Luchino Visconti was a director whose career appeared to embrace many contradictions. How did the progenitor of Italian neorealism, with its emphasis on naturalistic mise en scene, eventually turn towards making grand, operatic costume dramas? Salvador Dali described him as “a Communist who only liked luxury”; how could a man who held strongly Marxist beliefs also so fervently defend his own aristocratic stock? And why were his films, whose adaptation from historical and literary sources might appear to be what Truffaut contemptuously labelled cinéma de papa, so praised by André Bazin and the Cahiers du cinéma crowd?

These questions are raised when watching The Leopard, but so too are they answered. In order to more fully understand why, though, we must tell not only the story of the film and its relationship to the director, but also the source novel, its author, and first to the political events which provide its backdrop. The historical period in question is the Risorgimento, the series of conflicts which led to the formation into a single political entity of the Italian peninsula, and specifically within this the events of 1860 which eventually saw Garibaldi’s army, aided by local militias rebelling against the ruling Bourbon monarchy, annex the island of Sicily, allowing them a march on Naples.

Author Giuseppe Tomasi was born in Sicily in 1896 into an aristocratic family, inheriting the title of Prince of Lampedusa on the death of his father some 36 years later. In 1958, a year after his death, what would be his only novel, Il Gattopardo, was published; in the book, a Sicilian prince not unlike the author but living some one hundred years earlier witnesses the profound political upheavals brought about by Garibaldi’s invasion with a mixture of sadness and bemused detachment. The book proved to be divisive: derided by the Left as an apology for imperialism, criticised by conservatives for its portrayal of a corrupt self-serving Church, but loved by just about everyone else for its sensuous, languorous prose, it went on to become an international bestseller.

Who better to adapt the novel for the screen than Luchino Visconti? Like Lampedusa, he had been brought up in a noble household, albeit at the northern end of the country in Milan, but one who could well empathise both with Lampedusa himself and his literary protagonist. True, he had made his cinematic name with the realist likes of Ossessione (1943), La Terra Trema (1950) and Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960) but so too had he demonstrated his ability to stage opulent historical drama in the spectacular Senso (1954). In fact, in a similar way to how Ingmar Bergman is remembered in Sweden as equally for his theatre work as his film output, in his native country Visconti was just as noted a director of grand operas as man of realist cinema.

Opulent is something of an understatement in describing the film; The Leopard is firstly and most obviously a feast for the eyes. Shot by cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, who would later go on to film Fellini’s kaleidoscopic masterpiece Amarcord (1973), the full splendour of the Prince of Salina’s many palazzi is brought dazzlingly to the screen: gold-lined interiors flanked by countless paintings, sculptures and ornate pieces of furniture, and the lavish feasts and ceremonies the populous court he holds partakes in, all rendered with Visconti’s famous visual perfectionism, and underpinned by Nino Rota’s sweeping score. A life of absolute luxury, but one is stark contrast to the brief glimpses of the poverty suffered by ordinary Sicilians, and one now under threat from the bands of revolutionary armies sweeping through the lands.

The threat is not just from below, but from a new estate, personified by the ambitious Don Calogero: nouveaux riches of less-than noble birth whose wealth threaten to eclipse and even to engulf those of the established landed gentry. The Prince seems aware of this decline in his prestige, but remains passive to them; his favourite nephew Tancredi, by contrast, is an active Garibaldini, more aware of which way the political winds are blowing. He and the Prince’s own daughter Concetta are expected to marry, but when Calogero’s beautiful daughter Angelica is introduced to Tancredi, the Leopard must decide whether to sacrifice his familial line and allow old prestige, modern politics and new money to be joined in order for all of them to survive.

While witnessing these profound changes, there is also perceptible an increasing awareness on the Don’s part of his old age and inevitable eventual death. What is so delicately explored is the correlation of his political and physical mortality, seemingly personified by Angelica: he is drawn to her beauty himself, yet while for a man of Tancredi’s generation to marry the daughter of a nouveau riche is a politically astute move, wedding a non-noble for one from the Prince’s previous generation would have been unthinkable. And so, the personal fate of one man is shown to be inextricably influenced by the wider historical circumstances, and even a man of the Don’s considerable power is helpless in such a situation.

