about tracking eternity: max ophuls' moving pictures june 25 -- july 14, 1999 photo: LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN

back to main program calendar This program has been generously sponsored by Julien J. Studley, Inc. "His camera could pass through walls." This is the late Stanley Kubrick speaking of his acknowledged master, Max Ophuls. Kubrick was right--in the hands of this visual poet, the camera acquired a sensitivity that bordered on the supernatural, as it traced delicate pathways to the most secret recesses of his characters' hearts. It's odd to imagine that Ophuls was once dismissed as a light mitteleuropean ironist, a romantic confectioner. Each of his films opened a window onto an entire world, from the ornate, monied atmosphere of 19th-century French aristocracy in MADAME DE... to the drab dailiness of southern California middle-class life in THE RECKLESS MOMENT. Ophuls understood, perhaps better than any other filmmaker, the importance of surfaces. But he also knew that society, with its conventions and ceremonies, was nothing more than a thin membrane over a procession of hearts beating in desperate time.

MAX OPHULS

Ophuls was already well-established in German theater before he began his journeyman career in movies. Like many of his fellow countrymen he was driven out of his native Germany after the Nazi takeover. During the 30s, he made films in France, Italy and Holland, and had a long, frustrating stay in the US during the 40s. But although his career was plagued with trouble and heartache, his creative output was uniformly excellent, from DIE VERLIEBTE FIRMA, his earliest surviving work, to the breathtaking LOLA MONTÈS, in many ways his testament and the final work in the quartet of masterpieces made before his untimely death from a heart attack at the age of 55. A married woman throbbing with desire. A girl whose soul is transported by a careless lover. The unmistakable current of feeling that runs between a housewife and the somber man who is blackmailing her daughter. Ophuls created moments that gave form to something that was far beyond the reach of most filmmakers--the apparent permanence of feelings versus the transience of existence. This series pays tribute to a filmmaker who brought both Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael to their knees, and who seemed to hold the fragile essence of cinema in his hands. -- Kent Jones, curator, Max Ophuls Retrospective