SOURCE: "Max Ophuls's Letter from an Unknown Woman," in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 98, No. 5, December, 1983, pp. 1121-42.

[In the following essay, Wilson explores cinematic techniques used by Ophuls's in Letter from an Unknown Woman.]

It has been borne upon me this evening that perfect music has the same effect on the heart as the presence of the beloved. It gives, in fact, apparently more intense pleasure than anything else on earth.

. . . . .

The habit of listening to music and the state of reverie connected with it prepare you for falling in love.

Stendhal, De l'amour

In the first half of Max Ophuls' Letter from an Unknown Woman¹ there occurs a pair of shots, linked across distinct sequences, that seems paradigmatic of the methods and concerns of this strange and delicate film. The first of these two shots takes place when Lisa Berndle, having fled her family's departure for Linz, stands waiting for Stefan Brand at the top of the stairs that lead to his apartment. The camera, panning slowly, comes to occupy a position slightly behind and above her—looking over her shoulder and down the stairway. From this vantage point, we see, along with Lisa, Brand returning for the night accompanied by a beautiful and unidentified young woman. Later in the film with the camera in exactly the same position, we are shown Lisa ascending the stairs with Brand. It is she who on this occasion will spend the night with him. The obvious irony, of course, is that Lisa has taken her place in what we know to be a procession of women who have climbed the same stairs with this same man. She has simply replaced that other unknown young woman who she had watched with so much pain before. The repetition of camera placement underscores the repetition of action. But there is more suggested, I believe, than this. In the second shot, given its relation to the first, the visible absence of Lisa as observer of the scene makes salient the fact that she is now merely the subject of our perception and is utterly removed from the perspective which earlier she had held. (If the first of these shots had been a subjective shot that directly presented her field of vision and thus excluded her wholly from the frame, then the echoing second shot would not mark as it does her earlier complicity and later lack of complicity with the camera's point of view.) This simple strategy of echoing with a variation yields the sense, almost as an overtone to the second shot, that Lisa at this juncture lacks any consciousness of herself as an element in a mere recurrence of an event that had overwhelmed her consciousness before. I spoke of these shots as constituting a kind of paradigm within Letter from an Unknown Woman for the following reasons. First, this device of 'echoing with a variation' is repeated frequently throughout the film, often with the effect of showing the past to be interwoven with the present in ways the characters cannot grasp. And this is specifically connected with an issue, raised several times in the film, about the extent to which the characters are acting freely as they pursue their ends. There is a suggestion, made by Lisa, that destiny, chance, or some other outside agency rules her actions and Brand's. Second, it is central to the conception of the film, I will argue, that Lisa is depicted as a consciousness who is crucially closed off to the significance of her experience and, particularly, her relationship with Brand. Her perception of herself and her situation is filtered through a complex structure of fantasy and desire—an extreme instance of the kind of fevered crystallization that Stendhal so vividly describes.² In a way, Lisa is a fairly conventional heroine of a certain type of 'woman's picture': the woman who sacrifices everything for a unworthy male. But this movie is probably unique in its sharp definition of that sacrifice as the result of a partially willed obsession with an object of love who is largely the product of a passionate imagination. The film is doubly unique in that its disturbing heroine is viewed throughout with tact, sympathy, and serious affection. In Letter and in other Ophuls' films, love is held to be based necessarily on illusion, but the capacity for love is valued as a state of quasi-religious detachment from the self and from the world.

Moreover, if Lisa's love for Brand is sustained by an hallucination of the actual man, this fact about her is an obverse reflection of the cause of Brand's constricted and loveless character. For he also represents a closure of consciousness, a narcissistic sensibility turned in upon a dream of an 'ideal woman', an ideal whom, as it seems to him, he never finds. Both of these characters are oddly bound together and apart by a deluded worship based upon a conception of a perfect love. The issue is raised somewhat obliquely in the opening lines of the letter that frames the film. Lisa writes to Brand that "the course of our love had a reason that lay beyond our [hers and Brand's] poor understanding." Like much of the letter that we hear in voice-over, the sentiments are familiar from popular romance, but tested against what the film itself reveals, they have an edge that gives them an ironic force.

Finally, this hints at the characteristic mode of the specifically cinematic narration. If the central personages are hopelessly blind in different ways to one another, the film, through its construction and its style, continuously affirms the possibility of a wider and more accurate perception of the human affairs that it portrays. Again and again, the film establishes a larger viewpoint which its characters do not attain. For instance, the famous Ophulsian tracking shots not only repeat and thereby emphasize the fixed configurations that the characters trace out, but, at the same time, holding these configurations at a certain distance, they delineate the telling connections and disruptions that the characters have missed. Further, Lisa and many of the other characters are presented as acting out some internally constructed drama that they, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, try to impose upon the public circumstances in which they move. This fact, as we will see, is frequently marked in the visual narration by bringing out a certain theatricality in the manner in which they negotiate a confrontation that, as it seems to them, either favors or threatens the desired resolution of their inner dramas. (This obviously complicates the question, mentioned before, about the freedom or lack of it with which these characters act.) However, these last points raise a definite problems. Most of the film is understood to be, in some sense, a visual rendering of the contents of Lisa's letter to Brand. How then can the film yield a perspective significantly wider than her own?

