SOURCE: "Reading Ophüls reading Schnitzler: Liebelei (1933)," in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women's Film, edited by Christine Gledhill, BFI Publishing, 1987, pp. 73-85.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1986, Williams examines Ophuls's cinematic adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Liebelei.]

The work of Arthur Schnitzler was important to Max Ophüls, both as vehicle and as cultural reference point. In interviews and writings, Ophüls referred to Schnitzler frequently, comparing and contrasting the Austrian writer's work and attitudes with his own. Ophüls adapted a Schnitzler text as his last project in pre-Nazi Germany (Liebelei, 1933) and another as his first project on his return to Europe after World War II (La Ronde, 1950). But both these events are more the result of happenstance than of conscious design. Out of all the unrealized projects that punctuate this director's professional history, two Schnitzler works were actually produced as films. Change almost anything about the ever-shifting state of European cinema production (at least the economically marginal sectors in which Ophüls typically worked) and we might have had three filmed Balzacs and no Schnitzlers in the Ophülsian canon.

We must be wary, in fact, of seeing only a marriage of compatible sensibilities in Liebelei. Ophüls liked some Schnitzler works and not others, and those he liked he saw in differing ways:

There's a nice thing about Schnitzler's life itself. He wrote La Ronde at 23 and Liebelei at 40, and you'd think it was the other way round. [Indeed! These "facts" are wrong: Liebelei was written before Reigen (La Ronde), though not by much.—A. W.] But when you know his work well, you understand. La Ronde is opposed to love and its cynicism is not the fruit of lived experience. But at 40 or 45, Schnitzler is nostalgic for purity and that's why—because he's experienced it—the purity in Liebelei is genuine. If he'd written Liebelei at 23, he would have infused it with far too much romantic melancholy, whereas at 40 he could view his subject from the necessary distance. That's why I find that La Ronde, despite the cynicism of a 23 year old, has a splendid purity and freshness.¹

To judge by deed rather than by word, Ophüls seems to have had far less quarrel with his supposedly young, cynical Schnitzler than with the putatively more mature playwright: La Ronde is strikingly more faithful to its original text than isn Liebelei.²

One can find in these remarks of Ophüls's a kind of willful paradox that is typical of his public statements, and that is more significant than his mangling of the chronology of Schnitzler's life. Ophüls's public statements are dominated by a figure that one can call the "union of opposites." Another example that crops up often is that comedy is only effective when there is tragedy within it, and vice versa.³ This topos also makes its way into the film scripts: "Our marriage is only superficially superficial," says Monsieur de . . . This is merely the apparent form of a profound understanding.

The union of opposites topos links Ophüls, in my reading of his work at least, to the French moraliste tradition, and particularly to Pascal and to La Rochefoucauld ("Nos vertus ne sont que nos vices déguisés"). It also separates him from Schnitzler, for whom, no doubt, such thinking would seem fatally to miss the point of human existence. Schnitzler is Freud's contemporary in ways that Ophüls simply is not, and it is likely he would have rejected dichotomies of innocent/decadent, tragedy/comedy, and so on in favor of a deep structure-surface-structure configuration akin to that of psychoanalysis. It is a question, for Schnitzler, of instincts versus convention, energetics versus hermeneutics, as in this passage, chosen from Beatrice:

In a few moments the set was ended. Both couples met at the net, racquets in hand, and stood there, chatting. Their features, earlier made tense by the excitement of the game, now melted into vacuous smiles; their eyes, which before had followed the spring of the balls so keenly, now met dreamily. Beatrice realized this with strange uneasiness: it was as if the atmosphere, formerly so clean and pure, had suddenly become stormy and misty, and she could not help thinking: How well this evening would end if suddenly, by some magic, all the inhibitions of society should be done away with, and these young people might follow without hindrance the secret, perhaps even unsuspected urge which impels them. And suddenly she realized that there was a lawless world—that she had just stepped out of just such a one, and that its breath still hung around her. It was only because of that, that she saw today what otherwise would have escaped her innocent eyes.⁴

