Nature and Artifice in Max Ophuls' Cinema

VINCENT AMIEL Nature and Artifice in Max Ophuls' Cinema In the films of Max Ophuls there are endless staircases which organize both the lives of householders and the movements of worldly soirées; there are women who fall from on high, through windows, into the void . . . and there are carriages that glide along in the countryside, cartloads of flowers, sleds in the snow. . . . If staircases come from the theater, more precisely from the recommendations of Alexandre Tairov regarding the necessary elements of staging—recommendations that Ophuls saw fit to follow in his spectacles beginning in the 1920s—sleds and carriages represent a new encounter , specific to the cinematic medium. This is an encounter between an ancient dramatic apparatus, which the director knows and masters, which organizes his writing—that of movement as a trope for life—and a much more ambiguous device, in which the camera takes living nature itself into account. The snow of Austrian countrysides (Liebelei), the beaches of the Adriatic, of the English Channel, or the Pacific (in Madame de . . ., Le Pfoisir, The Reckless Moment), German wheatfields or the rapeseed of Normandy are just such natural realities taken into account—one may well ask how and at what point—by Ophuls' cinema, by his taste for artifice and by his will to compose. What role are they playing, these "already-present" forms, these realities seized before becoming tropes? How do they impose themselves as an autonomous pattern in the tight weave of Ophuls' compositions? Briefly, what is nature doing in Ophuls' world? What is it doing in the world of a man whose formative medium is theatrical artifice (in which "the truth of life becomes the lie of art," to cite an expression Arizona Quarterly Volume 60, Number 5, Special Issue 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 ISO Vincent Amiel attributed to Tairov, whom, as Annenkov and Asper have both noted, Ophuls greatly admired), and whose last films were applauded by the same people who praised neo-realism so highly? The question has even greater urgency insofar as it brings into play the relationship and the reciprocal transformation accomplished between writing and object. I propose, first of all, that we consider the different levels upon which the "natural" intervenes in Ophuls' films, and to analyze its identity , system and functions. The natural intervenes first on the level of what might be called the "motif," such as the beach or the field of flowers about which we spoke above. But also the horse that is running across the field—and the image field—at the end of Werther. Beyond the fact of the screen presence of all these animals, whose constant appearance Susan White once noted in conversation (dogs, birds, horses, ducks), is their way of reintroducing a different kind of nature, an instinctive reaction, into the social framework. But if we are discussing birds in cages (which are also numerous), we must also discuss potted plants, as well as the elements of the natural which are barely evoked: "Let's take a walk; it's a beautiful night," is repeated exhaustively by the bourgeois in "La Maison TeIlier "; and the ringmaster in hola Montes who presents Lola as a "wild beast a hundred times more dangerous than the ones in our menagerie." This beast, this night, are mere allusions, the traces of a distant, hypothetical —even ironic—nature. But nature will stake its claim: "The night is beautiful" will lead the distinguished citizens of the town towards the sea, and the dangerous beast will end up in a cage. Representations will follow the full logic of their being. This is why the issue is not so much whether Ophuls films "real" nature , or if he reconstructs it on a set; what counts is the perception he gives of it. What counts is that he feels the need, at a given moment, to make use of the illusion of a natural space, and not only of the signifier of a reality known elsewhere. And when Ophuls wants us to know that the nature he represents is false, he lets us know it, as we shall see below. The second level is that of...