The Leopard was released in 1963, at a time when European cinema was once again becoming explicitly politicized; not just the exploits of the nouvelle vague in France, but so too in Poland, Spain, the UK, and most significantly a crop of post-Neorealist Italian films by new directors: Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano (1961), Bernardo Bertolucci’s La commare secca (1962) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962). In this context, why was professed Marxist director Visconti making an historical epic, what looks to be misty-eyed nostalgia for his feudal ancestry, now something of a relic in the politically divisive scene of 1960s Italy? How does this fit in to his oeuvre of socially-committed films?

The answer is in the source novel as much as it is in the film. In Lampedusa, though significantly not filmed by Visconti, we flash forward in the final chapter fifty years to see the Salina household decades after the Prince’s death. The palace is a relic, haunted by its grandiose past, yet outside of it the ordinary people of Sicily are no better off than they were before. For many, the Risorgimento was a failed, compromised revolution, a triumph of the bourgeoisie, the third estate who would replace the aristocracy as the oppressors of the masses, a theme already explored by the director in Senso.

For dramatic flow, Visconti leaves this final chapter out of his film in order for it to concentrate more on the Prince’s view of his own mortality, but the politics are still there; in many ways the spectacular final ball sequence, lasting some 45 minutes, forms as political a denouement, where the demise of the aristocratic order, personified by the Prince, seems silently to unravel before our very eyes. At times both the novel and the film dare to suggest that the old feudal system was much better for ordinary folk than what followed – a position sure to infuriate professional intellectuals, and one which surely only the likes of Lampedusa and Visconti would try to defend. The over-the-top vulgarity of Don Calogero as played in the film shows that while Lampedusa may have a little respect for such a Machiavellian creature, Visconti has little but scorn.

Visconti, then, is politically engaged like his contemporaries, but so too in his own idiosyncratically contradictory way, much like Pasolini and Bertolucci were in their own ways. With Visconti there is something of a commonality with Jean Renoir, the great French director under whom he served his apprenticeship as directorial assistant on Toni (1935) and Partie de campagne (1936). Renoir’s twin masterpieces, La grande illusion (1937) and La règle du jeu (1939) both examined the mores of the higher classes with a certain degree of sympathy. So too is there an aesthetic debt to Renoir. Those interiors shot in deep-focus, those carefully controlled gliding camera moves, the painstaking attention to spatial arrangement of mises en scène all bear the hallmarks of the French master.

The interiors of the Prince’s world are more obviously lovingly rendered, but it must not be neglected how much the exteriors are too. Two years earlier, cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo had brought the stifling heat and beautiful if oppressive landscape of Sicily to life in the black and white of Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano, and here that is built upon in colour by Rotunno in a series of stunning outdoor scenes. In particular, the morning after the plebiscite on unification we see the island, so much a character in itself in the book, awakening under a literal new dawn, if not a metaphorical one.

That same day, the Prince and the accountant Don Ciccio, discuss the new political situation, all framed by the golden mountainous landscape stretching as far as the eye can see. “That America of antiquity” as Lampedusa describes it – do they not recall cinema’s similar renderings of the barren, hostile American West? Aptly, Sicily will later serve as such for the Andolinis and Corleones when Francis Ford Coppola films it in those greatest of American films, The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), films not by coincidence scored too by the peerless Nino Rota. Another Italian-American, Martin Scorsese, marvelled at Visconti’s use of colour, borrowing heavily from it for his own The Age of Innocence (1993). But as Peter Bondanella suggests, the lavish visuals are always in danger of overwhelming the film’s politics; perhaps this is why it is not embraced as widely as it should be.

The reason, for me, why The Leopard is so important to understanding Visconti as a director is illustrated by comparing it to his more internationally famous Morte a Venezia (1973). In that film too we have an ageing aristocrat in fin de siècle Italy, obsessed with beauty and his own decay; here Gustav von Aschenbach attempts to transpose this into his music, while Don Fabrizio seeks refuge through the lens of his telescope, observing the celestial motions above him which care not for trivial earthly matters. In the face of death, both men reject traditional religion for something other, a mathematical perfection of sound or light.