Similar passages can be found elsewhere in Schnitzler's prose fiction, and though the idea is less explicit in the plays, it seems crucial to them. Reigen (La Ronde) is a study of how the "urges" of the "lawless world" break through the surface in encounters among varying social types. Ophüls, while keeping most of Schnitzler's text, displaces its interest in his 1950 film adaptation. In the film, desire is always already embodied in the social system, which is there, not to repress it, but as its expression. Ophüls does not see desire and the social system as representing two warring levels, but as necessarily implying one another. (But let the reader beware. The film is notoriously open to a variety of other readings—most curiously to the "neo-Christian" interpretation of its subject as "the vanity of the flesh and the absurdity of life without faith."⁵)

Another way of looking at Ophüls and Schnitzler is to see the latter as speaking from and of turn-of-the-century Vienna, the former from the edge of the industrial German provinces several decades later. Even today Ophüls is sometimes erroneously identified as a "Viennese" filmmaker. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Vienna was the Other. Ophüls did make several films set there (three features out of twenty-one) not because of nostalgia but, to borrow his own words about Schnitzler, because "he could view his subject with the necessary distance." Vienna seems to have had only one tangible effect on his life: he married a well-known young Viennese actress, Hilde Wall, whom he had directed at the Burgtheater. To believe his somewhat malicious account of the place, they would have been virtually the only two people there under the age of 65. During the few months he spent in the city in 1926, Ophüls found Vienna lifeless and hopelessly tradition-bound. Engaged as a director at the very same Burgtheater that was so important to Arthur Schnitzler throughout his life, Ophüls found that:

Unfortunately, [my colleagues'] imagination did not flow from the same source as did mine. Their cultivated, brilliant minds flourished in a dying city that could only contemplate its own past, whereas mine had undergone the experience of urban industrial life. Of course, I was fascinated by the melancholy charm of Vienna . . . I would have liked to have been a painter and to capture it on canvas. But then I would have wanted to run away. As fast as I could.⁶

It is of course true that Schnitzler himself also saw turnof-the-century Vienna as a dying culture, turned in upon itself. Yet there is a peculiar quality to Schnitzler's Vienna, because he saw this culture from the inside, as a virtual prisoner. Thus he could cry out against it, but he could only criticize it in severely limited ways. The same seems to have been true for Ophüls, though for quite different reasons: he does not seem to have cared enough about the city (or, for that matter, to have known it at all well). His Vienna differs only anecdotally from his Paris in Madame de . . . (1953) or the Munich of Lola Montes (1955). What little historical specificity there is in the portrayal of Vienna in Ophüls's films seems rather distilled from media images of the city—and hence largely from Schnitzler. Gertrud Koch argues that Ophüls had an imago of Vienna long before going there, and that the city, as it were, never had a chance to be anything else for him.⁷ Ophüls seems to have adapted many of the elements and much of the tone of Schnitzler's view of Vienna, but in the service, as we shall see, of his own rather different purposes.

Ophüls recalls rereading Liebelei before accepting to do a film of it, and finding it charming, if "a little dusty."⁸ He and his collaborators seem not to have hesitated, in any event, to make major structural changes in the work. Schnitzler's play is in three relatively short acts, for a limited cast, and uses only two simple sets and a few props. It could be described as largely Racinian, in that the vast bulk of the plot does not occur on stage, but rather is described. Ophüls, Hans Wilhelm, and Curt Alexander have chosen to dramatize most of what Schnitzler merely has his characters discuss. And so they have multiplied the number of sets, actors, and episodes. Merely the dramatizing of the exposition in act I—how the characters meet, who they are—results in a film that is one-third over before it even hits a scene taken directly from the work on which it is based.

In the play, act I takes place in the front room of Fritz Lobheimer's flat; he and his friend Theodor Kaiser are not roommates as in the film. The young men enter and, in an exposition that is at times a bit clumsy, establish that Fritz has been having an affair with a married woman, that Theo does not approve, and that the latter has introduced Fritz to Christine, a friend of his lady friend Toni (Mizzi in the film), in the hope of distracting him from "that woman." The two young women, invited by Theo without Fritz's knowledge, arrive. A candlelit supper party ensues, interrupted by the unexpected appearance of The Gentleman (Herr von Eggersdorf in the film). Fritz sends his friends into another room and is confronted with proof of his illicit affair (love letters). He is challenged to a duel by the jealous husband. The latter departs and the party recommences briefly, with Fritz concealing everything from Christine, before the guests leave Fritz alone and the curtain descends.

