SOURCE: "Max Ophuls," in Interviews with Film Directors, edited by Andrew Sarris, Avon Books, 1967, pp. 350-65.

[In the following essay, Sarris announces the importance of Ophuls to world cinema as an introduction to an autobiographical essay by Ophuls.]

"Je n'ai pas la prétention d'être un réalisateur d'avantgarde. C'est un mot dont j'ai horreur. Il laisse supposer un mépris de la masse des spectateurs. Je suis seulement persuadê que, même dans un film commercial, on peut essayer de faire quelque chose de neuf . .. "

Max Ophuls, 1935

"I think I know the reason why
Producers tend to make him cry.
Inevitably they demand
Some stationary set-ups, and
A shot that does not call for tracks
Is agony for poor dear Max,
Who, separated from his dolly,
  Is wrapped in deepest melancholy.
Once, when they took away his crane,
I thought he'd never smile again . . ."

James Mason

I have been brooding for some years over the fact that little has been written in English on Max Ophuls beyond obligatory reviews, Eugene Archer's remarkably sympathetic essay entitled "Ophuls and the Romantic Tradition" in the Summer 1956, Yale French Studies, and Richard Roud's comprehensive British Film Institute Index on Max Ophuls, first published in 1958. The preponderance of lucid Ophulsiana, as of Mizoguchiana and Rosselliniana and directoriana generally, has been written in French, and a French, incidentally, more coherent and contextual than the fractured French excerpts of the British Film Institute would indicate.

On this occasion, however, I will merely acknowledge without amplification the contributions of Claude Bey lie and his colleagues toward the apprehension and comprehension of the Ophulsian œuvre. For one thing, the sheer geniality of the late director's genius discourages any renewal of Anglo-Franco aesthetic hostilities. For another, the individual works of Ophuls have never required the rationalisation of auteur analysis. From Liebelei to Lola Montès, the director's dominant concern has been more to please his audience than to punish it, and somehow pleasure seems less amenable to analysis than pain.

Also, the director himself had always remained discretely in the wings until his death in 1957 amid a Vigo-like scandal unbefitting a career so consecrated to entertainment and enchantment. Max Ophuls, who had always spurned the temptations of martyrdom, ultimately had martyrdom thrust upon him. The fact that his career ended with a bang instead of a whimper was simply an accident of film history, but if the coda of Montparnasse 19, which Ophuls was scheduled to direct before his death, had followed the climactic summation of Lola Montès, it would still be through Lola's filters brightly that the director's entire career would be focused. Yet even Lola Montès can be enjoyed as much as a self-contained spectacle as it can as a creative synthesis of Ophulsiana. Max Ophuls, like most directors, always made one film at a time, and anti-auteur moviegoers are free to pick and choose, but when Ophuls had concluded, he had constructed at least for some of us a vertiginous whirl of elegance and splendor around a world seen and felt in terms of memory and mortality. This is not simply a matter of waxing profound over the Dance-Fools-Dance dirge, currently updated to take in the Twist, nor a facile evocation of the pathos of pastness so fashionable in contemporary memory-lane movie reviewing. The Ophulsian sensibility was always too precise for period sentimentality. In fact, Ophuls invented his own pastness, with the result that his films can never be dated in the superficial contexts of costumes and coiffures which make up so much of the content of camp.

Pending the long overdue Ophuls retrospective in America, a consummation of this article devoutly to be desired, I would like to propose some paradoxes in the art of Ophuls, and, in the process, explain why Max rhymes with tracks. Years ago, it would have been unthinkable to talk about films in terms of the expressive meaning of camera movements. And particularly in America. After the elementary montage theorizing on Potemkin, lesson two was the need for Human Brotherhood, World Peace, Social Reform, Class Struggle, and all sorts of related Big Themes. Realism—Poetic, Social, or Neo—was all that separated us from the convulsions of Caligari and the horrors of Hitler. By these dubious standards, Ophuls seemed too frivolous for serious discussion. His plots were concerned excessively, almost exclusively, with the love affairs of women, most often in an atmosphere of luxury, far from the madding crowd of peasants and proletarians. Ophuls was always basically a set director, and when he did go outdoors in Lola Montès, he painted the trees gold as opposed to Antonioni's painting the trees gray in The Red Desert. However, the old chestnuts about Form and Content, Escapism and Edification, Art for Art's Sake and Social Significance have been roasted beyond recognition, and it is unlikely that anyone would criticize Ophuls these days for not promoting the class struggle. In fact, if anything has come into intellectual fashion, it is nonsignificance, and the result is that instead of drowning in dogmas, we are transfixed by trivialities, and Ophuls is still "out" because of the force of his gravity.

