Max Ophuls

Ophuls matters on this site because he makes it hardest to reduce camera movement to a technical label. Andrew Sarris’s praise — that “if all the dollies and cranes in the world snap to attention when his name is mentioned, it is because he gave camera movement its finest hours in the history of the cinema” — is the standard reference point, and the essay Camera Movement in Max Ophuls takes it seriously while resisting Sarris’s complaint that the camera movement has overshadowed Ophuls’s “other merits.” The essay’s argument is the opposite: camera movement is Ophuls’s mode of thinking, and the rest of his style — the social and gender critique, the visual-aural rhyming — flows through it.

The essay opens by refusing two reductive frameworks. Barry Salt’s taxonomy of pans, tilts, tracks and cranes — tabulated film by film with confident totals — is treated as descriptively narrow: “I doubt if anyone, including Salt himself, can use this data to account for our experience viewing the moving images.” Bordwell’s purely cognitivist position is pushed back on with equal care: it is right that the camera’s invisibility forces a perceptual rather than diegetic account, but wrong if it pretends camera movement cannot be “a trace of mental or emotional processes” or “a bearer of decisions or traits.” Edward Branigan supplies the corrective the essay borrows: “our talk about a camera is firmly linked with our implicit knowledge of everyday practices, aesthetic discourses, film theories, and narrative theories. ‘Sense perception’ is not enough.”

What follows is a sustained reading of Ophuls’s sensibility. In the “Maison Tellier” episode of Le Plaisir the camera refuses to enter the brothel; in Letter from an Unknown Woman the staircase shot from Lisa’s adolescence is repeated years later, so the second take “becomes, with the benefit of hindsight, a comment on the act that it purports to depict.” Sarris’s reading is quoted directly: “Ophuls’s camera slowly turns from its vantage point on a higher landing to record the definitive memory-image of love. For a moment we enter the privileged sanctuary of remembrance.” The waltz sequence in Madame de… is broken down shot by shot to show how the dissolves between five nights and five settings are masked by foreground and music — the camera “destroys a sense of orientation in order to achieve immersion.”

The deeper analogy the essay reaches for is calligraphy and music. Bertolucci’s gesture-based account of cinema is quoted to make the point: “I move the camera as if I was gesturing with it.” Tony Aboyantz remembered Ophuls directing with a baton; Eugene Lourié remembered scripts annotated with “allegro,” “andante,” “allegro cantabile.” This is what makes Ophuls clarifying for the rest of the site: he demonstrates that camera movement is expression, not just coverage, and that formal analysis has to stay close to singular style rather than collapsing everything into a generic technical taxonomy.

The Mysterious Craft of Camera Movement returns to the same lesson in summary form. Functions like patterning and bracketing — illustrated through the Letter from an Unknown Woman staircase and the doctors’ conversation in Caught — are exactly the Ophulsian moves that resist the pan/tilt/track inventory. Read alongside A Crash Course on Cinematic Staging, Ophuls also makes it impossible to treat camera movement as an alternative to staging. His scenes are choreographed for movement and for blocking; the two systems comment on each other, often contrapuntally, sometimes within a single take.