Return of The Leopard

I already dedicated to Luchino Visconti’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) an extensive post a while back, but I feel it’s worth celebrating it a little bit more since tonight the film will be screened again in the “Classics” section of the Cannes Film Festival (hurray!).

Last year the festival paid homage to another film by Visconti, Senso, but I’m particularly happy to see The Leopard being rediscovered again this year, since I think it’s a wonderful film and a feast for the eyes, apart from being also one of the most perfect achievements from a fashion and costume design point of view.

I find extremely silly all the hype about fashion and film surrounding commercial movies like Sex and the City 2.

In fact, I don’t think there is any costume design skill in filling up a set with designer clothes and accessories, especially when they are used to advertise your position as “creative consultant” (don’t make me laugh…) of a fashion house's "Heritage" line".

Real costume design skills come from research, quality, attention to details and craftsmanship, and do not have anything to do with product placement.

This is the first lesson costume design students should be taught and this is the main lesson that Visconti’s The Leopard still teaches.

I already focused on the Garibaldini uniforms in that first post on the film, so I’m just going to expand that post a little bit further here, briefly focusing on other costumes and on the connections the film has with art.

Let's start from the scene in which the family arrives in Donnafugata: all the main colours chosen for the dresses of the female characters in these scenes are rather dusty, almost opaque.

Tosi opted for example for a puce shade for Princess Maria Stella Salina (actress Rina Morelli)’s dress, matched with a black alpaca "burnus" decorated with ivory embroideries, while Mrs Arena, the farmer’s wife, wore a plum coloured dress.

The dusty nuances were cleverly used here to symbolise that a chapter in the history of Sicily was closing down and a new era was going to begin soon (costume/fashion design students pay attention to the symbolism dusty shades can add to your creations...).

In this scene characterised by rather oppressive nuances, costume designer Piero Tosi imagined also a girl dressed in white and made various experiments picking different samples of fabric and literally torturing tailor Umberto Tirelli while looking for a shade of white that could have somehow symbolised the rise of the middle classes without being too elegant.

Choice fell in the end on a white raw étamine fabric, decorated with a geometrical soutache applique that called to mind the motifs of the Second Empire.

A whitish shade was also the main colour Tosi chosen for Claudia Cardinale’s iconic ball dress, explored in my previous post.

In that post, though, I didn’t mention the fact that, in the eponymous novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa on which the film is based, the author described the ball gown as pink and matched with long gloves.

This was historically incorrect and shows you how writers aren’t always right in their historical representations when it comes to clothes (fingerless gloves were popular at the time, like the ones Cardinale wears in the first image in this post).

Tosi knew that pink wouldn't have suited actress Claudia Cardinale and came up with three different dresses, one in pale blue, one in white and the last one in a sort of mother-of-pearl shade (think a crossover between yellow and pale blue).

The final choice fell on the latter, but the most interesting thing about this dress stood in its construction. Though voluminous, the dress was very light and Tirelli did a great job linking the crinoline and the skirt together so that, during the ball, the entire dress moved with the actress who wore it, creating a sort of effortlessly sliding movement (genius!).

The entire ball scene lasted something like 4 hours and was later on edited to 44 minutes (unfortunately, all the material was lost - simply criminal...).

The extremely long shoot meant costume designers and make up artists always had be ready on the set to make sure the 300 extras looked immaculately spotless, even in the high temperatures and the oppressing atmosphere that surrounded them with thousands of candles burning and cakes melting.     

As it happened for Senso, some of the scenes and the colours used in The Leopard were lifted from the paintings of the "macchiaioli".

The costumes of the female characters and the way they moved in the film, especially in the scenes shot around Villa Salina and in Donnafugata, call to mind the scenes portrayed in Silvestro Lega’s "L’elemosina" (Charity) and Vito d’Ancona’s "Signora in giardino" (Lady in the Garden).

Telemaco Signorini’s "Pescivendole a Lerici" (Fisherwomen in Lerici) and Vincenzo Cabianca’s "La filatrice" (The Spinner) provided the colours and atmospheres for the scenes with humbler protagonists and settings.

Giovanni Fattori’s "Episodio della battaglia del Volturno (Porta Capua)" (Episode from the Volturno Battle - Porta Capua) inspired instead the sequences featuring the Garibaldini entering Palermo.

Alain Delon stated that, while he doesn’t like watching again his films to avoid feeling nostalgic, he will gladly do an exception for Claudia Cardinale and The Leopard.

I guess an exception is definitely due in the case of The Leopard, also for the amazing costumes courtesy of wizards Piero Tosi and Umberto Tirelli.

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