SOURCE: "From Der Reigen to La Ronde: Transposition of a Stageplay to the Cinema," in Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1996, pp. 52-6.

[In the following essay, Alter discusses the difficulties of adapting Arthur Schnitzler's play Der Reigen into Ophuls 's film La Ronde.]

Arthur Schnitzler, a Viennese contemporary of writer and physician Sigmund Freud (Nehring 179-94) wrote many plays and short stories. He is considered to be perhaps the best chronicler of fin-de-siècle Vienna and the dying Austro-Hungarian empire (Alter 11).

Schnitzler wrote Der Reigen in 1896-97. Max Ophüls made the film La Ronde, based on Schnitzler's play, about a half a century later in France. Both works consist of ten dialogues, or ten scenes, portraying a series of preludes to sexual intercourse where one person has sex with a new partner until in the final scene the circle is completed and we are back with the original female partner. Except for sex, these people have nothing in common. In none of the scenes is sexual intercourse portrayed. Yet in the hands of these two artists, play and film transcend their narrow banal subject matter and let us reflect on the elusiveness of love and sex without commitment.

Schnitzler seems to view man and his world as a rather absurd combination of chance events where only death stands out as a certainty and towers over all human problems. Therefore the philosophy of carpe diem underlies the characters' hunger for sensual or emotional experiences. This egocentric concept of life, where language unmasks the hypocrisy of the speakers, reveals the stark loneliness of the characters (Alter 72-73) and made Reigen such a disturbing play of human sexuality.

According to Susan Sontag, cinema often takes its inspiration from theatrical models. She explores the medium of the cinema:

The history of cinema is often treated as the history from theatrical models. . . . Because the camera can be used to project a relatively passive, unselective kind of vision—as well as a highly ("edited") vision generally associated with movies—cinema is a "medium" as well as an art, in that sense it can encapsulate any of the performing arts and render it in a film transcription. (362)

Sontag convincingly shows that movies are images and that the distinctive unit for films is the principle of connection between the images, the relation of a shot to the one that preceded it and the one that comes after (363). With the creation of a narrator and the use of music—a waltz, of course—Max Ophüls connects the scenes in La Ronde, softening Schnitzler's portrayal of sex, loneliness, and death, ever present in his work. Liebelei, the first film by Ophüls based on a Schnitzler play, shows the same tendency to substantially modify the emotional tone of the play: "Schnitzler's ferocity seems to dissolve in a generalized sentimentality" (A. Williams 79). The nuances of language so important in the original plays largely have been lost, or perhaps they were impossible to render in French. As the importance of language decreases, all other cinematographic devices gain in importance. The viewer is thus inclined to forget the deeper implications of loneliness, pessimism, hypocrisy, and melancholy.

Schnitzler stresses the sexual drive more than Ophüls's romantic film, in which women seem to long for some sort of affection and tenderness, which forever eludes them. What is left is the melancholy of time passing, and living for the moment.

The play, as well as the film, shocked censors and public alike. It might therefore be appropriate to give a quick overview of the reception of both.

Because of the subject matter, Der Reigen was published in a private printing in 1900 and was not for sale. The work was well received by Schnitzler's friends, but as early as 1903 some scenes evoked sharp criticism in Munich on moral grounds. According to Gerd Schneider's well-researched article on the reception of book, play, and film, it was not any one scene in particular that created an uproar, but how family life, marriage, Christian religious values, the officer class, and the class of actors were defamed and degraded. Yet in the play, not one sexual act is shown; either the lights are dimmed or the curtain falls. By 1905 it was banned throughout Germany. Because unauthorized stage performances increased after 1918, Schnitzler gave permission for an official performance first in Berlin and only later in Vienna. The "Viennese decadent work" activated nationalistic and anti-Semitic groups and the performance ended in a rather infamous theater scandal in Berlin in February 1921. The subsequent Reigen trial lasted from November 5 to November 18; the defense showed that Reigen was only used as a pretext for anti-Semitic feelings rather than concern about immortality. After the Reigen trial in Berlin, the play was staged again in Vienna in March 1922. Police were present to maintain public order, but to avoid the recurrence of another scandal, Schnitzler withdrew his permission to have the play performed. The last showing in Vienna took place on June 30, 1922, and not until 1982 (fifty years after Schnitzler's death) could Reigen be seen again on stage (Schneider 79). Then, on New Year's Eve 1981, it was performed on several European stages to an amused post-sexual-revolution audience. The witty social satire of turn-of-the-century Vienna was taken in good fun as a period piece of 1900.