In Letter from an Unknown Woman, the cinematic narration conforms generally to the tacit understanding that the events mentioned in Lisa's letter are being visually portrayed. Moreover, there is no question about the correctness of the letter, at least as an account of what events took place. Finally, there are qualities of Lisa's subjectivity that the film rather systematically reflects. Nevertheless, as I implied above, there is also a quite striking effort to make it clear that the perspective that the film offers upon this history is not to be identified with Lisa's. The narration simultaneously establishes a certain distance from Lisa's outlook even while it mirrors some properties of her subjectivity. There are many aspects of what we are shown that seem alien to Lisa's point of view and sensibility. The pair of shots on the stairway with which we began illustrates the point nicely. In addition, many of the explanations and interpretations expressed in the parts of the letter that we hear bear a problematic relation to the facts and situations that we see as they unfold. Again, we have noted one instance of this three paragraphs before. These and similar considerations entail that what I have characterized as the most plausible reading of a flashback is intended here to be definitely in force. But also, this cinematic narration declares itself to be a largely independent re-viewing of her past and insists that it has a coherence and integrity beyond that of her very special vision. Therefore, Letter leaves us with the job of defining, as it were, the function of Lisa's narrating voice in relation to the filmmaker's narrating eye. However, since I believe that these relations are fairly complex and that they are central to the final force of the film, this job is feasible only after we have arrived at a somewhat detailed sense of the subsidiary structures that inform the film. We turn now to these structures, but with the broader task in mind.

When Lisa makes her disastrous final visit to Brand's apartment, he finds her gazing at a small antique bust of a woman. In response to her apparent interest, he explains the meaning that the statue has for him. He asks Lisa if she admires it as much as he does. The Greeks, he continues, once built a statue to a god they did not know but hoped would someday come. In his case, he tells her, the unknown but hoped for deity has been a goddess. Every morning of his life he has awakened with the expectation that, on that day, the goddess would appear. But, of course, he adds, she never has and now he's given up the hope. These lines, I believe, are to be taken more or less at face value. For instance, they are pointedly reminiscent of Lisa's statement much earlier in the film that she has heard in Brand's playing a searching for something he hadn't found, a suggestion that seems to startle him with its perceptiveness. Presumably, at least part of the import of Brand's remarks about the statue is that, caught up in his fantasy of a perfect and impalpable ideal, he has moved, always dissatisfied, from one real woman to another. The restlessness this fantasy induces leads him, in Lisa's case, to miss the love she offers now and has offered in the past.

On the other hand, if Lisa's deity is more distinctly embodied in the person of Brand himself, it is hard to ignore the film's insistence that her god is also an elaborate construction of her own. In a moment, we will examine some of the ways in which this fundamental fact is articulated in the film. However, it should be noted that there is a poignant ramification of the psychological kinship that these two people bear to one another. Both Lisa and Brand seem regularly on the verge of breaking through their private idealizations into some form of more vivid awareness of the other. Lisa, on varied occasions, expresses what seems to be a truer perception of Brand's character and he repeatedly struggles to achieve a significant memory of her. It is pathetic and absurd that, every time they meet, Brand is troubled by the sense that he has known her sometime before. That he should not actually remember her is absurd, but his recurrent clouded impressions of coming close to something important he has lost in the past marks a continuity of feeling that he has for her, a feeling that, repressed as it is, he nonetheless retains. Lisa, of course, forgets nothing of their past together. It is her dream of there being a future for her love of Brand that is so problematic. And, just as he is haunted by shadows of memories of her, she is struck by a queer intermittent prescience about the fate of their relationship. Standing before a fun-fair wax museum, they discuss the probability that he will become so famous that the museum will someday own a statue of him. Jokingly, he asks her if she would come to see him then, and she answers that she would 'if he would come alive.' Seeing various wax figures arrayed behind him while she speaks, her response, made at the outset of their affair, hints at the very real question of whether the actual man can ever 'come alive' to her. Shortly afterwards, when they are dancing together, he asks her to promise not to vanish and she informs him gently that it is not she who will vanish. Later, when he leaves by train, purportedly on a two-week journey, it is obvious that she at least halfrealizes that their parting signifies the destruction of their brief involvement. In these and related instances, it is dubious that the full meaning of what she says and feels is clear to her, but that meaning seems constantly to flicker on the borders of her thought. We have, in these examples, an indication of the enormous repressive weight their fantasies impose upon this pair. It leaves him with only the remnants of memory of her, and she sees him through crazy, curving mirrors that intermittently reflect a potent truth.

Much of the subtlety of the film depends upon the way in which it succeeds in revealing from an outside view the 'inner process' of Lisa's self-construction of the object of her love. Indeed, the whole long section of the film before she leaves for Linz serves precisely to set out the basis and development of this construction. Thus, again at the beginning of her letter, Lisa asserts that everyone has two birthdays: the date of their physical birth and the date of the birth of consciousness within them. As this line about the birth of consciousness is delivered, the tracking camera follows a younger Lisa as she surveys the profusion of elegant furnishings, musical instruments, and art objects that are being moved into the apartment Brand will henceforth occupy. In a dazed state of wonder, she drifts with the passage of these items up the stairs until she arrives for the first time at Brand's door. "I had never seen such beautiful things," she goes on in the letter, and it is clear that this is the first startling vision of style, culture, and splendor for an adolescent girl living in slightly straitened bourgeois circumstances. This is the birth of Lisa's consciousness and that consciousness is already focused, through the marvel and mystery of his belongings, upon a man she has not even seen.

