"Le Plaisir" (1952)

At its most self-referential, film will contrive itself as a spectacle in the way of innovation, or a spectacle in the way of tradition; either mode, film's role as spectacle may go so far as to improve society by engulfing it in the pleasure of passive consumption (the improvement in the passivity of nations). The cinematic spectacle has a dream's power to hold its captive hostage for the length of its unwinding - it exerts a tyranny on the mind's sense of reality. After the initial shock - the 1st wave of realism -, when the photographic reached its ultimate effect of acquiring movement in the motion picture (think here of the early Edison films that induced panic & rioting & a good dose of fainting in those lucky early spectators), the viewer became so accustomed to the intrinsic artificiality in film that an increased demand for hyperbole was expected in a preconditionally necessitated mode of realism in motion pictures. Film sets became increasingly sophisticated and complex in their simulation of distant and contemporary locations in time (Nathanael West highlights this during several scenes of The Locust, as when the screenwriter-protagonist finds himself watching through the window of his studio lot office, as if through a theater screen, at a roman army marching to its film set in Los Angeles.) The film set, whether placed in the interior or exterior element, in its effort to simulate the reality of those sets in life we call living spaces or landscapes, had to aggregate to its presentation such a numerousness & distinction of objects & furniture, of figurines & mobs, that the film set came to absorb the realism of the real to such an extent as to achieve greater authenticity than the abusively termed 'reality' of life. A film set will nearly always have a heightened sense of order & detail in its composition than what is normally found in any of the living spaces we inhabit in our life - because the skillful filmmaker will train us, often forcing us, to pay acute attention to how densely a set is populated and how meticulously it is framed. This is in the way of depiction in art, of the classical rules that every trained artist had to learn to bring perspective unto depth & fineness - the illusion of reality.

Yet, one is reminded that the imitation of nature - in art and in life - seeks not to transcend the realism of nature's design but to escape the death of objects, the end of perception - death itself. Realism in art was a kind of thievery of the essence we call life - that picture so perpetually in motion that we strive to participate in lucidly, but which, through our own vapid preoccupation with absent ideals, we tend to lose our awareness of in even our best moments.

Max Ophuls' Le Plaisir similarly seeks not to convey happiness but to perpetuate joy. As Maupassant declares (through the personage of the parisian journalist who narrates the last story in the film): "But my friend, there's no joy in happiness." Happiness for the narrator (& for Ophuls) is not one coupled with joy, but distinctly separate: happiness is a kind of impenetrable reality that no quarter of realism could steal away; hence the inherent unfilmability of happiness, its unflappable obscurity. We know that whatever makes the artist+model couple so intriguing in the third story happens prior to marriage; after marriage, they turn insipid, ordinary, and boring: they void the spectacle in their lives, the same spectacle that had brought them together in the first place, but which they discard once the heavy pressure of a life wrought with debt, fidelity, handicaps, and joyless monotony bears down on them. We see the once young & ambitious artist, now greybearded, whom we are told is engaged to an ordinary job that pays well, pushing the wheelchair of his once fiery redhaired model girlfriend, now turned a complacent and pitiful paralytic, and undoubtedly a most dutiful wife, along the boardwalk of an overcast grey beach. The scene, when first introduced, and consummated in the final shot of the film, surrenders up an emotion of conflicted stratagem: the adversary in this case remains the spectre of marriage, of conformance - of joylessness. Anything outside of pure joy - the pure joy of cinema unspooling - takes place outside of the scenario & the frame - a sightless junction whence life marches on in its unimpeachable banality.

The elements of joy are a myriad: during the 'Maison Tellier' segment, toward the end, we witness Jean Gabin (an actor of organic subtlety) walking out in the warm country sun to wash himself at the pump and wake up from his ethanol reverie, muttering to himself that he must, with great reluctance, prepare the wagon to take back the ladies of the hour to their 3.15 train. Ophuls' pacing is majestic, so in tune with the specific rhythm of country life, with the specific rhythm of Gabin's emotion and austerity, that the simplest of acts takes our breath away: as Gabin rushes along with the train (tracking shot) - the name of 'Madame Rosa' on his lips - he watches the train roll along to its port city suburb out of sight and out of his enchanted hour, and the camera stays with him in the newfound silence of the herb field, while the rising emotion of dejection and interrupted joy arise in him - the emotion that overwhelms one once the joy has gone and past, and the old monotony of life creeps back with vengeful regression -, we cannot help but feel the stunning swell of film overlapping life in its simulation, on its way to a definite realism beyond the pale of the real: Gabin's tender agony is eclipsed by the camera's compassion for him - his emotion becomes beatific. Ophuls' art is to stride past life's misbegotten attempts at meaningfulness (or lack thereof) - he enriches life's hidden cadence with the camera's magisterial gaze into the surface ornamentation that brings our eyes into accordance with the spiritual life in things, in faces, in the melodies & rhythms of eleusinian ceremonies.

