The Incompossible Language of Natural Aristocracy: Deleuze’s Misreading of Visconti’s The Leopard

This study focuses on Gilles Deleuze’s use of Luchino Visconti’s 1963 cinematic rendition of the 1958 novel by Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard). (1) In Cinema 2: The Time Image, within the chapter “The crystals of time”, Deleuze dedicates four pages to what he sees as Visconti’s version of the crystal in the process of decomposition. Deleuze calls this the fourth state of the crystal of time, and uses Visconti’s work to illustrate it. (2) What I will show is how Visconti’s The Leopard is forced into the concept of “decomposition”. Deleuze misses the minor language in Visconti’s adaptation of The Leopard, convinced that Visconti represents the decomposition of the crystal that has four combinations.

For Deleuze, the crystals of time are states of the crystal, where cinema works from an atmosphere bathed by images that it presents. This construction of images is the modern phase of film, where cinema masters its own supply of space and time, and where the world, once the reportive locus classicus, is part of the stipulative power of cinematic art. This is already in operation and captive of the grander narrative structures of Sicilian aristocracy in the works that influenced Lampedusa, and that Visconti faithfully adapted. For the Sicilian gaze, history is an actor of opportunity on the island’s stage.

The first combination is the aristocratic world. Deleuze sees this as a synthetic crystal outside history and nature, yet overlooks that this world includes the becoming-rich – the arrangements of Tancredi Falconeri (Alain Delon) with Angelica Sedara (Claudia Cardinale), the daughter of Don Calogero Sedara (Paolo Stoppa) – and the becoming-noble – Don Calogero. (3)

The second combination is saturation, the clash between scenic composition and the process of decomposition. (4) This is seen in Tancredi and Angelica’s journey through the abandoned palace of Donnafugata, where bizarre extravagances were forgotten, and “little powdered demons had been put to flight […] as sleeping embryos, hibernating under piles of dust” (5). Pairing scenic composition and decomposition is not a theme of The Leopard, especially when the omnipresent and preserving “dust” is noticed. Decay is preserved by the surfaces of narration, an aspect of Sicilian Baroque. (6)

As the third combination of the decomposition of the crystal, Deleuze mentions history, the doubling of decomposition, an autonomous, elliptical, out-of-field power that disorganizes the crystal’s substance. A closer viewing of the film reveals that although Prince Don Fabrizio di Salina (Burt Lancaster) converses with the stars, they are referred to in terms of Parmenidean constancy, doubling nothing but composition. Deleuze’s rush to the image of decomposition is blind to Don Fabrizio’s graceful turning to images of constancy. (7)

The fourth combination of the decomposition of the crystal is the “something arriving too-late”, a dimension of time opposed to the dimensions of the past. The term “too-late” refers to Cavalier Chevalley (Leslie French) attempting to procure Sicilian representation by asking Prince Fabrizio to be part of the Italian senate. (8) Deleuze misses what that “something” is, which is impervious to decomposition since it is the “product of twenty-five centuries of bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization [where] we’re worn out and exhausted”, yet preserved. (9) For two thousand and five hundred years, Sicily, as Don Fabrizio makes clear to the northerner Chevalley, has been a colony. Deleuze misperceives the figure of Prince Don Fabrizio, who of all the characters is the least opaque and unopposed to the past. The Prince remains permanently above the action and critical of it, as in the scene in the observatory with Father Pirrone (Romolo Valli); with Mariannina (Olimpia Cavalli), the prostitute in Palermo; and with Chevalley. Deleuze misreads the film by overlooking these crucial figures.

