Recently chosen by French director Olivier Assayas as one of the ten greatest films of all time – “a flood of inspiration,” he calls it – Ludwig was butchered upon its original release, shorn of almost half its length. When restored to its Wagnerian grandeur, it was greeted as “a revelation, an unqualified masterpiece that ranks with the director’s greatest work” (Kevin Thomas). Where Hans-Jurgen Syberberg employs the bizarre, sad life of Ludwig, the mad king of Bavaria, to explore the roots of German Fascism in Requiem for a Virgin King, Visconti luxuriates in the story’s romantic tragedy, in its opportunities for extravagant decor and costumes, and, most of all, in its portrait of a kindred soul. There is little doubt from the fervent sympathy Visconti accords Ludwig that the director finds an imperial alter ego in the king’s homosexuality and hedonism, his pacifism, love of opera, artifice, and extravagance, and his self-imposed isolation from a “mean and unbearable” world. “Infinitely moving and majestic” (Thomas). “In Helmut Berger’s Ludwig, Visconti’s echt aestheticism finds its last champion, its Tristan, and also its supreme sacrificial victim, its Christ. Ludwig is a passion play: a mass” (James McCourt).

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