Max Ophuls: Motion Within Motion

“A shot that does not call for tracks / Is agony for poor dear Max / Who, separated from his dolly / Is wrapped in deepest melancholy. / Once, when they took away his crane / I thought he’d never smile again.” Actor James Mason’s tribute to Max Ophuls, his director on Caught and The Reckless Moment (both 1949), is a piece of good-natured ribbing in verse, but also touches on something essential about Ophuls, a native of Saarbrücken, Germany, whose career would include stops in Vienna, Berlin, Hollywood, and Paris—namely, that camera movement was at the emotional and expressive core of his filmmaking practice. A career-spanning, 12-film retrospective of Ophuls’s singularly kinetic, often startlingly emotional cinema, which has been celebrated and studied in all of its balletic grace by such latter day past masters of the unchained camera as Stanley Kubrick and P.T. Anderson, held on the occasion of a new restoration of Ophuls’s debut feature, 1931’s The Company’s in Love.