La Ronde (1950: France)

Continuing with my sort-of-biweekly foreign movie posts for this year...
For more foreign movies, check out Caroline's World Cinema Series 2012 and Richard's monthly Foreign Film Festival round-up.

Note: See this post for more detail on the play and storyline.

The elegantly structured Arthur Schnitzler play La Ronde lends itself to a movie adaptation and in the hands of director Max Ophuls, who made some wonderful additions, it’s a pleasure to watch. Ophuls keeps the spirit of the play intact, using the same storyline and many of the same lines. Ophuls uses a merry-go-round as the central motif, replacing the round dance of the title and it works extremely well (and lends itself to a wonderful gag for the young man’s impotence). The biggest addition, though, is master of ceremonies Anton Wellbrook. He pushes the action along, providing the hint of a narrative so there is more than just ten separate scenes. In addition to tying the movie together, the emcee also becomes a character in the scenes. If he interacts with the female characters he “directs” them, telling them what to do. When interacting with the male characters the emcee appears in a role consistent with the story.

Fortunately Ophuls doesn’t try to make La Ronde something it isn’t, focusing on the wit and irony of the human state Schnitzler developed in the play. There’s no real backstory for the characters—they simply exist as stereotypes of their role, displaying the societal expectations and judgments of that role. They are allowed to develop as individuals during their liaisons when cajoling or deflecting advances, then ruminating or running away after sex. Since each character (other than the emcee) has two love scenes with two separate characters I found it interesting to note the differences in the way they interact with their two paramours. For example, the husband keeps his wife emotionally at arm’s length while he becomes passionately attached to the sweet young miss. Personal inconsistencies are nothing new but Schnitzler humorously highlights their exaggerated nature when it comes to passion and Ophuls emphasizes the differences.

Both the play and the movie highlight an unsettling topic—passion may be durable but its subject need not be. Or to put it more directly, is it sex that makes the world go round instead of love? The emcee seems resigned that this has been and will be the case, but there’s more than a hint of melancholy in delivering this sentiment. Even though the act is never actually shown, the power of sex remains on full display—it overcomes all social and class barriers in the play and movie. To complicate things further, time after time the relationships are less than satisfying. For such a simple storyline there are plenty of emotional layers and insights.

Other things I loved about the movie:

The acting is superb, combining up-and-coming talent with established French actors. Ophuls doesn’t rely on gimmicks—he lets the actors carry the scenes. Did I mention Simone Simon and Odette Joyeux are in the movie? (Did I say that out loud?)

The simple feel of the movie hides the complicated technical work. There are many long shots of extraordinary length that provide a natural feel to the scenes. See the opening sequence with Anton Wellbrook as he moves across several (literal) stages in the link at the end of the post for a great example.

The Criterion Collection DVD includes several excellent features:

•   Film scholar Alan Williams on La Ronde and Max Ophuls,
•   An interview with Marcel Ophul, (Max’s son),
•   Actor Daniel Gélin on his experience in filming the movie,
•   Correspondence between Laurence Olivier and Heinrich Schnitzler (Arthur’s son) that highlights the controversy surrounding the play and why Arthur Schnitzler forbade production of it. 

 

The movie is available in sections on YouTube. Sample it and enjoy (embedding disabled for the video—click to see the opening scene from the movie), and if the movie interests you be sure to check out the specials on the Criterion Collection DVD.

La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler

A print of the 1900 private circulation of Der Reigen
Picture source

Arthur Schnitzler’s play La Ronde (Reigen in German), written in 1897 but not performed until the winter of 1920/21, looks at a chain of ten sexual encounters. While known by several names depending on the language of translation, the title, named after a circular dance, often goes by La Ronde since France was the one country Schnitzler allowed the play to be performed after the initial riots and complaints in Berlin and Vienna. An English version, translated as Hands Around, can be found here (no translator noted other than it was ‘authorized’).

