‘This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate’
Here’s one way to clear your reading backlog: Watch the film adaptation, then read the book. You could read the book first, but you’d be setting yourself up for disappointment: in nearly all cases, the movie is unworthy of the novel. The requirements of cinema differ from those of literature; inevitably something is sacrificed in the translation to the screen. Otherwise the characters would be standing around reciting the book to each other, and film adaptations would be twelve hours long. (Film editors should be cold and pitiless.) If the movie is better than its source material, The Godfather 1 and 2 being the prime examples, it is usually because the material merely provides the skeleton or excuse for the filmmaker’s vision.
Example of a great book that became a great movie: Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, filmed by Luchino Visconti in 1963, starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, and Claudia Cardinale.
The Leopard is a melancholy novel set against the political and social upheavals of the 1860s (the Risorgimento) which led to the whole Italian peninsula being unified for the first time since the Roman Empire. The Leopard—the Prince Salina—understands that his era is coming to an end, and power is shifting from the old aristocracy to a new breed of ambitious, rapacious men.
Visconti, who was himself a count and a Marxist, had a unique insider’s view of the material. In the novel, The Leopard explains to a government emissary why he must decline a nomination to the Senate. That crucial speech is delivered in the movie by Prince Salina (Burt Lancaster in a towering performance).
“This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything…all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood…all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind…”
He’s talking about Sicily, but it sounds strangely familiar.
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January 8th, 2009 at 02:42
Balzac and Zola sound very familiar too.
The movie version of The Leopard is very well cast, especially that peasant girl with the rich daddy. I like the cinematography, too. If it was remade now Sicily would’ve been treated melodramatically.