romanticism. In Goethe’s early novel The Sufferings of Young Werther, Werther talks rapturously about the waltz as an experience of holding an adorable creature in his arms and whirling round with her like the wind so that

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everything around them disappears. Other dances, like the mazurka, polka and galop, which emerged later in the nineteenth century, also involved physical contact between couples, but they were more energetic than the waltz. [02:34:30] A number of writers on the film have noted that the Prince’s waltz with Angelica starts exactly midway into the ball section. They have seen it as a turning point in this long penultimate act of the film. The Italian critic Lino Micciché maintains that the waltz with Angelica is ambiguous: a belated affirmation of life by the Prince and at the same time a dance of death. The Prince is dancing with Death in the form of a beautiful young woman. Angelica is dancing with a man who has just been facing an image of death. The life she transmits to him will be only temporary, doomed to fade as soon as they stop dancing. The dance will not bring the Prince back to life. If anything it will heighten his recognition of his inevitable decay. In the copy of Lampedusa’s novel that Visconti had with him in Sicily there is a passage he underlined in red ink but did not make it into the script of the film. It is during the dialogue with Father Pirrone in the observatory: ‘The real problem is to go on living this life of the spirit in its most sublimated moments, those that are most similar to death.’ [02:35:55] When the waltz ends the Prince magnanimously hands Angelica back to Tancredi, who has been watching them nervously, and declines their invitation to join them. Here the relay of gestures and looks between the three which began in the library is developed and concluded. As Tancredi holds Angelica’s face and kisses her, she keeps her eye on the Prince and we see him react. [02:36:22] When the Prince rejoins the older guests, who compliment him on still retaining his youthful prowess, a dolly onto his face isolates him as he looks off screen towards Angelica.

23 The new order

02:36:32 11:48

[02:36:35] There are two moments in the ball section when the music is suspended: a short one towards the end and this longer one during the supper sequence. This is a good moment therefore to talk about the music in the film as a whole. Visconti always paid great attention to the music in his films just as, when he directed operas, he worked closely with the conductor. Music never functions simply as background or ‘furniture’, to use Eric Satie’s expression. It is always an element that works in conjunction with the others in the film – the visual, verbal and narrative elements – to create a totality of meaning. As the film has progressed the function of the music has changed. At the beginning it was used mainly to characterize people and places and communicate mood: the music of the credits sequence introduced the Prince and his palace, the arid landscape, the character of Tancredi. These motifs were repeated and developed through the film up to the beginning of the ball.

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Once we get to the ball the music has a very different function. It emphasises the stretching of time. In the forty-five minutes of film time devoted to the ball, if we include the moments in which the orchestra tunes the instruments, the music is virtually a continuous accompaniment. It underscores the fact that this is a time of spectacle, a spectacle of celebration but also of death, a funereal time set apart from the time of history. The continuity and long duration of the music allow the spectator to experience not just the shimmering beauty of the spectacle but also the tiredness it engenders. [02:38:40] The suspension of the music during the supper marks the irruption of the time of history into the otherwise closed world of the ball. Don Calogero has just been talking about his favourite subject, property values. Pallavicino, whom we now see again, is going to boast about his recent military exploit. [02:40:02] PALLAVICINO: ‘L’HO LIBERATO DA QUELLA CONGREGA’, READ QUITE SLOWLY] The historical events referred to here took place in August 1862 when Garibaldi mounted a second campaign in Sicily with the aim of marching on Rome, taking it from the Pope and declaring it the capital of Italy. The slogan at the meetings Garibaldi addressed was ‘Rome or death’. He crossed the straits of Messina onto the mainland with around four thousand volunteers, including a good number of deserters from the Italian army, and headed north. However the Italian government in Piedmont decided to stop him and sent in troops against him. The name of the company commander was actually Pallavicini, not Pallavicino, as he is called here and in Lampedusa’s novel. At a skirmish in Aspromonte, in southern Calabria, Garibaldi’s volunteers were defeated and he was wounded in the foot. After this there was a big public-order crackdown by the Italian government throughout Sicily and the south. A state of siege was declared, military commanders were given full powers to break up public meetings by force and freedom of the press was suspended. None of this is mentioned here by Pallavicino, who recounts the events of Aspromonte as an almost amicable encounter between two heroes, himself and Garibaldi. His account is a rhetorical performance that provokes an outburst of anger from the Prince. The main claim Pallavicino is making is that Garibaldi, the hero of the 1860 campaign that led to unification, needed for his own good to be separated from the rabble he had now gathered around him. Then his campaign was part of a legitimate move for unification; now it was a move against the authority of the new state he had helped to create. [02:42:07] The music now comes in again as a polka strikes up. The show goes on. [02:42:41] This is one of the most painterly shots in the film. A large mirror, slightly tarnished, reflects the turquoise and gold decoration on the opposite wall. The first part of this scene emphasises the opposition between Angelica and Concetta. Angelica loves