In general each of the ten scenes focus on a pair of lovers, fades out for their sexual encounter, then returns for a post-coital conversation. Each character appears in consecutive scenes, except for the prostitute who starts and ends the play. The scenes as listed using the linked translation's names are as follows:

1. The Girl of the Streets [Prostitute] and the Soldier
2. The Soldier and the Parlor Maid
3. The Parlor Maid and the Young Man
4. The Young Man and the Young Wife
5. The Young Wife and the Husband
6. The Husband and the Sweet Young Miss
7. The Sweet Young Miss and the Poet
8. The Poet and the Actress
9. The Actress and the Count
10. The Count and the Girl of the Streets

As you would guess from such a topic and structure, Schnitzler was very open on sexuality despite the veiled language used at times. The structure goes well beyond the alternating couples. The one licit coupling appears at the center of the play between the wife and husband, but even that scene involves the exertion necessary in a marriage (as opposed to the exertion needed for…other things) in addition to the baggage that is brought into a marriage. In a sense, this is the most complicated pairing in the entire play.

There are other devices used in the structure that adds to the play. Generally there is a rise in class from scene to scene until we get to the count and a shift back to the lower class with the prostitute--we have come full circle. To complicate that pairing with her and the count, the sex happened the night before, or so she says…the count can’t remember. Another part of the structure I found interesting was the transition between male dominance in the pairings early on that transitions to female dominance in the latter pairs. Or maybe it would be more correct to say the female sexual power is better disguised in the early pairings.

The play is fun to read to see how each pairing unfolds. It’s clear both parties are willing participants early in each scene, the woman sometimes putting up the appearance of resistance for propriety’s sake. Her actions usually don’t match her protestations, though. The resistance is more pronounced in the earlier scenes, less so in the latter ones. There’s more to explore in the pairings, especially the similarity between scenes with the common character. Often there is a hitch in the pairing, the funniest (to me) is the temporary impotence of the young man in Scene Four. His discussion of Stendhal after the disappointment leads to a successful conclusion. So to speak.

Highly recommended. It would be easy to dismiss the play as simple fun that Schnitzler intended for his friends but the deceptions, and more importantly the self-deceptions, lend themselves to deeper meaning. The married couple provides the most philosophical pairing as the husband waxes eloquently on friendship, love and passion while the wife provides a wistful counterpoint, sardonic at times. His simultaneous understanding and ignorance yields some of the funniest lines of the play. The wife complicates things by bringing up past lovers while the husband does his best to evade the topic. For all his bluster, the husband sums things up rather well:

Husband: If we hadn’t sometimes forgotten that we are in love with each other during the five years we have been married—we might not be in love any longer.

Young Wife: That’s beyond me.

Husband: The case is simply this. We have had perhaps ten or twelve love-affairs with each other [in five years of marriage]…. Doesn’t it seems that way to you, too?

Young Wife: I haven’t counted them!

Husband: If we had enjoyed the first one to the last drop, if I had from the very beginning surrendered without restraint to my passion for you, the same thing would have happened to us that has happened to millions of other lovers. We would be tired of each other.

Update: I've added some comments on the play in my post on Max Ophuls' 1950 movie version of La Ronde.

Arthur Schnitzler: a consideration

One "consideration" from Book of Aphorisms and Considerations by Arthur Schnitzler, translated by Carl Richard Mueller.

The reposeful effect of a work of art is primarily due to the fact that that which we call chance is totally excluded from it.

In the same way it seems that chance is also excluded from history (insofar as it is the past), and all things historical operate as necessity.

Only the present, and in particular our personal existence, is exposed and subjected to what we call chance.

There exists, therefore, no universal difference between necessity and chance, rather it is entirely a question of the spectator’s point of view.

We always command a view of only a certain number of causal chains, and even so only to a certain point, while every moment we live presents to us the intersecting point of an infinite number of causal chains which emanate from infinity and return to infinity.

History, however, tells only of those causal chains which have proven themselves to have had important consequences in the highest sense of the word, and ignores the others.

An example: A great man chokes on a cherry pit. The life of this great man from birth to death is an open fact. The cherry pit, however, was important only at the moment when it took its wrong course down the great man’s larynx, not during the course of his gradual rise; furthermore, we are indifferent towards any other part of the man’s history.

But the cherry pit has no part in tragedy, even though it gave rise to the death of this great man. For in works of art we require that the causal chains whose intersection brings on the moment of tragedy develop with an approximately equal intensity.

The hero may be brought low through his antagonist who has causally, so to speak, attached himself to him, or through such threatening causalities as exhaustion, suicide as a result of revulsion, and so forth. He may only be brought low as a result of the cherry pit, if perhaps the basic idea of the drama is that the history of the world is capable of being directed from its course by a cherry pit.

