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Max Ophüls’ legendary Lola Montès (1955), in a definitive new 35mm color and
CinemaScope restoration that was a highlight this year at Cannes and Telluride — and is the
spotlight retrospective at this year’s New York Film Festival — will have its theatrical
premiere at Film Forum from Friday, October 10 through Thursday, October 30. Showtimes daily
are at 1:00, 3:15, 5:30, 7:45, and 10:00.
In a garishly colored circus, the suckers line up at a buck a kiss with celebrated
adventuress Lola (French sex symbol Martine Carol), as ringmaster Peter Ustinov starts his
spiel and the flashbacks begin. Ophüls’ final work — and his only movie in color and
widescreen — was the biggest-budgeted French film to date, with his always-mobile camera
gliding, tilting, and craning amid dazzling sets and costumes, as the oscillation between
the tawdriness of the circus and the romanticism of the flashbacks underscores the
difference between reality and memory, each flashback with its own color scheme.
Arguably Ophüls’ masterpiece, Lola was a flop on first release and subjected to a
brutal butchering by its producers, who hacked up the original negative and re-arranged its
complex structure chronologically. After their eventual bankruptcy, legendary New Wave
producer Pierre Braunberger (Shoot the Piano Player) acquired the rights and issued a
limited restoration to great acclaim in 1969.
But restoration technology has progressed dramatically in the intervening 40 years and many
more materials — including the innovative original sound mix — have since turned up. In
2006, Braunberger’s daughter Laurence and the Cinémathèque Française, with the support of
the Thomson Foundation, the Franco-American Cultural Fund, and Ophüls’ son Marcel, embarked
on a state of the art restoration. Scratches, tears and missing frames were fixed and the
full stereophonic magnetic track was restored and remastered in Dolby Digital, with the
vibrant hues as conceived by production designer Jean d’Eaubonne and cinematographer
Christian Matras replacing the washed-out existing prints and videos. The original
CinemaScope ratio of 2.55:1 has also been restored (later prints were made in the narrower
ratio of 2.35:1, cropping off image on the left and right of the screen), along with five
minutes of long-unseen footage.
A sensation at both Cannes and Telluride this year, the ravishing new restoration is also
the spotlight retrospective at the 2008 New York Film Festival (tickets for that screening
sold out instantly). It is the only film to have been selected for the New York Film
Festival three times: for the very first NYFF in 1963, again in 1969 (in an earlier, not so
successful, restoration), and this year. It was following the 1963 festival screening that
critic Andrew Sarris famously wrote, “In my unhumble opinion, Lola Montès is the
greatest film of all time, and I am willing to stake my critical reputation on this one
proposition above all others.” In 1969, Sarris wrote, “Lola Montès is clearly the
film of the year, or any year.”
“THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CINEMASCOPE MOVIE EVER MADE.
Ophüls uses color with a dazzling, kaleidoscopic imagination.”
— Phillip Lopate
“SUPERB…THERE IS NOT A FLAW IN THE MISE EN SCÈNE,
NOT A DULL FRAME FOR THE EYE.”
– Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic
“A BAROQUE MASTERPIECE.”
– Dave Kehr
“OPHÜLS' MASTERPIECE… majestic and complex... Nearly as reviving and moving as the response
of Mozart to da Ponte's Cosi Fan Tutte.”
– Penelope Gilliatt, The New Yorker
For more information, links and showtimes, visit www.filmforum.org
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