Lisa is an isolated and insecure figure as she threads her way through the commotion of the move, and her general state of isolation becomes a major theme of the first part of the film. Most particularly, the great love for Brand is shown to have been conceived at a distance, without significant contact with the man himself. During this formative period, they never really meet. From what we learn, he appears to her briefly, intermittently, and with hardly a word exchanged. In fact, when she perceives him, there is almost always some literal barrier interposed between the two. There are repeated shots in this early section of the film in which we watch from behind her as she looks out at him through a windowed view. The first time that she ever sets eyes upon him she gazes shyly through the glass panels in their apartment door while he leaves the building, and this establishes a motif that recurs in several variants. She also catches a glimpse of his picture on a concert program and devotes herself to a course of study in reading about music and musicians. And, most of all, she listens by herself, unnoticed, to the passionate romantic music that he plays. Hence, once more her perception is distinctly at a distance. She listens outside while the music pours down from his open apartment window or through a transom she has set ajar. Her letter informs him that these secret, lonely audiences provided 'some of the most beautiful moments of her life.' In all of this, it is as though her love had been conceived for a mobile wax statue with musical talent with whom she is acquainted only as a faithful visitor to his glassed-in case. There is, then, an added irony suggested when later they speculate about what it would be for her to view him in precisely this way.

In one very striking and curious scene, Lisa sits in the apartment-house courtyard and listens while Brand practices the piano upstairs. She rocks herself gently in a crude rope swing as she hears the music played above. Her abstracted reverie is interrupted by the entrance of a girlfriend who rather contemptuously dismisses the music and goes on to relate an incident that she regards as much more thrilling. It seems that she has had an exciting encounter with an interested shopboy down the street. Taking a lusty bite from an apple she is holding, the friend exclaims, "I'm going to have to do something about that boy if he doesn't keep his hands to himself. The things he does—right out in the street." The mock reproval in her tone signals her satisfaction at the rough attentions she's received. At this remark, there is an immediate cut to an insert of Brand playing the piano in his room and then to a shot of his hands as they powerfully strike the keys. (The shot is from below the level of the keyboard, emphasizing the downward force of the movement of his hands.) Finally, as the music swells to a crescendo, there is another cut back to Lisa in the courtyard, her cheek pressed against one of the swing's rough ropes, the shot showing her to be visibly stirred by the passion of the music. Both the intended comparison and contrast are clear. Just as the girlfriend has been sensually moved by her meeting with the shopboy, Lisa is likewise moved by Brand's playing. But the commonplace character of her friend's reaction is distinguished from the more private, sublimated, and idealized nature of Lisa's feelings. Nevertheless, the feelings in both cases are sexual. The character of the music, Lisa's dreamy state, her easy swinging motions, and, at one point, her abrupt distracted plucking at the swing ropes as if their tactile pressure were too intense to bear, all conspire to define her experience. Both girls undergo the beginnings of sexual responsiveness, but Lisa's response centers on Brand through the mediation of his music and in the absence of real interaction with him. As we will see later, it is through the mediation of Lisa's letter that Brand is awakened to Lisa and to the significance of her love. It is as if, for both Lisa and Brand, some expressive and/or representational structure, whether in music or in words, is required to generate and give form to the crucial vision of the person loved.

Immediately after this scene, Lisa proclaims in her letter that 'she began to prepare herself quite consciously for Brand.' In a series of three shots, we are given a synoptic sense of what this solitary preparation comes to. In the first shot, she assiduously attends to the care of her clothes. In the third shot, she visits the music section of the public library to obtain biographies of the great composers. And in the second, the most unusual of these vignettes, Lisa goes to dancing school. The class consists of facing lines of boys and girls who are being put through their paces by a dancing instructor standing to one side. However, these lines of students are visible to us only through the open spaces cut in the top half of a partition that divides the hall. The partition separates the other students (in the rear of the shot) from Lisa (in the foreground). While the paired off couples execute their steps, Lisa also practices the same movements, but she alone is dancing without a partner. Or, to describe the impression one has more accurately, she seems to be dancing with a partner who is invisible to everyone but her. Towards the end of this extended shot, Lisa moves around the partition and tries awkwardly and unsuccessfully to join the other boys and girls. Thus, the imagined presence and actual absence of Lisa's dancing partner is amusingly portrayed, but, in the conclusion of the shot, another important element has been introduced. That is, we see the potential in Lisa's isolated commitment to disrupt the more normal course of male and female interaction.

In fact, this theme is handled in a similar but much more complex manner in the pair of sequences set in Linz. In the first sequence, Lisa and a promising young lieutenant are introduced by her parents and his father, a distinguished looking colonel. As the handsome couple strolls leisurely around the town's central square, they carry on a pleasant if desultory conversation about the respective merits of Linz and Vienna. In the course of this exchange, the lieutenant, who is a bit displeased at her fondness for Viennese music, praises the outdoor concerts given on Saturdays in that very square. All in all, it seems as though the first stage of a budding and quite proper courtship is smoothly underway. The camera, which has followed them throughout their conversation, now swings back to permit a wider view. With this, we see the good people of Linz, mostly in couples (wives and husbands, parents and children), headed off to services at the cathedral that fronts the square. Lisa and her lieutenant drift easily and naturally into this respectable Sunday crowd.

In the following sequence set in the same square, the musical glories that the lieutenant had previously praised materialize in the unlikely form of a stolid military band. The camera cranes up slowly from this ungainly group, rising almost as if it were lifted by the bombast of the music that we hear. As it rises, the camera picks up Lisa and the lieutenant headed for an intimate conversation in a garden adjacent to the square. Lisa's parents and the imposing colonel seat themselves at a nearby café in anticipation of an imminent engagement between the young people. In the next shot, with the camera fixed and framing them squarely, the couple take their places somewhat stiffly on a garden bench. The look and sound of the scene suggest a critical dialogue between the hero and heroine of a romantic and ridiculously banal light opera.

