Frieda Grafe
Translated from the German by Barrie Ellis-Jones
Originally published in Filmkritik, 1970; translated in Ophuls, edited by Paul Willemen (London: BFI, 1978), 55-60.
A bit of Munich press coverage of 1932: 'The new form of opera film which was attempted in The Bartered Bride met with the wholehearted appreciation of the audience from the very beginning of the picture. Smetana's music aroused the audience's enthusiasm, and one could clearly feel the excitement rising up to the final, thunderous applause. Contrary to the pessimistic expectation that the film of the opera would produce the longeuer of extended songs... the famous ducats aria was successfully interspersed with a sequence of riding scenes... all the Munich press... an indigenous Munich art film well up to standard... for Munich as a film city... a piece of prestige...'
I have never heard Smetana's opera in its entirety, nor seen it staged. With Ophuls - musical direction by Theo Mackeben - all that remains of it is a sort of digest; the famous numbers which the title promises. 'Can one imagine anything worse than to hear one's favorite song in the following way: some bars of the melody and at the same time someone speaking the words, which - shoddily composed in the tradition of opera texts - are simply futile without the tune. There is really not much left of the opera, except the story and parts of music.' (A contemporary English critic in Close Up.)
A rejection not basically dissimilar to that which Ophuls received in 1956 with Lola Montes - too many overlapping and contradictory voices and styles; hints of what to expect rather than the thing itself. Ophuls was supposed to have kept to the story of the opera! That is the proof you give to show that someone who has filmed a cultural work has failed to come up to his model. Smetana's basis was a libretto by Sabina. Ophuls basis was Smetana's opera, whose music and libretto he altered. The harmony at the end and as a conclusion to the film was created in Ophuls version by Kezal the procurer, who brings all the characters together for a family photograph. But that is a lot of people. In Smetana money ultimately finds its way back to money. The legitimate son, the first-born, marries a wife of his own standing. The avaricious procurer and the wicked stepmother, who wanted to supplant the legitimate son with her somewhat simple one, are ridiculed and driven out. Ophuls makes a tableau of it in which any idea of legitimate inheritance, logical consequence and continuity are ridiculed. His Hans is a wandering postillion, and the second-born marries Esmeralda, the circus girl. Nor is he simple, but gentle and sensitive, and only kept silent by his mother so that love should not upset her money-making plans.
Ophuls has made the story thoroughly erotic, beautifully risqué and ambiguous. He was not primarily interested in parents who barter their children like moveable property. What interested him was the bourgeois Underground, the basis of bourgeois morality. In Ophuls' films it is forever threatened with being bankrupted by love, the unforeseeable element which destabilizes wealth. Ophuls lifts the skirts of bourgeois morality (like Belmondo in À Bout de Souffle) finding enormous fun in the process, enjoying dreadful puns and anything regarded as vulgar. A church fair with a Try-Your-Strength machine. There is an explosion when Hans hits the button, and a trembling little marker struggle up a few centimeters when a pompous 'financial consultant' has a go. A euphemistic reading is impossible. Dépense inproductive!
It is only a step from the words to the idea. That step is not permissible in explicating this film. In this instance, keeping to the words is the same thing as keeping to the sounds, dwelling on the various voices which the film draws together - where everyone prevents everyone else from stealing the show. 'A major sequence in the film takes place at a fair. I travelled throughout Germany and engaged proper fairground people, who came to Geiselgasteig with their families: fire-eaters, acrobats, clowns, gypsies with their dancing bears. Fortune tellers. (And: Kurt Horwitz, Therese Giehse, Valentin and Liesl Karlstadt, Domgraf-Fassbaender, Otto Wernicke, Paul Kemp and Beppo Brehm inter alia - author's note.) Genuine farm boys and farm girls from the mountains.' Domgraf-Fassbaender sings a duet with Otto Wernicke, and it is not Wernicke who runs out of breath so much as Fassbaender who is deflated. The mésalliances and disharmonies in The Bartered Bride deserve attention. The destruction of bourgeois concepts of property, of the smooth and consistent circulation of wealth, is both total and subtle. These are not the amiable motives of comic opera, such as cheerful malice at the fate of the deceiver deceived. Families are ruined - mothers who are fathers, families without mothers, middle-class sons who join the circus, and middle-class daughters who go off the rails. Paralleling the selling-off of bourgeois forms of portrayal at knockdown prices there is a concerto of heterogeneous voices, cracks and gaps appear throughout the structure of portrayal and representation, in respect to which, as Ophuls shows, photography and the cinema are not innocent. The loss of the original. The mirror carried across the country road?
