It must be very difficult for an artist to be aware of being in a state of grace, an unrepeatable moment in which genius combines all his talents to reach the top and offer enduring works. In 1963 the world was preparing, also without knowing it, for the explosion of The Beatles while, in Italy, Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti dazzled with two films destined to go down in history: 8 1/2 y The Leopardso different in substance and form and so similar in their context.
Both directors had just touched the sky in 1960, when they presented two unforgettable gems. Fellini wowed the world with The sweet lifemythologised by the scene of the Trevi Fountain and brutal in its diagnosis of a sick societythat of the Italian miracle of the 50s, when La Bota too abruptly abandoned its old charm to plunge fully into an accelerated modernity, according to the Rimini filmmaker typical of a feverish state.
None of this would have been possible without the economic engine of the north and its southern immigration, symbolized for posterity with Rock and his brothers. With her Viscontithe Milanese nobleman of communist ideology, he put his finger on the sore with a stellar cast in which a young Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori and a very young woman shone Claudia Cardinale.
The actress of Tunisian origin would take over the credits of the pair of star films from 1963, at which time Italy was the second largest film producer in the worldbrilliant in a proposal far from neorealism and impeccable in giving the seventh art its own language.
Both tapes are summarized for moviegoers in very basic plots. 8 1/2 would show how the inability to shoot a film is avoided, precisely, by shooting it until you find the key to put the word Fin. For his part, The Leopard It would be a three-hour fresco to narrate the Italian Unification and the sacrifice of the Prince of Salina, masterfully interpreted by Burt Lancaster, who ceded power to the bourgeoisie to sign the famous maxim of changing everything so that nothing changes.