Frieda Grafe
Translated from the German by Barrie Ellis-Jones
Originally published in Die Zeit, 1968; translated in Ophuls, edited by Paul Willemen (London: BFI, 1978), 51-54.
It is held there are no unacknowledged geniuses so far as film is concerned. Because of the laws of chance which regulate the showing of old films, there now exists an opportunity of revising this prejudice.
Two films have found their way back into cinema programs, into art house programs at least, which have not been available to the public for years. They are two films by the same director, made almost a quarter of a century apart, which, now seen together, give proof of an admirable logical progression, of which those who attended their premieres could have had no idea.
Neither film meant much to them. Liebelei and Lola Montes, the fifth and twenty-second films of Max Ophuls, his last German films, the last before his emigration and the first after his return, which was also the last film he made. They are the best German films of a director who was regarded as French in his native land, as Austrian in France, but who came from Saarbrücken and spoke German for preference all his life long - the man whom French critics called a 'Balzacien', but who preferred to read Balzac in German.
Between Liebelei and Lola Montes there is a gap of twenty-three years and sixteen films: ten French - seven before and three after the war - and, in between, four American ones, one Italian, and one Dutch. Ophuls made his last film in two versions, French and German, but with the same cast. In the one version you can hear Willy Quadflieg speaking French, and in the other Martine Carol speaking German. Peter Ustinov treats both languages as foreign - that is to say, as his own.
"Die Lust am Sehen" ("The Pleasure of Seeing") is the title of one of Ophuls' magazine articles. To quite the same extent, his films both express and demand a pleasure in hearing. For him, as the Russians say about women, it was a case of love reaching him through his ears.
He chose his main actor for Liebelei without having seen him. He had heard his voice over the telephone. 'He spoke clearly and simply. His voice was warm, tangible and impressive. I became a member of an audience, and could see him at the other end of the telephone.' The fact that Wolfgang Liebeneiner spoke with an unmistakably Prussian accent did not prevent Ophuls from having him play an Imperial Austrian lieutenant. And just as little with Lola Montes does an audience wonder why an Irish girl brought up in India should, of all things, speak in a French accent.
For Ophuls language was not a vehicle of predetermined content. He made it carry no messages and did not make it responsible for the past, class or character of the speaker. It is rather that his characters reveal themselves to each other and to the audience in speech in an involuntary, more than deliberate way. 'The highest reaches of the actor's art,' he wrote, 'begin, I believe, at the point where words cease to play a part... I mean that what goes on inside a character, behind the words, is often more powerful than words themselves can be - and sometimes less powerful; that it can sometimes contradict the words, and that dialogue limps along behind emotions. I mean that experience begins long before words and continues long after words.'
Ophuls could - as Josef von Sternberg, the most closely compatible with Ophuls of any film auteur in the world, actually did - have made a film in Japanese without understanding a word of the language. In any case, the language in Lola Montes sounded Japanese to the film's contemporaries. 'You hear, you notice, that someone is speaking. But you are not meant to understand what is being said." So said Friedrich Luft. He meant it in a negative sense: 'Too many experiments! Ophuls is trying to achieve too much. His basic idea falls apart in his hands.'
'There was not much speech, and you could not understand what speech there was. And if you did not understand it, then the quality of the dialogue was such that it would have been better for you not to have understood it. The chief impression was of noises.' That was not written by Luft, but by Ophuls himself, not about Lola Montes, but about the first sound films he saw, and he meant it by no means in a negative sense. 'I saw the screen no longer as the enemy of the theatre, but as the continuation of theatre. And from that evening on I wanted to work in film.'
Ophuls sensed antagonism to theatre in film because he feared the latter's ability to subsume artistic representation into what was represented. He never deviated from this fear. As in his use of speech, so, with his increasingly sophisticated use of the moving camera, with the scenery of studio sets and properties to identify the world of film with that of reality, he fought against the blackmailing of art by reality. For him film was a spectacle, not a document of life. But never from the outset did 'the continuation of theatre' mean for him the preservation of stage plays. It meant making them dynamic.
For Ophuls the stage was no longer an autonomous artistic dream in front of an audience. Stage and stalls were seen as aspects of the same reality. They represented two perspectives which were interchangeable. Ophuls object was to create complicity between actor and audience, at first in a playful way, later in a critical, even polemical way.
Liebelei begins at the opera. The first act of The Abduction from the Seraglio is over. The stage manager is looking out through the cap in the curtains into the auditorium. Perspectives are reversed. Then the great chandelier in the auditorium is switched on, as a sign that the Emperor is coming. The audience rises, turns its back on the stage, and looks up at the Emperor's box, which is now the stage, while the stalls have changed their function for a second time. The visual attention of the audience in the cinema is activated by seeing the people in the stalls first as subject, then as object, then as subject again; the object being first the stage, then the auditorium, and then the Emperor's box.
