Max Ophuls The Earrings of Madame de…
on TCM tonight...

Evanescence is an integral part of cinema, and no other director captured it as lyrically and yet as savagely as Ophüls. His tracking, dollying, gliding camera was never more mellifluous, or his visualization of life's inexorable flow more tangible, than in The Earrings of Madame de…: The dissolving ballroom twirls between the Countess and the Baron form possibly the most graceful invocation of the passage of time ever depicted on screen, while a transition from the fluttering pieces of a love letter to snow falling outside brilliantly conveys the slender line separating the incandescent from the sepulchral in a world marked by transience...