Max Ophuls's works offer insights into women as figures for male pleasure. He has been characterized as a woman's director whose films were made for male spectators. Melodramatic depictions of women are consistently at work in Ophuls's films, and his sorrow for women's degradation, which gives rise to their spiritual strength, can not be denied.
Susan White believes that "The interest of Ophuls's films lies, therefore, not simply in their exaltation of the woman-martyr but in their analytical approach to the process of marginalization of the bad or amorous woman and other outcast members of society" (White,6). From White's point of view, Ophuls's women are mostly the victims of patriarchal capitalism. The processes of capitalistic exchange, as they relate to prostitution, undermine women's ultimate self-sacrifice for love and martyrdom.
On the other hand, Stephan Heath emphasizes the standard Hollywood production. Heath places Ophuls's film about a woman's gender identity within what he sees as the ideological realm of classical Hollywood cinema: " That "Ophuls" is the name of a certain exasperation of the standard Hollywood production of his time is no doubt the case as it is too that the exasperation is a veritable mannerism of vision, and vision of the woman-with the masquerade become the very surface of the text" (Heath, 163). For Heath, the relation between the woman and the look in Ophuls's films, such as A Letter from an Unknown Woman(1948), has an important function. He places the film within certain ideological boundaries that separate Hollywood films from other films. The use and the representation of women in classical Hollywood cinema have been thought by Heath and others to present feminine desire as masochistic and the female body as the prey for the male gaze. Still, Ophuls's films reveal an awareness of what drives a woman to despair or suicide.
Ophuls's women are not in control of the narrative and it seems they are tormented by the plot. The movement of narrative in classical Hollywood cinema reinforces the male ego by its placement of the masculine subject in the position of visual mastery.
The woman in classical Hollywood cinema is either investigated by the narrative through the surrogate spectator, or narrator and is found guilty or she is set up as a fetish object. Does Ophuls have the director figure that seems to control the movement of the plot that torments the female character?
A Letter from an Unknown Woman is a cinematic expression of female suffering for love as white states in his writing: " If that love is masochistic, then the film is a tribute to the heroism of female masochism, through which Lena manages to have her way in the guise of submitting to another" (White, 132). In A Letter from an Unknown Woman, the polarization between the observer(Lisa) and the observed (Stefan) reveals the dualism between the woman's problematic status as a subject of the gaze and the man as the object of the gaze. As Robin Wood states in his writing: "The cinema of Max Ophuls signifies women as the subject in searching for the gaze... In the context of Letter's visual realm, the aggressive potential of the gaze ultimately rebounds upon the two protagonists while Stefan is reading the letter, and the action of the story that unfolds in the flashback is narrated by Lisa but imagined by Stefan" (Wood, ). The Perception of the other's subjectivity-especially when the "other" is a woman who must establish her right to exist-is made difficult or impossible when the projection of image of that "other" seems to imply the oppositions between gender representations. On the other hand, in Letter Lisa's gender representation is a lonely image that is not dangerous to Stefan's right to exist and never threatens his bourgeois life. Lisa's voyeurism is not fetishistic but can be explained psychoanalytically. Throughout most of Letter, Lisa sees, hears, and narrates. Only at the end of the film does Stefan see Lisa when he hallucinates the girl behind the glass door. For Lisa, he is out of ordinary mortals.
Her fascination with the necessary distance from the desired object is caught by the nature of the photographic images. The function of Ophuls is firmly centered on Lisa's consciousness. the following description of a sequence in the film leads us to the sensation of moving with the character in the mise-en-scene that creates a kind of subjective experience for the audience; "Ophuls' camera work achieves a perfect balance in terms of spectator's involvement-between sympathy and detachment" (Wood, 126). As Robin Wood discovers, Ophuls's camera has a stronger tendency to move with the characters rather than giving a subjective shot or point of view of character which is infrequent in Ophuls's films. Whereas Ophuls's position of camera do not restrict the audience to Lisa's point of view, the spectator can still realize what Lisa experiences in her journey into the narrative. The tendency of the film to draw us into her vision is balanced and counterpointed throughout by a conflicting tendency to stop us from identifying with the character.
