The BAMcinématek series The Cinema of Max Ophuls
(Nov 28—Dec 18) is a twelve-film retrospective of the director, including a week-long run of Letter from an Unknown Woman and rare films The Tender Enemy and The Trouble with Money.

Ophuls and the Big Distancers
by Chris Fujiwara

In Lola Montès, as in many other films by Max Ophuls, the world is not so much seen as seen through. Curtains, screens, windows, banisters, doorways, nets, scaffolds, dismantled parts of stage sets, and all kinds of obstacles distance the characters' lives from the viewer for whom, it might be supposed, those lives are put on display. Lola Montès is all a giant trick on vision and a comedic undermining of the cinema's powers of revealing and commanding life. So many frames are partly blacked-out: it's as if Ophuls wanted to ensure that we see less in CinemaScope than in the standard screen ratio.

BAMcinématek screens twelve films by Ophuls from Nov 28 to Dec 18. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in Saarbrücken, Germany, in 1902, Ophuls achieved success as a theater director before entering cinema in 1930. He gained international renown with Liebelei in 1933 and then made films in France, Italy, and the Netherlands. Ophuls spent the 1940s in the United States, directing four Hollywood features from 1947 to 1949. He then returned to France, where he made four more masterpieces before succumbing to heart disease in 1957.

Madame de... is a defining Ophuls work and, I believe, his most perfect (though Liebelei, Letter from an Unknown Woman, The Reckless Moment, and Le Plaisir are also perfect, and La Signora di tutti, Caught, La Ronde, and Lola Montès, for possibly being imperfect, are no less great): an admirable spiral of gesture and dance that hurries the characters past us while, in the interstices and on the margins of the fabulous and inane social whirl being documented, a desperate love story starts, climaxes, and ends in tragedy. The intensity of the early Liebelei is not traduced in Ophuls' later masterpieces; it's only more veiled. Ophuls proves that intensity is no less intense for being inaccessible.

The biggest distancer is time. Time's distance may be internal: during the sea-voyage flashback in Lola Montès, Lola's solitary journey on deck is mounted and lit like a scene of memory: the blue light, the breeze, the artificial stars ("la vie brillante," exults the ringmaster in voice-over). Or it may be external. Everything passes, everything is bounded: this is the message of even that most expansive of Ophuls' episodes, the "Maison Tellier" portion of Le Plaisir, in which the redemptive moment (a first communion in a country church, attended by prostitutes from the far city), detached from time, soon falls behind in the flow of time. In Madame de..., André realizes he loves Louise only after he has already lost her. "Things always come in their time," says the king in Lola Montès, which may be true enough objectively, but for Ophuls' characters, subjectively, things generally come too late.

Dialogue doesn't reveal, but separates. Lola Montès, like The Reckless Moment, is filled with murmurs, remarks uttered in passing, and conversations that are meant not to be heard. Ophuls wrote: "Dialogue may in some sense follow along in the wake of the feeling expressed. In my view the event starts before speech and continues past it." André asks Louise in Madame de...: "Do you want to have a serious conversation?" That he has to ask the question shows that most of the time, for these people, talk is just something that one should keep doing while something else is happening.

Everyone is playing a role; that keeps things moving. The characters of La Ronde only imagine they exist, and the ones who are closest to the heart of the film are those who know themselves to be performers. Sometimes a role stands before one of Ophuls' characters so clearly that he or she is conscious of entering it, like Stefan at the end of Letter from an Unknown Woman when the pieces of his destiny finally fall into place for him, or the king in Lola Montès when he reluctantly accepts the truth, from Lola's mouth, that at a time of revolution he must appear "in his role of the king." For the rest of their films, such characters are trying either to avoid or to catch up with their fates—in much the way that Ophuls' dialogue falls behind or swerves alongside the event.

What do we hear in these films? Stories with music, stories that are music (consider the piano-playing narrator in Le Plaisir and the long passages from Mozart, Brahms, and Beethoven that structure major parts of Liebelei). What do we see in these films? The rush of time in waves, in layers; for example: a man runs alongside a moving train in order to catch one last sight of a woman passenger, while the camera runs alongside the man (Le Plaisir). Objects are always lost—like the money in The Trouble with Money, the cigarette filter that becomes an unacknowledged love token in The Reckless Moment, and the earrings of Madame de...—and no lessons can be learned from finding them. What counts are the speed, curve, and beauty of a movement across a space marked by so many visual and temporal interruptions, so many marks of the distance life makes us take up toward our lives, a distance that we may feel as comic or tragic, or not feel at all for a long time, until we're shocked into feeling again by the subversive irony and chilling tenderness of Max Ophuls.