The lieutenant plays his part, correctly if a little clumsily, and delivers the inevitable proposal of marriage. But Lisa is the heroine in a plot that involves much more of passion and intrigue. She is, she confesses with appropriate breathlessness and melodrama, engaged to a musician in Vienna. Her parents know nothing of this secret engagement, but, naturally, she regards herself bound by her solemn vow. All of this, of course, is not quite the truth but it answers most acceptably to everything for which she wishes. The lieutenant is suitably shocked by the announcement and hastens to deliver the errant daughter to her parents. It is here that the arch theatricality of the scene is particularly underlined. Just as the flustered couple make their exit from the garden, the bouncing music rolls to a conclusion and scattered spectators in the gardens, heretofore unseen by us, burst into appreciative applause at the dramatic departure. Moreover, in the following shot, the military band parades in file off the square leading still another procession of citizens of Linz. The wives and husbands, parents and children, who, in the previous scene, converged tranquilly upon the cathedral, now beat a rather clamorous retreat in the face of the folded courtship. The discomfited couple, returning to their dumbfounded parents, barge confusedly through the disappearing throng. This metaphorical disruption of the way that life is lived in Linz parallels the lesser disruption of the lines of dancing adolescents.

These relatively minor disruptions culminate much more explosively when Lisa later renounces her marriage to pursue Stefan Brand a final time. This is a topic to which we will return later. But here I want to note that the strain of theatricality just described is found throughout the film as various of the characters play out real or fantasized roles. Consider, for instance, the small set performance given by Lisa's mother when she announces her planned remarriage. Or consider Stefan's stagy seducer's manner among the columns outside the opera house. Or Johann Stauffer's stark warning to Lisa delivered beneath the crossed swords and hunting trophies that adorn his walls. Or, going back to the first third of the film, consider the scene in which Lisa trespasses into Brand's apartment. In the opening shot the screen is initially darkened by what turns out to be a large carpet hung up for beating. The carpet is then pulled away (by Lisa) to display the courtyard and the apartment building where the ensuing action will take place. The effect is that of a curtain being opened with a flourish with the attendant revelation of a theatrical space in which some minor drama will be performed. And this is, indeed, what happens. Lisa, barefoot and dressed in the austere gown of a would-be religious acolyte, steals worshipfully up the back stairs and into Brand's apartment. She has made her way into precincts that are, in her eyes, made sacred both by the man and his music. The relevant connotations of religious service are treated with playfulness and irony in this context, but they come to assume a dimension less theatrical and of greater resonance as the film goes on. This scene constitutes the point at which Lisa first takes positive action to gain some sort of intimate knowledge of Brand and his personal life—to force herself somehow into that life. So, in a sense, it is the opening of the first act of their personal drama together. When Brand, long after their brief affair, reappears to her at the opera house, this renewal of their active relationship is announced at the very beginning of the scene by a voice that cries out "Act II—curtain going up". And so, on the portico of the opera house, it does. In any event, a sense of stylization in the acting of Letter from an Unknown Woman is partly to be accounted for by the way its characters tend to stylize themselves. It is a kind of measure, within the texture of the film, of the way these characters fail to comprehend their lives.

A number of the themes that have been adumbrated so far are clarified and enriched by the lovely sequence in which Lisa and Brand visit the amusement park. It is a winter evening, the park is almost deserted, and so the lovers' isolation is once again set in relief. What is more, their visit to the park is overtly portrayed as an escape into the sources of fantasy and childhood dreams. The setting, of course, is perfectly appropriate to this, and the implication is repeatedly taken up in the dialogue. When they first enter the snow-swept park, Brand asserts that he has always liked the place best at this time of year, to which Lisa replies, "Perhaps, because you prefer to imagine how it will be in the Spring." A little later, in a discussion of why he continues to climb dangerous mountains, she proposes that he likes to imagine that the next one will be more wonderful than the last. (Presumably, she does feel the particular edge her hypothesis contains.) Driving to the park, Lisa performs the maternal gesture of tucking in his muffler, and Brand comments musingly, "It's been a long time since anyone did that for me." In a similar vein, when Lisa buys a candied apple at a stand, Brand, waiting a few steps back in frank appraisal, says, "Now I see you as a little girl." Finally, having made their first rounds of Europe on the magical funfair railway. Brand calls out, "We'll return to the scenes of our youth."

In that part of the simulated train ride that we see, they have returned to the scenes of Lisa's youth—to Lisa 'seen as a little girl.' They talk about her long departed father who was, it seems, a regular champion of imaginary traveling. Although he held the unspectacular position of assistant superintendent of the municipal waterworks, at home he would put on this 'traveling coat' to take his little daughter on flights of fancy to the farthest regions of the earth. Apparently, this little game caused friction between husband and wife because Lisa reports her mother's claim that he knew the weather everywhere except the place he was. Given the factors we have discussed before, it is obvious that the father is supposed to have passed on his predilection for the realms of the imaginary to his daughter. In fact, when Lisa tells Brand that her father had 'the nicest eyes,' he answers, gazing into hers, that he can see that this is so. What is for him simply a pretty compliment registers the link between Lisa's vision, understood in the broadest sense, and her father's. This scene, above all, makes explicit the character of Lisa's cast of mind and the basis of her appetite for the rare, the exotic, and, especially, the beautiful.