In spite of its limited performance on the German-speaking stage, several translations were made into English, none very satisfactory. In New York the book was seen as a lurid story of ten illicit sexual encounters and according to Gerd Schneider, it was banned by John S. Summer, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Later, the charges against the bookstore owner were dismissed, but other justices labelled it as "obscene and indecent" (Schneider 80). A performance of Reigen had to be changed to a reading mainly because of objections of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. The censorship of Reigen, however, was not over yet. On the next occasion the target was not the book or the play but the French movie version, directed by Ophüls in 1950 and released in this country in 1951 under the title La Ronde. While the British Film Academy had voted La Ronde as the best film in 1951, it was banned in New York State by the Division of Motion Pictures of the State Education Bureau and the National Legion of Decency. The ruling was not overturned until 1954, but it was a cut version which finally played in New York. Eric Bentley's review was rather negative. He objected strongly to the film's watered-down version. He did not like the translation and published one of his own (Schneider 82), which is also not very good. Other versions followed, none too good, none capturing Schnitzler's feel for language, nuance, and dialogue. However, it is interesting that despite all the negative comments and publicity, neither play nor film has vanished from American theater and art cinema. Today, audiences enjoy both Schnitzler's sardonic view of human behavior and Ophüls's naughty, opulent sex comedy. The amoral content of play and film contain enough universality to resurface successfully in the era of the post-sexual revolution. So it can be viewed again in a modern context and not only as a dance macabre of the "K. und K." monarchy, but as a comment on one night stands and the dangers of transmittance of sexual diseases. These implications are certainly not an accidental by-product of Der Reigen, for Schnitzler, the physician, certainly was aware of the many-layered implications he wove into the fabric of the play.

Max Ophüls used this text as a starting point for La Ronde. He transformed the play and evidently had no scruples about changing the script to maximize use of different medium (Koch 310-29), which permitted him a different focus. Ophüls cleverly took the bite out of the satire on human sexuality. We no longer are in the historical Vienna of 1900, where we move through the layers of Viennese society from prostitute and soldier up and down again, where the sexual act fleetingly brings together the various types of a stratified society, and where for a brief moment during the sexual encounter the ego is suppressed, leveling social classes. Ophüls uses the dialogues between the various types to show his imaginary Vienna. It is a view from an outsider, not only one generation in time removed from Freud, but also from the perspective of an outsider. Ophüls uses the camera and sensual music to enhance his magnificent, rich staging. The characters are obviously manipulated by a very sophisticated metteur en scène, a meneur du jeu. Transitoriness is still present, but the finality of death certainly is held at bay. The camera focuses on more pleasant objects. This clever innovation of Ophüls's ties the scenes together and gives the film version the continuity needed: "He is at once metteur-en-scene and a narrator-commentator in the Brechtian mode" (Kuhn 94). To Ophüls, two world wars and a half a century later, the various ramifications of class society circa 1900 had lost the original pertinence. "Schnitzler is Freud's contemporary in ways that Ophüls simply is not" (Williams 74-79). Only a diffuse, melancholic atmosphere remains. Schnitzler's bitter comment has been watered down. The game of flirtation and sex, with the hope of affection and love, was more in the post-Second-World-War spirit of the fifties. Western Europe and America tried to regain their loss of innocence. So the film, too, is a product of its time. The viewpoint has shifted.¹

