Anthony Lane has a welcome notice of one of the truly genial spirits in the latest New Yorker. The piece marking the occasion of the centenary of Max Ophuls' birth will probably only be up a short time, before the miserly mag takes it away. A few snippets:
Studio heads grew itchy at the footage that came back from an Ophuls set; instead of the clipped, peremptory cuts that the system had always encouraged, and that were seen as the motor of speedy American narrative, this guy was hellbent on delivering unfractured shots that wound through and between the characters like a party-giver weaving courteously, all glance and eavesdrop, amid his invited guests.
...the atmosphere in his movies is so congenial, and the brilliance so lightly worn, that we may not notice how acutely he is laying bare our illusions.
...an artist by whom it was a joy to be mystified.
"A tender despot," Peter Ustinov labelled him, "a German giggler, who lived in his own particular stratosphere of subtlety, and who protected himself against the intrusion of philistines into his private world by a grotesque and wonderful perversity."
Charles Boyer, in "Madame de. . . ," never without that winning quarter smile, even in the antechambers of catastrophe, and keen to remind his wife that their Wildean marriage, like the film that enshrines it, "seems superficial only superficially";
The cynical eye in Ophuls somehow doesn't puncture the riddle of beauty, rather, it seems to assure us of its power. "This miracle of believing in the dreams of our films," he said, "this is a miracle which ought to be maintained, has to be maintained in the face of industrialization."
Here's the man himself, from an essay entitled "The Pleasure/Desire [Lust] of Seeing":
On this occasion, I remember, Renoir said, "Very often there is no text in my scripts. Once the actors feel that they have been properly put in the picture and thoroughly understand the situation, I let them say what they want to...." "poor actors" said someone. But "rich Renoir," I thought to myself (a bit enviously).
And now I've just cut myself shaving. Perhaps because I got carried away by my insistence on the priority of the image. But where would people like us get to if we couldn't get carried away?
...Ophuls, in his wanderings, learned enough of the world to slip us that devastating news and to suggest, by way of remedy, that we face the music and dance.
7:51:33 AM 
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