Audio transcription

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Letter from an Unknown Woman introduction by David Pendleton and Laura Mulvey. Sunday February 8, 2009.

David Pendleton  0:12  

Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Hi, my name is David Pendleton. I'm the programmer here at the UCLA film— Oh my god. That's a Freudian slip. I've been here for a year and a half. I've been waiting to do that. I was at UCLA for many years. But you are actually currently attending a screening of the Harvard Film Archive. My apologies to Haden Guest. Of course I had to do it when our director is here. Actually, I think our guests may have something to do with it, because I actually first heard her speak at first about her work when I was a student at UCLA. But in any case, before we get to that, let me make a brief reminder. Please turn off your cell phones or anything else. Any other electronic devices that might emit noise or light. Please don't text during the film. Even if you're not making any noise, the light can be very distracting.

And welcome to the first of the last three nights of our Max Ophuls retrospective. That's what I said three nights. There's only two nights left according to our printed calendar. However, we have added a screening on Thursday—this coming Thursday—February 12th. It's the makeup screening of the film Le Plaisir which we had to cancel unfortunately the originally scheduled screening. So if you know anybody who's interested in coming, who wants to see Le Plaisir, one of Ophuls’ last four masterpieces, be here Thursday at 7pm. 

Tonight and tomorrow night we're presenting four of Ophuls 1940s films, the 1940s having been kind of a transitional decade for Ophuls, who began his career as a stage director in Germany, primarily Germany, but also Austria in the 1920s, before becoming a filmmaker in Germany at the beginning of the 1930s, but spent most of the 1930s as a filmmaker in France. The film that we're going to see tonight is the second of the four films that he made in Hollywood. The second film tonight which starts at 9:30, is From Mayerling to Sarajevo, which is actually Ophuls’ last film that he made in France before leaving for the US on the eve of the the Nazi invasion and occupation of France.

And so he made four films in Hollywood, the second of which is Letter from a Unknown Woman generally considered the greatest of his four Hollywood films. And here to say a few words about that film we're very grateful to have the scholar, writer and filmmaker, Laura Mulvey. Anybody who has taken a film studies class will know the name Laura Mulvey because of her groundbreaking essay from 1975, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” That article is best known today for its provocative thesis that classical cinema relies on a sort of a gendered division of labor, whereby the woman on screen typically figures as the object of desire, while the man on screen is the narrative agent and functions as the object of identification for the spectator, who is thereby presumed to be male and heterosexual. I beg the pardon of Ms. Mulvey for boiling this essay down to that to that thumbnail, which hardly does it justice. But it does sort of indicate the ways in which Laura Mulvey’s work makes her an excellent person to speak to us about Max Ophuls because so many of his films involve the status of woman often as an object of competition or exchange between men, the question of the woman as spectacle—most notably in Lola Montez—but also and especially in tonight's film: the question of female desire and female agency and the ways in which that comes into conflict with the expectations of the roles of mother and wife. Having authored “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” would in itself be remarkable. But in fact, it's only one facet of Laura Mulvey’s long and noteworthy career. Besides having co-authored a book on Godard, as well as the book on Citizen Kane for the EFI classic film series, her essays are collected in two volumes, Visual and Other Pleasures, the second and expanded edition of which will be coming out shortly, as well as Fetishism and Curiosity. Her most recent book is Death 24x Times a Second, which is a book about spectatorship in the digital age. And I should also point out her remarkable commentary track on Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom on the DVD for those of you who haven't already listened to that. And Laura Mulvey’s also a filmmaker in her own right having made a series of groundbreaking films in the 1970s and the 1980s in collaboration with Peter Wollen, most notably, or probably the best known, one of which is Riddles of the Sphinx, as well as more recently in 1996, the film Disgraced Monuments. And now without further ado, here to say a few words about Ophuls and Letter From an Unknown Woman, please welcome Laura Mulvey.

