Word: deathly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ECONOMY OF CITIES, by Jane Jacobs. Operating as curmudgeon and gadfly, but with a love of cities that overshadows mere statistics, the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities explores the financial aspects of growth and decay in urban centers...
...long shot--isolated in the frame and imprisoned by the camera sweeping 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...
...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. But complete imprisonment is prevented...
...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 around her one way and then the other; she gasps, closes her eyes, and finally bends into...
...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 action of her life...