No, the argument has shifted somewhat. Even in America, critics and audiences have become more aware of the permutations of film techniques. I can tell the difference by comparing the letters I get nowadays with the letters I used to get only four or five years ago. For example, Ronald Caro wrote me just recently on a stylistic matter which would have been of little concern five years ago: "I saw Lola Montès on TV some time ago and, even though it was a cut version, I don't think I've ever seen such graceful camera movements. The film completely floored me; it was like one long sublime dream. Then I saw Caught and Letter from an Unknown Woman. I watched the latter carefully and here is my question: for what reason does Ophuls use the track? It is not, I think, to convey a state of mind, i.e., track equals euphoria, happiness, etc. (very crude equation) because he tracks Fontaine with Jourdan and with the soldier. The first long track with the soldier is when he is trying to woo her after Jourdan has left her. Surely this is not a pleasant moment for her! And I don't think he uses tracking to simulate reality and/or unreality, although I admit this would be extremely difficult to prove. In Lola Montès, some of his tracks are fairly evident in meaning, such as the 360 degree around Lola. Here she is being trapped both literally and cinematically. But I can't seem to pin down the technique in Letter From an Unknown Woman. Can you help me?"

Mr. Caro is quite correct in not ascribing a specific mood or meaning to the tracks in Letter From an Unknown Woman. Nevertheless, the meaning of the scene with the young officer is quite clear. It is a curious scene in many ways. Joan Fontaine is obviously not in love with the officer. How does Ophuls show this? Certainly not by caricaturing the officer into a feeble substitute for the romantic pianist played by Louis Jourdan back in Ophulsian Vienna. Ophuls never resorts to caricature to make life's choices look easier. The young officer is attractive and dignified and reasonable. What he lacks for Fontaine is the aura of romantic illusion. We know at this point that our heroine will be deceived, but we know also that she can make no other choice. As the camera follows her walk with the officer, passing horse-drawn traffic in the streets masks the couple from time to time. The clanging bells of the town's churches are a cacophonous contrast to the Liszt etude that obliterates the street noises when the heroine is thinking of the pianist. By objectifying the scene, mainly through the sound track, Ophuls expresses the subjective void in his heroine's heart. It is her destiny never to accept a world she can sense in all its concreteness and immediacy. She is too enmeshed in the trap of time, too paralyzed by the numbness of nostalgia. For Ophuls, the track is less a method of treating individual scenes than the instinctive expression of a personal vision. The Ophulsian style is neither dramatic nor dialectical. He usually tells his stories from the woman's point of view, and the fluidity of his camera serves to hasten his heroines to their disillusioning rendezvous with reality. From Magda Schneider in Liebelei to Martine Carol in Lola Montès, the Ophulsian woman triumphs over reality only through a supreme act of will. For Magda Schneider, it is suicide. For Martine Carol, it is jumping into the circus tank without a net, and then offering her soul to the public. For Barbara Bel Geddes in Caught, it is cleansing her body of the child of one man so that she can be redeemed by another. For Paule Croset in The Exile and Danielle Darrieux in Madame de, it is a question of renunciation.