Laura Mulvey  5:25  

Thank you very much, David. And I'm delighted to be here at the Harvard Film Archive. I know it's a little bit tricky introducing a movie—Thank you very much. Can people hear me? Yeah.—introducing a movie when the movie is the main attraction. But I am also here just to say a few words, introduce the film, but I won’t be too long because I hope to kind of balance the introduction with the desire to see the film. And I've got, I thought I'd make five points to begin with. One is the first one is about the themes that are there in Letter From an Unknown Woman  that are particularly of interest to me. Secondly is about the adaptation from the Stefan Zweig novella, thirdly about the production. Fourthly, a few theoretical points the film brings up and finally, a couple of final points of my own. So, here goes.

Max Ophuls was born in 1902 in Saarbrücken in the Saar. And this is significant for his future life is the Saar is that bit, that little bit in between France and Germany, which was constantly being exchanged between the two countries, and which was more or less kind of bilingual and culturally fluent in both French and German. He died in Hamburg when he was producing a play. His ashes were very appropriately buried in Pere Lachaise, the famous cemetery in Paris. Now, a few things about recurring themes, and particularly to do with gender and genre as David just mentioned, but I want to try and give a kind of twist here to the way in which Ophuls is very frequently thought about and discussed.

Now within the history of film theory and criticism, discussion of Ophuls’ work has mutated in a way that's quite typical of directors of this kind, in that, first of all, he was discussed as an important director, particularly by the critics of the Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s, who supported Ophuls, even at his worst moments, during the failure, for instance of Lola Montez towards the end of his career, but more and more as feminist film theory evolved, he came to be seen as the director of the woman's film and a great experiment of the melodrama, and if any of you are interested In the work of Douglas Sirk, you see a similar kind of trajectory in which Sirk was first kind of acclaimed as a director. And then re-claimed as director of the woman's film. By and large discussion of Hollywood melodrama has revolved around women generally dismissed, originally as trashy romances, weepies, films directed to a female audience, which ultimately then offered an opportunity for applying feminist readings. And so in a sense, one could say that the melodrama provides a kind of crucible for the development of feminist film theory. Now, although Ophuls’ films are concentrated on those associated with melodrama, love, women, romance and so on, at the heart of the three of his most important films—Liebelei  made in Germany in 1933, Letter from an Unknown Woman in Hollywood in 1948, and Madame De... in France in 1952—each made in very differing moments of his career and clearly in very different circumstances. In the heart of these three films, to my mind lies a crucial twist. In these films Ophuls returns to fin-de-siècle Europe. While this context offered him appropriate settings for his extraordinary cinematic style, with its elaborate operas, balls and particularly the wonderful choreography of camera and dance around the waltz sequences—it also the fantasy act, Europe provided an imaginary space for conflict between adulterous love and the order represented by an aristocratic and military husband. So this theme amounts to a repeated reflection on an opposition between masculinities at the dawn of the modern era, and suggests that the figure of the womanizer—one of excess visually and erotically—is there to challenge a patriarchal order represented by the military man. And so while Ophuls’ films certainly belong to the melodrama genre, I would argue these three make an original contribution to it. 

Now, the womanizer conjures up a contradictory paradoxical discourse of sexuality under patriarchy, the simultaneous centrality and repression of sex and gender under its rules. Tania Modleski has written about the significance of Stefan our protagonist in Letter From an Unknown Woman as a feminized man, and she points out that this figure can't be detached from the figure of the woman. She says, although he's a womanizer, this activity paradoxically womanizes him where it immerses him in a sensuous existence, a stereotype associated with the feminine and running counter to the self-denial espoused by Lisa's husband. And this argument has been taken up, elaborated, debated with Stanley Cavell in his wider discussion with feminized man in Contesting Tears: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. So, to my mind, this opposition introduces an important ideological element into these Ophuls movies and enables Ophuls to condemn the death dealing rigidity of aristocratic patriarchy and particularly that of the Habsburg elite, and it's perhaps no accident that there's opposition. First between two masculinities with the anti-war themes in Liebelei—for those of you who've seen Liebelei in this season—which was made in Berlin in 1933, under the immediate shadow of fascism. But the opposition womanizer/military man—from a more abstract poetic and theoretical perspective—creates an emblematic opposition between Eros and Thanatos, between the conflicting principles of love and death, which was so important to the later Freud. And this opposition could also be displaced onto narrative structure itself, in which the principle of desire—emblematized by the womanizer—fires and drives forward a story, while death—emblematized by the military man—brings it to closure and stillness. 