The generally lighthearted ambience of this 'magical' journey should be contrasted with the suffering and separation that real journeys in real trains entail, at least within this and other Ophuls' films. Brand, when he deserts her, and Stefan Jr. before he dies, are taken from Lisa by trains. In fact, Brand's desertion seems to be mysteriously portended, even on his first night with Lisa, by the drawing of a train in a hotel advertisement that appears, rather oddly, in one of his concert programs that he signs for an admiring Countess. Somehow these real journeys in Ophuls' works either never return their passengers to their origin or, when they do, the people and the circumstances that were left behind have become completely transfigured.

The ride on the amusement-park train should also be contrasted with a different, more somber nightime ride that Lisa makes: the carriage ride home from the opera during which she and her husband discuss the consequences of the fact that she and Brand have met again, after many years, at a performance of The Magic Flute, This scene is very simply shot with the camera always stationary and largely at medium range. Lisa and Johann Stauffer sit stiffly in the darkness of the carriage and do not look at one another as they speak. Their respective lines are delivered in a low-key manner, almost without overt expression of emotion, and punctuated by the regular, monotonous hoofbeats of the horses. The content of the lines is stereotyped, but in a fashion that defines the specific melodrama in Lisa's conception of her situation.

Johann: What are you going to do?

Lisa: I don't know.

Johann: Lisa, we have a marriage. Perhaps it is not all you once hoped for, but you have a home and your son and people who care for you.

Lisa: Johann, I would do anything to avoid hurting you, but I can't help it.

Johann: And your son? You think you can avoid hurting him?

This is still another scene in which the conventionally theatrical is evoked with some emphasis. Nevertheless, there are stronger and stranger currents beneath the flow of familiar words. In particular, her assertions of helplessness, while deeply meant, are ambiguously clouded by her dream of who Brand is.

Johann: There are such things as decency and honor.

Lisa: I have told myself that a hundred times this one evening.

Johann: You talk as though it were out of your hands. It's not, Lisa. You have a will. You can do what's right—what's best for you—, or you can throw away your life.

Lisa: I've had no will but his—ever.

In the full context of the film, this last line—this perfect cliché of fictional romance—sounds absolutely extraordinary. If Letter has established any one thing it is the iron will of this woman to pursue the love of Stefan Brand and to possess it on her own terms. (In the letter, commenting on her refusal to identify Brand as the father of her child, she writes, "I wanted to be the one woman you've known that never asked you for anything.") As emerges shortly, she is determined to give up everything to regain this man. In contrast, it is Brand himself who seems to have no will of his own. He is the one who floats aimlessly from one love affair to another and who, it appears, allows his talent to dissipate in rather petty dissatisfaction with himself. When he and Lisa first meet as adults, he admits, "I almost never get to the place where I start off to," and similar thoughts are echoed several times. So the notion that Lisa espouses, that Brand has a will that dominates her, is unquestionably absurd. And yet, when Stauffer coldly dismisses her claims with the words, "That's romantic nonsense," he is missing the important truth that lies behind her self-deception here. It may be nonsense that Lisa's will is controlled by Brand's, but it is not at all nonsense that this is exactly the way in which she is bound to perceive the situation. The phenomenon of crystallization is a phenomenon of self-projection, the lover projecting the deepest qualities of herself upon the person loved. It is therefore completely natural that Lisa's will should seem to her a mere reflection of Stefan's. It is also not nonsense that her will and actions are apparently determined by the compelling drama that her imagination projects. On the other hand, somewhat inadvertently, Stauffer catches the contradiction in her fantasy, when he asks the following about Brand.

Johann: What about him? Can't he help himself either?

Lisa: I know now that he needs me as much as I've always needed him.

Johann: Isn't it a little late for him to find that out.

The aspect of theatricality in this scene is certainly not playful. Large issues are at stake for both Lisa and her husband. But Lisa speaks from the very center of her self-constructed illusion, and Stauffer cannot see beyond his codes of reason, honor, and propriety. As a consequence, each speaks stage speeches and cannot comprehend the other.

At the very outset of the opera sequence, Lisa's letter asserts, retrospectively, her powerlessness over her destiny, but this time on rather different grounds. "The course of our lives can be changed by such little things," she writes, " . . . I know now that nothing happens by chance. Every moment is measured, each step is counted." In this case it is Fate that she holds responsible for her reunion with Brand. This is one of the clearest instances of the way in which the familiar romantic rhetoric of the letter is belied by what we are shown. For, in the first place, it is apparently by chance that the two discover one another again. And, in the second place, it is she who, having seen Brand on the foyer stairs, subsequently leaves and makes possible their face-to-face meeting outside the hall. When Brand finds her nervously pacing on the opera house steps, he says, "Where there is a pursued, there must be a pursuer." However, his remark is ambiguous since it is notably unclear which of them is the pursuer and the pursued.

