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DAVID M. LUGOWSKI Woman/Road/America/Cinema G??? A METICULOUSLY RECONSTRUCTED VERSION of Max Ophuls' Lola Montés (1955) beginning to receive screenings at conferences and selected venues just after the centennial of its director's birth, it seems the ideal time to revisit the film and the fascination it still engenders despite the rocky road it has traveled.1 Ophuls' adored and reviled film, a romanticized and incredibly lavish "biopic" of the scandalous nineteenth-century dancer and her many famous paramours , has certainly received its fair share of attention in cinema studies , and critics have noted its highly self-conscious narration and reflexivity .2 To my knowledge, however, no one ever has categorized Lola Montés as among the greatest of all "road movies" and then considered its central issues of gender, performance, the marketing of the female body, and the institution of image production from this starting point. Furthermore, I would argue that this singular film is one of its director's most profound commentaries upon a half-century of cinema and American mass culture as well. Ophuls' films always combine a bittersweet, nostalgic romanticism with sophisticated cultural commentary, satirical irony and a serious yet playful sense of abstraction. It is with this same combination of light-hearted good humor, clear-eyed affection and reflexive cultural critique that I hope to extend the impressive body of work on this film by means of an offbeat new reading. So let our journey with Ophuls' final and most controversial work, an allegorical historiography meditating upon Cinema itself, begin. Arizona Quarterly Volume 60, Number 2, Summer 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 1 6? David M. Lugowski 'lola montés' as road movie and AS ALLEGORICAL historiography Many road films have been examined in cinema studies, but it is only recently that the "road film" as an object of study has begun to receive much attention in its own right. Two useful anthologies have started to fill this gap: The Road Movie Book, edited by Steve Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, and Lost Highways, edited by Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson. I intend to use some of their insights, but let me first say that both works understandably focus their primary attention on U.S. (and to some extent, Australian) cinema. They argue quite powerfully, in fact, that the road movie might just be the quintessential expression of Hollywood and American independent cinema, especially after World War II. Many adventure films can be subsumed under its rubric, as can Westerns, chase-oriented crime films and films noirs. Musicals, comedies and horror have traveled U.S. highways. The road film is indeed quintessentially American because of the development of the expansive U.S. frontier, the journeys of immigrants, and the historical era when new transportation technologies and westward expansion became complete, coincident with when cinema first explored that landscape. Australia, too, has vast expanses of road to traverse and similarities in its development. Both lands have a history wherein tensions among individualism, populism and rebellion have required a cultural space such as the cinema to be played out, especially in recent decades (Cohan and Hark 2-3, Sargeant and Watson 6-7). Much work, of course, remains to be done on U.S. and Australian road films. And yet even more work must be undertaken elsewhere. The trope of the "road movie" has been vital to Brazilian cinema (Iracema 1976, B;ye Bye Brasil 1979) and one can find notable examples to study in such vast countries as China, India, Canada and the former USSR. A geographic area that seems to me among the least studied in terms of the road movie, however, is Europe. The one European filmmaker explored to any degree in terms of road films is, of course, one of the most important of all road film directors, Wim Wenders. But otherwise , film scholarship has neglected Europe, probably because many of its countries are perceived to be small compared to the U.S. and Australia , and their landscapes seem so "developed." Also, road films sometimes deal with specific physical and cultural landmarks and, ironically, Woman/RoadlAmerica/Cinema i6i do not "travel" well outside their...

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