Now adaptation... In order to create this opposition military man womanizer, the Stefan Zweig original novella Letter From an Unknown Woman had to be radically changed. It was militarized. In the second part of the film, a rich, aristocratic military man is introduced as the husband of the unknown woman. Now from a practical point of view, a change along these lines was needed. One problem that constantly faced the process of scriptwriting adaptation was the explicitly sexual content of the original story. And the Breen office in charge of censorship would continue to ask for revisions right through to production on a script that was already kind of self-censored by writers who knew very well what they were up against. So, in the original Stefan Zweig story, Lisa, in the second part of the film, is a successful courtesan. This would neither have been acceptable to the Breen office, to the censorship of Hollywood, nor would it have been acceptable for a major star like Joan Fontaine to play such a role. So, there are practical reasons why in the second part of the film, she has to marry and become respectable. 

On the other hand, to give the respectable husband a strongly military identity sets up the opposition between two iconographies of masculinity that I've been outlining here, and I think in an interesting way, this “militarization” as I call it, this process is prefigured in a sequence in the film which takes place in the Austrian military city of Linz. And this is a sequence that Ophuls is known to have initiated and contributed to the script. In the actual novella, the family moves to Innsbruck, and the move takes perhaps less than one page, and there is no mention of any military. And to my mind, the Linz sequence combined two key Ophuls’ elements: an excuse for extremely long and intricate track camera movements, and an emphasis on the significance of the military in the Austro-Hungarian empire, which then, as I'm arguing is later dramatized to these opposing images of masculinity. 

Now, as David pointed out, this is about the production. My third point. Letters From an Unknown Woman was Ophuls second Hollywood film. Unlike many other European exiles who'd gone more or less straight to the United States, Ophuls stayed in France. After leaving Germany in ‘33, he became a French citizen. He actively participated—through German-language radio broadcasts—in anti-Nazi propaganda, and he was one of the last of the exiles to arrive in Hollywood, and he arrived in ‘41 and was without work until ‘45. And this was an extremely difficult period for him professionally, personally and even financially. Preston Sturges offered him the first opportunity of work, but their relationship deteriorated. After increasingly appalling humiliations, Ophuls was sacked from that project. Douglas Fairbanks Jr, whose film The Exile will be shown tomorrow, came to his rescue and treated him with respect and dignity throughout the production of the film. Letter, however, offered hope of a real and lasting breakthrough. 

The project was executive producer William Dozier, as favored vehicle for his new wife, Joan Fontaine, and for the new independent production company Rampart Films. The producer was John Houseman who is from Alsace, a neighboring territory to the Saar. And so Ophuls could speak French and German easily with Houseman. Houseman had worked with the screenwriter Howard Koch in Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater On the Air. So while both were now established Hollywood professionals, neither of them were creatures of the industry. Both were independent minded men. Ophuls had comparative freedom of production. And most importantly, he had Franz Planer, his cinematographer who he previously worked with on The Exile and on Liebelei. But perhaps most importantly of all, he had the use of a crane or the wooden arm for his characteristic crane shots, and all the grips and carpenters needed to move around walls, the wild walls to accommodate trucks, camera movements of all kinds, and he even had real snow for the meeting between Lisa and Stefan. So when you see that moment, remember that the snow had been shoveled by six prop men for three hours before they started to shoot. 

However, the production was not untroubled and one Universal producer remembered thinking during the sequence when the child Lisa first goes into Stefan’s apartment. He says ”There are too many silent traveling shots, nothing much going on. Too much of that, not enough dialogue” or something. But if Ophuls had friends on the production, his inveterate enemy was the editor Ted Kent, who he'd also crossed swords with on The Exile. Kent fiercely objected to sequences that develop through unbroken takes. And the particular sequence when Lisa creeps into Stefan’s flat is a case in point. There are many others throughout the film. The editor managed to break up a carefully conceived camera movement through which the sequence was kind of rhythmically and carefully developing with cutaways to Lisa and cutaways to Johan, Stefan’s valet.

