In last year’s edition we were supposed to present the restored German version of Lola Montès from Münchner Filmmuseum. However we were unable to do so because the copy never arrived from Munich. This year we will present the French version. According to Max’s son, director Marcel Ophuls (who will be in Bologna for presentation of the film), the French version of Lola Montès, with optical sound, put back in circulation by Pierre Braunberger in 1968, is the only version that conforms to the director’s will. In particular, Marcel insists that Max Ophuls was strongly opposed to attempts on the part of German producers to provide the film with stereophonic sound. Particular thanks to Laurence Braunberger who made a copy of the film available to us.

A producer once told me the life story of Lola Montès, and I was overcome by a wave of pity; pity for the poor Lola, pity for the director who would take on the job. […] Reading the papers, I was impressed by a series of events in the news that both directly and indirectly led me back to Lola Montès: Judy Garland’s crises because of depression, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s messy love affairs – they made me reflect on the tragic and blazing speed of careers today, on the lack of “stepping stones”; I knew that Lola Montès had acted out her life story in a U.S. theater, and that the show had been a flop: the facts represented were so numerous that people didn’t believe them! […] So, I was about to shoot my first film in color, which was also my first CinemaScope; this raised many issues: I looked continually at paintings by Brueghel, the great master…

Max Ophuls, in “Arts”, n. 549, 1956