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Visconti has been seen in this season as the director of the searing, accusatory film of the interdependence of the industrial class with the Nazis in Germany, The Damned. But where did this European industrial class arise, when Europe was still saddled with an immense set of royalty that began with kings and queens and spread its fingers into every aspect of the lives in their respective nations or nation-states until almost 1920? How was the transfer of power and wealth from the royals to a burgeoning middle- and then upper-class of technocrats, industrialists and traders brought about? How did this unweighting of the royals and shift in power to common but now wealthy families buckle civil society under the strain? In the 1963 film, The Leopard, Visconti examines the shift in the sand in the quiet, almost dispassionate gaze of a Sicilian nobleman, who sees his royal station being slowly eroded by the forces of politics, but also by the forces of economics, as wealth passes from hands supposedly blessed by a lineage from God into the more clever, adept hands of a new line. 

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