In both play and film, women play the more interesting role. Schnitzler and Ophüls draw their women compassionately but in completely traditional roles, passive partners in the game of sexual pursuit, hoping for more than a moment of sexual frenzy. Though they want more than a momentary sexual release, still they accept their disappointment in graceful resignation. Only twice the woman is shown as the aggressor: the prostitute in the beginning of the narrative circle and the actress who seduces the weak-willed degenerate count in the morning (Schwarz 54-70). (The count would prefer sex in the evening, after theater and dinner, the socially acceptable way for his role in society. She, however, seduces him in the morning, which makes a dinner engagement in the evening pointless.) Both prostitute and actress are outside accepted society, so neither of them needs to play the role of acquiescent female assigned to them by the society of the fin de siècle. The males in both versions are sexual chauvinists.

Ophüls shows women's expressive faces, shows the game of love with its own set of rules mirrored particularly in the female partners. The movie is frankly romantic, the decaying belle epoche opulent and beautiful in its disintegration. It is the farbenvolle Untergang (colorful decline) of Stefan George's poem. However, the decline of the individual in a crumbling bourgeois society is not Ophüls's primary subject. His preference is for an imaginary Vienna (Koch 310-13), where the narrator records like his camera. The commentator pulls the strings. The characters are puppets, unaware of being manipulated. We, the film audience, do know. We see the meta-narrator use a clapboard; we see him cut and censor a strip of the film; he speaks to his puppets; and we see him fixing the carousel when it almost gets stuck, which would interrupt the flow of action. The mini-scenes are an eleventh dialogue with us, the film audience (Cf. Williams 41). The frame is given at the beginning of the film, a stage within a stage—an old-fashioned merry-go-round, a waltz, as a perfect metaphor for life and sex.

The use of the camera permits us to see exactly what the director wants us to see. Gertrud Koch shows how the camera follows the director's building of architectonic stages with all sorts of stairways and spiral staircases suggesting by their very nature the different stages of the actual seductions. One sequence flows readily into the next. The new medium of the camera becomes our eye and we only see what the genial director wants us to see. The camera allows for a selective view. This is intensified by the circular movement of the camera visually brought home to us with the merry-go-round that connects the scenes. The many mirrors show us the scenery from a different angle; the many spiral stairways—going up and down—suggest the sexual act not shown. The clever placement of clocks signals the passage of time, just as the many references to time in the dialogues heighten the feeling of the transitoriness of the brief encounters. Yet the scenes are united by the commenting stage director who, in changing costume from scene to scene, blends the sexual sequences together with urban charm and wit (Koch 71-80): prostitute-soldier, soldier-servant girl, servant girl-the young son of the upper-middle-class family, the young son-married lady, the married lady and her boring businessman husband. The married woman is called Emma, alluding to Emma Bovary. In the movie as well as the play, the theme of loneliness and hypocrisy of the married couple exactly placed in the center of the play and film are poignant reminders of the frailty and dishonesty of human relations; the double standard of society is unmasked. After the fifth dialogue in Der Reigen portraying the married couple, the cornerstone of traditional bourgeois society, the play turns to the husband with the süsse Mädel, poorly translated as grisette in La Ronde (here we see the difficulty of nuances of translation)—the süsse Mädel with the poet, the poet with the actress, the actress with the count, and finally the count with the same prostitute we saw in the beginning. It is theater within theater, film within film. The introduction of the conferencier is obviously patterned after Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author or Thornton Wilder's Our Town (Koch 325 and Magris 79).

At the end, when the circle has closed, the dance macabre is over. In the film the count leaves the shabby room of the prostitute followed by Harras, his dog, an aristocratic, skinny, elegant, over-bred Windhund, a final metaphor of the count and of all other males in the film. Windhund, with its double meaning in German (greyhound/philanderer), is a fitting image for the final statement of the movie. Viennese society, like the elegant dog, is no longer fashionable and has largely ceased to exist. Harras the Windhund has become as much an anachronism as the society of Freud's Vienna.

