Word: films
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...action. The former gives one on entire frame and requires that one make sense of it through the juxtapositions that already exist within. No single clear moral judgement is made for one by the director; one must see moral connections between characters oneself. The joy of seeing a film that lets one make one's own moral judgement can hardly be described...
Instead of being rational moral alternatives as in the analytic style, characters assume greater complexity, sometimes taking on the character of psychological archetypes whose power can be for good or evil. In the hands of someone whose sensibility is as acute as Franju's, this style of film can suggest moral facets of characters and events which one hadn't suspected, and create a world whose moral structure is highly ordered. That Franju does not separate this aim from the entrancing beauty of the world he re-creates, is a tribute to the keenest sensibility among living directors...
...OPHULS' camera motions create the famous 'romanticism' of his films. The pans and traveling shots of The Exile (1947) don't just follow his characters; they give an extraordinary grace and sweep to the characters' motion through their physical surroundings. The shift from a male to a female protagonist in Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) gives the film, which is told through her narration, a sense of memory which freezes certain images, and of personal isolation which somewhat dwarfs the heroine in her opulent surroundings. The relations between characters in Madame de.... (1953) feel still more detached, more based...
...heroine of Lola Montes (1955), Ophuls' last and greatest film, has stopped--yet she continues to live, by force of memory and will in an artistic creation. Hired at the end of her life by the Mammoth Circus, she is alternately forced and persuaded by its ringmaster to recall and re-enact her infamous exploits. With no more hope for love, she moves brokenly through the flashbacks and circus skits which recreate her life...
...discards for a moment his detached domination of the scene, covers her figure entirely (we see only his back to the camera; the two are exactly aligned in depth). Thus Ophuls reduces to its most brutal terms the subjection of women to men, a subjection which informs the entire film. The relation of these two independent artists, romantics who know the desperation to which their wills must lead them, is different from any other relation, full of the tension between likes...