Word: circusing
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...sandals tend to pitch the wearer forward, but Cecil Beaton does not care. Neither do Scholl-shod Jackie Onassis, Jean Shrimpton and all of England's Royal Ballet Company. Greta Garbo clomps around sidewalks in Swedish clogs; so do Dustin Hoffman and the trapeze troupe from Ringling Bros, circus...
Nevertheless, the return to the circus finds her in her ultimate imprisonment, at the top of the circus in a cage. Her dive into a tiny net is the last necessary step in the circus act (which is also the act of re-creating her life)' the audience demands it as part of the romantic spectacle. Since it might cause her death, Lola's dive is also a potential act of suicide and escape, the most desperate of all romantic acts. At the same time the ringmaster is forcing her to jump. As he counts to three, the frame tilts...
Both stylistically and thematically this fragmentation of the film's progress defeats Lola's imprisonment (present and in memory) in space. The time of Lola Montes' flashbacks is willed into being. Though in the circus she is at the end of her life physically and morally, she can by an act of art transcend her present situation, if only to relive the compulsion of her past. The effort drives her nearer death, both in the flashbacks and in the circus. The person we see developing in the two situations is a single person, Lola in the most artistic and romantic...
...will only leads her into attachments where her imprisonment becomes more and more complete, her position more and more dangerous, her strength less powerful. Ophuls breaks new ground in showing her escape in each case a transcendence of the situation, a refusal to stop or yield, that in the circus leads to her most dangerous act, re-creating her past...
...actually do what novels only metaphorically do to create a drama: put characters in situations. The fact that film requires mise-enscene explains everything. It also makes Lola Montes possible, for the film is above all the development of a character in physical settings. Film does exactly what the circus acts do--realize an ideal conception of drama and character, and abstract view of life. LOla Montes' flashback structure gives its mise-en-scene a stylization greater than that of any other Ophuls, and makes explicit a cinema of memory whose view of life transcends all others...