Max Ophuls: Motion and Emotion

7/20/07 to 8/17/07

Master of the fluid image, Max Ophuls translated the ineffable qualities of love, memory, and time into a sensual cinematic language. This series tracks an artist whose career roved across continents and genres, from German comedies to American noirs to French masterworks like The Earrings of Madame de . . ., but whose style remained unmistakable and consummately cinematic. "Everyone who's in love with movies loves Max Ophuls."-Boston Phoenix

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  • La signora di tutti, August 5

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • Letter from an Unknown Woman

    Friday, July 20 7:00pm
    Joan Fontaine pines for concert pianist Louis Jourdan, to whom she means nothing. "Of all the cinema's fables of doomed love, none is more piercing than this."-Time Out
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  • La ronde

    Friday, July 20 8:50pm
    In a "witty version of Arthur Schnitzler's play showing love as a bitterly comic merry-go-round . . . Ophuls displays dazzling technical virtuosity and cinematic elegance."-Chicago Reader
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  • Liebelei

    Sunday, July 22 5:00pm
    From Ophuls's early German period, an adaptation of a Schnitzler play about love that outlives life under an oppressive military authority.
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  • Le plaisir

    Sunday, July 22 7:00pm
    In adapting three de Maupassant stories, Ophuls sardonically explores the distinctions between pleasure and happiness. "Illustrates not merely Ophuls's unparalleled sense of flow and texture, but also his proto-feminism."-Slant
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  • Caught

    Friday, July 27 7:00pm
    Barbara Bel Geddes marries Robert Ryan for his money but discovers that the dream house is a prison. A darkly ironic Cinderella story, also starring James Mason.
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  • The Reckless Moment

    Friday, July 27 8:50pm
    Housewife Joan Bennett must cope with a killing, blackmail, and the everyday pressures of domesticity in this stunning suburban noir. "An underrated gem."-Phillip Lopate
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  • The Trouble with Money

    Sunday, July 29 5:00 pm
    Ophuls's one Dutch film is a comic parable on the perils of capital.
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  • From Mayerling to Sarajevo

    Sunday, July 29 7:00 pm
    In this neglected masterwork, a historic love affair becomes "a fascinating study of repression and isolation . . . love as a shifting series of masquerades."-Paul Willemen
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  • Happy Heirs

    Friday, August 3 7:00 pm
    Ophuls's early musical comedy about the price of love is a Rhineland Romeo and Juliet.
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  • Lola Montès

    Friday, August 3 8:35pm
    In Ophuls's audacious final film, a life of passion becomes the stuff of carnival. "The ultimate cinephilic object: a color-and-CinemaScope dream."-Boston Phoenix. With Martine Carol, Peter Ustinov.
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  • La signora di tutti

    Sunday, August 5 5:00 pm
    Italian star Isa Miranda as a reluctant femme fatale "rises to the heights of tragic self-realization so typical of the greatest Ophulsian heroines."-Andrew Sarris
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  • The Exile

    Sunday, August 5 7:00pm
    Ophuls's first American film stars Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as a swashbuckling Charles II in "a poetic and pictorially lovely costume picture."-Village Voice
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  • The Earrings of Madame de . . .

    Friday, August 17 7:00 pm
    Following a pair of earrings, Ophuls's fluid camerawork tracks the course of love and the character of a class. "Perfection."-Pauline Kael. With Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer, and Vittorio De Sica.
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  • The Tender Enemy

    Friday, August 17 9:05pm
    This rarely seen comic fantasy is a lovely roundelay of mothers and daughters, lovers and ghosts, past and presentiment.
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