Max Ophuls - 1955
Using 'scope and Ophuls' only use of colour, this film looks like nothing else. Needing to move it less, but continuing to do so, Ophuls uses vertical movements more than before. The incredibly saturated, unnatural (or natural for the circus) reds, greens, and blues and often harsh lighting all contribute to the obvious way, thematically, this film discusses the playing out of a scene, an attraction, the world as a stage play, fateful.
Ophuls has something he wants to say; Lola's oppression as almost the same, her wishes crushed in the arts (dance, painting, music, and the cinema), politics, the ages, in all she is objectified. There is a rather worrying sense of revolutions and so on not mattering, as all the world is just a sad stage play for Lola; I didn't get the sense of a varied society I have had in other Ophuls' films, for all the interest in this message.
The idea of the woman as forced into prostitution, into being examined and objectified by the cinema, clearly relates to Godard and the interrogation of the camera's role. As perhaps a precusor, and certanly as singular, this is something.
Godard / fate
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