Of course, anyone can track. In recent years such otherwise disparate directors as Stanley Kubrick, Jacques Demy, and Valerio Zurlini have tended to transport their scenarios on the conveyor belt of camera movement, but though Kubrick has acknowledged a debt to Ophuls, and Demy even dedicated his first film (Lola) to the director of Lola Montès, none of the three directors can be termed Ophulsian. Kubrick is essentially a satirist with a habit of putting his players through their paces. His elaborate track in the gymnasium dance scene in Lolita is designed to exaggerate the milieu with the sustained satire of incongruity. If he cut back and forth, Kubrick would imply a logical relationship between images and individuals while, in fact, he finds this relationship grotesque. In Paths of Glory, Kubrick forces Menjou and Macready to follow the camera's chalk lines over an ironically tiled floor. The difference between Kubrick and Ophuls is that Kubrick makes the players follow the camera and Ophuls makes the camera follow the players.

Jacques Demy bears only the most superficial resemblance to Ophuls. A combination self-conscious stylist and Left Bank intellectual, Demy emphasizes the artifice involved in both camera movement and fortuitous plot construction. If Kubrick creates satirical caricatures rather than characters, Demy is content with sentimental constructs which he can manipulate with calculating condescension. There is no feeling of mortality in Demy's world because there is no genuine life. Zurlini is quite simply flamboyant in his use of tracks as lyrical sweeps of emotion. Though there is less meaning than mannerism in his camera movements, he does achieve his emotional effects on occasion by suggesting momentary liberation from conventions.

The main point is that Ophuls is much more than the sum of all his camera movements. What elementary aestheticians overlook in Ophuls is the preciseness of his sensibility. His women may dominate subjectively, but his men are never degraded objectively. James Mason in Caught does not know what Barbara Bel Geddes is feeling when he proposes to her, but Ophuls conveys through the acting sensibility of Mason that a man need not understand what a woman feels to be capable of providing love. The Bergman-Antonioni problem of communication between the sexes does not arise in Ophuls simply because the director recognizes the two separate spheres of men and women. The Ophulsian view is never feminist, like Mizoguchi's, nor feminine like Bergman's and Antonioni's. No Ophulsian male, for example, is ever caught with his pants down like Gunnar Bjornstrand in Smiles of a Summer Night or Gabrielle Ferzetti in L'Avventura, and no Ophulsian female ever displays the smug complacency toward her own moral superiority evidenced in the superior expressions of Eva Dahlbeck and Monica Vitti. We have instead the desperate effort of Wolfgang Liebeneiner in Liebelei to recapture his lost innocence with Magda Schneider on a sleigh ride that is mystically reprised by the camera after they both have died. It is not merely the moving camera that expresses the tragedy of lost illusions, but the preciseness of the playing. There is a direct link between Liebeneiner and Gerard Philipe's jaded count in La Ronde looking deep into Simone Signoret's eyes to find something he has forgotten forever. There is the same delicacy of regret nearly twenty years apart.

Some critics, particularly in England, have objected to the softening of Schnitzler's cynicism in the Ophuls versions of Liebelei and La Ronde, not to mention the Ophulsian rendering of de Maupassant in Le Plaisir. Ophuls himself observed that Schnitzler wrote Liebelei after Reigen, and not before. The implication is clear. It is cynicism, and not idealism, that is generally the mark of youthful immaturity, or rather it is the cynic who is generally the most foolish romantic. A cynic delights in the trivial deceptions lovers practice on each other, and his attitude is particularly fashionable in a culture dedicated to the happy ending. There is a time in every film critic's life when he thinks that Billy Wilder is more profound than John Ford, and that nastiness is more profound than nobility. However, the acquiring of moral wisdom comes with moral awareness, and vice begins paying back all its youthful debts to virtue. At such a moment, Ophuls becomes more profound than Schnitzler and de Maupassant, and Madame de becomes infinitely more tragic than The Bicycle Thief. By showing man in his direst material straits, De Sica and Zavattini imply a solution to his problems. Ophuls offers no such comforting consolation. His elegant characters lack nothing and lose everything. There is no escape from the trap of time. Not even the deepest and sincerest love can deter the now from its rendezvous with the then, and no amount of self-sacrifice can prevent desire from becoming embalmed in memory, "Quelle heure est-il?" ask the characters in La Ronde, but it is always too late and the moment has always passed.