This ambiguity is further heightened when Lisa actually pays her last visit to his apartment. The standard maleand-female courtship roles seem to have been weirdly reversed, and she is the one who appears in the guise of 'a gentleman come calling.' The clothes she wears constitute a feminine parody of a man's top hat and formal evening dress. Covering terrain over which Brand had once led her on their first evening together, she is forced to seek him out among his old established haunts. She is the one who purchases a bouquet of white roses (a near repetition of his earlier gesture) and bears them to her lover's door. There is something a little absurd, pitiful, and, at the same time, terrible about this late-night caller with the bunch of white roses, this person in a severe suit of black and white with padded shoulders, standing outside the well-known apartment house gate. And it is this image of her that elicits a surprising piece of filmwork. The image-track has followed Lisa up to her arrival at the gate. Suddenly, there is a cut from a medium shot of her ringing the bell to an extreme long shot, from down the street, of her standing in the same position, a shot in which she is abruptly presented as distanced for us, diminished, and absolutely alone in acting on her fatal choice. As soon as this new remote view has been allowed to register, the camera pans rapidly to one side to reveal that we are sharing her husband's perspective on her as he observes her from a carriage halted down the street. We are forcibly pulled back from our natural involvement with Lisa at this instant and made, for a moment, to see the figure that he sees. (This is another case in which the cinematic narration rather flamboyantly asserts its independence from the focus of Lisa's point of view.) Inevitably, Lisa's last interview with Brand collapses into disaster. At this meeting, as before, he is oppressed by a dim sense of having seen or met her on some earlier occasion. But this, aside from his appreciative, predatory interest, is all. He does not remember who she is or what their relationship had been. Moreover, his manner has never seemed so coldly mechanical, so suffused with a glazed charm. While he chatters on, more and more trampling the past as he does, he calls out cheerfully, "You know you are a strange woman, Lisa." To this she has only the power to respond helplessly with the words "Am I?" Although he doesn't really understand the real force of his remark, Lisa is, of course, a very strange woman. It is the depth of this strangeness—the completeness of illusion and the strength of unacknowledged determination—that the movie has so carefully laid out. However, the appalling strangeness of their whole relationship is most clearly revealed by the new fashion in which Brand has come to serve as a reflection of Lisa's sensibility. For in this scene, and earlier at the opera house, he enunciates, in his own style, many of the ingredients of her conception of the meaning of her devotion. He tells her, "I followed you upstairs and watched you in your box, but I couldn't place you. And I had to speak with you. I know how this sounds. I assure you that in this case it's true. You believe that, don't you?" Or again, "I have a feeling—please don't think I'm mad—I know it sounds strange and I can't explain it—but I feel that you understand what I cannot even say and that you can help . . . Tonight when I first saw you and later when I watched you in the darkness, it was as though I had found that one face among all others." In his apartment, he continues in the same vein. "I knew last night, didn't you?", he asks her, and, echoing thoughts of hers about the unreality of time for them, "You're here, and, as far as I'm concerned, all the clocks in the world have stopped." Finally, from him to her, the most absurd line of all, "I know you won't believe it, but I couldn't get you out of my mind all day." In the first of the two scenes, one is not quite certain how his words are to be taken. But in the second, one's doubts are answered. In his mouth at this time, her notions have become the hollow discourse of the practiced and sophisticated seducer. The convictions that have guided and then shattered her life are played by him like cards to which the infatuated woman should, he supposes, appropriately respond. Two faces of romantic love are captured here. There is the emotion that backs a world transcending commitment, and there is the decorated strategy of a game of sex. The power and emotional complexity of Letter depends upon our lively sense of the dialectic between these facets of the claims of love.

In pointing out the distorted reflection of Lisa in the mature Brand, I am not proposing a reading of the film that applies one or another 'adverse' judgment to her.³ It is important to stress this point because, although the movie exploits and undercuts the conventions of its genre to expose, putting it bluntly, a certain craziness in Lisa and her sacrifice, the vision that drives her is significantly a generous and redemptive one. When at last she flees in despair from her last assignation with Brand, she comes upon a drunken soldier in the streets below, a soldier who manages to slur out the baldest and most basic of propositions. The encounter is the final stark reminder to us of the more realistic alternatives to Lisa's impossible idealizations. Here, on one raw extreme, is an offer of the casual and unadorned sexual act. Or, from earlier in the film, there is the economic contrivance of her mother's well-calculated second marriage. Or there is the bland respectability of the life the young lieutenant has implicitly proposed. Lisa's pursuit of Brand is a strict rejection of the convenient, the comfortable, and the ceremonial in personal relations. It is a rejection of all the usual commerce of love. Lisa's work as a dress shop mannekin is meant to symbolize her potential situation within the transactions of such a commerce. (In voice over: "Madame Spitzer's, where I found work, was the kind of establishment where one learns many things.") From this situation she has turned decisively away.

Nevertheless, the film, with its characteristic moral complexity, does not make it an easy matter simply to endorse her outlook. Certainly, the insistence on the deluded nature of her perception makes this hard enough. But we are also intended to be disturbed, not only by her actions toward her child, but by her desertion of Johann Stauffer. From what we see of him, he is undoubtedly rigid, restrained, and unimaginative, and he holds grimly to fundamental conventions of society that she does not accept. Still, it is clear that he is a man of decency, generosity, and genuine honor. In his reserved way, he loves her and her son sincerely. One is led to recognize that Stauffer is a representative of much that is best in the conventional ordering of things and made to feel the considerable cruelty in her leaving him. In the end, it seems to me these tensions in our disposition to make some global judgment about Lisa are deliberately left unresolved. Her impulses toward beauty, perfectibility in love, and selfless devotion are held in value as an almost religious aspiration. When Brand, through the words of her letter, discovers at last the spirit of her love for him, he is reclaimed to natural emotion and moral sentiment. The man without a will is redeemed to act again. So the redemptive and destructive sides of Lisa's passion must be balanced against one another and no ultimate assessment, it seems to me, emerges.

