David E:

".... Lola and everything around her is in constant motion...."

David, thanks for the excellent insights. They also brought to mind one
of my favorite film teaching stories

In the fall of 1975, I taught one one-semester introductory film history
course at the William Paterson College of New Jersey, filling in for
Gregory Battcock. The seriousness with which the school took this course
is indicated by the fact that it met for two and a half hours a week,
including the movie. It had the reputation of being an easy course, a
"gut," and had 300 students. I realized early on that most of them would
never have seen a subtitled film, so for the first of the three
"foreign" subtitled films I showed, I gave a short talk on the language
problem, and the three way's of dealing it: Anthology's (no titles, just
a written plot synopsis), dubbing, and subtitles, and explained why I
was showing subtitled prints and what the problems were of watching a
film with subtitles.

The second of the three foreign films I showed was Lola Montes, in a
16mm print -- I'm trying to remember if it was anamorphic (which I think
it was) or masked (which in 16mm wasn't a much worse solution than
anamorphic). That one student obviously missed the previous week's talk
on subtitles was evident from her paper. The assignment was to choose a
technique in a film and relate it to the plot or theme: "the high angle
shots express the main character's dread," that sort of thing. She wrote
something like this: "The technique I want to choose in Lola Montes was
the printed titles at the bottom of the screen. Trying to follow the
movie and look at the images and read the subtitles was very confusing,
just like Lola was confused; she never could decide between all of those
men she went with."

This might have been appropriate were the film Yvonne Rainer's
autobiographical "Film About a Woman Who..."

About falling into the image as a death metaphor, this has a great
realization in Brakhage's one-minute meditation on suicide, "Cannot
Exist," which uses optical zooms. Some of the same effect can be seen in
"Black Ice," which is on the DVD, and was inspired by and depicts
metaphorically a fall Brakhage took on some black ice. But "Vertigo,"
too (which Brakhage hated) sets up instabilities in each image; the
actual fall is much more interesting when connected with the space of
the whole film than as an image alone.

- Fred