Liebelei (Max Ophüls 1933)

I saw this picture at the historic Portage Theater (in need of saving), in a perfectly fine 16mm print with rather eccentric subtitles. All in all it was an experience of viewing the past through a concatenation of filters. In 2012 watching a print of a film that I would guess was struck in the 70s of a film from 1933 of an 1895 play by Arthur Schnitzler. What makes this particularly unique is that every moment stands it seems at the brink of an entirely new epoch, historically and cinematically:

1895 End of the 19^th century, the publication of the Freud and Breur’s Studies on Hysteria, and the birth of the cinematograph.

1933 The rise of fascism, with Hitler’s ascendance to power. Since they were Jews, Schnitzler and Ophüls’s names were removed from the credits, So this a film that was neither written nor directed and instead appeared on the screen from nowhere. I would also note that this is around when sound cinema reached maturity.

2012 Digital age, death of film/cinema as a mechanical medium, as well as the mechanism itself?

The effect is one of seeing ghosts. The sense we are watching the shadows of the dead reanimated. Which is both true and untrue, the mechanistic/chemical medium so tied an external reality (the players, the sets, etc.). But it’s not re-presenting reality, they aren’t moving on the screen. It just looks like that. Who you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes? Still though I can’t shake the feeling that I was seeing a dream of the 20^th century that is about to become a nightmare. All this begs the question; what the fuck am I talking about? I don’t know. Film has aura.