Tania Modleski makes the fascinating point that if the heart of Letter involves Stefan's being made into a man by finally accepting the duel at the end, then Letter, thought to be a prototypical woman's film, is really for and about a man: " We might suspect, then, that the film's movement will involve Stefan's coming to repudiate the former childishness of his ways and acknowledge the sway to the patriarchal law" (Modleski, 20). Moreover, Wood states that Ophuls's films in comparison with Howard Hawks's films are woman-centered: " Traditionally, the female principle has been regarded as passive, the male active, and, without wishing to suggest that Ophuls's films endorse any simplistic opposition of male and female roles, one cannot but feel a connection between the emphasis on fatality in his movies and his gravitation to woman-centered subjects" (Wood, 122). Not surprisingly, when she explains to the doorman that she forgot something, a reverse shot reveals Lisa standing behind the bars of the gate: the visual signs of entrapment have not been leaving Lisa from the beginning of the film. However, at one point in the film, Lisa explains her radical refusal to speak about her own; "I wanted to be the one woman you had known who never asked you for anything." From Tania Modleski's point of view, Lisa's silence is the mark of hysteria: "Lisa's is the classic dilemmas of what psychoanalysis calls the hysterical woman, caught between two equally alienating alternatives: wither identifying with the man or being an object of his desire" (Modleski, 20). Even Andrew Saris seems to believe that Ophuls's camera movements in Letter never create an aesthetic through which the man can be degraded objectively: "The main point is that Ophuls is much more than the sum of all his camera movements. What elementary aestheticians overlook in Ophuls is the preciseness of his sensibility. His women may dominate subjectively, but his men are never degraded objectively" (Sarris, 71). For Tania Modleski, Ophuls' view is never feminist, like Mizogouchi's, or feminine, like Bergman's and Antonioni's.
In contrast, Modleski, White, and Wood believe that the audience's sympathies are certainly with Lisa, and Ophuls's camera tracking shot intensifies the viewer's engagement with Lisa's experiences. While the architecture of lighting and camera movement in the staircase scenes prefigure ominous losses later in the film, Ophuls's visual metaphors in the shot enhance the structural accuracy of the details and establish the power of the look as Willeman states in his book: "It is also interesting to note that Ophuls appeared to be aware of the sexual implications of isolating a person for the look, the sexual implications of cutting to close-ups offering e.g., the body of a woman for access to the look" (Willeman, 70). Lisa's look seems not to objectify Stefan's body and simultaneously her body is not objectified by Stefan's look. Lisa's desire for Stefan can be captured and displayed not as fetishistic but repressed. But another implication at the end of the film is also that Lisa has finally become a normal girl. Perhaps in comparison with Modleski's criticism, Lisa's final devotion to a female figure, a feminized Stefan or herself, may also indicate an even more radical exclusion of patriarchy via lesbianism.
Most of the sequences in the film translate Lisa's masochism to her submissiveness, I mean to say that she acknowledges the force of patriarchal values and their all masculine qualities especially when she leaves the building at the end of the sequence and lets Stefan continue with his romance. In that sequence, Lisa is much more in control of the fantasy. However, she is certainly not the director of her story. In fact, through her story, the feminization of Stefan makes it possible for him to embody the necessary sadistic element in Lisa's masochistic fiction. This sadistic element must construct him carefully to prevent him from emerging as a potential other subject who might take control of the scenario away from the masochistic subject. She self-consciously orchestrates her development into what might appear to be passive femininity, and she actively denies Stephan the opportunity to come to know and love her by avoiding, at significant moments, acknowledgment of their past together as White states in her book: " Lisa's actions, her keeping herself at a distance from the object of her affection, may be necessary to the fulfillment of her desire, even, perhaps, to her psychological survival" (White, 161). Her strategic silence in the sequence is more than a defensive measure. The silent suffering is crucial to Lisa's happiness. Though she will manage to gain access to the aural pleasure and the visual control, she is more than willing to suffer in silence.
