Truffaut noted that when an actor in an Ophuls film was required to remain still, standing or sitting, the film-maker strove to interpose between the camera and the actor’s face some object, not necessarily transparent, considering that the actor, knowing that his own face would remain partially hidden “will force himself to compensate for this inferiority and so express himself with the intonation of the voice. It will be more true more correct”. In this way Ophuls played off truth against artifice (the set-designing, the plot). This dialectic might assume the form of the contre-emploi. “Who would you see as the coachman in Lola Montès?”, the director asked Jacques Natanson, the writer of the film; “I am thinking of Henri Guisol”. Natanson protested: “I like Guisol, but I think he would be the opposite of the character”. Ophuls: “So do I. That is why I’m going to give him the role”.
An analogous challenge lay in the choice – the acceptance – of Scope for Lola Montès. Scope has an horizontal dimension, but the subject, a circus spectacle, demands a vertical vision. A new gamble which Ophuls won by multiplying the close shots and the partial framings (during the performance, the public of the circus spectators is also tricked, “falsified”, simulated, far from the ring, on the left of the frame, represented by painted figures or cut-out silhouettes). Another element enters into the dialectic relation of false/true, artifice and realism. I think of the poverty of the design, not always evident, and which is only recognised with an observant and prolonged examination. (…) To create the illusion, there are the details, a few rare props, the costumes, and the sumptuous frames of the mirrors. The real confuses the story as the memory confuses the past.
All this, one suppposes, continues to depend on a stylistic will. To raise obstacles and suddenly dissolve them. The circus spectacle is absolutely unrealistic, incredible in movement, in sounds, in volume, in symbolism. Around Lola, an almost immobile idol, morally crucified, offered as a meal for voyeruism, the present makes the past go round, partly acted, partly mimed, and, above all, verbally recounted by a ringmaster (Peter Ustinov). But without this movement, could we take account that every coincidence between the past and the record is impossible because one moves and the other does not?

Barthélemy Amengual, “Il faut écrire comme on se souvient”: la poétique de Max Ophuls, “1895”, n. 34-35, October 2001