(Witness for instance the utter joy that takes place in the Catholic ceremony during the 1st communion mass sequence. Joy here is a religious sentiment so Christian in its dimension - that is, an irredeemably aesthetic experience - that even Madame Rosa, the disaffected prostitute, breaks down in tears at the mere presence of a sacrament coming to life in the church - which in turn is enlivened further by the camera's orchestral arrangement and pan of the scene's visual jewelry. The soundtrack music goes nearly unheard in the scene as a result of the camera synthesizing with the visual chorus at play, in a seamless span shot - the music nearly turns corporeal in the manner that the camera, swooning with religious intoxication, pivots on its span shot.)

"Le Plaisir" is a film made by a director's director; coincidentally, among Kubrick's favorite films, by reason of the emphatically virtuosic skill with which Ophuls glides across walls & scenes overcrowded with props & models, with an indecipherable effortlessness. Ophuls' kinetic methods to this day are disputed, and the scenes in the film, from the beginning to end, are to be endlessly pondered at and reworked by even the most stalwart technologists at work currently. Ophuls is to camera art & cinematic prosody, as Flaubert was to his respective realm - disciples of an aesthetic emancipation through a precision of means synergized with measureless equipoise.

The film's opening is demonstrative of the medium of the spectacle as the primum mobile of joy's fractures & containments: the camera fades in from darkness (after listening to Maupassant divulge to us that he sits next to us in the darkness of the theater), pans from a marquee lighting up a dancehall's moniker, and tracks down to a motley assortment of regal characters and buxom femmes on their way to the dancehall with wild glee and bustle - we scoot into the arena of pleasure, cutting back and forth from frame to frame - we see on one side of a glass frame a variety of leisurely hommes studying the figures of timid & pompous women hurrying in to gain a spot to take in the sights of others themselves - another glass frame on one side with prim ladies bending over a balcony to take a closer look at the cavaliers who've just entered on the prowl for their likes - & finally, the camera, in one stupendously composed and effervescent tracking shot, follows a strange masked man who hurries in and begins to dance the measure with wild abandon, as he circles around the hall and pairs up with a damsel - the entirety of the action assembled in a single circular shot that somehow manages to navigate through the crowd as if magically through a feigned distance. As with any dance that one has found oneself to have discovered the rhythm to through a steady mimesis & improvisation, the camera simulates joy - eventually to overtake its mysteriousness - in a motion forward, and around, and behind, and through, the mechanics of sheer spectacle. As we watch the bizarre & giddy masked man throw himself in a fit, into the nostalgia for the wild & dissipated days of youth, he is engorged by the spectacle, and disappears. As the truth arises (that he is in fact an old man feigning the younger through the use of the mask) the spectacle overtakes him, replaces him - Ophuls does not allow the spectacle to end (in fact, a nameless character, likely the club owner, rushes to order the band to keep playing, after they had stopped to wonder at the commotion caused by the collapse in exhaustion of the old-masked-man on the dancefloor) - the music renews again, the club goers continue their pleasure & dance, and the camera resumes its fascination with the physical act of the motion picture.
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Cf. Todd Haynes' instructive introduction to the film on the Criterion DVD; his excellent condensation of the film's tropes is terrific, particularly his breakdown of the value of the scene in which the artist + his girlfriend have their spat that ends in the breaking of mirrors. (Another moment of self-referencing: the scene begins with a nearly contemporary-style hand-held camera zoom on wild hands desperately opening drawers of utensils in frantic search of a key, then zooms out to take in the interior of the couple's glassy home; then the camera follows the artist as he rushes from one room to the next in a tracking shot that seems to go through walls - indicating of course that the set is a film set constructed for the film's scenario - and then showing the couple fight each other for control of scattered objects as the artist struggles to find something to break down the door with - to at last ending with a pan to a mirrored wall that the couple join in violent concert to shatter, using blunt objects; this last pan to the mirror wall works to bewilder our assumption that the film set is but a film set, when in fact the film set - by sheer virtue of framing, pacing, and conglomerate prop design - translates to a place in time more real than the real, as if daring us to believe that behind the camera are also more walls that house an entire structure in which real people live; indeed, the breaking of mirrors metaphorizes for the breaking of the illusion of reality, inserting in place of mere artifice the fourth wall that we had thought was absent.)

Also, Dario Argento's Tenebre, & other of his masterworks, in which the first-person perspective is employed behind the camera's activated self-referencing; it becomes clear that Argento owes a great deal of his praxis - & a great deal of the tropes that have formulated the spirit of his oeuvre - to the magnificent one-shot/no-cut sequence involving the introduction of the Maison Tellier, as the camera scopes the facade of the house (from the outside) and follows the Madame (walking inside) as she goes through the preliminaries of opening her place of business for the night;

& finally, the stellar action-shot of the 1st person perspective at the end of the last story (when the model commits her rash act of suicide by jumping out the window) is among the essential and greatest action sequences ever shot on film. Pure dynamism. A victory over material, made plenary through technique.