We will never permit ourselves to be convinced by the work of art (even though it conform to our philosophical or religious convictions),that the cherry pit was willed by God—even if we believe that for God all lines of causality are equal, because they all come from and return to Him. God, as it were, has always had his reasons, because He is reason itself. But in art God can only be that against which the hero revolts. A pious hero, in the dogmatic sense of the word, is an impossibility. No causal chain can be significant enough that in its intersection with the causal chain of the hero it may destroy it. Furthermore, death cannot in any way terminate the causal effects of any human being; the death of a great man in particular has consequences in the same way as the deeds of his life, often they are even more significant.

The Road to the Open: a prophet without wrath

Previous posts on The Road to the Open:
Fin-de-siècle Vienna
My art is mediocre and so is my character
Grotesque and repulsive peculiarities

The version of the book I read was the translation by Horace Samuel, which can be found here. (Note that a couple of pages are missing in the scan)

I’ve finally finished The Road to the Open by Arthur Schnitzler and while Blogger is temporarily allowing me into my account I’ll try to post about it. I’ll start with the end of the review by Carl E. Schorske in Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Vintage, 1981):

The novel has no real end, the hero no tragic stature. Schnitzler was a prophet without wrath. The scientist in him avenged itself on both the moralist and the artist. As social observer and psychologist he drew the world he saw as necessitous, but not—like the true tragedian—as justified. Morality and the dynamics of both instinct and history were incompatible. Schnitzler could neither condone nor condemn.

Yet, as a proclamation of the death of a cultural idea, his novel has power. The break-up of Georg and his artist-sweetheart symbolizes the end of a half-century’s effort to wed bourgeoisie and aristocracy through aesthetic culture. Schnitzler shows that the historical force compelling recognition of this failure was the rise of anti-liberal mass politics. Appropriately, the pure and aesthetic Anna’s own brother is a vicious anti-Semite. While she is doomed to a humdrum petit bourgeois existence by her aristocratic lover’s weakness, her brother embarks on a promising if hideous political career. As for Georg, he is paralyzed by his own hypertrophied sensibilities, conscious of being driven by instincts within and an irrational society without. The social aristocrat can no longer control the reality; the aesthetic aristocrat cannot understand it. He can but feel his own impotence in a bourgeois world spinning out of orbit.

Aspiring to tragedy, Schnitzler achieved only sadness. One of his characters observes that there is no Weg ins Freie [Road into the Open] except into the self. Schnitzler, caught between science and art, between commitment to old morals and new feelings, could find no new and satisfying meaning in the self, as did Freud and the Expressionists; nor could he conceive a solution to the political problem of the psyche, as Hofmannsthal was to do. A despairing but committed liberal, he posed the problem clearly by shattering illusions. He could not create new faith. As an analyst of Viennese high bourgeois society, however, Schnitzler had no peer among his literary contemporaries. Like Ravel, he understood not merely the traditions of the world of the waltz but also the psychology of its individuals in their increasingly eccentric relation to the dissolving whole. He described as no other has done the social matrix in which so much of twentieth-century subjectivism took for: the disintegrating moral-aesthetic culture of fin-de-siècle Vienna. (pages 14 – 15)

Schorske packs a lot more into his short review and I highly recommend his book in addition to Schnitzler’s novel. I think his review is pretty much spot on except for a few minor quibbles…or maybe not so minor. I want to look at the struggle between the generations because I think that is one part Schorske touches on but doesn’t follow up on the implications. He notes that the title “refers to the desperate attempt of the cultivated younger generation of Viennese to find their way into the clear, their road out of the morass of a sick society to a satisfactory personal experience. After noting that many of the young Jewish characters turn “from the path which a just society might have left open” (but clearly Vienna didn’t) he turns to a look at the older generation. “Schnitzler views them positively now. It is as if he had made peace with his father. Though their values are anachronistic, no longer relevant to the social-psychological facts of life, the older characters still offer an example of stability, a basis for engagement in constructive work, and even a certain ground for human sympathy.” Yet the poisonous picture of Vienna Schnitzler paints comes from which generation? The younger generation lives in it and accelerate it, but the trends started earlier.

