How does Letter From an Unknown Women balance commitment to and detachment form Lisas point of view

MA1052 CRITICAL THEORY AND TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
Film
Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948)
Reading
Perkins, V.F. (1981) ‘Moments of choice’ in The Movie 58, 1141-1145. This is also available online: http://www.rouge.com.au/

Further Viewing
Liebelei (Max Ophuls, 1933)
Caught (Max Ophuls, 1948)
The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949)
La Ronde (Max Ophuls, 1950)
Le Plaisir (Max Ophuls, 1952)
Madame de… (Max Ophuls, 1953)
Lola Montes (Max Ophuls, 1955)

Further Reading & Lecture Sources
The literature on Letter from an Unknown Woman is extensive. This is a small selection.

The following journals have all devoted special issues to Ophuls:

Film Comment summer (1971) – Available in the British Film Institute library (BFI) – http://www.bfi.org.uk/filmtvinfo/library/

Movie Issues 29/30, 34/35 and 36 all have important articles on Ophuls. These journals are held in Founders.

CineAction 52 (2000) – in the basement of Founders library.

Arizona Quarterly 60:5 (2004) – this special issue on Ophuls contains the most recent scholarly work, twelve articles from a 2003 conference on the director. It is available as an electronic journal via Metalib, via the library website.

Bacher, Lutz (1996) Max Ophuls in the Hollywood Studios. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press.

Bordwell, David (1985) Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Methuen.

Browne, Nick (1982) The Rhetoric of Filmic Narration. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press.

Bukey, Evan Burr (1986) Hitler’s Hometown: Linz, Austria 1908-1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Cavell, Stanley (1996a) ‘Psychoanalysis and Cinema: Moments of Letter from an Unknown Woman’ in Cavell Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 81-114.

Cavell, Stanley (1996b) ‘ Postscript: To Whom it May Concern’ in Cavell Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 151-196.

Dhoest, Alexander (2003) ‘Ophuls Conducting: Music and Musicality in Letter from an Unknown Woman’ Senses of Cinema 28. Available on-line:
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/28/music_letter_from_unknown_woman/ (Accessed 15 March 2012).

Duncan, Pansy (2011) ‘Tears, Melodrama and “heterosensibility” in Letter from an Unknown Woman’ Screen 52:2, summer, 173-192.

Freud, Sigmund (2002) Civilization and Its Discontents. London: Penguin.

Gibbs, John (2002) Mise-en-Scène: Film Style and Interpretation. London: Wallflower Press.

Harcourt, Peter (2002) ‘Circles of Delight and Despair: The Cinema of Max Ophuls’ CineAction 59, September 4-13.

Henderson, Brian (1976) ‘The Long Take’ in Bill Nichols (ed.) Movies and Methods, Volume 1. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 314-324. First published in Film Comment, summer 1971.

Keegan, Paul (2002) ‘Introduction’ in Freud, Sigmund (2002) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. London: Penguin, vii-xlviii.

Modleski, Tania (1990) ‘Time and Desire in the Woman’s Film’ in Gledhill, Christine (ed.) Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. London: BFI, 326-338.

Mulvey, Laura (2011) ‘Max Ophuls’s Auteurist Adaptations’ in MacCabe, Colin, Murray, Kathleen and Warner, Rick (eds) True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity. New York: Oxford University Press, 75-90.

Neale, Steve (2005) ‘Narration, point of view and patterns in the soundtrack of Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948) in Gibbs, John and Pye, Douglas (eds) Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 98-107.

Perez, Gilberto (1998) The Material Ghost. London: John Hopkins University Press. This contains a short but illuminating section on Letter from an Unknown Woman.

Perkins, V. F. (1982) ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’, Movie 29/30, summer, 61-72. Held in Founders Offprints section.

Perkins, V.F. (1990) ‘Must We Say What They Mean? Film Criticism and Interpretation’, Movie 34/35, winter, 1-7.

Perkins, V.F. (2000a) ‘Ophuls Contra Wagner and Others’, Movie 36, 73-79.

Perkins, V.F. (2000b) ‘Same Tune Again! Repetition and Framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman’ CineAction 52, June, 40-48. Also available at http://www.16-9.dk/2003-09/side11_inenglish.htm

Pipolo, Tony (1979) ‘The Aptness of Terminology: Point of View, Consciousness and Letter from an Unknown Woman’ Film Reader 4, 166-179.

Pye, Douglas (2002) ‘Falling Women and Fallible Narrators’ CineAction 59, September, 20-29. Also available at:
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/17/ophuls.html

Rivette, Jacques and Truffaut, François (1978) ‘Interview with Max Ophuls’ in Paul Willemen (ed.) Ophuls. London: BFI, 15-32.

Thomson, David (1967) Movie Man. London: Secker and Warburg.

Walker, Michael (1982) ‘Ophuls in Hollywood’ Movie 29/30, summer, 39-60.

White, Susan M. (1995) The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Magisterial Vision and the Figure of the Woman. New York: Columbia Press.

White, Susan (2004) ‘Max Ophuls: An Introduction’ Arizona Quarterly 60:5, 1-14.

Wilson, George (1996) ‘Max Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman’ in Wilson Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press; first published 1986.

Wood, Robin (1976) ‘Ewig hin der Liebe Glück: Letter from an Unknown Woman in Wood Personal Views. London: Gordon Fraser, 116-132.

Wood, Robin (1993) ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman: the double narrative’, CineAction! 31, spring-summer, 4-17.

Zweig, Stefan (1943) The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography. London: Cassell.