The long and beautifully handled exposition of the film Liebelei is much too complicated even to outline here. Things that are merely alluded to in the play get fleshed out, in many cases more than is strictly necessary to explain what is spoken of in the Schnitzler text. Characters get not only complete names, but visible social backgrounds. We see the opera orchestra in which Christine's father plays, the millinery shop where Mizzi works (where Toni used to work, in the play), the home of the von Eggersdorfs, and so on. The Gentleman's wife becomes a character. There is a sequence to illustrate the husband's suspicions (he comes home early from the opera in hopes of finding his wife with Fritz).

Although the rest of the play is not quite as strikingly expanded in the film version, the same process obtains. There is an added scene for the fatal duel (which is very reminiscent of later Ophüls duels, particularly in Madame de . . . ), for the setting of conditions for the duel, reactions of various additional minor characters to the conditions, and so on. The last event in the narrative, Christine' s suicide, is only predicted in the play but gets full dramatic treatment in the film.

In addition to this sort of change, and presumably to make for a less "stagy" film, things that Schnitzler has happen in one of the play's two sets—Fritz's flat and the much shabbier Weiring home—get shifted around to a variety of locations. This "opening up" of the play entails creating still more minor characters, social situations, and bits of behavior than are introduced merely by visualization of events referred to in Schnitzler's narrative. Ophüls and his collaborators have taken a play that seems to exemplify the notion of economy of means—a "classical" text—and multiplied its entities well beyond necessity.

There are many ramifications of this process, but perhaps the most characteristic of Ophüls's film work is the way in which dramatic space is modified. Liebelei the play exemplifies what for André Bazin was the essential, intense, inward-directed space of the stage:

Whether as a performance or a celebration, theater of its very essence must not be confused with nature under penalty of being absorbed by her and ceasing to be. Founded on the reciprocal awareness of those present, it must be opposed to the rest of the world in the same way that play is to reality, concern to indifference, or liturgy to the common use of things. Costume, mask, or make-up, the style of the language, the footlights, all contribute to this distinction, but the clearest sign of all is the stage, the architecture of which has varied without ever ceasing to mark out a privileged spot actually or virtually distinct from nature. . . .

Just as the picture is not to be confounded with the scene it represents and is not a window in a wall, the stage and the decor where the action unfolds are an aesthetic microcosm inserted by force into the universe but essentially distinct from the Nature which surrounds them.⁹

Max Ophüls's film shifts dramatic action from Schnitzler's two constricted sitting-rooms to a succession of hallways, doorways, streets, stairs, windows, balconies. Focused dramatic space cedes to transitional space, to spaces between things. A crucial scene between Fritz and Baron von Eggersdorf, for example (their last encounter before the film's version of act I of the play), is played on a broad staircase, one of many in the film. Theo first meets Christine and Mizzi at the concierge's box inside the stage door to the opera. Many scenes are set between two places, as with Christine and Fritz's walk through the streets of Vienna on the night of their first meeting. Even the centered dramatic spaces of what remains of Schnitzler's play text have been somewhat displaced. In the play, The Gentleman throws a packet of love letters at Fritz as proof of the liaison. In the film, Baron von Eggersdorf fits a key he has found in his wife's dressing-room into the door to Fritz's flat (itself in an anteroom) and turns it back and forth, his face contorted in silent fury. (Surely this is one of the best uses of sound in this remarkably inventive early talkie: the sharp click of the bolt sliding home is repeated as the Baron's anger grows.)