The disintegration of moral codes ushers in a freedom that opens possibilities, good and bad. “Anna is freed from negative repercussions about her pregnancy out of wedlock, yet that liberation also frees George from any commitment to her. Freedom is a double-edged sword, as Schnitzler presents here and in other situations. Schorske notes the struggle Schnitzler finds himself “between a renewed allegiance to traditional values and a scientific view of modern social and psychological reality which makes those values inapplicable. But Schnitzler takes pains to show the older generation loosened the traditional values while not providing anything to replace them. I don’t think it is a coincidence the book begins shortly after George's father’s death and George is shown unmoored, drifting even more than usual because of the loss. The father allowed George and his brother to abandon their university studies, amplifying George’s natural tendency to drift. Schnitzler seems caught between admiring and condemning the older generation. It’s nice that George is allowed to pursue his musical studies because of his talent but not everyone is a baron, treated deferentially by the bourgeois despite limited achievements.

There is so much more that can be explored in the novel. One area I think would provide a fun paper or post would be the importance of Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde in the story. What aspect of the opera did Schnitzler want to stress? The unachievable desires (driven by Schopenhauer’s influence)? The musical innovation? The topic of frustrated love? Other fun topics could be the importance of dreams. But all of these are secondary to Schnitzler’s study on the role of class warfare and anti-Semitism during the decline of turn-of-the century Vienna. So-called secondary characters provide a rich range of responses to the poisonous atmosphere around them. The metaphor of George and Anna’s stillborn child feels heavy-handed, yet it still works (think of Tolstoy’s use of the thistle in Hadji Murad for a similar example). My final quibble with Schorske: I’m not sure Schnitzler was “aspiring to tragedy”. Rather he seems more intent on documenting the social disintegration of Vienna and its impact, psychological and political as well as societal. Highly recommended.

The Road to the Open: grotesque and repulsive peculiarities

Even though I’ve only been able to read through Chapter 4 of The Road to the Open by Arthur Schnitzler I’m thoroughly enjoying it. Schnitzler paints a complex and conflicted portrait of fin-de-siècle Vienna. People defer to the main character, George von Wergenthin-Recco, because of his title yet he feels out of place in either aristocratic or bourgeois social circles. He had originally studied law but when his father allowed him to pursue general studies George worked on a musical career. “Worked” may not be the right word. Despite showing great promise, George is a dilettante, rarely finishing anything he begins. That flightiness carries over into his personal life. He is unable to commit to anyone or anything. His happiness when with his lover is replaced by his happiness in being alone the second he leaves her. He feels he leads a double life in his affair with Anna, the lower-middle class woman he gets pregnant. The responsibility of fatherhood sounds “oppressive, almost sinister” to him.

The actual oppression comes from the anti-Semitism on display by many characters as Schnitzler presents a complex and multifaceted picture of the toxic atmosphere. Jewish characters face many questions on assimilation and identity. Summing up how many Jewish characters feel, especially in the younger generations, is Nürnberger: “I’m not baptized,” replied Nürnberger quietly. “But on the other hand I am certainly not a Jew either. I’ve ceased to belong to the congregation for a long time, for the simple reason that I never felt myself to be a Jew.” At the other extreme lies a burgeoning Zionist movement, yet few people can agree on what their goals should be. Many in the older generation feel homesickness for a land they haven’t seen but they identify with it much more than the younger generation (in general). Heinrich Bermann, one of George’s friends, proves to be abrasive but more insightful than most characters. He expounds on part of the problem as he sees it:

“But I will not deny that I am particularly sensitive to the faults of Jews. Probably the only reason is that I, like all others—we Jews, I mean—have been systematically educated up to this sensitiveness. We have been egged on from our youth to look upon Jewish peculiarities as particularly grotesque or repulsive, though we have not been so with regard to the equally grotesque and repulsive peculiarities of other people. I will not disguise it—if a Jew shows bad form in my presence, or behaves in a ridiculous manner, I have often so painful a sensation that I should like to sink into the earth. … One gets embittered at being always made responsible for other people’s faults, and always being made to pay the penalty for every crime, for every lapse from good taste, for every indiscretion for which every Jew is responsible throughout the whole world.”

