EN
“Have you ever shuffled faces like cards, hoping to find one that lies somewhere, just over the edge of your memory? The one you’ve been waiting for? Well tonight when I first saw you, and then later when I watched you in the dark, it was as though I’d found that one face among all the others. Who are you?”
Stefan
“By the time you read this letter I may be dead. If this reaches you, you will know how I became yours when you didn’t even know who I was or even that I existed.”
Lisa
“I think, and this is nearly an axiom with me, that there are as many creators to a film as there are people who work on it. My job as director consists of making, out of this choir of people, a creator of films.”
Max Ophüls
“Film, of course, unlike opera, is a medium of resurrection, where images can come back to haunt us from a distant past; the melodrama of this film exploits this fully. In many operas’ episodic raising and falling of curtains, the potential for the tragic heroine’s happiness always lurks behind a latent revelation, a pulsating recognition, or simply the elusive, right timing. But in opera, these concerns inhabit a social landscape (as they do in other melodramas). In Max Ophuls’ film, the landscape of turn-of-the-century Vienna is instead transformed into a stage of Lisa’s desire: doorways, stairs, streets and trains are the cinematic vehicles that enact oneiric entrances and departures, moments pregnant with the psychic promise of happiness – in the imagery of the film, happiness is a fairground – that will not be realised, and thus Lisa meets the same fate as her operatic forebears.”
Carla Marcantionio
