"Who Am I in This Story?": On the Film Adaptations of Max Ophuls
2006; Salisbury University; Volume: 34; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoIntroduction Most of great auteur films of classical American cinema are adaptations, a concern which has been of little attention to either auteur or adaptation theorists. The majority of American films by E)ouglas Sirk, Alfred Hitchcock, and Fritz Lang were adapted from mostly popular novels. When it acknowledged this connection at all, auteur criticism assumed that studio-assigned source material was an obstacle that great auteur overcame with visual genius. The case of American films of Max Ophuls indicates that nothing could be further from truth. Instead, argue that Ophuls's engaging American melodramas can lead us back toward otherwise neglected, but nevertheless provocative, popular American literature. The years of poststructural critique notwithstanding, auteurism's core is theoretically sound: filmmakers have a personal style that they bring to bear on their film work. However, we should attend more carefully to how and why filmmakers adapt literary material, rather than just assuming that fascinating aspects of their films are their unique inventions and not visualizations of material in source texts. Each auteur has his or her own approach to adaptation; discovery of this particular approach will tell us a great deal about films and source novels alike. To build this argument, will use one of Ophuls's international art films, La Ronde (1950), based on a high culture play by Arthur Schnitzler, to establish a definition of the Ophuls will then use this definition to explore Ophuls's two 1949 American melodramas-Caught and The Reckless Moment-as adaptations of popular novels, Wild Calendar (1946) and The Blank Wall (1947), respectively. By comparing these novels to Scnnitzler, mean to demonstrate that cultural status of source novels is of little consequence to importance of resulting Ophuls adaptations, and that this is not only a testament to quality of Ophuls as an adapter, but also to interest these novels hold in their own right. La Ronde, Ophuls's adaptation of eponymous 1903 play by Schnitzler, maintains a detailed respect for source text, while inventing a cinematic mode for delivery of that text's narrative and ideological material. La Ronde offers a startling adaptational invention, Anton Walbrook as meneur-de-jeu, a transdiegetic figure who weaves in and out of role of narrator and character participant. In film's tour-de-force opening, meneur-de-jeu asks, Who am in this story? as he first walks through a stage with nineteenth-century candle footlights and then a modern film set. Embracing artifice, meneur-de-jeu establishes a more specific location: We are in Vienna, in 1900. As he changes costume, he emphasizes historical importance of this-we are in past-a past that moves back across recent trauma of both world wars: I like past. It's more restful than present, more predictable than future. As birds chirp happily in background, he discovers a carousel of love, which will turn through ten stories in rapid succession. The meneur-de-jeu introduces each of ten love affairs, all of which culminate in sex, next one always involving one of participants from previous. In tenth story, film comes full circle, spanning full class strata of European civilization, with prostitute Leocadie (Simone Signoret) who had sex with Franz soldier (Serge Reggiani) in first story now having sex with Count (Gerard Philipe). The opening of La Ronde establishes three motifs that define Max Ophuls as an artist of film adaptation. First, Ophuls overlays narrative material with a modernist film style, commenting on characters' activities using various forms of direct address. In La Ronde, this involves self-reflexive opening of film, with its meditation on various theatrical and cinematic presentations of stories about love. …
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