Circles of Delight and Despair: The Cinema of Max Ophuls
2002; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
Resumome, life is movement. --Lola Montes Max Ophuls (ne Oppenheimer) was born in Saarbrucken in 1902 and died in Hamburg in 1957. Throughout his life, he made over twenty films in five different languages but principally in German, English and French. He also worked in theatre. More Rhenish than Viennese, he was as much at home in French as in German, adopting French citizenship in 1938. Coming from a well-to-do German Jewish home, he changed his name to Ophuls when he began to work in theatre so as not to embarrass respectability of his family. Living in a Europe dedicated to persecution of Jews, his life was a constant pilgrimage away from this persecution in search of production companies that would allow him to create his extraordinary art. While in their day, his films enjoyed a decent critical acclaim, especially in Europe, they seldom made much money. And his way of working was expensive. His emphasis on period pieces, his fondness for extravagant decor, plus swirls and sweeps of his camera all required substantial budgets in order to achieve desired effects. While demonstrably one of world's finest directors, his work is not well known. Prints of his early films, even on video, are hard to come by; and for most part, even films that are known are still not well understood. In England and in North America, he had reputation of a decorator addicted to elegance and melodrama--a creator of weepies. There was little mention of his tragic sense of life, of his view of moment as ephemeral and ever-changing. Nor was there much discussion concerning purpose his elegant art was intended to serve. While not his most subtle film, Lola Montex (1955) is unquestionably his apotheosis. Possessing all characteristics of a swan song, it is as if Ophuls knew that it would be his last film. It is Ophuls' The Tempest--his farewell to his art. Being his only film in colour and CinemaScope, it recapitulates all elements of his previous work, both thematic and stylistic. It is simultaneously beautiful and bizarre, exhilarating and terrifying --as Ophuls must have experienced world to be. The basis of our profession is circus. Consequently, true aristocrats of this profession, ones who mould their bodies, their hearts, their souls to display them to public are acrobats and clowns. (2) Like Fellini, Ophuls has always felt an affinity for circus-- for pure art of acrobat or clown. Circus performers give themselves to their craft as devoutly as any other artist but for far fewer rewards. For Ophuls, however, circus involved more than this selfless dedication. It was ultimate form of theatre--a theatre in which everything is movement and everyone takes risks, in which everyone has a role to play which is crucially dependent on roles of everyone else. In this way, for Ophuls, circus serves as microcosm of world. In Lola Montes, life of this extraordinary woman--part princess, part courtesan--is presented as a sequence of diversions, her life recapitulated through a series of stages that finally enshrines her at centre of a merry-go-round of circus acts. With his whip and top hat, Peter Ustinov is both dompteur and Master of Ceremonies. Like Anton Walbrook in La Ronde (1950), he narrates film, inviting our participation, but in a far more sinister way. After long tilt down from gas-lit chandelier at top of tent, past band conductor further down to curtains through which Ustinov makes his entrance, he walks directly towards us. We are about to witness, he explains, the greatest act of century ... thrilling, brilliant, and exceptional. If in terms of plot, Ustinov is thus introducing Lola to his circus audience, in a more immediate way he is introducing film to us. He continues to walk towards us through a corridor of young women who start juggling as he passes them, throwing all sorts of things up into air. …
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