In addition to this shift in dramatic space, another correlate of Ophüls's structural expansion of the play is a multiplication of accessories, costumes, and bits of dramatic business associated with them. Things that happen in Schnitzler's play happen only once; things that happen in Ophüls's film happen, in various guises, repeatedly. One might even suggest that for Schnitzler's unity of time, place, and action (the unities of classical drama),¹⁰ Ophüls and his scriptwriters have substituted a unity of props and behavior. Consider items of clothing, for example, or musical performances, or going through doors and up and down stairs. It would be tedious and ultimately unrevealing to map out the film in terms of its micro-level dramatic devices, but it could easily enough be done—and a complicated map it would be. (Elsewhere I have given a demonstration, with a rather different sort of film, of this level of analysis.¹¹) The point to be retained here is that nothing of the sort happens in Schnitzler, or in any classical dramatic text. But it does happen routinely in the so-called "classic" sound cinema. (This is a very different sort of "classicism" than that of classical drama. "Classical Hollywood cinema" is—alas!—the label most widely used to designate dominant sound film practices from the early 1930s to the present.) In the early 1930s, dominant narrative film practices were not wholly codified, at least not in Europe. Liebelei is a bit ahead of its time in terms of commercial screen dramaturgy, on this level of the deployment of dramatic devices.

All of this expansion, specification, and structuration has the effect of profoundly modifying the context of Schnitzler's dramatic vision. Questions left open in the play are answered in the film (for example, the quality of Christine's vocal technique). In choosing to spell out what Schnitzler most often only alludes to, the film's authors have been forced—have forced themselves—to read the play, to interpret it, to do some of the work that its original author left to the audience. I do not mean this necessarily as a criticism: a film of Liebelei as Schnitzler wrote it would be claustrophobic, pedantic, and (unlike the play) probably doomed to commercial failure. What one can sell in the theater is not, clearly, what one can sell in the cinema. Liebelei as a play was one of its author's box-office triumphs. A "faithful" rendering of it would possibly be interesting as minimal cinema, but would be entirely different from the original in terms of audience reception.

What I have said so far could easily be stated as part of a defense against possible charges of infidelity to Schnitzler. But there is another area of modifications performed by the filmmakers which cannot be classified so easily, if at all, as correlates of the change from play to commercially viable film. Ophüls's work substantially modifies the emotional tone of the original play, and Schnitzler's ferocity seems to dissolve in a kind of generalized sentimentality. Octave's famous remark in Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu, 1939) that "everyone has his reasons," could not be applied to any work by Arthur Schnitzler without adding, "though of course these reasons are always patent self-deception." But it might just apply, unmodified, to Ophüls's rendering of Liebelei. Or perhaps—and this is a view I am happier with—the film has been consciously made ambiguous on the question of the moral responsibility of most of its characters.

In Schnitzler's play, there are two sorts of people: Christine and everyone else. She is the only character capable of awareness of her own feelings, and of expressing these to others. Her polar opposite is Theo, who believes only in social gamesmanship and the pleasures of the senses. He thinks that Fritz should forget his dreams of forbidden passions and devote himself to flirtation (which is the literal meaning of the word Liebelei):

THEODORE: It's not the business of women to be interesting, but to be agreeable. You must seek happiness where I have sought it and found it—where there are no grand scenes, no dangers, no tragic entanglements—where the beginning has no special difficulties, and the ending has no torments—where you take your first kiss with a smile, and part with very gentle emotion.¹²

Schnitzler's Theo does not believe that Christine has any real feeling for Fritz, though he changes his mind when he sees her reaction to the latter's death. Ophüls and his collaborators, on the other hand, make Theo aware of and supportive of Christine's feelings. And Fritz himself is also emotionally shifted towards Christine, in the film, though perhaps not as much. At the very end of Schnitzler's act II, Fritz looks around the Weirings' shabby rooms—which Ophüls will make much less shabby—and says to Theo, "I'm almost ready to believe that my happiness is here, that this sweet girl. . . but this hour is a tremendous liar!" (p. 65, my italics). Ophüls's Fritz not only knows that his happiness lies with Christine, he pledges eternal love to her in the film's most sentimental scene, an idyllic sleigh ride complete with romantic background music score.