This is the ultimate meaning of Ophulsian camera movement: time has no stop. Montage tends to suspend time in the limbo of abstract images, but the moving camera records inexorably the passage of time, moment by moment. As we follow the Ophulsian characters, step by step, up and down stairs, up and down streets, and round and round the ballroom, we realize their imprisonment in time. We know that they can never escape, but we know also that they will never lose their poise and grace for the sake of futile desperation. They will dance beautifully, they will walk purposively, they will love deeply, and they will die gallantly, and they will never whine or whimper or even discard their vanity. It will all end in a circus with Lola Montès selling her presence to the multitudes, redeeming all men both as a woman and as an artistic creation, expressing in one long receding shot the cumulative explosion of the romantic ego for the past two centuries.¹

Letter to the editor-in-chief: . . . and believe me, I know from experience that I am neither an essay writer nor a professional literary man. If you feel you absolutely must have an article about my experience, for your Easter edition, I ask you to be content with these notes that have no pretension to being a coherent ensemble.

Thoughts without definite form, pell-mell notes, reflections in fits and starts—for people like me, these things signify a kind of relaxation. The brain goes on vacation, on a cure, and wants to gather, instead of a red thread, a multitude of vari-colored ones. That's good because with a film everything is completely opposite; you must construct, calculate, you need a general view since film is an industrial product, and as I am in this industry up to my neck, my experience has been . . . but that's what I'm going to tell you about now.

"Indeed! You'll end up having your experience!" (Prophetic words of 1922.) My uncle was right. All uncles are right when they prudently give such pessimistic advice to young people at the beginning of their career. Experience—one only learns this late—means losing the ignorance and dreams of childhood. One exchanges illusion for reality; one passes from things divined, desired, inaccessible, to the world of limitations. A man of experience is a broken child. We like to place our destiny in the hands of politicians, pilots and dentists.

In Darmstadt, I once met a bankrupt theatre director. It was winter, during the occupations after the first World War. Having come from Aix-la-Chapelle, I was obliged, in order to visit him, to cross the Mayence bridge on foot in a snow storm. My small valise was full of publicity brochures and hope. He was at home, lying on a sofa and he looked grey in the daylight. He had an ice-bag on his head and dirty handkerchiefs spread over his chest. A performance under his direction (I believe it was Egmont) had been a complete fiasco because of defections, strikes, the theatre crisis, a row and the reviews after opening night. "All this—these aren't men," he groaned, "excuse me if I can't listen to you today . . . even the musicians in the orchestra, even the chief designers, not to mention the actors: they're all big babies."

Thirty-five years later, the day before yesterday to be exact, I paid a visit to a Parisian studio. A colleague, a director, had a very resigned air: "I'm fed up. All this—it's kid stuff and nothing else." But as for me, I like children. I don't like little children, not at all, but big ones. Unfortunately, in my métier, it appears that the time of the adults has begun, the time of broken children. The cinema was taking its first steps, barely forty years ago, when my uncle prophesied, "You'll end up having your experience!" Was he right? If we have truly entered the era of the experienced cinema, we can only hope that this stability will be short lived.

"Seek qualified engineers; no experience necessary." If I were in iron-and-steel following an ad like that I would go and present myself immediately. But they don't look for directors in this fashion. That's why, these last few years, before each film I place this ad in my imaginary newspaper and then I answer it myself.

In order to illustrate what I mean, Paris traffic is the best example. There are laws. Many people know these laws. Many hardly know them. Some people pay attention to them, others hardly at all. The police know that they are taken seriously and also made light of. That's why they change continually. Result: everyone knows how to drive. The traffic in Paris is a work of art. The police commissioners are marvelous directors. When they have proven their capacities, they have to go away. To Morocco, even. The traffic in Paris should be studied by all aspiring directors. Not from manuals or diagrams, but nonchalantly, just glancing at it, from the terrace of a cafe. In any case, that's the reason my friends give in order to justify the long hours they spend at the café terraces.

