SOURCE: "From Der Reigen to La Ronde: Transposition of a Stageplay to the Cinema," in Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1996, pp. 52-6.

In the following essay, Alter discusses the difficulties of adapting Arthur Schnitzler's play Der Reigen into Ophuls 's film La Ronde.

Arthur Schnitzler, a Viennese contemporary of writer and physician Sigmund Freud (Nehring 179-94) wrote many plays and short stories. He is considered to be perhaps the best chronicler of fin-de-siècle Vienna and the dying Austro-Hungarian empire (Alter 11).

Schnitzler wrote Der Reigen in 1896-97. Max Ophüls made the film La Ronde, based on Schnitzler's play, about a half a century later in France. Both works consist of ten dialogues, or ten scenes, portraying a series of preludes to sexual intercourse where one person has sex with a new partner until in the final scene the circle is completed and we are back with the...