Let’s begin with his full name and title: Don Luchino Visconti, Count of Modrone. Visconti wasn’t just an aristocrat; he was from one of the oldest aristocratic families in Europe. He was also, as most film fans know, a Marxist. This is often characterized as a stunning contradiction: Everyone from Visconti’s fellow Neorealist Roberto Rossellini (who hated his guts) to that great despiser of cinema, Gore Vidal, used it against him. The idea was that beneath the surface grandeur and left-wing fury lurked one of the great poseurs of the 20th century. The work, all of which is being shown in an impressive retrospective beginning this weekend at BAM, shows a filmmaker who, like his mentor, Jean Renoir, was intimate with the workings of human folly, which is as fully in evidence at the top of the economic and social ladder (“Senso”) as it is at the bottom (“Rocco and His Brothers,” “Ossessione”). It was this knowledge, along with his Olympian talents, that made him a genuinely great filmmaker.

It’s difficult to imagine anyone but a Marxist aristocrat making a film like “The Leopard” (screening November 27 & 28) – in fact, there is no other film like “The Leopard.” This adaptation of Giuseppe di Lampedeusa’s novel is a vision of historical change from the inside out – intimate with the style, the aspirations, the limitations, and the extravagant dreams of aristocracy, without an ounce of the drop-jawed amazement with which most filmmakers respond to the resplendent decor and extravagant manners of the upper classes. Visconti knew that he had to take his time, that his movie had to move at the luxuriantly slow tempo of the life led by the Prince, so soulfully incarnated by Burt Lancaster. Visconti understood history. He knew how it worked, and he knew that aristocrats were just as likely to resist or succumb to the lure of power as middle-class strivers or lowly wretches.

Visconti was born into the pink in Milan, in 1906. He was attached at the hip to his wealthy mother, reportedly the model for the mother played by Silvana Mangano in his adaptation of “Death in Venice” (one of the least of his films, screening December 10 & 11). By all accounts, he grew into a foppish layabout, armed with knowledge, looks to die for (Visconti was easily as beautiful as any of his leading men, or women), and a heavy dose of aimlessness. The legend goes that he arrived in Paris in 1936, a right-wing serial seducer of women. After meeting Renoir and working as his apprentice (this was during the height of the French master’s involvement with the Popular Front), he returned to Italy with passionately held left-wing beliefs and a burning desire to make movies. Somewhere along the line his sexual orientation also shifted from women to men.

It was Renoir who suggested that Visconti adapt James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice” as his first film. “Ossessione” (December 8 & 16) is often cited as a forerunner of Neorealism, when it is in fact a florid, operatic melodrama of life among the lower classes – perhaps not as self-assured as his (rare) later journeys into the lower depths, but a startlingly physical film nonetheless.

Visconti’s first great breakthrough film, “La Terra Trema” (November 29), was one of the key works of Neorealism. This adaptation of Sicilian novelist Giovanni Verga’s “I Malavoglia” was originally meant to be a documentary funded by the Italian Communist Party, and the narration (written by Visconti himself) remains as didactic as the sweep of the action, the perfect tonal mixture of the intimately realistic and the grandly operatic. Visconti’s genius with the orchestration of film elements – movement, sound, light and shadow, pace, uniformity of performance style, music – are all present in this film, still one of the triumphs of postwar cinema.

Visconti was not a prolific filmmaker – he made three features and two shorts in the 1950s, five features and two shorts in the 1960s, four features in the 1970s. Aside from the fact that his films required massive preparation and that he was just as much a perfectionist as Stroheim or Kubrick, the principal reason for the relative paucity of his output was his commitment to opera and theater. Not content with being a great filmmaker, Visconti was one of the pioneers of European stage, the Italian counterpart to Elia Kazan, and was the first on the Continent to stage Williams and Miller.

Yet “The Leopard” is probably his crowning achievement. It is a film of extraordinary breadth and beauty. It is also a work of genuine wisdom in its becalmed viewpoint of Italian unification and the subsequent rise of the middle class. And it is one of the most influential movies in modern cinema – aside from the fact that it is one of Martin Scorsese’s five favorite films, it casts a long shadow over “The Godfather,” “The Deer Hunter,” and many, many other films. “Rocco and His Brothers” (November 25 & 26) his massive, Dostoyevskyan epic about the sorry fate of a poor Southern family that has emigrated up north in search of work, would be a close second, its gleaming shades of black, white and grey as lustrously beautiful as “The Leopard’s” rich color palette; “Senso” (December 1 & 2), his 1954 take on the Risorgimiento period from a more melodramatic angle, takes a proud third place, compromised work though it may be (it was severely truncated by the Italian censors). Most underrated would be a toss-up between “White Nights” (December 3) his bewitching, small-scale adaptation of the Dostoyevsky short story, featuring a resplendent performance by Marcello Mastroianni as the luckless suitor; “The Innocent” (December 12), his final film, a corrosive D’Annunzio adaptation; and “Ludwig” (November 23), his extravagant meditation on the life of the delusional Bavarian King. Truth be told, even the least impressive Visconti film (a toss-up between the zoom-happy “Death in Venice” and his lackluster adaptation of Camus’s “The Stranger,” with Mastroianni, (December 9) is more worth your time than anything else playing in New York at this moment.

Until December 16 (30 Lafayette Avenue, between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).