If one gave the commissioners—or their lieutenants or the patrolmen at the Place de la Concorde—a free hand with the problems of production or distribution, it would result in a gigantic mish-mash. The film wouldn't obey them. Film demands a rigorous order. Today it wants to be sure of itself, and there is its drama. Once, when it lacked assurance, it was not yet menaced. Today, it tries to be a divertissement that has proved itself, that is constructed on conventions it can rely on, hanging desperately on to proven recipes instead of going on a search for the marvelous and mysterious. Perhaps it's the fault of the financiers, who are now rich and fashionable people. The big banks and the Ministry of Finance have taken the place of the speculators and they are responsible for the savings that have been entrusted to them. It is necessary to understand them.

There is a man in the history of the cinema that I like very much without ever having made his acquaintance, and for whom I would have liked to work. He is the merchant who founded this profession and who was nearly an artist. This man is the Laskys, the Samuels, the Mayers, the Loews. Today he has practically disappeared. Such a man must have been an impetuous lassothrower of the cinematographic adventure. I see him in front of me with a large cowboy hat, boots, cartridge pouch and a revolver. But this uniform is worn only for me, for, experienced spectator that I am, I can imagine a pioneer in no other way. In reality, perhaps he wore a monocle and a cutaway. This magic merchant, with no experience, saw little strips of celluloid on which little things jumped around for two minutes—an acrobatic cyclist or a monkey—and the merchant cowboy believed one could put long stories on this celluloid, with a beginning, a middle, and an end and a dramatic action.

And then these cowboys left in a caravan or on horseback or perhaps by express train, towards California, for the desert. There, there was nothing—except the sun. And that's a lot. There, on the sand, they built studios, laboratories and production houses. The money that was gathered wasn't "invested"; it was risked. They were the first adventurers of the imagination. What they photographed were the first dreams, the first kisses, the first fires and the first waters, the first war and the first peace, the first birth and the first death. What they shot was the first shooting.

Today, the adventure has become a commercial branch on which are installed the successors to these pioneers: the presidents, the employers, the advisors. So that no one will saw their branch off, they only let go of their money for a sure thing. I fear that this is the illness from which all industrial trees suffer. For when we make films we are building castles in the clouds. But there are no castles in the clouds that are solid. When you want to consolidate them you must bring them down to earth.

Extract from a discourse (to be delivered to the students of some university or other around 1969): " . . . With that, I wouldn't want, for the love of God, to venerate chaos, to give the cue to the iconoclasts who didn't even have the time to learn to paint, by dint of destroying. The self-styled avant-gardists grow old quickly because they want to stay young forever. The make-up on their interior face doesn't efface the wrinkles of years. There is a knowledge that, in my opinion, escapes explanation, a miraculous knowledge. I don't know why, but it has always obliged me to stop, to mark a classic and refreshing pause. When you meet with it, your heart starts to pound. You mustn't copy it but, more humbly, try to follow it on its path. Honoring masterpieces is an experience that must be preserved living. The golden number of this knowledge must be transmitted across the ages with infinite precautions, from the hands of the master to the heart of the disciple. For, whoever has not been touched by the healing breath of what was made before him will never meet with the benedictions of tradition. Full of respect and admiration, we look at the films of Murnau, Lubitsch, Griffith, Eisenstein and Podovkin. We feel them, like the last echoes of a divine music; they prevent us from taking ourselves too seriously in the concert of time and we . . ." Student's remark, to his neighbor: "Ahh! How solemn he is! The professor is beginning to act like an old man!"

Extract from a speech I gave January 15th, 1956, in Hamburg: " . . . and then, Ladies and Gentlemen, your president gave me to understand that he would like to have a speech entitled: experience of a creator of films. I didn't refuse this title, I simply changed it to experience. For I don't believe there is a creator in a film: I think, and this is nearly an axiom with me, that there are as many creators to a film as there are people who work on it. My job as director consists of making, out of this choir of people, a creator of films. A film cannot live with the aid of one man alone. I can only—and as far as I'm concerned my colleagues can only—awaken the creative drive in each person, whether he be an electrician or an actor, a musician, an editor or a decorator. (I haven't the time to enumerate everyone in this little world that I love). It is necessary to discover in them the creator, nurse them until they come to life—and then we have a good film. But how to arrive: Ladies and Gentlemen, at having my costumer design prettier costumes for me than I myself could ever have imagined? How attain to—this word is often abused but here it is used in the proper sense—this "freedom"? By not clinging to experience. For, I fear, when you are hooked on your experience, routine awaits you at the next day's shooting. The door must stay open. Although we generally liked closed doors—at the studio or at home, when someone from the gas company or a cousin is always dropping in—but the door, in a profession, must always stay wide open for the unknown, the unexperienced. When we have open house, guests do not fail to arrive."