The first scene of Liebelei is not the only example of how stage and auditorium are reversible and how this relationship continues into the cinema, into the imagination of its audience. The interchange between stage and auditorium became increasingly a stylistic device and a theme in Ophuls' films. In the final scene of Lola Montes the circus audience crowds in front of the cage in which Lola is on show, to lick her hand for a dollar. The camera draws back above their heads, so that for a minute the screen looks like the doorway through which the public is leaving the cinema. Here, clearly, the play with perspectives becomes a means of criticism - criticism of the public and criticism of show business.
Mizzi and Christin, the Viennese girls in Liebelei, snatch the opera glasses out of each other's hands so as to see the Emperor in the flesh. This is shown with sympathetic irony - but to an audience that has seen Lola Montes the two girls must appear related to the crowd of circus-goers. And in them the audience in the cinema must feel itself represented. The interest of the circus audience in Lola is the same as that of film fans in their stars. It is directed at the outward person, not the character, and tends to identification. The view through the opera glasses, which magnify the figure of a supreme ruler, becomes the use of the camera, which completes the process of making the audience into voyeurs.
In Ophuls memoirs of 1946 his attitude to the audience is still at odds with itself, a product of tradition, but attacked by doubt. 'The theatre [of the Weimar Republic] did not follow the herd. The terrorism of taste by the proletariat did not take place in Germany. On the other hand I do not know whether its audience was always an audience... In the same way as he washed his hands before a meal, so a respectable person would go at least once a week to the theatre. In this stolid fulfillment of duty and cultural reverence he must also have swallowed and even applauded a lot of things that he really did not want to.' When, ten years later and shortly before his death, he was interviewed by François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette, he had come to realize that: 'there is practically no such thing as an audience anymore. There is a mass of consumers, that is all. They are no longer individuals, prepared to be receptive; they are just people who turn up to consume and who destroy what they want to consume.'
'I love people en masse as a spectacle, but not as spectators. If I had the resources I should make a film with twenty-thousand actors and show it in a tiny cinema.' Such a statement as this, which his costume designer, Georges Annenkov, recalls in his memoirs, makes one suspect Ophuls of being a supporter of a reactionary ideal of cultural elitism. But his films show the historical bankruptcy of such ideals.
Ophuls' films are historical films - not because they set out to reconstruct the past (this is precisely what they do not do), but in that they mediate between historical periods. In Lola Montes it is not only the relationship between the present and the past of the characters that is fluid, but even the past in which Ophuls' films appear to be set is open to the present of his audience. The Vienna of Liebelei is not the real, past Vienna of Arthur Schnitzler, so much as the Vienna of the present, which Ophuls first came into contact with in 1926, and of which he wrote: 'I felt as if I had not arrived in a city, but in one of Schnitzler's chapters or one of Raimund's scenes.' And the circus in Lola Montes certainly does not evoke the illusion of nineteenth century America. Instead, one is reminded of Wedekind, whose prologue to the Earth Spirit is imitated by Ustinov. In so far as theatre turns into circus it points forward to the future of show business.
The language of the theatre as a means of conveying ideas is used again here, but as heralding the language of the advertising copywriter. Linguistic anachronisms like 'star' and 'commercial' activate the audience's conception of time just as the travelling shots activate its conception of space. Ophuls' interest in making the film was aroused by reports of the fate of Judy Garland. He shows the young Lola as having an impulsive nature, whose every flash of temperament becomes a piece of successful personal publicity. She abominates advertising, sees herself as an artist, but the circus owner knows that: "it doesn't matter a bit whether she has any talent or not. What matters is something else entirely - personality, audience-impact, and of course, beauty.' For the late bourgeoisie, personality is not something that flourishes unseen. It goes with 'audience-impact.' And beauty does not provoke recognition, but possession. 'I know the men don't come to see her dance. They come to wait for her at the stage door.'
Ophuls encourages his audience to become aware of the present in the past, and to see that established practices had been subject to development. His critique of the present is a critique of a past that had allowed the present to come about. Even as a representative of that past, first as a stage director, then as a film author, he makes both himself and his profession the medium and subject of his critique.
The character of the circus owner, which Peter Ustinov plays in Lola Montes, is at one and the same time a beautiful homage to the pioneers of show business, and an extremely accurate reckoning of accounts with them - by someone who saw himself as a man of the circus.