What decomposes? Is it the image of aristocracy? Unlikely, since Don Fabrizio’s relations remain measured by the same distance throughout the film, whether entertaining progressive illusions, reactionary hope, nostalgia or measured eroticism. Is expression what decomposes? (10) This is what must decompose in Deleuze’s view of the crystal, but nowhere does the film grant this reading. L’espressione and la bella figura remain steadfast. The time-image is powerless against Sicilian aristocracy, which is immobile, dream-like and autonomous. As Don Fabrizio explains to Chevalley, “They are coming to teach us good manners. But they won’t succeed, because we are gods.” (11)

Deleuze misunderstands the environment of the Sicilian sun and earth, where landscape is treated as a face. This face “becomes another kind of object in space, a terrain on which may be enacted dramas broad as battles, and sometimes more intense” (12). Notice the scene of peasants working in the fields leading to the ball scene. Lampedusa’s Sicily is like that. In Deleuze’s “process of decomposition” – or, in the words of Bernard Dort, “inevitable degradation” (13) from which Deleuze transposed the metaphor – this powerful image of absorption and adaptation is already resolved in Sicily’s landscape. Could this be how Deleuze attached himself to the detail where roses bought in Paris, and brought to the villa Salina degenerated in the Sicilian earth? Yet, by the higher tastes of the Prince, these roses captured the scent of the thighs of ballerinas, “excited at first, and made more tender from the vigorous and numbing juices of the Sicilian soil parched by July’s apocalyptic sun mutated into a kind of cabbage the color of flesh. Obscene, but they distilled a dense aroma, almost indecent, that no French gardener could have ever dreamed of.” (14) This is Sicily’s impulse-image, its accursed soil, disturbing hyper-naturalism and truncating realism that Visconti’s adaptation captures. (15)

One can not escape the film’s rendition of Don Fabrizio’s style of control and regulation. (16) The loss of ground to the house of Salina does not decompose the master’s narrative of its return to unity. Notice the scene in which Don Fabrizio and Don Calogero discuss the marriage contract, where Don Calogero, standing in front of a map of Donnafugata and its region, divides parts of his hectares of land for the marriage contract. Not even this counts as a deterritorialisation, for soon after Don Calogero tells the Prince that the Sedaras are (once a missing link is found) also noble. This “heraldic impromptu gave the Prince the incomparable artistic satisfaction of seeing a type realized in all its details” (17). The construction of power remains the Prince’s as he merges hyena and jackal. Even the Risorgimento history, another example of hyena and jackal mentality crystallizing in the barrack rhetoric of Colonel Pallavicino (Ivo Garrani), is entertained on the soil of natural aristocracy and succumbs to this absorption as another “convenient settlement” (accomodamenti). (18)

The Leopard is guided by an antagonism of the old and new that even in its failure, or falsity, does not decompose. It is an organic classical state, not a crystalline, time-based modern state. The crystal-image is the crystallization of the optical-image formed by its relation to action. (19)

The description of the crystal-image is part of the immemorial tension between virtual and actual image. This is seen in the mirrored images of Prince Don Fabrizio and Tancredi, in the mirrors in which Don Fabrizio inspects himself before the dinner when Don Calogero and Angelica arrive, where Don Fabrizio looks at the girls at the ball, where Angelica and Concetta (Lucilla Morlacchi) are reflected, and where Tancredi and Don Fabrizio give themselves a final look. Where in the density of mirroring effects does decomposition take place? (20)

With the crystal-image we are at the “most fundamental [modern] operation of time” (21). How can this be reconciled with The Leopard‘s classical position, powerful thematic and formal conventions? This concept of power is especially present in the figure of Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina. Notice the two flashbacks in the film referring to hidden beauty, one mythological and the other of dark familial secrets. The film works within this kind of “exchange of interaction and capture, or absorption and creation” (22). None of this is mentioned by Deleuze. (23)

How does Deleuze set Visconti’s The Leopard into the fourth and final state of the crystal? (24) The move is rather extraordinary in its simplicity. From Max Ophüls’ “perfect completed crystal” (25), we pass to the second state of the crystal, through Jean Renoir, where the crystal is flawed, dividing in two by how the actual or the virtual leave the crystal. Next is the third state (Federico Fellini’s stage) where the crystal grows by the seeds dispersed (26), which return an environment where actual or virtual images have travelled back into the crystal. The fourth state is the exhaustion of Fellini’s hopscotch game of childhood memory, historical/sociological, archaeology/kinesthics, the decomposition of the crystal – or, to use Félix Guattari’s term, its “ritornello” (27). Yet, a “ritornello” is not decomposition. Such classification flies in the face of the transformismo at the heart of The Leopard. (28)

In The Leopard, the guile of the fragment is taken as an impulse-image, a preserved zone of the originary Sicilian world. (29) Recall the fate of the Parisian roses transplanted in Sicilian soil. Decomposition is how naturalism and verism give way to decadentism. Yet, decadentism, as a literary movement, is not decomposition.