In the history of the cinema, as I see it, a very peculiar thing happens. The métier advances only when there is an opening, when experience can no longer help us. These "holes" are the keynotes of evolution. It is at these times that Chaplin is born, fully grown, at the beginning. When, after the war, Roberto Rossellini made Open City in Italy, the same thing happened, with no precedent at all. Until that time, there had been no example of someone's going out with a camera under his arm, with damaged materials and no floodlights, and setting it up in entranceways, in order to extract a drama out of daily life and make a poem out of it—without permission, almost clandestinely. A marvelous moment, full of magic and surprise. A lack of experience is an important factor in the health of our métier: for it is quite simply appalling to think that a dramatic means of expression, dating from only forty years ago, already has the temerity to pretend to establish laws.

If you come, as I do, from the theatre, which is more than a thousand years old, you find that the pride taken by the cinéaste in his professional experience is a bit precocious. The technicians, above all, try to forge a system out of their new technical discoveries. Beware the technicians! They can be our friends, when they set themselves to it, but they can be tyrants when they decide that technique comes first. They are nice people, but they have no idea how dangerous they can be, when they welcome us with open arms, declaring, 'This or that must be like that and you can't do this or that because, for example, when it's developed, the print will lose clarity. . . ." And then they whisper a thousand things in our ear that sound like crytograms from the middle ages. I lose my head and can hardly follow them. I no longer understand about it. Only one thing persists in my thoughts: at this moment they are in the process of leading the soul of our profession astray.

It's very serious, for the consequences are far reaching. Already, they are beginning to contaminate the actor. Today, all over the world, we see actors involved with technique, even before being actors.

In Berlin, in the Thirties, there was a great lady who taught me many things. She was old and her name was Rosa Valetti. I saw her, for the first time, at the studio. She had to do a scene and someone was hammering nails. She got up and said, "Where I act, people do not drive nails." And she went home. Today, all the actors are ready to accept an uproar without batting an eyelash. There is no longer any true respect for creation in the proper sense of the word. They allow themselves to be intimidated by technique, they come out of the guts of technique. They no longer have the courage to avoid it. And technique becomes insolent.

Several weeks ago, I went to a laboratory. There, they had come up with some very clean prints, with the help of chemical preparations, of some sonorous passages in my film that I had wanted to be very confused. I didn't want to allow it. The gentleman who had directed this operation declared to me: "The policy of our laboratories is this: people must always understand what one is saying." I tried to explain to him what it was all about. He cut me off with: "You must consider, Mister Ophuls, that you are working in an entertainment industry." I answered: "That's true. That's why I try to do what gives me pleasure."

Extract from my private journal (April 1st, 1956): "Today I met a financier. He had an air of being sort of new to the métier. It wasn't I who telephoned him, but the contrary. I know from experience that it's better that way.

Financier: Will you make films for your pleasure?

Director (me): Not entirely. More exactly, because it gives me pleasure.

F: That means you amuse yourself continually?

D: No, but one's sorrows procure pleasure.

F: And who, permit me to use harsh words, guarantees me that what gives you pleasure will give the spectators pleasure?

D: (stealing away): Well, one believes that one has a heart that beats for them, feelings that see for them, in brief, after all, a nose.

F: Aside from that, there are other guarantees?

D: None.

F: None?

D: None (Silence).

F: And your experience?

D: In this domain, nothing. You cannot calculate success in advance. Yesterday I went for a walk with Henri Jeanson down that Champs-Elysées. The Champs-Elysées is a good place to talk. Maybe that's where it gets its name. Well, he said, "When Julien Duvivier and I were finished with Pépé Le Moko (and Pépé, as you know, Sir, was one of the most successful films ever made in France) and when we saw the first print, we were convinced that it had been a catastrophe. We left for London before the premiere so as not to be present at this disaster." So much for guarantees!

