— Max Ophüls; his craning, leaning, peering, flowing camera — bolted to its crane even while it wafts like a feather. Typically — I mean, in the history of cinematic practice — the tracking shot is a device of pursuit: the lens following the protagonist, the scene, the action; but with Ophüls, this track — his track[ing] — feels more like a gesturing hand, a ribbon or rope that pulls his characters through the faceted, glittering, encrusted world of their jewels and opera houses and tall-ceilinged apartments (people have argued otherwise; that it does pursue, but I’m not quite convinced). It’s by the by, but James Mason — once Ophüls had arrived in America — wrote a fondly satirical verse about “poor dear Max” who, “separated from his dolly, / is wrapped in deepest melancholy”. Figures.
— Through this languorous tracking, his heroes seem to be drawn perilously and inevitably toward their various fates (these often end with death, shame, dishonour, or all of these things) — a world of foregone conclusions which even they might (it seems!) be wholly aware of; choosing — in the half-remembered words of Mayakovsky — to allow the “ship of love to crash upon the rocks of [everyday] life”. Trapped within a kaleidoscope (how everything is so sparkling, so rich, so obscenely beautiful), they seek an exit — a trajectory — through the only route available to them: the path dependency of tragedy. Louise (of The Earrings of Madame De [1953]) is shown to us — at the very start — ‘trapped’ in her own reflection as she sits amongst all her finery and jewels. They (his protagonists I mean) throw themselves into the sublime indeterminacy of the known, of the ‘predictable’, making this act — this knowing demise — all the more strangely beautiful; an auto-de-fe of narrative compulsion. It is what it is. Hold my drink.
— When I watch his films I feel like he’s tenderly satirizing this mode; the melodrama, shoring up its structures — its great sea walls — even while he kicks the foundations to dust (albeit softly); and — really, like his protagonists; like Louise and Lisa (of Letter from an Unknown Woman [1948]) — we’re being pulled along too. He’s surely aware of this: think about the funfair ‘train journey’ in Letter From an Unknown Woman — the two lovers sitting in graceful stillness while the faux scenography of Italian alps and Swiss peaks — painted on canvas screens — rolls past them, all at the behest of a man on a pedal-bike. Ophüls shows us exactly what’s happening, exactly what a film really is: an illusory ‘journey’ that is also entirely (and still surprisingly) inevitable (the canvas can only ever unfold in a particular way — the same mountains, goats, shepherds, and clouds rolling ‘predictably’ past). Fates are sealed, heads will roll. He’s showing us what cinema (or; his cinema) really is, a kind of tableaux-vivant that, even despite its fakery, nonetheless manages to move us (in more ways than one, Etc). What’s more, he shows us exactly who these people are from the very beginning; they tell us. Andre, the general, knows that Donati will fall in love with Louise (his wife). Their liaison is hardly a surprise. We know, from the very get go, that Stefan — in LFAUW — is a playboy, that their tryst ends in tragedy. Ophüls isn’t interested in red herrings or wrong-footing us; he wants to lead us — again: ribbon, tether, gesturing hand — toward the conclusion that we already know is waiting at the mark of 87 or 93 minutes. Really, it’s the getting there that counts.
— In something so starched and predictable, he allows the image — what we see; how we see — to take the lead: and it’s through his formal choices that we see where his bread is really buttered (stories are nice, but images are nicer); the blurring crossfades of LFAUM, the balletic tracking shots of Madame De, the point-of-view telescope where we witness Donati fall from his horse; the point-of-view shot in LFAUM where we — unexpectedly; excitingly — collapse our own eye with the eye of Lisa, who’s looking through Stefan’s window while she pushes back and forth on a swing. Here and there, Ophüls transports us into the bodies of his protagonists (often at very crucial moments; moments of ‘actual’ revelation for his characters [in both cases: love]) even while their interiority is withheld from us in the (very rich) meat of the film that surrounds them. He says: they’re not marionettes, I’m just choosing not to invite you inside (except now, at this moment). He’s asking us — for the most part — to stand aside, to look at our own looking. If he was a chef he’d cook with aspic; we’re wolfing down a great deal of very rich confit — and then we glance at ourselves in our own reflection as it’s thrown back at us by the cutlery we’re holding. He’s good at doing these sudden surprises; opening a new doorway in a house we thought we’d fully explored. This is where he gets his herrings in (red, I mean).
— Things change hands; hearts stay the same — or don’t; the earrings of Madame De become a tchotchke of eye-waggling import; a ‘tell-tale’ object that keeps returning to its owner (how many times are they bought and sold); similarly, Ophüls leans into repetition — the eternal return (the earrings yes; but also the montage of dances between Donati and Madade; the multiple departures of the General’s lovers from the train station. There is a received way of behaving, one that doesn’t allow for emotion to easily seep through (Ophüls seems to despair at the starched collars of the bourgeoisie; so, he looks closer). The way that Ophüls’ camera is always there, pushing through windows, capturing reflections, leading the action — the world of affects and effects is entirely within its inevitable grasp. Each time, the women of his films disperse, are ‘disappeared’ (how Stefan abandons Lisa and their child; how Louise’s earrings become separated from her own name; how Stefan cannot even recall — so he claims — who Lisa really is). Her affections were always extreme, blind, myopic — her fate sealed as soon as she heard the first notes played by Stefan on his piano. Through the corset of its narrative rigidity — sealed fates; foregone conclusions — Ophüls recovers the idea of spectatorship itself; we become aware — realizing — our own immobility, fulfilling Jean Louis Schefer’s assertion that we are watched by the cinema, caught up in the ‘real’ of our watching, where “the real in question is what already and momentarily lives as the spectator”.
— The encrusted, sugary, glistening object of his cinema — of the cinema — is shot through with a bolt of electricity; for a moment, ‘it’ lives. And isn’t there something vaguely suggestive of Rohmer, here? The way in which his characters pig-headedly make their way through bad decisions (we see it happening; we live it happening), or the “human models” of Bresson (“the thing that matters”, as he writes in Notes on the Cinematograph, “is not what they show me but what they hide from me, what they do not suspect is in them”). The actor, he remarks, “does not speak” the language of the film in which they’re suspended. But we — the spectator — do, or understand that they exist within a structure of looking. The objects of this faceted, kaleidoscopic lifeworld (a letter; a face; a pair of earrings; a piano player’s fingers; a telescope; a handful of banknotes, a photograph studied through a magnifying glass) pertain to “the difficult, vacillating relation between visible things and the secret that would simply be their own” (Schefer). Even this feels incomplete.
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