I also believe that this refusal to resolve certain of the larger issues is essential to the narrational assumptions of the film. I spoke, a moment before, of Brand's redemption by Lisa's letter, but there is a question about what precisely happens in this episode. Among the enigmatic shots that end the movie, when Brand pauses at the foot of his apartment house steps before entering the carriage that will take him to the duel, a point-of-view shot occurs that shows his memory image of Lisa as she stood, when he first saw her, at the door. The shot is held surprisingly long; held, in fact, until we see the image dissolve away. It is hard to be sure whether it disappears only because he is about to turn and leave or because this image of Lisa fades for him now just as his memory of her has always vanished in the past. At least, the slight emphasis on the fading of the image raises the question. Moreover, Brand turns and leaves to fight a duel in which he surely will be killed. The significance of his action, as suicide, seems largely negative. Here, at last, the man takes definitive action, but it is an act of futility and resignation. In the concluding frames, a pair of dark, closed carriages start heavily off through the rainsoaked morning streets. Hence, the culmination of everything that has gone before remains somewhat opaque. The upshot of the whole affair, this daybreak journey to a duel, is moving and ghastly at the same time.

One reason for pondering the ambiguity of this scene is the fact that a similar problem arises concerning the state of Lisa's mind at the time of her own death. As the narration of her letter draws to a close, the dominant impression is that Brand's spell over her has finally been broken. The dreadful revelation of their last encounter, the death of her son, the ruin of her marriage have, one assumes, opened her eyes to the emptiness of their affair. And this may be so. However, the lines that terminate the letter are striking in this regard. For she says, "If this letter reaches you, believe this: that I love you now as I've always loved you. My life can be measured by the moments I've had with you and with our child. If only you could have shared those moments. If only you could have recognized what was always yours and found what was never lost. If only . . ." But this is just the perspective she has always occupied: defining her life in relation to his, regretting that something somehow keeps them apart always. Even when the truth is before them both as they face death, it may still be that neither is able to hold onto a drastically altered view of their lives. There are these suggestions that she subsides into her constant fantasy and he into the vivid oblivion of his restless consciousness.

These uncertainties are also connected with the question of the role of human will in the behavior of these characters. Lisa, we know, imagines that romantic forces are unremittingly at work upon their action. But I have argued that it is their private visions or lack of vision that appear to determine their respective choices. The considerations of the previous paragraph hint at another level of complication. That is, it can seem, if the characters are substantially unchanged at the end, that there is an unidentifiable force, a determinative agency in operation, that binds them repeatedly to the only paths that they are able to perceive, paths that cross for a moment but, on the whole, diverge. This possibility is thus offered by the ending, but is also left as a troubling ambiguity.

That these matters are not closed off and specified assigns a limit to what this film's narration will claim to answer. Since Letter is throughout concerned with limits of perception, expression, and representation this should come as no surprise. In this respect, the narrational strategies of the film are deployed with dexterity and precision. At several points in this essay, we have seen why the narration cannot be read as a mere visual rendering of the contents of Lisa's letter. The interrelationship of sequences and the design of shots and mise en scène are used too persistently as a means of commenting upon Lisa and her experience for that. For instance, we noted how the camera is authorized to step out of Lisa's field of knowledge and interest for a moment and how the repeated element of theatricality defines the unconscious self-dramatization that she and others perform. It is impossible to escape the impression of an intelligent and sometimes ironic observer, the implied filmmaker as it were, who is continuously observing with special insight into the wider patterns that Lisa ostensibly describes. In this light, the letter only fixes the more superficial aspects of narrative sequence and remains subordinate to the visual sensibility that relates it all for us. Indeed, and I have suggested this before, what is essential to the letter, within the framework of the film, is the way that it expresses Lisa's cast of mind and the way it elicits Brand's vision of her while he reads it. On the first point, we have already observed how the statements that we hear from the letter are often played off against the much more complicated facts established in what we come to see. At best, Lisa's words are safely taken to define her own self-conception and her conception of the situations in which she acts. Further, it is just these concepts that the letter conveys to Brand. The letter plays much the same role for him as earlier his music had played for her. It creates a detailed scheme for apprehending her actions and a particular mode for valuing the history that she portrays. In the montage of resurrected memory that Brand experiences after he has read the letter, it is only the most idealized and touching moments that occur. We are given no reason to suppose that the conception of Lisa and of their lives that he forms shares any of the distancing complexity that the film as a whole provides for us. The claims and explanations in the letter invoke a distinctive but somewhat dubious picture of their relations. However, they patently strike home to Brand, conveying just that picture to his eyes. Through the vehicle of the letter, Brand assimilates Lisa's memory of the past—her memories fill that void in him—and comes to see her as the 'ideal woman' whom he had not recognized and now has lost irretrievably. This closure is satisfying in that it reverses the situation in which his music creates her vision of an 'ideal love' in the future, an ideal which for other reasons, she was bound to lose.

