The Lives of Lola Montes: A Report from the Max Ophuls Beyond Borders Conference

An international conference on Max Ophüls took place March 27-30, 2003, in Williamsburg, Virginia, hosted by the College of William and Mary. The conference presented a singular opportunity to compare different versions of Lola Montès (1955), and to hear of the picture's complex history from film scholars who have been researching it for decades: Martina Müller (Westdeutscher Rundfunk), Stefan Drößler (director of the Munich Film Museum), and Ronald Wilson (University of Kansas). On the evening of March 29, the conference screened the most commonly seen version of the film, where the characters speak French. Yet this French print derives from a second phase of editing, after the commercial failure of Lola's French and German "premiere" versions. The next morning, the conference screened a restoration of the German premiere version of the film. Lola's genealogy of languages and editions represents the number of permutations a film can have when artistic, commercial, and national considerations cause numerous variations.¹

Lola Montès was produced by a European company named Gamma Films. The company had the ambition, embodied by Lola, to compete with Hollywood pictures. The heads of Gamma fabricated a number of company branches from North Africa to Europe to New York City to impress banks. The firm raised a lot of money on credit. Although Gamma produced a few other pictures, the failure of Lola bankrupted the company. The various versions of Lola Montès stem from Gamma's attempts—increasingly desperate and ultimately in vain—to make the film a commercial success.

The film was originally planned in three versions: one where the actors predominantly speak French, one where they predominantly speak German, and one where they predominantly speak English. To create the different premiere versions during production, the same cast recited their dialogue in French, German, and English, with similar though not identical mise-en-scènes, in different takes. The actors also dubbed themselves, and were dubbed, with Ophüls's approval.² In September 1955, in Paris, Ophüls edited three different language versions of Lola in three cutting rooms with three editors. Lola Montès originally premiered in two versions, the French and the German, in Paris and Munich respectively.

The premiere versions of the film were screened in France on December 22, 1955 (113 minutes), and on January 12, 1956, in Germany (115 minutes). In the premiere versions, the issue of language acquires additional complexity. In certain scenes, actors speak in a language other than the one intended for a country—e.g., they speak French in the "German" version of the film. The German premiere version had subtitles in the scenes where characters spoke French. The French premiere version had subtitles for the scenes where characters spoke German. Ophüls wanted audiences to listen to dialogue as sounds, rather than for their meaning. This strategy, which diminished dialogue's narrative function, annoyed both critics and audiences. To quote from Martina Müller's conference presentation:

Ophüls was not interested in making a pure French version, a pure German version, or a pure English version. He wanted more than one language in each version. Sometimes he wanted the language to change in a single scene or in one short dialogue, as he had planned in his written continuity. Ophüls wanted a mix of languages, and intended the final sound track to combine both direct sound and dubbing.

An example of how the filmmakers denied the primacy of dialogue occurs in the scene where Lola and her mother go to visit the Baron at the opera. In the commonly seen French version, Lola and her future husband sit silently in the foreground, with Lola's mother and the Baron in the background. Yet we hear the older couple's conversation clearly, as if Lola's mother...