Word: lola
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...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...
...style and the meaning of the whole sequence of events to this point show a great development for Ophuls. The settings (in particular the use of foreground objects) and the relatively static camera and quick cutting emphasize the fixity of Lola in her settings. Ophuls does not develop a romantic personality in the abstract; he derives the meaning of her life from her changing position and motion in a setting. The inescapability of Lola's physical settings, her existence in the physical world, is the reason her ambitions are defeated--but it's also the basis of her fleeting triumph...
...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...
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...