In conclusion, in Reigen we still recognize the old types that populated the decaying Austrian empire; in La Ronde, no longer. The social criticism Schnitzler portrays with the eye of the diagnostician is to Claudio Margis the "historical time frozen in a moment of sexual frenzy," and he sees this pattern woven into the destructive rhythm of the sexual drive. Sympathy and nihilism fuse in Schnitzler into a distressing vision of a society in which sickness charts the human condition and in which history and politics appear as illusionary masks of sexual drives and fate (Magris 73-75). For Schnitzler, to live means to betray "wir spielen immer, wer es wei ist klug" (498). Feelings and passion react like mechanical physiological impulses, like chemical elements which sometimes unite, separate, and destroy one another.² It is the determinism of the turn of the century showing the absurdity of life.

Ophüls also shows a dying society, but from the different perspective made possible by the new medium, the camera. He unfolds a visual, sensual, theatrical spectacle which permits him to show, in a dreamlike fashion, his world view of Schnitzler's Vienna. The view differs from Dr. Schnitzler; to Ophüls, sexual drive is no longer linked to disintegration and death. The characters are openly manipulated by a benevolent meta-narrator, who fifty years after Freud holds a much more generous and romantic view of human sexuality. Ophüls, in the spirit of his age, views the sexual drive within the framework of bourgeois society and not as a destructive chaotic force that destroys society from the outside. Therefore, the unfolding of a luscious spectacle of seductions has become the focal point of the film, which Is in part due to the new medium. Paradoxically, the fifties was a more generous and naive age than the decaying nineteenth century.

NOTES

¹ See Cf. Williams 38-50. I find it hard to agree with the conclusion that "Ophüls's irony is . . . more demoralizing than Schnitzler's."

² See Swales, especially the chapter on "Mechanical Comedy" (233-52).

WORKS CITED

Alter, Maria Pospischil. The Concept of Physician in the Writings of Hans Carossa and Arthur Schnitzler. Berne and Frankfurt: Herbert Lang, 1971.

Koch, Gertrude. "Positivierung der Gefühle. Zu den Schnitzler Verfilmungen von Max Ophüls." Arthur Schnitzler in neuer Sicht. Ed. Hartmut Scheible. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1981.

Kuhn, Anna. "The Romantization of Arthur Schnitzler: Max Ophüls's Adaptations of Liebelei and Reigen." Probleme der Moderne. Studien zur deutschen Literatur: Von Nietzsche bis Brecht. Eds. Benjamin Bennett, Anton Kaes and William J. Lillyman. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1983.

Magris, Claudio. "Arthur Schnitzler und das Karussell der Triebe." Arthur Schnitzler in neuer Sicht. Ed. Hartmut Scheible. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1981.

Nehring, Wolfgang. "Schnitzler: Freud's Alter Ego." Modern Austrian Literature Vol. 10 (3/4 Nov. 1977): 179-94.

Schneider, Gert K. "The Reception of Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen in the Old Country and the New World: A Study in Cultural Differences." Modern Austrian Literature Vol. 19 (3/4 Nov. 1986): 75-89.

Schnitzler, Arthur. Gesammelte Werke Die dramatischen Werke. Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1962.

Schwarz, Egon. "Arthur Schnitzler und die Aristokratie." Arthur Schnitzler in neuer Sicht. Ed. Hartmut Scheible. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1981.

Sontag, Susan. "Film and Theatre." Film Theory and Criticism. Eds. Gerald Most and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1974.

Swales, Martin. Arthur Schnitzler: A Critical Study. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971.

Williams, Alan. "Reading Ophüls Reading Schnitzler: Liebelei (1933)." German Film and Literature Adaptations and Transformations. Ed. Eric Rentschler. New York and London: Methuen, 1986.

Williams, Alan. "Keeping the Circle Turning: Ophüls's La Ronde [1959] from the Play by Arthur Schnitzler." Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation. Eds. Andrew Horton and Joan Magretta. New York: Frederich Ungar, 1981.