silver nitrate notes

Madame de... and the Camera That Will Not Stop Moving

4 aug 2023

Max Ophüls (1902-1957) made The Earrings of Madame de... (1953) at the end of his career, four years before his death. The cinematographer was Christian Matras, whom we have met on Renoir's La Grande Illusion sixteen years earlier. The film tells, with elaborate visual elegance, the story of a pair of diamond earrings that are sold and bought and sold and given again across the social circles of late-nineteenth-century Paris, ruining marriages and revealing characters as they go.

The plot, summarised, is light. The film is anything but. Ophüls's signature is the moving camera, and in Madame de... the camera moves more than in any other film of his career. Matras photographed long sequences in which the camera tracked, dollied, craned, and panned in continuous motion, following characters from one room to another, around staircases, into and out of carriages. The film is built almost entirely out of long takes. The cuts, when they come, are usually motivated by a character moving from one location to another that could not be reached without a cut.

The famous sequence is the ball at the opera, where Madame de... (Danielle Darrieux) waltzes with the Italian diplomat (Vittorio De Sica). Ophüls and Matras shoot the entire sequence in a series of long takes that follow the dancers across the floor, then around the dance floor, then through doorways into smaller rooms and back. The waltzes themselves are shot with the camera dollying in time with the music. The audience experiences the dance as the dancers experience it, which is as a continuous turning of the world around the partners. Most of the sequence is one piece.

Charles Boyer plays Madame de...'s husband, a general whose decency and pride are gradually exposed as the same thing. De Sica's diplomat is the lover she takes. The earrings move from her possession to her husband's to a series of others and eventually back to her, having acquired in their travels a meaning that finally destroys her. Ophüls is making a film about objects that carry feelings. The earrings know things the people do not.

The film was a commercial failure on release. Pauline Kael spent thirty years arguing for it. She was right.

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sources
[1] Williams, Alan. Max Ophüls and the Cinema of Desire. Arno, 1980.
[2] Bacher, Lutz. Max Ophuls in the Hollywood Studios. Rutgers UP, 1996.
[3] White, Susan M. The Cinema of Max Ophüls. Columbia UP, 1995.
[4] Kael, Pauline. 5001 Nights at the Movies. Holt, 1991.