Word: films
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Tampering. The tide of visitors keeps a constant daily crowd of 300 to 500 people on hand from dawn until late evening, reducing the Bass's backyard to dust and littering it with Polaroid film waste. Mrs. Bass, though, rejoices that the vision has brought her 78-year-old husband back to churchgoing. She is undisturbed by the variety of reported visions ("Everyone's seeing what they need") and by the relic hunters who tore her fig tree apart for souvenirs and crushed what was left of it. ("Maybe the Lord intended for them to take it home...
...across his figure, then on the backswing half-way across her, linking them while it indicates the fixity of his position and character (including his advanced age) and the semi-fixity, two-way pulls, or hers. He proposes to her: the rope stops swinging, motion ceases, and again the film nearly ends. But her favorable answer begins the swinging again. Both times a "miracle" has overcome the setting's threat to conquer life, the miracle of personal generosity or love...
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...
...DESCRIBED Lola Montes' camera motions and settings at such length not just because they are the grandest and most devasting I have ever seen. One of Ophuls' greatest triumphs is that Lola Montes, being pure film, tells us on unbelievable amount about film. Ophuls knows that the most direct, vivid possible way of showing each character's situation and relation to other characters at any moment is a visual representation. He also knows that through images he can best link the particular, moment-by-moment physical and moral situations of his characters to the moral and dramatic scheme...
Lola MOntes will play at the Harvard Square, July 9-16. The M.I.T. Film Society will show Ophuls' Caught (1949) on July...