Heinrich goes into detail on the Jews he really hates, those “who try to offer themselves to their enemies and despisers in the most cowardly and cringing fashion, and think that in that way they can escape from the eternal curse whose burden is upon them, or from what they feel is equivalent to a curse.” There is so much more and I realize I’m barely scratching the surface on the dysfunctional society Schnitzler presents. Schnitzler also prepares the groundwork to delve into generational conflict and poisonous politics, preventing any possibility of normal relations in Vienna at this time. But that will have to wait for another post…

(All quotes from the translation by Horace Samuel)

The Road to the Open: my art is mediocre and so is my character

I just finished the first chapter of Arthur Schnitzler’s The Road to the Open and I’m enjoying the immersion into the world of early 1900s Vienna. "Enjoy" might not be the right word, though, since the world he describes can be a brutal place, especially for Jews. Anti-Semitism permeates society, as one character adroitly decries “those people who gorge themselves sick at Jewish houses and then start slanging the Jews as soon as they get on the door-steps. They ought to be able to wait till they got to the café.” (All quotes are from the Horace Samuel translation.) Another character resigns his political seat for the abuse he receives for inquiring into questionable official actions (“Be quiet, Jew!” “Hold your jaw, Jew!”). The breaking point for him, though, was when those shouting insults expected him to be friends away from the floor of parliament. He doesn’t take the insults personally, realizing the society’s “indignation is as little genuine as our enthusiasm. The only things genuine with us are our malice and our hate of talent.”

The main character, George von Wergenthin-Recco, displays melancholy and ennui, partially because his father died a few months earlier. But it’s clear that those characteristics are part of his normal state. The first chapter takes place in one afternoon and evening as George wanders, unfocused, around the city. “A feeling of the dreamlike and purposeless character of existence came over him,” a state that seems to characterize him in more than just the one setting. At one point he comes to the conclusion that “his life was slipping away from him on the whole in far too quiet and monotonous a fashion.” George enjoys a reputation as a composer although he admits he hasn’t worked on anything in six months.

At the end of the chapter George is shocked that he “had enjoyed the whole day with such full gusto, without any painful memories of the beloved man who now lay beneath the ground.” Much of his day involved reflections on earlier times, both with friends and family, and it would be difficult to say that they brought him any pleasure, either. So far, George just *is*, an object for others to do with as they please. One acquaintance George runs into accurately sums up the people seen around him so far: “My so-called art in particular is more or less mediocre, and a good deal too could be said against my character.” We’ll see where these mediocrities and Vienna’s poisonous atmosphere lead George…

The Road to the Open: fin-de-siècle Vienna

I’m not sure what my posting schedule will be like the next few weeks. Work is going to take most of my time and I’ll be travelling with the family when I can, so posting will be hit or miss depending on time and access. I enjoy writing about what I read because it makes me think twice (or more) about the book, giving me a chance to articulate what I just experienced.

In addition to the ancient texts I’m currently reading, I wanted to work in some time for turn-of-the-(20th)century Austrian works. To start things I began reading The Road to the Open by Arthur Schnitzler (translation by Horace Samuel). I’m only a few pages into the work but I can see much of the framework defined by Carl E. Schorske in his notable book Fin-de-siècle Vienna. A few quotes from Schorske to help provide structure for Schnitzler and for other books in this setting:

Two basic social facts distinguish the Austrian from the French and English bourgeoisie: it did not succeed either in destroying or in fully fusing with the aristocracy; and because of its weakness, it remained both dependent upon and deeply loyal to the emperor as a remote but necessary father-protector. The failure to acquire a monopoly of power left the bourgeois always something of an outsider, seeking integration with the aristocracy. The numerous and prosperous Jewish element in Vienna, with its strong assimilationist thrust, only strengthened this trend. … The traditional culture of the Austrian aristocracy was far removed from the legalistic, puritanical culture of both bourgeois and Jew. Profoundly Catholic, it was a sensuous, plastic culture. … If the Viennese burghers had begun by supporting the temple of art as a surrogate form of assimilation into the aristocracy, they ended by finding it in an escape, a refuge from the unpleasant world of increasingly threatening political reality.

Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Vintage, 1981), p. 7-8.

I’m only half-way through Schnitzler's first chapter and Schorske’s description of the era encapsulates the world I’ve seen in the novel so far. I realize I’ve shortchanged Schorske’s description, but I’d have to quote the entire chapter to do it justice. Both Schnitzler and Schorske will be covered as I read the book and both are highly recommended.