Implied in these symmetries, there is a certain ambivalence toward the expressive and representational possibilities of art. In its clarity, affective conviction, and unique beauties, a work of art can touch the intellectual and emotional core of a receptive audience. But, selective of facts, controlled by an interested intelligence, and potentially indulgent to ready emotion, it can simplify and deceive. Film in general and this film in particular does not escape the questions such ambivalence raises. In the case of Letter, it was to be expected that it would be widely received with the kind of dreamy romanticism with which Lisa and Brand take in the moving pictures of the fun-fair railway, and there is, perhaps, a quiet warning in this scene to an overly sentimental audience about the film that they are watching. We have one of those episodes in which Ophuls briefly deserts Lisa's viewpoint to open up the context to a wider look around. The dreamers, as we are shown, have to pause in their dreaming to pay the ticket taker for another journey. And this act, as we also see, sets in motion the ridiculous, clanking machinery that makes their illusory journey possible at all. Nevertheless, romantic escape is only one possible way in which the moving pictures can be viewed. In the fun-fair railway scene we are forced to step back and consider the hidden contrivance behind the images that pass by. By the same token, I have argued in this essay that, throughout the whole of Letter we are also invited, subtly but persistently, to step back and consider the 'hidden' contrivance behind its narrative flow. This is one of the main reasons that we are so repeatedly made aware of the fact that this film is self-consciously a visual telling by another mind of the tale that Lisa has written. The details of this encompassing narration are to be seen as determining a skeptical but sympathetic perspective that places and elucidates the radical romanticism that Lisa asks Brand and (implicitly) the audience to share.

Several paragraphs ago I urged that this movie refuses to resolve some of the chief issues that it poses. This renunciation of judgment and ultimate explanation is fully consonant with what I take the aims of the visual narration to be. There is an affirmation here that film can bring us to see the whole of a complicated pattern with acuity and insight. It is possible to resist the temptations of an engaging but false picturing of the relevant events, to resist simple expression of a sensibility too involved with or too analytically removed from the action. The goal is that these people and their circumstances are to be seen from a variety of angles and thereby with a sort of critical empathy. But this wholeness of perspective does not mean that everything we want to know or judge is knowable and open to judgment. In these lovers' lives, there are truths that they cannot at all discern, which the film reveals to the properly responsive viewer. Nevertheless, there are also mysteries about their lives which this and, probably, any narration will not dispel. It is a part of the affirmation of the possibility of seeing things more openly, broadly, and clearly to acknowledge as well the limits to what we can expect to see in such a case.

In many of Max Ophuls' films (in La Ronde, Le Plaisir, and Lola Montès) there is a character who more or less explicitly stands in and speaks for the director. In Letter, there would seem to be no one who fills this role. However, upon reflection, there is the puzzling figure of John, Stefan Brand's mute and faithful butler. It is John who first sees Lisa on the stairs and bids her a silent welcome when Brand is moved into the apartment house. He is also the character who gazes after her at the end upon the same stairway when she flees her final interview with Brand. When John first greets her before Brand's door, he is directing the proper disposition of the furnishings and, thereby, in effect, is setting the main dramatic stage of the future romance. And throughout the affair he unobtrusively facilitates the lovers' trysts. Most of all, when Brand has finished reading Lisa's letter and still cannot name its author, John is the person who does remember. He writes her name for Brand and, in doing so, implicitly signs the unsigned letter from the unknown woman. If my recent suggestions about the function of the visual narration are correct, then it is more than appropriate that John should stand, in a sense, as Ophuls' surrogate in this film. He seems to function as an emblem, within the film, of the perfect observer of these painful lives—an observer remaining discreetly at a certain remove, but seeing their respective plights with concern and balance. As such, he matches exactly the leading qualities of the invisible but unfailingly present implied filmmaker. Although John cannot speak directly either to the characters or to us, and although he does not otherwise intervene in 'the course of their love,' by registering their history in his perception and memory, he is the ideal servant to the movie's enraptured pair.⁴

NOTES

¹ Again, although I speak of Letter as being a Max Ophuls film, I want to acknowledge the way in which Howard Koch's exquisite screenplay provides a foundation for the film.

² Stendhal is reputed to have been Ophuls' favorite novelist and, in thinking about the director's concerns and attitudes as expressed in his films, reflection on the writer's great novels is interesting and instructive. But, more particularly, the views on love and related matters in De l'amour are directly and immensely suggestive in relation to Letter and other Ophuls' films. I have not attempted in this essay to analyze the rich connections that exist. However, beyond the words given at the beginning of the paper, I can't resist one further quotation. "No matter whether it be in the forest of Arden or at a Coulon ball, you can only enjoy idealizing your beloved if she appears perfect in the first place. Absolute perfection is not essential, but every perceived quality must be perfect. Only after several days of the second crystallization will the beloved appear perfect in all respects. It's quite simple; you only need to think of a perfection to perceive it at once in your beloved." The quotation that heads the paper and the one just given are from Love, translated by Gilbert and Suzanne Sale (Hammondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1975). The former is on page 65, and the latter on pp. 57-8.

³ In his essay on Letter, Robin Wood states, "Yet the more times one sees the film [Letter], the more one has the sense—it is a mark of its greatness—of the possibility of a film against Lisa: it would require only a shift of emphasis for this other film to emerge." Wood's claim makes it sound as if the film, basically structured around a strongly positive view of Lisa, contains strands, more or less unassimilated, of a darker viewpoint towards her. I am arguing that Letter develops a much more complex structure than Wood suggests, a structure that coherently incorporates both the more and less sympathetic aspects of Lisa's character. To repeat, I am not trying to provide a 'shift of emphasis' that yields a reading of the film as 'against Lisa'. Despite my disagreement with Wood, his essay is generally sensible and helpful. In particular, his discussion of the use of echoing elements in the movie constitutes a good overview of the matter. The quote above is on pages 129-30 of "Ewig hin der Liebe Gluck" in Personal Views: Explorations in Film (London and Bedford: Gordon Fraser Gallery Ltd., 1976).

⁴ Thanks to John Belton and Mark Wilson for helpful advice and suggestions.