Ophuls's camera begins to follow Lisa in her masochistic fantasy, and its tracking shots have sympathetic accompanying with her suffering looks. His strategic camera movements reveal the most poignant moments of desire that are folded in Lisa's look. Finally, the camera movements at the end of the sequence linked to Lisa's sighting of Stefan and his place draw our attention to how Stefan lives outside of Lisa's realm of narrative as Wexman states in her book: " Stefan exists in an atmosphere of random temporality...Stefan is associated with the street, a multidirectional space, where time is governed by chance" (Wexman, 6). Perhaps Lisa realizes that the street has a meaning for Stefan. Moreover, the empty spaces of the hallways, recorded by tracking shots, are potentially entrapping for Lisa. We should not forget that the stairways suggest the inescapable consequences of Lisa's sexual assertions.
In terms of the character's class representations, the female protagonist is ultimately geared to the sphere of the middle class. There is always tension, in this type of film, between class and sexuality. In women's films, the moment of the hero's acknowledgment of his humble impulses often takes the form of a rejection of bourgeois life. Lisa is more and less a member of the middle class, and it is precisely in the collapsing of class conflicts into the bourgeois family romance that the middle class remains prevalent in the film.
Letter redefines the history of cinema in its distillation of the Hollywood vision of female suffering and pleasure. The concepts such as voyeurism, masochism, class, suffering, and pleasure are reiterated in the particular moments of the film. Problems such as nationalism, sexual and religious identity, historical change, and artistic desire can never be solved entirely in Ophuls's cinema. The interchange between stage and auditorium or public and private life became increasingly a stylistic device and a theme in Ophuls's cinema. The public and private lives of Lisa and Stefan create tension that reflects the difference between what is hidden behind the curtain and what is revealed on the stage. For Ophuls, the film is a spectacle. With his increasingly sophisticated use of a moving camera, he attempts to overcome his fears of confusion between work of art and reality.
Ophuls is not a Hollywood director. The Works of Max Ophuls today are more than academic, the province of film studies and criticism. His cinema focuses not in any immediate sense on men and women but on those positions and relations of the meaning of man and woman in its representation and its production of those representations as Willeman states in his book: " In Ophuls, cinema becomes a machine for the entrapment of the look" (Willeman,71). Therefore, does Ophuls have the director figure that seems to control the movement of the plot that torments the woman? My answer is no because the dialectic of order and the excess turns on the pivot of a woman's look in a patriarchal society that is controlled by the male gaze and Ophuls does seem to identify with his women. characters. Ophuls's films focus on women, not as the other sex, but as the human phenomenon who seeks the power of the gaze to control her narrative and destiny.
Heath, Stephan. Questions of Cinema Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.
Modleski, Tania. Time and Desire in the Woman's Film Cinema Journal 23, No.3, Spring, 1984.
Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Max Ophuls New York: Dutton, 1968.
White, Susan. The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Magisterial Vision of the Figure of Woman New York, Columbia University Press, 1995.
Willeman, Paul. Ophuls London: British Film Institute, 1978.
Wexman, Virginia Wright. The Transfiguration of History: Ophuls, Vienna, and Letter from an Unknown Woman New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1986.
Wood, Robin. Ewig Hin der Liebe Gluck Personal Views, London: Gordon Fraser, 1976.