F: You please me enormously, you know, because you don't tell stories. I will give you all the necessary capital for the film.

D: . . .

F. At least if it doesn't require too much. Of course, it would be on condition that you employ, beyond your talent, all of your experience. Not only a good film, but an economically good one. (He looks in his portfolio, in which is found my curriculum vitae). You have experience, that is correct?

D: Yes, I've done some small things.

F: Many?

D: Many small things.

F (bluntly): And color, for example? What do you think of color?

D: If you aim to be in the black, it isn't too necessary to show it.

F: And the camera, sound, the cutting, the décor, the costumes, the scenario—you know how to handle all that?

D (in a peremptory tone): Like a surgeon his instruments, a pilot his log book, a painter his brushes. One learns that.

F: And the actors?

D (bantering): You must liberate their desire to express themselves, by trying to do everything to make them believe in it. It's a bagatelle. Aside from that, there isn't much to do.

F: And the time?

D (for the first time, truly, serious, conscientious and desirous of convincing): Look, everything is made of a multitude of little experiences. And this is the real core of the subject. Obviously one can make plans. There is so much of it. You go around the world, from "Time is money" to "Stakhanov." There are many people who can be bought. They are strong and take care that an established time-table is respected: the production director, the stage manager, the propertyman. In the United States, they particularly knuckle down. It's guaranteed that the film's director won't be late: he is taken there by plane, nothing is unforeseen, he arrives on time. I have never understood how. When these specialists are intelligent, they adapt their plan to the subject. An adagio is directed more slowly than a polka.

One might well shoot a detective story at a very accelerated pace but Tristan and Isolde will be arrived at more rapidly if it unfolds slowly. Obviously, Sir, these little experiences are perhaps in contradiction to the big ones, the essentials. May I read you something without presuming on your time?

The Financier indicates "Yes." The Director puts on his glasses:

"The artist is everything to his subject. He communicates with it with love. He carries the best of his spirit and his heart to it. He makes it be born again. In this act of rebirth, time doesn't count, for it is love that accomplishes it. What lover feels the passage of time in the presence of the object of his adoration? What true artist pays heed to time when he is working? (Silence). . . . The author of this truth without guarantee, Sir, is called Johann Wolfgang. His family name is undecipherable. As you see, Sir, it can't be Goethe."

I raised my head. My financier had disappeared on tiptoe. It was no loss. Since, in any case, he was only imaginary." End of extract.

In spite of everything, I do not feel abandoned if I shoot or if I write—private journal or article—if I pace in my room or walk down the street, head full of projects, but without a film to make. In Hollywood, I spent four years without work, but I never felt myself abandoned, for I believe in a certain current. There is a certain current that carries the ship of our life, an immense boat on which actors and directors are giving a performance. This is neither an electric nor an atomic current, but poets live on its banks. It is the current of the imagination. It runs across all the arts and if, from time to time, it sprinkles the cinema a little, we should feel joy and contentment. At the moment, this current is menaced by an excess of intelligence. It was Musset, I believe, who said one day, "Whoever abuses his intelligence, in order to stop the imagination's flow, would have been better born stupid." To keep this current from drying up is our duty, the duty of people of the cinema and guardians of the flow—this current of poetry that was ahead of us, that is around us or will be born tomorrow. It is up to us to detect it, to stay with it on its course, even when it runs underground, to let ourselves be carried along.

As long as we do that, in spite of crisis, our métier, I believe, will continue to exist. To be able, one day, to say to oneself that one was lucky enough to help keep it alive, should be the most beautiful and essential experience one could have.

NOTES

¹The Editor's article on Max Ophuls appeared originally in Moviegoer, No. 3, 1966.

The statement of Max Ophuls appeared originally in Cahiers du Cinema, No. 81, March 1958, and was reprinted in Cahiers du Cinema in English, No. 1, January 1966, and was translated by Rose Kaplin.