But this is not to say that the cynicism, the alienation from true feeling, characteristic of all persons but Christine in the play is wholly absent from the film. Rather, it has been shifted onto most of the additional characters devised for the screenplay, such as the Baroness von Eggersdorf, her brother-in-law Major von Eggersdorf (a character not mentioned in Schnitzler's text), Fritz and Theo's commanding officer, and so on. In Ophüls's film, the emotional dividing point seems placed between the two central couples and everyone else. The Others are those who believe in honor over love, appearance over emotion.

Paradoxically, this shift makes the film both less and more bleak than the play. Less bleak because love and good will are possible. People can be nice to each other across class lines: Theo does not automatically make snide remarks about Christine's home as he does in the play (p. 64), nor does he wait until after the funeral to tell her about Fritz's death (p. 75). Fritz can say that he loves Christine. But these changes can also be seen as making matters worse. Fritz is still unworthy of Christine, though now for a different reason. He goes to what a very brief scene identifies as certain death (the Baron is a crack shot) despite his feelings for her and though he must or at least should know how she will react. Unlike Theo, he will not opt out of his social surroundings to go to South America (!) out of love and a sense of decency. But one need not read the film this way, and many viewers do not. To see Fritz as an emotional and moral weakling, and Christine as his trusting victim, does not make for a good cry à la West Side Story. Yet Theo seems to have been strengthened emotionally in the film precisely in order to offer this contrast with Fritz.

But for any defense of the film, there remains the problem of its ending, the ghostly reuniting of the lovers after death on the soundtrack. Schnitzler would have been appalled: his play ends with Christine's father sobbing "She won't come back," while Ophüls's film returns to the scene of the lovers pledging their troth, accompanied by the same musical theme, dripping with easy sentiment, while their words of love are heard once more. Some viewers like this, and take it at face value (Andrew Sarris, for example).¹³ My own reaction is that the carefully ambiguous mood of the work has been broken, and that the end must be taken as ironic—an interpretation that may be supported by the fact that prominent in this "happy" image is a snow-covered graveyard.

But I would argue that the film has been deliberately crafted to support both an empathetic and a judgmental reading of its characters (except Christine), both a straight and an ironic reading of its conclusion. Is this not "success" in the commercial cinema, to leave a work open to as wide a range of audience response as possible (and thus to as large a number as possible of happy, paying customers)? To some extent, how one reads the film will be inflected by whether or not one knows the play on which it is based, or at least the play's author. This is presumably the case here to a greater extent than for most filmed theater. Liebelei would not have posed the same problems to its first audiences that it does today, since Schnitzler's play was a semi-classic of the German-language stage in 1932, only one year after its author's death. Ophüls and company, I think, wanted to have it both ways: to craft a double-faced text that can be seen as a sentimental love story or as a critique of emotional dishonesty and inadequacy. (The latter is Schnitzler's recurring stance towards his characters.) That the film was a commercial success in some widely different milieux—with German Nazis and with Parisian leftist intellectuals—is at least some evidence that they succeeded.

There are two remarkable aspects of Liebelei considered solely for a moment as a film: it is a remarkably adept early talkie (with one exception—see below), and it seems to contain practically all of the motifs that will characterize Ophüls's great cinematic works, particularly those to come after World War II. The two points are not always easy to separate, nor is either easily disengaged from the question of who did what in a collaborative medium.

Ophüls almost overwhelms Schnitzler with music. Liebelei is typical of the director's work in that it quotes an opera. As with the other classic opera sequences in the Ophüls canon, from La signora di tutti (1934) to Madame de . . . , the quotation is ironic in a variety of dramatic and rhetorical senses. The fate of the happy lovers in Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail) does not foreshadow Christine and Fritz's destiny. And we do not ever see the work performed. We hear it while an almost associative-seeming flow of images furthers the (offstage) plot. These images have a free-floating feeling to them, as if they ride on a wave of music that both engulfs them and flows independently past them. From this opening sequence on, the film is periodically characterized by a wide variety of musical materials, from a tinkly player piano to a Beethoven symphony. One result—and in this Ophüls may well have profited from the early work of René Clair—is that the visuals are not continually tied down to any fixed dramatic center. It is easier to cut freely or move a camera in an unusual way if continuity is assured by the soundtrack. Compared to any other play adaptation of the early 1930s, for example Pagnol and Korda's Markts (1931) Liebelei seems remarkably unstagebound.