Like The Leopard, Morte a Venezia is beautiful to look at. But the later film is overly stylised, and an emotionally cold film, when by contrast, there is a warmth and pleasure in watching The Leopard, even amidst the introspection. Visconti’s class identification with the Prince, I think, is the key to this. The tragedy of Von Aschenbach’s demise when it comes is less than that of Don Fabrizio’s implied death because he is so detached a character, obsessive like the director, but remote from the world around him; Don Fabrizio, though, is aware of his situation but helpless to change it. The Leopard‘s marriage of the epic and the personal is what makes it Visconti’s most affecting work.

At this year’s Cannes, the renowned director Martin Scorsese announced the completion of a seven year labour of love: the restoration of the classic 1940s British film, The Red Shoes. Scorsese has never been shy about revealing which films have inspired him: in two documentaries he produced in the late 1990s he discussed the importance that both classical Hollywood and post-war Italian cinema played in making him decide to become a film-maker. Through his World Cinema Foundation, launched in 2007, he continues to spearhead efforts to recover and to restore classic forgotten films which otherwise may have been forever lost.

His relationship to The Red Shoes, though, seems to me to be outside of much of this. Indeed, for a director whose work is generally associated with realism, violence and Catholic guilt, it perhaps seems odd that he should hold in such esteem a melodramatic romance about ballet based around a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale. Yet in interviews he has candidly described it as ‘the movie that plays in my heart’; his dedication to its preservation and his fervent championing of both it and the wider canon of films by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger show that the film has more than a great significance for him.

The key to an appreciation of the film is to understand that at its core it is about the creation of artistic spectacle, and the sacrifices which must be made in its process. Take away the film’s romance plotline, one that can be found in countless matinee melodramas, and what is left is one of the darkest portraits of obsession put on screen, a clear inspiration for Scorsese’s own maniacal protagonists as well as those of messrs Schrader, Coppola, De Palma et al; a deep plunge into the heart of darkness of all artistic creativity.

The story will revolve around a curious ménage à trois between two younger characters trying to enter the ballet world and an older one who knows no other world, but to begin with they are all, like the cinema audience themselves, spectators. The world famous Ballet Lermontov has come to London, led by the charismatic but enigmatic Boris Lermontov and starring renowned prima ballerina Irina Boronskaja. In the audience, eager to catch the attention of the Russian impresario is Vicki Page, whose influential aunt Lady Neston forcibly tries to arrange an impromptu audition for at the aftershow party. Lermontov is disinterested, but enquires why it is she wants to dance. “Why do you want to live?” Vicki replies somewhat rhetorically; within this exchange it is clear that he sees something of promise, and so invites her to study with his company.

The third main character comes to the fore the following morning; Julian Craster is a young student of Lermontov’s conductor who believes his master has plagiarised his own compositions for use in the last night’s production. Lermontov agrees – quipping “It is much more disheartening to have to steal than to be stolen from” – and promptly hires Craster as his new orchestral coach. Through the eyes of these two inexperienced newcomers we are thrust into the world of ballet behind the stage. A montage of scenes shows use the messy underweave of the tapestry, a beautiful confusion of dancers, stage hands, set dressing and musicians, all under the steely gaze of Lermontov, a solitary seated figure in the shadows of the stalls.

The company moves to Paris, but once there prima ballerina Boronskaja announces she has married. She is congratulated by her colleagues, but when she looks for Lermontov he has disappeared; she observes that he must have no heart. Cut to him alone, smoking in a darkened study, visibly distracted. He calls for Craster and dramatically announces to him that he plans to produce in Monte Carlo a ballet of the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale The Red Shoes, in which a girl is offered some footwear by a demonic shoemaker which cause her to dance uncontrollably, leading to her eventual death. Boronskaja is dismissed, Page is promoted to top billing and Craster is to compose the score.