By: Morad Sadeghi
Her fascination with the necessary distance from the desired object is caught by the nature of the photographic images. The function of Ophuls is firmly centered on Lisa's consciousness. the following description of a sequence in the film leads us to the sensation of moving with the character in the mise-en-scene that creates a kind of subjective experience for the audience; "Ophuls' camera work achieves a perfect balance in terms of spectator's involvement-between sympathy and detachment" (Wood, 126). As Robin Wood discovers, Ophuls's camera has a stronger tendency to move with the characters rather than giving a subjective shot or point of view of character which is infrequent in Ophuls's films. Whereas Ophuls's position of camera do not restrict the audience to Lisa's point of view, the spectator can still realize what Lisa experiences in her journey into the narrative. The tendency of the film to draw us into her vision is balanced and counterpointed throughout by a conflicting tendency to stop us from identifying with the character.
Tania Modleski makes the fascinating point that if the heart of Letter involves Stefan's being made into a man by finally accepting the duel at the end, then Letter, thought to be a prototypical woman's film, is really for and about a man: " We might suspect, then, that the film's movement will involve Stefan's coming to repudiate the former childishness of his ways and acknowledge the sway to the patriarchal law" (Modleski, 20). Moreover, Wood states that Ophuls's films in comparison with Howard Hawks's films are woman-centered: " Traditionally, the female principle has been regarded as passive, the male active, and, without wishing to suggest that Ophuls's films endorse any simplistic opposition of male and female roles, one cannot but feel a connection between the emphasis on fatality in his movies and his gravitation to woman-centered subjects" (Wood, 122). Not surprisingly, when she explains to the doorman that she forgot something, a reverse shot reveals Lisa standing behind the bars of the gate: the visual signs of entrapment have not been leaving Lisa from the beginning of the film. However, at one point in the film, Lisa explains her radical refusal to speak about her own; "I wanted to be the one woman you had known who never asked you for anything." From Tania Modleski's point of view, Lisa's silence is the mark of hysteria: "Lisa's is the classic dilemmas of what psychoanalysis calls the hysterical woman, caught between two equally alienating alternatives: wither identifying with the man or being an object of his desire" (Modleski, 20). Even Andrew Saris seems to believe that Ophuls's camera movements in Letter never create an aesthetic through which the man can be degraded objectively: "The main point is that Ophuls is much more than the sum of all his camera movements. What elementary aestheticians overlook in Ophuls is the preciseness of his sensibility. His women may dominate subjectively, but his men are never degraded objectively" (Sarris, 71). For Tania Modleski, Ophuls' view is never feminist, like Mizogouchi's, or feminine, like Bergman's and Antonioni's.
In contrast, Modleski, White, and Wood believe that the audience's sympathies are certainly with Lisa, and Ophuls's camera tracking shot intensifies the viewer's engagement with Lisa's experiences. While the architecture of lighting and camera movement in the staircase scenes prefigure ominous losses later in the film, Ophuls's visual metaphors in the shot enhance the structural accuracy of the details and establish the power of the look as Willeman states in his book: "It is also interesting to note that Ophuls appeared to be aware of the sexual implications of isolating a person for the look, the sexual implications of cutting to close-ups offering e.g., the body of a woman for access to the look" (Willeman, 70). Lisa's look seems not to objectify Stefan's body and simultaneously her body is not objectified by Stefan's look. Lisa's desire for Stefan can be captured and displayed not as fetishistic but repressed. But another implication at the end of the film is also that Lisa has finally become a normal girl. Perhaps in comparison with Modleski's criticism, Lisa's final devotion to a female figure, a feminized Stefan or herself, may also indicate an even more radical exclusion of patriarchy via lesbianism.
