Compositional Affect in Ophuls

In his celebrated handbook The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968, Andrew Sarris offers the following assessment of German emigre Max Ophuls: ‘The cinema of Max Ophuls translates tracking into walking [...] and 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’. Such mastery found early confirmation in Ophuls’s 1934 Italian feature, La signora di tutti; the film was awarded a prize in Venice that year for technical brilliance — ‘il film italiano tecnicamente migliore’ — and it includes a number of bravura tracks, tilts, pans, and wipes. The film’s narrative, too, tacks backward and forward, and this gives rise to a series of disorienting vocal overlaps and irregular dissolves. Yet precisely as the film outplays the codes of continuity editing at every turn (and so disputes the concept of continuity more broadly), it marks decisive moments in its plot with compositions set in extraordinary depth — a technique long associated with duration, realism, and spatial integrity. In what follows, I want to give a somewhat different account of the work deep space can do: for not only have its critical fortunes turned on a selective reading of Andre Bazin, its development in Ophuls suggests that a richer dialectic is at work between motion and arrest, the animate and inanimate, and the real and its reproductions. By way of introduction, then, I would like to sketch in the range of Bazin’s arguments in favour of deep space composition (and its corollary, deep focus photography), as his work has become a touchstone in critical discussions of screen space. As Daniel Morgan has observed

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