Lola Montès · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Ophüls's last film turns mise-en-scène into moral argument. Christian Matras's camera does not merely record the New Orleans big top where Lola Montès has become a sideshow attraction — it enacts her condition, craning into the circus rigging, sweeping along the rings, tracing continuous choreographic arcs through the widescreen frame that are at once breathtaking and imprisoning. That mobility descends directly from Sunrise, whose lyrical tracking shots through the marsh established the expressive grammar of the untethered moving camera; here, in color and CinemaScope, it reaches an apotheosis in which the very beauty of the image implicates us in Lola's captivity. What the circus structure makes impossible to ignore is the gaze — Peter Ustinov's ringmaster literally auctions her scandals to a paying crowd, each flashback summoned by his barked cue, turning the camera's habitual objectification of women into the film's declared subject: the gaze is ticketed, sold, enforced by architecture. Yet the film's deepest device is the crystal-image, borrowed from Citizen Kane's non-chronological reconstruction of a celebrity life from interested witnesses. As the circus present and the ballroom-and-bedroom past contaminate each other, the actual and the virtual become indiscernible — Lola's affair with Liszt cannot be experienced; it can only be performed for an audience. Ophüls's melancholy insight is that this indiscernibility is not a formal trick but a historical truth: for a woman whose life was always already a spectacle, the difference between living and being watched collapses completely.