SOURCE: "The Abstraction of a Lady: La Signora di tutti" in Cinema Journal, Vol. 28, No. 1, Fall, 1988, pp. 65-82.

In the following essay, Doane identifies Ophuls's distrust of modern technology, and places him beside director George Cukor as a filmmaker successful at depicting female issues in film.

The films of Max Ophuls consistently manifest an obsession with what the cinema—as a machine—is capable of doing. The extended, elegant tracking shots, which are his trademark, test the limits of the technology, and his play with image and mise-en-scène testifies to a desire to investigate fully the material basis of the medium. Nevertheless, many of Ophuls's statements belie an ambivalence toward the technology of the cinema and a certain anxiety about its relation to representation: "Technology has reached a stage in our profession where it is a threat to our heart"; or "This industrialization—which I have to...