In a broad sense, the fusion of music with play text that Ophiüls and his collaborators created for Liebelei can be called operatic, and it will continue to characterize his later works, even those done with other collaborators. What is remarkable is that it emerges, so to speak, wholly formed in Liebelei. The same can be said of the film's ruling opposition, between the worlds of the military and the theater. This will remain a dominant, if not the dominant dichotomy in all of Ophüls's work, and again it seems to have emerged fully formed, down to details that will recur in later films such as the various bits of business with soldiers' hats and swords. Now this theme, like so much in the film, is only latent in Schnitzler. Theo and Fritz are reserve officers in the play, but this is only mentioned. Christine sings, and her father plays in the opera orchestra, but again these details are given only as background. Related to the military/theater opposition is the film's loving attention to social hierarchy, which is always on the "military" side of the dichotomy. Ophüls's films give much attention to what can be termed, broadly speaking, master-slave relations. Hence all the servants, obsequious shopkeepers, and so on, that people his films. The constant military presence in his work seems a concretization of his concern for hierarchy in general.

Were these Ophüls's ideas, or did he only admire them after having gotten them from Wilhelm and Alexander? It matters very little. Either way, the director seems to have harked back continually to Liebelei, formally and thematically, every time he treated a belle époque subject. (Two years later in Italy, Ophiüls, Wilhelm and Alexander wrote the script for Ophiüls's other master text of the 1930s, La signora di tutti. What little of the director's later work cannot be traced to Liebelei can be found there.)

Cinematographically, Liebelei sets the Ophiüls style for the 1930s. Like almost all directors, Ophüls changed his style over time, and like so many others, he seems to have made a major shift immediately after World War II—probably in part as a response to Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). (Caught (1949) frequently seems a sort of affectionate parody, visually, of Citizen Kane.) But the Ophüls style of the 1930s has a bit larger range than that of the later works. The long take, generally with intricate camera movement, is present but does not dominate—as it will seem to in works like La Ronde. Liebelei manifests an extraordinary range of formal experiment, from classic shot/reverse-shot dialogue sequences to the more recognizably Ophülsian long takes. Again, much will be repeated, as for example a complicated above-the-table tracking sequence-shot of a conversation among the officers, which will reappear with little change in La Tendre Ennemie (1936) at a wedding banquet. It seems to me that Ophüls must have made a careful study of a variety of sound-film styles and come up with a broad synthesis of what he had seen. Later in his career, he will eliminate some of this 1930s' synthesis and emphasize other elements, developing the style of what are now considered his mature masterpieces.

In this area I think there is evidence that we are considering something specifically Ophülsian. It is unlikely that the 1930s' Ophüls cinematic style came from anyone other than Ophüls because in this first manifestation, Liebelei, we find one of his weaknesses. The amazing thing about Liebelei is how such a visually sophisticated film can be filled with occurrences of a trivial error: "bad" directional matches. In the opening sequence, particularly in the shots of the audience, one finds errors that no first-semester film student is allowed to make. People look offscreen left, and the next shot shows what they are supposedly looking at on the right. Later in his career, when convinced of the importance of this problem, Ophüls supposedly wore buttons on his lapels labeled "left" and "right." For the director was, according to his son Marcel, mildly dyslexic—which is, ironically, one explanation of his liking for long takes, in which screen direction is not crucial.¹⁴

Although not conclusive, the inclusion of marked directional mismatches in Liebelei seems to be strong circumstantial evidence that visually the film is primarily an expression of its director's way of seeing things. This is important historically because Liebelei is one of the earliest examples of what I propose calling "classic" European découpage of the 1930s, a style that dominates commercial cinema in France and, perhaps to a lesser degree, elsewhere on the continent. This style is more inclusive and flexible than the so-called "classic Hollywood cinema" of the 1930s, but it is in most senses its functional equivalent.¹⁵ When Ophüls arrived in Paris in 1933, he found somewhat to his surprise that Liebelei alone sufficed to give him entrée to the French film industry. It seems unlikely that this was accidental. All of Europe, and France in particular, was still adapting to and arguing about the introduction of sound to cinema. Liebelei was one of a few privileged works that integrated and deployed early sound practices in a manner that was satisfactory to the European film community and that also seemed to promise commercial success. (Perhaps this was also the reason for the great interest that the Soviet film industry showed in Ophüls during this period.) In any event, the film undoubtedly either sets or anticipates later commercial practices (which is not, of course, to say that later films were as good).

