Letter From An Unknown Woman

Max Ophuls - 1948
I find it difficult to theorsie about precise compositons in Ophuls; I'll say the compositions are often long, relatively intricately framed, with lovely soft blacks (it may be partly the print for this). What it is is immensely beautiful, backlights and all. The images are usually then complex, often with neat, but full, bars crossing one another, imprisonment maybe. The major scenes can break with this to have clear backdrops, often with smoke, to give a different feeling.
What this film does have is great depth of field. Down and up staircases, across rooms, it really uses that big space.
But it is camera movement that we are told to talk about with Ophuls. Those pans and usually tracks, nearly always moving at least a bit, gradation of emphasis. There are some through walls here, and the most radical is probably coming into the opera, where for all the bodies we are told of a fate (the voiceover, and the actions shown, combine to be very novelistic; it's a Zweig novel). The tracks can also wonderfully convey the music early on (very clear sound mix).
Ophuls tracks, to me, seem to open a new world with every move. Quite tentaive sometimes, not 'smooth' in the precision and determinism of, say, Kubrick's, they seem to mirror the passing of time, the constant surprise at a new future, a new space. My (rather up in the air) thesis is that this is due to the people moving with the tracks rarely being interested in where they are going. The compostions center rather than leave space to be balanced as they follow. The character is rarely looking where they are going; the mind and the story is nearly always from where they have come, a thought or memory (counterexamples to this, among others, would be the nun). Repeated motifs, endless numbers of them, add to this. It is as though the characters eyes only ever reach the side of the frame, so each track opens an entirely new world to see.
Ophuls, for me, is as much as anything about incredible reticence. Largely in long shots, no histrionics usually, turning from the action, no raised voices, not milking looks. At the end the couple of shots that do turn it on are all the more powerful.
What can cinema do, and Ophuls world can't? It can, as in previous superimpositons, cross memory in that montage sequence, fly together things that even we can't remember; but how could we forget, be so cruel? And those who are forgotten; Zweig's story is a deeply affecting one. Stefan is, by the story, really more of a cad and frankly a bastard than his rather nice demeanour could suggest here; this is a tragedy, making Stefan too nice, or rather reading it that way, could make Lisa's actions too arbitrary. But if one can't remember... well. Ophul's sheer fatalism (is it class specific? That would be pushing it. By the way, I like the little moments like the rug-beating and the workers at the fairground; Ophuls doesn't have to be high society) does trouble me, but the sheer beauty and affection of his mis-en-scene are quite something.