In a nasal accent - Baudelaire, Wedekind and Brecht rolled into one - Therese Giehse urges the public to have their photographs taken:
Fotogrrrrrrrrrafiiiiiiiierrrrrren
Das solle eine schöne Erinnerung fur Sie sein
Das Spiegelbild auf Papiiiiiierrrrr
Das Amüsement der wirklich vornehmen Herrschaften
In Paris, Wien, Berlin
Das ist nicht gemalt, das ist fotogrrrafiiirrrt
Das is kein Zaubermittel, das ist kein Magie
Das is Fortschritt, das ist Wissenschaft
[Get your photogrrrrrrrraph
It's bound to be a beautiful souvenir
Your mirror image on paper
The pastime of the really upper-crust gentry
In Paris, Vienna, Berlin
It's not on canvas, it's a photogrrrrrraph
It's not magic, it isn't a conjuring trick
It's progress, it is Science]
When Giehse says fotografieren your ears tell you that it has something to do with writing. Scratched on to film, like McLaren. And the mirror-image on paper is flat, as flat as the fairground pictures of a hurdy-gurdy man singing of true love, and as flat as the images which break up the ducats song, when Domgraf-Fassbaender and Wernicke are hopping about on piggy-back in time to the music. The opera star as hurdy-gurdy man.
Now and then Ophuls shoots his actors at such a sharp angle from below that they look slapped on to the screen, completely two dimensional. Here he shows how he achieves that sensation of the voluminous, which one remembers when one thinks of Ophuls' films, and how it has nothing to do with volume in reality. It comes from a flat picture and is developed by the multiplicity of voices and accents, of music, walks, and gestures. By perspectives which have nothing in common with reality - windows which open like boxes, upwards. That is the impression it has made on me.
Ophuls did not like realism in the cinema, but he enjoyed the realist novelists of the nineteenth century - Stendhal, Maupassant, Balzac. 'Son âme passa dans ses oreilles et dans ses yeux. Il crut écouter par chacun de ses pores.' (His soul flowed into his ears and his eyes. He felt he could listen through every pore.) For Ophuls realism is a literary process, not a recipe for depicting reality. That is why for him there is no such thing as a model with a claim to priority, but simply images of images. You have to look at his films with your ears because they consist of mixed forms, because they blur boundaries. He opens up networks and circles which would otherwise be static because they would insist on their isolated existences. The things he introduces into his films take on multiple values, polyvalences, which dissolve the boundaries between high and low art, and between what is mine and what is yours. The sense of freedom that you feel when you see The Bartered Bride (how funny it will be when everything falls apart) comes from Ophuls' lack of respect towards his source material. 'He rapes it, knocks it into shape, cuts it, leaves things out of it, pads it out, invents things, twists things and does all the other things to it that go with interpretation.' He incites you to do the same with his film. Fixating on a message would blow the light of life out of his creation. There are too many echoes, whose sources cannot be localized. Stereophonic, stereographic, and stereotype. Kezal the procurer is, in Smetana, a bad lot with a bad character. In Ophuls he is the grease that keeps the cartwheels turning. He is not driven out, as in Smetana, but, with the group photograph, he creates an ephemeral moment of harmony and peace.
And involved in this precarious moment of peace is a man who is always tripping up, lousing up the most apparently straightforward procedure or simplest statement - Valentin. 'True art unties, true art reconciles.' An endless conversation about how lovely it would be if the daughter's lover were not only rich but also had a talent for the circus. A discussion in which not a single word follows logically on the last. In the end the girl sums it up in a cliche and Valentin says that that was just what he had been trying to say. But everything that he had said had already had the effect of making commonplace expressions untrustworthy. Another scene. The circus owner's wife is supposed to lay an egg. Valentin and Karlstadt are quarrelling in front of rows of occupied seats, with their hands hiding their mouths, as it were. He hisses to her: 'Don't talk so much, or you'll stop me clucking." As if clucking were a superior form of expression to talking! At all events it is one which corresponds exactly with Valentin's attitude to speech. For him speech is an automatic machine which produces meanings and lands you where you do not want to go. Or, put another way: clucking is the bass note, from which talking arises, becoming fixed in expressions which have little to do with the matter in hand and are nothing more than an agreement of terms for smooth-running circulation, for keeping the traffic flowing.