Most of the sequences in the film translate Lisa's masochism to her submissiveness, I mean to say that she acknowledges the force of patriarchal values and their all masculine qualities especially when she leaves the building at the end of the sequence and lets Stefan continue with his romance. In that sequence, Lisa is much more in control of the fantasy. However, she is certainly not the director of her story. In fact, through her story, the feminization of Stefan makes it possible for him to embody the necessary sadistic element in Lisa's masochistic fiction. This sadistic element must construct him carefully to prevent him from emerging as a potential other subject who might take control of the scenario away from the masochistic subject. She self-consciously orchestrates her development into what might appear to be passive femininity, and she actively denies Stephan the opportunity to come to know and love her by avoiding, at significant moments, acknowledgment of their past together as White states in her book: " Lisa's actions, her keeping herself at a distance from the object of her affection, may be necessary to the fulfillment of her desire, even, perhaps, to her psychological survival" (White, 161). Her strategic silence in the sequence is more than a defensive measure. The silent suffering is crucial to Lisa's happiness. Though she will manage to gain access to the aural pleasure and the visual control, she is more than willing to suffer in silence.
Ophuls's camera begins to follow Lisa in her masochistic fantasy, and its tracking shots have sympathetic accompanying with her suffering looks. His strategic camera movements reveal the most poignant moments of desire that are folded in Lisa's look. Finally, the camera movements at the end of the sequence linked to Lisa's sighting of Stefan and his place draw our attention to how Stefan lives outside of Lisa's realm of narrative as Wexman states in her book: " Stefan exists in an atmosphere of random temporality...Stefan is associated with the street, a multidirectional space, where time is governed by chance" (Wexman, 6). Perhaps Lisa realizes that the street has a meaning for Stefan. Moreover, the empty spaces of the hallways, recorded by tracking shots, are potentially entrapping for Lisa. We should not forget that the stairways suggest the inescapable consequences of Lisa's sexual assertions.
In terms of the character's class representations, the female protagonist is ultimately geared to the sphere of the middle class. There is always tension, in this type of film, between class and sexuality. In women's films, the moment of the hero's acknowledgment of his humble impulses often takes the form of a rejection of bourgeois life. Lisa is more and less a member of the middle class, and it is precisely in the collapsing of class conflicts into the bourgeois family romance that the middle class remains prevalent in the film.
Letter redefines the history of cinema in its distillation of the Hollywood vision of female suffering and pleasure. The concepts such as voyeurism, masochism, class, suffering, and pleasure are reiterated in the particular moments of the film. Problems such as nationalism, sexual and religious identity, historical change, and artistic desire can never be solved entirely in Ophuls's cinema. The interchange between stage and auditorium or public and private life became increasingly a stylistic device and a theme in Ophuls's cinema. The public and private lives of Lisa and Stefan create tension that reflects the difference between what is hidden behind the curtain and what is revealed on the stage. For Ophuls, the film is a spectacle. With his increasingly sophisticated use of a moving camera, he attempts to overcome his fears of confusion between work of art and reality.
Ophuls is not a Hollywood director. The Works of Max Ophuls today are more than academic, the province of film studies and criticism. His cinema focuses not in any immediate sense on men and women but on those positions and relations of the meaning of man and woman in its representation and its production of those representations as Willeman states in his book: " In Ophuls, cinema becomes a machine for the entrapment of the look" (Willeman,71). Therefore, does Ophuls have the director figure that seems to control the movement of the plot that torments the woman? My answer is no because the dialectic of order and the excess turns on the pivot of a woman's look in a patriarchal society that is controlled by the male gaze and Ophuls does seem to identify with his women. characters. Ophuls's films focus on women, not as the other sex, but as the human phenomenon who seeks the power of the gaze to control her narrative and destiny.
Heath, Stephan. Questions of Cinema Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.
Modleski, Tania. Time and Desire in the Woman's Film Cinema Journal 23, No.3, Spring, 1984.
Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Max Ophuls New York: Dutton, 1968.
White, Susan. The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Magisterial Vision of the Figure of Woman New York, Columbia University Press, 1995.
Willeman, Paul. Ophuls London: British Film Institute, 1978.
Wexman, Virginia Wright. The Transfiguration of History: Ophuls, Vienna, and Letter from an Unknown Woman New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1986.
Wood, Robin. Ewig Hin der Liebe Gluck Personal Views, London: Gordon Fraser, 1976.
By: Morad Sadeghi
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