To see The Leopard as “decomposition” is to perform a type of Hegelianism, by arranging tidy moves from Ophüls, to Renoir, to Fellini and finally to Visconti. It is also to betray Antonin Artaud’s critique of cinema and Deleuze’s belief in its “crucial importance” (30). With Artaud, Deleuze recognized a “powerlessness which does not yet have a bearing on cinema, but on the contrary defines the real object-subject of cinema” (31). This is what The Leopard uncovers and what Visconti captured from the novel. Following this line would have revealed the “story of lethargy and inertia, seen as natural products of the sun and earth of Sicily” (32). Deleuze’s critical optimism reined in an example of how Sicilian minor literature recomposes a “world that is making cinema for itself”. This is what Deleuze did not see in the film. This is what makes the “spaces and times of minorities who can no longer be ‘represented’ by intellectuals” (33). This aspect is in Don Fabrizio’s furthering the “foreign language in the language of the time”, for “those that do not yet exist”, in relation to Tancredi and Angelica. (34) Salient points of minor language in the film are where “language stammers” (notice Don Calogero, the exclamation of pleasure in Mariannina, Sarah and Princess Maria Stella Salina (Rina Morelli)), or the “stretched tensors through all of language” (notice Tancredi, Father Pirrone, Don Ciccio Tumeo and Colonel Pallavicino). (35) Visconti picked up on this aspect and “bears witness to the unlocalized presence of an indirect discourse at the heart of every statement” (36). This is an exacting description of the Sicilian world. The Leopard is an example of this majority seen as “Nobody” and the becoming-minoritarian of everybody. (37) How is it that Deleuze, who pursued the “becoming-minor of philosophy”, missed this becoming-minoritarian in The Leopard? (38)

By refusing to pay attention to organic narration, Deleuze’s state of decomposition of crystalline description is fatal to his own theory. Deleuze divests the film’s spaces and times of unrepresentable minorities, from the aristocracy to the unification of the peasants. While doing theory is a putting oneself within and between different practices, inside “the other practices with which it interferes”, interference must recognize the existing patterns that are being run as “preserved zones” and the “artificiality of the sets” (39). Decomposition is both a preserved zone and an artificiality of sets in The Leopard‘s Sicily. This self-interference remains originary to the action of The Leopard, not a space where, due to decomposition, the crystal is jarred from immobility. To move in this direction, a movement that the film itself does not allow, is remarkably naïve, but understandable, since theory desires to progress, even in its own decomposition.

In The Leopard, Visconti is reading the time-image not as conquest or coming to essence, or degrading of a telos, but as maintenance of interiority, as life seen through the “self-interrogation of an aristocrat obsessed with the need to account for his own survival” (40). This self-interrogation applies to the figure of Don Fabrizio, Tomasi di Lampedusa and Visconti. (41) To their position one may apply what Jean-Luc Godard said about Bande à part (1964); “it is the world that is out of synch; they are right, they are true, they represent life. They live a simple story; it is the world around them which is living a bad script.” (42)

In The Leopard, we see the “whole that is no longer the logos unifying the parts, but the drunkenness, the pathos which bathes them and spreads out in them […] a primitive language, an internal monologue” (43). For Visconti, “meaning is not in the image, it is in the shadow of the image projected by montage onto the field of consciousness of the spectator” (44). There is no mistaking this kind of projecting if one reviews a handful of interviews with Visconti. (45) Even without knowledge of the source of Visconti’s film, the power of the scenes reveal how immobility remains the backbone of The Leopard. (46) The film and novel remain within the narrative movement of the master (Prince Fabrizio di Salina), where images and signs perform servile tasks. What is important is that the Salinas get to Donnafugata.

