Film Screening: La Signora di Tutti (Max Ophüls, 1934)

Thursday 5th June, 2014

6pm, Hitchcock Cinema, Arts One

Introduced by Adrian Garvey
Film melodramas, sometimes denigrated as ‘weepies’, are indelibly associated with emotion, both representing and evoking heightened states of love and loss. Active in Europe and Hollywood, German-born Max Ophüls (1902-57), who made such films as Letter From An Unknown Woman (1948) and Madame de… (1953), is among the most acclaimed directors of the genre. La Signora di Tutti was produced in Italy where Ophüls worked briefly as a refugee from Nazism. Narrated in flashback, the film relates the tempestuous romantic life of a film star, Gaby Doriot. Less widely seen than his later work, it demonstrates the director’s characteristic synthesis of motion and emotion, as the expressive fluidity of the mobile camera intensifies the action and our responses to it.