Word: circusing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...around her. Ophuls' cutting in closer to her body, rather than tracking in (a surprising thing to do in CinemaScope, which is better adapted to long takes than to quick cutting), emphasizes her staticity, her closeness to death. But the camera motions, which express the glamor vital to the circus, generate the energy and the grace Lola needs to begin re-enacting her life...
...return to the circus takes Lola backstage to her dressing room, a cage behind which pass actors staging her childhood. The camera follows them back and forth, passing in the middle of each are the sick, static Lola, and provoking a second flashback. In it Lola, a child still mourning her father's death, accompanies her mother aboard ship only to discover her affair with an officer. The sweeping camera movements which follow this child through the ship and express her curiosity and longing, ironically stress the objects and walls that confine her movement through the cramped lower deck...
...FOLLOWING circus sequence the ringmaster recounts her progress through the world. The props represent the capitals of Europe, Lola dancing from one to another; but her broken-down body can only hobble through the successive positions of Madrid, Rome, and Warsaw. The sequence's most sweeping action is an abduction on horseback; Lola lies across the saddle as if dead. A scene change fills the frames with screens--quickly passing objects--before and behind the actors, and sets up a transition to the next flashback...
Back in the circus, the ringmaster drives Lola higher and higher, till at the top of her career she begins a romance with the King of Bavaria. And in this flashback Ophuls, relenting for a moment in his detailing of determination, describes more movingly than anywhere the simultaneous freedom and compulsion, calm and desperation, of Lola's romantic life...
...this, it's essential that we are seeing flashbacks, not Lola's actual life. The "wooden" Lola of the flashbacks is at least half the circus Lola, an almost dead woman. In her memory decor assumes tremendous evocative weight, the context assumes power over the characters, and events are more nearly frozen memory-images than continuously moving points of an evolving life...