Today from 18:00-21.00 hrs, the UvA Film Club will host their next screening in HVL/BuzzHouse’s Co-Working Space! This week's film is Lola Montes (Max Öphuls, 1955), with an introduction by Nimaye Nambiar.

In preparation for an autumnal scene, Max Öphuls is said to have wrapped an inn on the set of Lola Montès (1955) — his final film — with kilometres of netting and to have painted his roads a reddish brown every morning. A box office disaster at the end of a tumultuous career, Öphuls’ extravagant nineteenth century period piece bleeds in scarlet and marine with a hefty budget to accommodate both Technicolor and CinemaScope. As we follow our eponymous protagonist, an Irish-born dancer and courtesan, in a repetitious circus of the present and her rise to notoriety through a series of flashbacks, Öphuls captures the many intersecting pasts, presents, and futures of Lola to provide a deeply complex and compelling character study. Perhaps what is most distinguishable in Öphuls’ cinema is its sense of restlessness; there is a dizzying geometry where lovers flurry up and tumble down staircases, yearning protagonists reach a nauseating vertigo, and where carousels bob up and down interminably. A tale of romance and reminiscence as much as a meditation on cinema, Lola Montès is the final epic of a wistful filmmaker.