The Leopard is a story of lethargy and inertia, of Sicily that problematises its real milieu into incompossible narrative. It is a world that makes cinema for itself. (47) This part of the crystal image in “narration” (48), and as “story” (49), is what The Leopard constructs as un-decomposed crystal-image, a virtual becoming that “takes itself as its object in the process of its making or of its setbacks in being made” (50). Where can decomposition take place in such a structure? (51)

In The Leopard, there is invention and conversions, but the root of Visconti’s rendition is firmly planted in a fidelity to the original text. (52) Another part of Visconti’s cinematic approach is clarified if one studies his 47 works for the stage, and his directing of 22 pieces of opera and ballet. (53) Visconti is much closer to Artaud than Deleuze realized. Using what Deleuze states about Artaud, one could say that Visconti “soon thinks that theatre is more capable of renewing itself and freeing sound powers, than a still limited, over-visual cinema, even if this means that the theatricalization has to include electronic rather than cinematographic aids” (54). In agreement with Bazin, “to create theater of any worthwhile kind is more difficult than to create cinema” (55). What Anton Chekhov brought to the stage from the historical novel, Visconti brings to cinema from his work in theatre and literary masterpieces. (56)

Deleuze’s view of Visconti’s cinematic æsthetics fails when considering Sicilian minor literature, with which Visconti was working in The Leopard. Like Lampedusa, Visconti belongs in an ambiguous neo-realism, the memorial productions, tinged by its own lamentation for action. Il Gattopardo is not quite a historical novel, but a memorial production wherein history makes an appearance. Historical figures (in particular Giuseppe Garibaldi) are reduced to “carriage flies” (mosche cocchiere) within the sweeping tempo of Sicily experienced as the abstract, immutable, and eternal category of sublime indifference. (57)

If the thought of the “crystal in the process of decomposition” makes sense in relation to The Leopard, it needs to be linked to that “certain motor helplessness […] one which makes him [the Prince of Salina] all the more capable of seeing and hearing” (58). This is an example of “creating that isn’t communicating but resisting” (59). In the minor language of Sicilian literature, the action-image (realism) is forever bound to the impulse-image (naturalism), as image-at-rest. Deleuze actually divests the protagonist’s gaze that make up points in the intersections of images-at-rest captured in the coincidence between the narrating eye and the protagonist Don Fabrizio. (60) Within The Leopard‘s Sicily, this structure is the way things are, the way temporality is within each joint, impossible to decompose without distorting its anatomy. Each attempt to raise a new image that would weld the action to a world finds itself part of the island’s invariance. This is what The Leopard captures. The Leopard‘s Sicily is a “vast crystalline universe” (61), not one open to the decomposition, nor open to time. Decomposition misses the baroque folds in the world and elementary impulses that make up Sicilian narratives – continually reanimating their own story even if in a heap of livid dust. (62)

Visconti works this impulse between camera mobility and montage. The montage found in The Leopard‘s ball scene, a tracking shot made to resemble an organic montage consuming all before it remained undeveloped by Deleuze. The ball scene, lasting 46 minutes of the 185 minute film, is a single camera movement acquiring the “syntactic effect of a series of cuts [montage-like] because of the single use of the 14 rooms of the palace in which it was filmed in Palermo” (63). Prince Don Fabrizio di Salina constitutes the whole, guaranteeing it as the mirror-image of time flowing from the movement of the tracking-shot by the montage of architectural elements of the palace. (64) Deleuze does not recollect the aristocratic eye of Don Fabrizio, which performs this same trick throughout the entire film.

From this aristocratic eye one can understand the “too-late” as implying the power of clairvoyance. Only in such a way can one grasp Don Fabrizio’s master statement: “it is not permissible to hate anything but eternity.” This is what gives the crystals of time welded seams upon which present time is rendered imaginary, and where mental-subjective sonsigns are rendered inoperable and immobilized. (65)

Clairvoyance is the fabulation that haunts Sicilian verismo, a dialect and minor language striating itself. (66) Lampedusa stirred the magma of Sicily’s chaos, a movement that Visconti follows, and one that Deleuze reduces to the cliché of decomposition. As the plight of lyrical existence, the minor language of natural aristocracy and The Leopard‘s Sicily joyfully suffers this incommensurability as its amor fati.

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