Until this point, the film has been light in tone, but the introduction of the fairytale interrupts this and announces something very different. Witness the abrupt cut to Lermontov closing the score book to reveal its title, emblazoned in red, and how it sends Craster into a trance, unable to hear what the director is saying. And then see the Russian’s impassioned explanation of the synopsis, clutching a sculpture of a ballet shoe, and then his quick dismissal of the girl’s sad fate.

The loss of Boronskaja to wedlock has lit some form of fire inside of him, but motivated by what? Sexual jealousy? Speaking to Ljubov, his chief choreographer, he pours scorn on those who seek human love, suggesting one who succumbs to it can never be a great dancer. The choice, one which he has clearly made himself, is between love or complete commitment to one’s art. Some readings of the film read Lermontov as being a repressed homosexual, but this makes for a much less interesting character, and in reality there is little on-screen to suggest this; it is his entire repression of all sexuality which is most in evidence, and some are fooled by the fact that both actor Anton Walbrook and the character’s real-life model Sergei Diaghilev were openly gay.

The ballet is a spectacular success, and as Vicky and Julian are thrust together during the preparations for the new production, a romance between them unsurprisingly blossoms. Lermontov is once again furious with what he perceives as his new muse’s betrayal of him. Unlike Boronskaja, though, he presents her with a choice: married life with Julian or become a great dancer under his tutelage. And thus, he has transformed from the charming, inscrutable figure at the start of the film into tragic villain by the end, undone by his own pride and perfectionism, much like Charles Foster Kane in another film.

The Red Shoes was not an immediate success on release, despite the name the Powell and Pressburger had forged for themselves on the back of hits A Matter of Life and Death [aka Stairway to Heaven] (1946) and Black Narcissus (1947). J Arthur Rank saw such little commercial potential in the film that he left its initial screening without saying a word to the directors, and subsequently only supplied one print for the entire US market. That print went on to screen continuously in a small New York cinema for nearly two years before it gained a wider distribution, and eventually went on to win two Oscars, as well as opening up ballet to a younger, much wider audience.

The film’s enduring critical appeal stems from the darkness and ambiguity of the Lermontov character, played with sympathy by Anton Walbrook. His fall is one of the most tragic in screen history, without any doubt up there with the likes of Citizen Kane (1941) and The Godfather (1972), and as an examination of the process and problematic nature of artistic creation, it can also be placed alongside Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963).

And yet, the continuing popular image of the film is not one of tragedy but great joy. This is, of course, thanks in no small part to its lush bombardment of the senses: Brian Easdale’s magnificent Oscar-winning score, the physical splendour of the cast of famed ballet dancers Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine and Ludmilla Tchérina alongside the ravishingly beautiful Moira Shearer in the lead role, all captured in dazzling Technicolor by cinematographer Jack Cardiff.

Cardiff, who died last month, had already pushed back the boundaries of visual possibilities on Powell and Pressburger’s last two films, but this would become his most loved work. The film’s centrepiece, the seventeen-minute Red Shoes ballet, is quite the most extraordinary montage of dance, motion, light, colour and in-camera wizardry, set on a stage but defying it by every means, transporting the dancer to a nightmarish nether-world where she floats, soars, plummets, and dances to her eventual death. The camera completely eschews objectivity, immersing the viewer in subjective visions. The expressionistic use of colour was unlike anything seen before, and would notably resurface in Scorsese’s own Mean Streets (1973), while the choreography would be an influence on the filming of Raging Bull (1980).

The ballet sequence is clearly marked as artifice, but as the film ends with its tragic repetition, the frame dissolves to a burned-out candle atop a book marked Hans Christian Andersen, the candle which the observant viewer will have remembered as being the very first frame of the film after the title cards. The entire film has, like the ballet, been a kind-of fairytale, typically filled with melodrama, romance and villainy. Post-war, this kind of filmmaking was unfashionable: realism was king, and the fantastical likes of Jean Cocteau’s La belle et la bête (1946) had been criticized for their lack of political commitment.. Looking back at it now, The Red Shoes is such an established classic that it is easy to forget what a gamble it was for Powell and Pressburger, and like the great art contained within the film, how ambitious and ambiguous it all is.