There was a difference of opinion about the ending. Dozier was very keen to insert shots of Lisa as a kind of montage of memory at the end. (Lisa, Joan Fontaine, his wife, the star of the movie.) And Dozier described in retrospect the long harangues that were finally resolved when John Houseman said, “Okay, we will put that in, but we will call it the President's shot.” Dozier himself says, “John didn't want it. Max didn't want it. They thought it was corny. I admitted it was corny, but I said, I think it could be telling and very touching.” So when you see these flashback shots at the end, see what you think. 

Two theoretical points that have been brought up in relation to Letter: Victor Perkins has commented on Letter as a film of impossible narration. There's no consistent point from which the film can be told. The letters read out in Lisa's voice, and he says, “No rational timescale or system of subjectivity, hold the key elements in harmony. Lisa cannot be reading the letter because she's dead. Stefan cannot be imagining the reading in Lisa's voice, since he doesn't know who sent it. Images are not always a projection of the letter. Ophuls and Koch pushed hard against the limits of convention, where others will have sought to naturalize its artifice.” And repetition. Stanley Cavell again has drawn particular attention to the importance of repetition in Letter from an Unknown Woman. There are recurring farewells, railway stations, the repeated phrase, “I'll see you in two weeks.” And both Perkins and Cavell comment on one of the film's most magical repetitions: the scene when Lisa as a young girl hides on the stairs in Stephan’s flat and watches him return late at night with a woman. This is repeated when Stefan takes the grownup Lisa back to the same flat. In the second scene, the camera drops her previous place on the stairs, marking a moment of innovational artifice and the complex implications of that particular moment. I think the film's multiple repetitions finally resolve themselves into a sense of the erotic compulsion that drives Stefan as the womanizer, that ultimately overtakes the repetition compulsion that had been essential to him as a successful pianist. The successful pianist has to practice, perform. Repetition is of the essence. And that drive is replaced by the drive of the womanizer. 

Now finally, my last points. I want to end with subjective, perhaps whimsical observation. I suggested at the beginning that Ophuls uses stories and settings to create an opposition between a military man and a womanizer. But to my mind, the womanizer might also be a figure of Ophuls’ own desiring engagement with the mobile camera, its exuberance and excess, the extended shot in counter-distinction to the rigidity of the normal studio style—the studio style with its adherence to convention, and its subordination to the laws of the industry. I mean, there's a kind of metaphorical extension here, in which I'm putting the industry in the place of the patriarch, and Ophuls in the place of the subversive womanizer. Ophuls belongs to the modern world, epitomized by the internationalism of the Jewish intelligentsia to which he belonged, and that was lost and fractured with the other modernities by fascism. He emerged as a filmmaker in the early 30s, as that period of utopian modernity came to a definitive end. And I think it would be a mistake to see the films that look back to the fin de siècle as pure period pieces. Implicitly, they were turned to another moment in which history was also at a crossroads. As the domination of the ancien regime declined, new cultures were emerging, including that of the cinema. Ophuls’s cinema celebrates the excitement of the machine itself, and its metaphoric relationship to desire. And for me this fusion is represented above all. First, for those of you who've seen Liebelei when Fritz and Christine dance to the little mechanical jukebox, surrounded by mirrors caught by the movement of the camera. And secondly, in Stefan and Lisa's journey on the fairground with its citation of both railway travel and the 19th century panorama, which you're about to see in Letters of an Unknown Woman. Both involve linking a mechanism of modern popular culture to love and to the cinema. And I just want to end with the rhyme that James Mason—who worked with Ophuls in two films, Caught and The Reckless Moment—composed in his honor. I'll just give you the beginning and the end. It starts, “A shot that doesn't call for tracks is agony for dear old Max,” and it ends, “And the day they took away his crane. I thought Max would never smile again.” So remember that when you see Ophuls’s extraordinary mastery of cinematic style.

[APPLAUSE]

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