The first was Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc which I actually did see at the Castro complete with a live Oratorio. It seemed a little wrong to so flagrantly betray Dreyer who urged that his film be viewed in complete silence, but the Voices of Light (or so it was called) contributed so much the wealth of emotion that it now seems difficult to imaging watching the film without it. It is a stark film, and a relatively simple one: the last day of Joan of Arc's life, the day the English tried, found guilty, and burned her on a stick. Out of this, and using the actual trial record (the first shot authenticates or at least legitimizes the claim, showing a modern hand opening the ancient bound book) Dreyer creates a harrowing, emotional, and technically astounding film. For true devotees of film, this is one of the greatest, and along with The General and Sunrise one of the greatest silent films, for you cinematic dilletantes who know little more of silent film than The Gold Rush and nothing of foreign film but Amelie (which I actually haven't seen, but hopefully will tonight) should really see this. If there are any Berkeley people reading this go to the second showing at Hertz Hall on Campus tonight!
Last night I saw Lola Montes a film which fell flat on a small television but which utterly astounded on the big screen. Andrew Sarris, America's premier auteurist critic, claimed that it was the greatest film ever made. Unfortunately, its director, Max Ophuls didn't live to see the sixties, the Golden age of the art house, and he never achieved the divine status of Fellini, Bergman, or Godard. Hopefully this pristine new print and the release of the three films which preceeded Lola Montes on Critierion will resurrect Ophuls.
The film takes place in a garish circus where Lola Montes (a real life figure) is forced to relive her scandalous past for the pleasure of the audience (both us and the people in the crowd.) The film switches back and forth between snippets of Lola's life, and the absurdist circus where Lola's health suffers, and where she is fastidiously controlled by the American ringleader (Peter Ustinov).
If you ever want to discuss mis-en-scene, Ophuls is the man to bring up. His composition is so dense, complex and beautiful, both nuanced and overwhelming. His shots are almost always in deep focus which allows for many different layers (objects and screens dangle in front of actors who are trapped before the garishly ornate sets) that continually recontextualize when the camera moves, an event that occurs quite frequently- rolling along tracks or flying by aid of a crane, sometimes even floating through walls, and once taking a cliamactic nose dive.
Martine Carol plays Lola Montes as a blank slate, a cipher like Ryan O'Neil in Barry Lyndon, who is thrown from scene to scene. The aptest metaphor in the film (which has as many layers of narrative and visual metaphor as it does layers of focus) shows Lola in the circus being thrown from acrobat to acrobat, moving ever higher and higher up a chain of lovers. She makes choices, yes, and she acts up, but what Lola is best at is being what the public wants- a beautiful scandal. Joan's a scandal too, but in not quite the same way of course.
Really, the two films could not be more dissimilar, Lola Montes spans time and space, uniting two continents and thirty years, Joan of Arc is almost in real time. Ophuls uses supremely colorful and cluttered backdrops to thematize the high artifice of European culture and the block between individuals, Dreyer presents almost nothing but faces, some looking like mountain ranges, oddly placed before a white backdrop. However, both films are technically astounding! Both play fast and loose with the conventions of editing and composition (montage and mis-en-scene), both directors love the dutch tilt (turning the camera so as to decentralise the horizonline and put the viewer generally ill at ease) and both are about women turned automatons by widely different social constraints.
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