With Ophuls there is neither a main actor, a star, nor a theme. No single subject is allowed to parade itself as one. The main points are minor points. Digression is everything - anything to break up a subject or the impression of an exhaustive, rounded work of art. Everything is pursued with an addiction for enjoyment. Like Valentin, endlessly unfolding and poking into every cranny. The end only comes where you arbitrarily put it. And so the audience can select whom it likes to be the main character. It could be Valentin and Kezal or the circus owner and Otto Wernicke. Each of them holds an important strand of the film in his hands. One of them is busy smoothing and straightening everything out. (Yes, the happiness of the country is happily in my care); the other is continually pointing out differences with his fingers until he typically, but unintentionally, sticks them in an inkwell. The village policeman says he must not forget to pay his entertainment tax, and the girl promises that she'll certainly remind her husband to forget.
Forgetting and remembering are not separate categories for Valentin. They are words which, therefore, are the things themselves, as one can tell from what the girl says. The period of time, which separates the things from the name of them, has disappeared. The question has been asked whether the form Ophuls uses is epic, like Brecht, and the similarities between the two have given rise to ideological difficulties. I would never say Ophuls was epic. The epic is too much associated with the idea of logical development through time, with one thing happening after another, while Ophuls piles things on top of each other, and creates tangles. Ophuls' films are like the way Lola's life appears. Just try to unravel in your memory the parts of Lola's life that Ustinov shows to the citizens of New Orleans, and what Ophuls shows us in the cinema and what we add to that from what we think we know about the authentic Lola. A film freely adapted from life, as the other was from Smetana.
The famous 'needle and thread' scene in Lola Montes is prefigured with constantly changing intonations which turn speech into song and allow it to take a rest from mere meaning. 'Roll up, Roll up, Ladies and Gentlemen,' cries Liesl Karlstadt, advertising like Ustinov later does for Lola. For Ophuls, elevated language means that the sound is more audible than the words. Speech tends toward advertisement with Ophuls, not because nasty advertising has ruined pure speech but because this tendency is inherent in speech. It has always promised more that it has been able to deliver.
The space of Ophuls films is full of holes, stitched together, a play of facets. And if these facets mirror one other thing, it is the current crisis in artistic representation, the end of the classical, realist narrative method with its author solely responsible, with its truth, its subject and with an ending which reinstates order. The Bartered Bride has two endings, one for the story and one for the film. Repetition, which Ophuls indulges in every possible form - and as the form most certain to produce ambivalence and ambiguity - in which he indulges at the expense of uniqueness, comes into play once more at the end. Two ends = no end. An incitement to continue, to repeat. 'Une autre chambre, un autre Stock' (another room, another storey) as the Munich landlord says in Lola Montes. Life imitates books says Oscar Wilde. And if he is too frivolous a witness, then even Dante said that the passions come from books, and Lola says to Ludwig that he must do what the books expect of him.
Often by such simple means does Ophuls produce an infinity of fictions and spaces. By, for example, having Domgraf-Fassbaender with his operatic manner, movements and miming act alongside Valentin. Even to have Domgraf-Fassbaender in a film at all is like having O.E. Hasse's cultured voice coming out of Bogey's ravaged visage in a German dub. When the self-confidence of Domgraf-Fassbaender, nutured by the artistic performance of centuries, runs into Valentin doing acrobatics without a net, there is no question of things being good enough to serve.
What I mean is this: 'When we were shooting the film I directed him (Valentin) in the way he had suggested. I explained the situation of a scene to him. For example - "Here comes the village policeman and he wants your taxes from you. You didn't pay them last year when your circus was here, and now you're afraid that if you don't pay them you'll not be allowed to put on the show. But you haven't got any money." Meanwhile the village policeman entered. Valentin called the girl over and said the first thing that came into his head. He had his own answers for every question that was put to him. When things got too complicated and had been going on too long, he clouted the village policeman on the head.'
From art to life is just a step.
