The man who made the camera move

Discs celebrate Max Ophuls, master of the tracking shot

Max Ophuls's ''Le Plaisir,'' which is partly set in a 19th-century bordello, is one of three of the director's films released last month by the Criterion Collection. (Photofest via the new york times)

There are two ways of adding motion to motion pictures: montage, which does it within the frame through editing; and tracking, which does it from outside the frame through moving the camera. The classic example of montage in the history of cinema is the Odessa Steps sequence in Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin." The classic example of tracking is the filmography of Max Ophuls.

The Criterion Collection last month released three of Ophuls's best-known films as uniformly packaged separate discs: "La Ronde" (1950), "Le Plaisir" (1952), and "The Earrings of Madame de . . ." (1953).

Max Ophuls, Max Ophuls . . . - for those of us besotted with the glories an ambulatory camera offers, the name itself verges on poetry. In fact, James Mason, who starred in Ophuls's "Caught" and "The Reckless Moment" (both 1949), actually did write a poem about him:

A shot that does not call for tracks

Is agony for poor old Max,

Who, separated from his dolly,

Is wrapped in deepest melancholy.

Once, when they took away his crane,

I thought he'd never smile again.

Perhaps no other filmmaker has ever used the camera with such grace, such sensuousness, such intricate choreography. One trembles to think what Ophuls might have done with a Steadicam. Given a pilot's license, Icarus might still be aloft.

Montage is all about tempo: the eliding and recasting of time. It effectively ignores space to play tricks with time. The tracking shot exalts duration (occurring in real time, it embraces each moment as a bird does sky) even as the camera's movement cherishes and ennobles space. For Ophuls, visual stasis doesn't just diminish style; it diminishes life.

It's a mark of what a strange, if transcendent, career Ophuls had that he's probably less well known today than his son, Marcel, the maker of such mammoth documentaries as "The Memory of Justice" and "The Sorrow and the Pity." The latter could furnish the title for a retrospective of his father's films. His was an often-thwarted life dedicated to tales of too-often-thwarted love.

Maximilian Oppenheimer was born to Jewish parents in Germany, in the Saar, in 1902. He also died there, in Hamburg, in 1957. He made films in German, French, Dutch, Italian, and English. In part, that polyglot output reflects how thoroughly European Ophuls's sensibility was. Borders are an abstraction; and for Ophuls the supreme reality was style. Knowing, urbane, cosmopolitan, the Ophulsian manner belongs to no one nationality. Instead, it represents a set of Old World attitudes that transcend place, period, and even class.

Playing an impossibly suave master of ceremonies in "La Ronde," Anton Walbrook surely speaks for Ophuls when he remarks, "People never know more than one side of reality. Why? Because they see one side of things. But I see all sides, because I see 'in the round.' "

Ophuls's rootlessness also reflects something else that was thoroughly European: the rise of Nazism. He fled to Paris in 1933 and found a second home there. (In many ways, Ophuls's sensibility was far less German than French, the language of the three Criterion releases.) After the fall of France, he fled to Hollywood, staying for nearly a decade. They were frustrating years. Ophuls made only four movies, though three were of very high quality: "Letter to an Unknown Woman" (1948) and the pair with Mason.

John Houseman, the producer of "Letter," found Ophuls both inspiring and maddening to work with. "As a director," Houseman wrote in his memoir "Front and Center," Ophuls "was creative and resourceful, with a technical expertise such as I had never encountered and which he occasionally practiced for its own sake."

It's understandable that the person watching the budget might find Ophuls's artistry gratuitous - not to mention expensive. Having no such concerns, viewers can luxuriate in an ecstatically mobile camera and lavish production values. Far from being self-indulgent, Ophuls's opulent camerawork and exacting eye for period detail - he didn't so much set stories in the past as make the viewer feel transported to it - are central to his art.

"Le Plaisir" and "Madame de . . ." take place in the 19th century; and "La Ronde," based on the Schnitzler play, in fin-de-siecle Vienna. "I adore the past," Walbrook says in "La Ronde." "It's so much more peaceful than the present and so much more certain than the future."

Any exile is wary of the present - and skeptical of the future. Ophuls's preference for the past went beyond sad personal experience, though. He loved costume and theatricality and decor, all of which a historical setting allowed him to revel in. Whenever he leaves the studio to shoot on location, as in much of "Le Plaisir" and a few key sequences in "Madame de . . .," it's disorienting. Artifice came as naturally to him as motion did.

The great danger of artifice is airlessness: Suffocation sets in when style becomes end rather than means. Stanley Kubrick, another aristocrat of the tracking shot, comes to mind. Ophuls clearly felt this temptation. The slightly curdled sophistication of "La Ronde" - with its daisy chain of sexual partners mocking any idea of lasting love - is the most obvious example. The line there between knowing smile and nasty smirk is narrower than we might care to admit.

Yet Ophuls never lets his love of fancy dress and grand gesture keep him from showing hard human realities. The character in "La Ronde" who closes the daisy chain is Simone Signoret's prostitute. Momentarily unsure if her partner aims to harm her physically - she doesn't know this is all stylized make-believe - Signoret gives a small flinch of fear, and we see the anxiety in her eyes. It's a stunning moment, which Ophuls, keeping the camera stock still, shows in close-up.

There are similar instances of humanity in the other two films. In "Le Plaisir," it's the simple sweetness of the premise in the longest of the three films: what happens when the staff of a small bordello takes the night off to go to the First Communion of the madam's niece. In "Madame de . . ." - well, where to begin? There's sheer yearning on the face of Vittorio De Sica's Italian diplomat as he gazes on his lover, Danielle Darrieux. There's Darrieux's growing realization of the grief she has brought upon herself, her lover, and her husband (Charles Boyer) through her frivolousness.

Above all, there is Boyer, whose performance is truly beyond praise. "It's only superficially superficial," he says at one point about his marriage. Seen in print, the remark might seem facetious and glib. As delivered by Boyer, it carries the weight of so much wisdom and experience as to be breathtaking. There are insights Boyer expresses in the film through the mere lifting of an eyebrow or downturn of the lips - a different kind of film movement - that Henry James spent a lifetime trying to capture in prose. There is nothing prosaic about the films of Max Ophuls.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.