This site already dedicated extensive previous posts (in 2008 and 2010) to Luchino Visconti’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963). Today another one is due since the film was recently re-released in Italy in a new restored version celebrating its 50th anniversary. The movie was restored by the Cineteca di Bologna and the film conservation institution L'immagine ritrovata, in collaboration with Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation.
Taken from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's eponymous novel published in 1958, the story, as you may remember, takes place in Sicily in 1860 at the time of Garibaldi's Redshirts' landing on the Sicilian coast and traces the end of the aristocracy represented by Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina (The Leopard - Burt Lancaster). As wealthy ex-peasant Don Calogero Sedara rises and the prince's nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) marries Don Calogero's daughter Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), the prince learns that, in life, "everything needs to change, so that everything can stay the same".
Apart from a brilliant cast, a screenplay by Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Enrico Medioli, Massimo Franciosa and Luchino Visconti, and a soundtrack by Nino Rota, the film also features costume designs by Piero Tosi (who will receive the Honorary Governors Award in November) and made by the Tirelli tailoring house.
Please refer to previous posts on this site to discover more about the costumes, and if you have never seen the film, do so paying attention to the details (and the photography - some of the scenes look like perfectly composed paintings, and throughout the decades they inspired quite a few fashion shoots) because they were all historically accurate and carefully researched.
If you are a costume design student play particular attention at the sumptuous ball scene shot inside Palazzo Valguarnera-Gangi in Palermo because that's one of the film highlights. If you are a fashion writer and critic it may be a good idea to re-read the book for its minute descriptions that will undoubtedly enrich your personal vocabulary ("The women rose slowly to their feet, their oscillating skirts as they withdrew baring bit by bit the naked figures from mythology painted all over the milky depths of the tiles"; "Behind the paper barricade was the King (...) with his pallid heavy face between fairish side-whiskers, with his rough cloth military jacket under which burst a purple cataract of trousers").
A final note: the restored version of the film is accompanied in Italy by a documentary entitled I due gattopardi (The Two Leopards) by Alberto Anile and Maria Gabriella Giannice. The documentary features some scenes that Visconti cut for aesthetic and political reasons, including one about the Prince of Salina's nightmares and another about Tancredi suggesting his soon-to-be father in law to send the soldiers against the peasants. As a whole the documentary features 12 previously unseen minutes of The Leopard, but each of them is a true gem.
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