But a curious and basically unresolvable question remains: how important is it that it was through Schnitzler that Ophüls discovered "himself" and also possibly a major style of the commercial sound cinema? To some extent, the dramatist may be incidental in these important historical matters. Or perhaps not. What seems certain is that the contemporary interest in Liebelei the film is largely due to the meeting of two strong and not always totally compatible artistic sensibilities, and that of their "meeting" came a seminal work in the history and aesthetics of cinema.

NOTES

¹ Jacques Rivette and François Truffaut, "Interview with Max Ophüls," in Ophüls, ed. Paul Willemen (London: British Film Institute, 1978), p. 23.

² See my article, "Keeping the circle turning: Ophüls's La Ronde (1950)," in Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, ed. Andrew S. Horton and Joan Magretta (New York: Ungar, 1981), pp. 38-50.

³ See, for instance, Max Ophüls par Max Ophüls (Paris: Laffont, 1963), p. 91.

⁴ Arthur Schnitzler, Beatrice, trans. Agnes Jacques (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926), pp. 46-7.

⁵ This is Richard Roud's formula (and label), summarizing the attitude of the Télé-Ciné group, in Max Ophüls: An Index (London: British Film Institute, 1958), p. 3. I must confess that I find the idea of Ophüls and Schnitzler as premature Jews for Jesus a bit unsettling.

⁶Max Ophüls par Max Ophüls, p. 92. I have translated from this version but corrected it in two instances to follow the German text cited by Gertrud Koch (see note 7).

⁷ Gertrud Koch, "Positivierung der Gefühle: Zu den Schnitzler-Verfilmungen von Max Ophüls," in Arthur Schnitzler in neuer Sicht, ed. Hartmut Scheible (Munich: Fink, 1981), pp. 309-29. The article, working from initial theses on Ophüls, analyzes Liebelei and La Ronde as literary adaptations. It can profitably be compared with the present analysis of many of the same issues.

⁸ Rivette and Truffaut, p. 17.

⁹ André Bazin, "Theater and cinema," in What Is Cinema?, ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 104-5. I have modified Gray's translation in the interest of greater fidelity to the original text. ("Locus dramaticus," for example, is not in Bazin's article.)

¹⁰ Clearly Liebelei is not quite as restricted as Racinian drama, taking place in two locations rather than one, and over several days rather than twenty-four hours. But this is a matter of degree compared to, for example, Shakespeare.

¹¹ Alan Williams, "Narrative patterns in Only Angels Have Wings," Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 1, No. 4 (November 1976), 357-73.

¹² I cite, with occasional very slight modifications, the translation by Bayard Quincy Morgan in The Drama, 7 (August 1912). This citation is from p. 19; subsequent page references are given in the text.

¹³ Andrew Sarris, "The most dangerous game," Village Voice, 7 June 1983, 45.

¹⁴ Interview with James Blue, Rice University Media Center, 7 March 1973.

¹⁵ Classic European découpage is more flexible than the American style(s) of the same period: integrating travelling movements within sequences routinely, rather than only at beginning or end; having the alternative of the sequence shot for dialogue scenes (in Ophüls, typically combined with camera movement in or out at crucial points); and other peculiarities which remain to be classified. I propose the term based on Bazin's description of découpage classique (which Hugh Gray translated, somewhat misleadingly, as "classical editing"). The attentive reader of Bazin's text (note 9) will note that the sequence imagined by the critic (see What Is Cinema?, p. 31) is more likely to occur in a European film of the 1930s than in an American one, where the camera movements proposed would probably not occur, and where variation in shot type and length would be smaller and more regular. All this is an important area for future research in the history of cinema.