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parties, Concetta hates them. [02:43:22. A FEW SECONDS BEFORE SHE SITS DOWN WITH C] The subtle differences in their costumes are visible. Piero Tosi described Angelica’s ballgown as follows: it had ‘eleven tulle petticoats each of a slighly different colour. Over them and containing them was an organdie by Dior with little gold and silver [dots all] over it’. The photographic effect, Tosi remarked, was ‘strange, almost subliminal…The beauty of the dress was in its lightness.’ The dressmakers had managed to tie the crinolines to the outer skirt in such a way as to make them shift and slide against one another. One saw this when Angelica was waltzing with the Prince. In this sequence there are in fact two moments when the dialogue in the side room is interrupted and we return to the dance floor and can see there that the crinolines on the other women are much heavier than Angelica’s. [02.44.20] Tancredi’s entrance marks a change within this sequence. He makes himself the focus of attention for both women. He expresses his support for Pallavicino and he will approve the shooting of the soldiers who had deserted to follow Garibaldi. Gone here is the eager boy we saw at the beginning of the story telling his uncle he was about to embark on a great adventure with Garibaldi. Two years have passed and Tancredi now says it is good to suppress the adventurers. [02:45:22] Tancredi also now has the appearance and the gestures of an older man. At first he lies down wearily. He gets up and preens his bow tie. Concetta notices the change in his way of speaking, the cynicism of the man she had loved as an adventurous boy, and she doesn’t like it. Visconti said to Antonello Trombadori, reminiscing with him about Lampedusa’s novel, that he had always wondered whether Tancredi might not have gone on to support fascism. Tancredi could indeed have lived long enough to see the rise of fascism in Italy. He is in his early twenties in 1860 and would have been in his eighties when Mussolini came to power in 1922. [02:46:58] The long kiss between Angelica and Tancredi is now shot from a high angle and they begin to be encircled by a line of dancing guests. The ball takes over the dialogue, the group takes over the individual characters. The spectacle dominates. Visconti’s films have often been described by critics as melodramatic, and this is true, but it is important to note that they are melodramatic in an a rather different sense from the one that is common in film and theatre criticism in English. In Italian the word melodramma, meaning musical play, was used in the nineteenth century as a standard word for opera, and this sense is relevant to Visconti. His films are not intimate stories of stifled desire in a domestic setting, like Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s, nor are they simply

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spectacles of passion or jealousy, like Victorian melodramas. They are stories of strong emotion, often taking place on a grand stage, alternating between individual and choral scenes, in which music plays an integral structural part.

24 End of the ball

02:48:19 06:52 [02:48:58] After that remarkable piece of facial acting in front of the mirror, Lancaster pauses outside a room full of chamberpots. The physicality of the body is overbearing in this scene. [02:49:35] In the second of his books on cinema, The Time Image [1985], the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze talks about four elements which recur in many of Visconti’s films and which all have a relation to time. The first is what Deleuze calls a ‘crystalline’ world: in The Leopard this is the ritualized world of the aristocracy on display in the ball, ‘outside history and nature..outside divine creation’. The second is a process of decomposition, like a fault inside the crystal, which eats away at it from within. This is the aristocracy’s inner decay and corruption. The third element is history, a time of real public events that lie outside the crystalline world but which intermittently intrude within it. In the film the main intrusions of history are the sequence of the battle in Palermo, the speech of Colonel Pallavicino and the execution of the deserters at the end. The fourth element, and the one Deleuze considers the most important in Visconti, is the revelation that something arrives ‘too late’. In The Leopard the Prince’s response to Chevalley’s offer, and to his government’s ambition to improve Sicily, is to say ‘the intention is good, but it arrives late’. Angelica also arrives too late for him when she invites him to dance. They can dance but he cannot have her. [02:51:34 SHOT OF GUESTS LEAVING] This second pause in the music after a very slow waltz and the shot of people leaving make us think that the ball is over. [02:51:48. WAIT FOR BEGINNING OF GALOP] But this expectation is frustrated when a lively galop strikes up. Probably the intention is o create irritation in the spectator, to emphasise the seemingly interminable duration of this night. [02:52:41] Pallavicino exits with his men. He will remark cryptically to his hostess that ‘the tasks of the night are not yet finished’. The task he means is that of a firing squad, and the historical reference is to the execution, after summary procedures, of four soldiers from the Italian army who had deserted to fight with Garibaldi at Aspromonte. There were only two places in the finished film where the screenwriters significantly added material that was not in Lampedusa’s novel. One is this reference to the shooting of the deserters, which we will hear being carried out at the end. The other was the Palermo battle sequence. The execution of the deserters will make the film finish on a decidedly sour note, drawing attention to the betrayal of the hopes of Garibaldi’s followers and the harshness of the new regime. This ending will also allow the film, despite its adherence in many respects to Lampedusa’s text, to offer a slightly more critical historical view than the novel.

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[02:53:40] The Prince, who had disappeared from the action, now reappears almost like a ghost. The crowd of soldiers parts in front of him and the camera picks him up in a slow dolly forward. His face is pale. [02:54:40] The Prince will also disappear like a ghost. Tancredi talks to him but asks to be excused to say goodbye quickly to some guests. When he turns back his uncle has already gone out of the door.

25 Dawn 02:55:11 credits end at 02:57:48

02:37

[02:55:15] We are now into the last sequence of the film where two different scenes from the novel have been folded into one. In the novel it’s when he is on his way to the ball that the Prince sees a priest going to give the last rites and kneels, and it’s when he is on his way home that he sees the morning star and invokes death. [02:56:14 WAIT TILL SOUND OF SHOTS] The noise off of the firing squad – shooting the army deserters who had fought with Garibaldi at Aspromonte – is a brilliant device for ending the film. It emphasises, through Don Calogero’s satisfied reaction, the profound difference between the characters who are on the make – Don Calogero, Tancredi and Angelica – and the Prince, the man who is on his way out, in every sense.