Zweig, Stefan (1999) Letter from an Unknown Woman; The Fowler Snared. Translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul. London: Pushkin.

Credits:
Director – Max Ophuls
Producer – John Houseman
Screenplay – Howard Koch and Max Ophuls (uncredited); based on a story by Stefan Zweig
Editor – Ted J. Kent
Photography – Franz Planer
Music – Daniele Amfitheatrof
Also features: Franz Liszt ‘Etude in D Flat Major’; extracts from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Wagner’s Tannhäuser.
Lisa Berndl – Joan Fontaine
Stefan Brand – Louis Jourdan
Mrs Berndl – Mady Christians
John – Art Smith
Baron Johann Stauffer – Marcel Journet
Marie – Carol Yorke
Herr Kastner – Howard Freeman
Lt. Leopold von Kaltnegger – John Good

Lecture Topics
Creative decision-making when adapting Stefan Zweig’s short story.
Significant additions
Music
Military
Location changed
Short story: Vienna and Innsbruck
Film: Vienna and Linz
Linz = Hitler’s ‘hometown’
Narrative structure
Double narrative: framing story of letter and flashbacks.
Double perspective: Lisa’s point of view and film’s point of view
How does the film encourage us to identify with Lisa?
How does the film show a wider perspective than Lisa’s
What is the result of this double perspective?

Lecture Quotations
‘The fiction is almost of Lisa’s seeing the past now as Stefan reads about it, and offering her response to its sights and statements – responding now, for instance, to Mme Spitzer’s description. So the impression of presence, of an impossible presence, is reinforced’ (Perkins 2000b: 43).

the ‘notion of women as merchandise for purchase by the male pervades the film’ (Wood 1993: 8).

the core of the film is ‘Lisa’s romanticism and the complex, delicately balanced attitude (commitment to, detachment from) that is defined toward it’ (Wood 1993: 9).

‘It is vital to its effect [the effect of the double narrative] that it should not solicit a literal reading of its devices, and that it should arrive at a persuasive form while blocking any coherent understanding of the relations between the words of the letter, the speaking voice and the movie’s images’ (Perkins 2000b: 41).

‘One effect of these changes is to create a link between the uniformed figures who in Linz (her suitor) and in Vienna (her husband) represent the forces ranged against Lisa’s pursuit of her romantic destiny’ (Perkins 2000a: 73).

‘the most immediate associations of Linz would have been with Adolf Hitler and the rise of Nazism’ (Perkins 2000a: 73).

Letter from an Unknown Woman ‘picks up scathingly on two aspects of Hitler’s attachment to Linz: his partisanship in its imagined rivalry with Vienna, and his ambitions for the vindication of Linz in the sphere of culture’ (Perkins 2000a: 74).

‘the markers of time: hours of the clock, days and nights, fortnights, youth and age, sunlight and darkness, seasons, birthdays, fixations on past and future, questions of memory and hope’ (Perkins 2000a: 75).

Perkins argues that the repetitions and variations are palindromic, in that ‘the elements of the first part are repeated in reverse order in the second so that the approach to the end is also a return to the start’ (Perkins 2000b: 44).

‘Ophuls unites precision of form with openness to possibility rather than making it serve the definition of a thesis’ (Perkins 2000b: 45).

‘the device marks the shape of the story, marks the story as being shaped and not just unwinding with the course of events or the process of memory’ (Perkins 2000b: 40).

‘For all the clarity with which the film exposes the complementary follies and blindness of its central pair, its moral preference is affirmed by placing both of them – pursued and pursuer alike – on the side of the scale marked “Mozart”’ (Perkins 2000a: 79).

‘Contemporary Austria-Hungary was monarchical, clerical, militarist, socially and politically restrictive in respect of minorities. More significant for the culture of the parapraxis, the bourgeoisie was itself constituted as an outside caste, forever seeking assimilation with the aristocracy, and the strong assimilationist Jewish element within the Viennese bourgeoisie redoubled or exemplified these emphases. The parapraxis thrives along fault-lines, and Hapsburg Vienna is the home of the [Freudian] slip because it is here that bourgeois rectitude encounters a highly developed critical spirit … In polite life a host of taboos had to be negotiated – or scrambled in the dyslexicon of the verbal slip: sex, politics, money, the Jewish question, authority, relations with colleagues, professional self-esteem’ (Keegan 2002: xiv).

‘The “double standard” that applies to the men in our society is the plainest admission that society itself, which has laid down the rules, does not believe it possible to comply with them’ (Freud 2002: 96).

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart The Magic Flute
Act II, Track 21, CD 2

Papageno sings a song called ‘A sweetheart of a wife’ – as Perkins notes, his song expresses his desire for a real woman, not a goddess, unlike Wolfram’s song in Die Tannhäuser (Perkins 2000a: 76).

A sweetheart or a wife
Is what Papageno wants!
Oh, a soft little dove
Would be bliss

Then food and drink would be pleasant
And I could match wits with a prince
Enjoy life as much as a sage
And think myself in heaven!

Ah, can I not please even one
Of all the charming girls in the world?
One must come to my aid
Or else I shall surely die of grief

If none will offer to love me
The flames of desire will consume me;
But if I am kissed by a woman –
I shall be happy once more

Richard Wagner Die Tannhäuser
Act III, CD 3, Track 6

Oh thou, my gracious evening star
How gladly have I always greeted thee;
From a heart that she never betrayed
Salute her as she passes by thee,
As she soars from this earthly vale,
To become a blessed angel yonder


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