7:00 p.m.	Letter from an Unknown Woman Max Ophuls (U.S., 1948)

In one of Max Ophuls’s most elegant films, and arguably the most written-about example of female voice-over in classical Hollywood cinema, the eponymous letter is a sublime and ultimately Siren-like call from the beyond. Joan Fontaine performs the transformation of a shy Viennese schoolgirl into a self-aware woman, taking her character, Lisa, from adolescent infatuation to passionate, self-denying devotion to a concert pianist (Louis Jourdan), a charmer who never quite seems to remember her. Lisa’s life is like the carnival ride that takes the couple, on their only night together, through the quaint painted screens of a simulated old-world Europe, a fantasy of movement that is really a circular stasis, going nowhere, but endlessly pleasurable. The film itself shares this troubling structure, and Lisa’s invocation of her martyrdom, while quintessentially romantic in its tragic end, also finally forces a fitting response from the man in whose name she has been inspired to sacrifice all.

—Britta Sjogren, Judy Bloch

• Written by Howard Koch, based on the novel by Stefan Zweig. Photographed by Franz Planer. With Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan, Mady Christians, Marcel Journet. (90 mins plus 30-min lecture, B&W, 35mm, From UCLA Film & Television Archive, permission Paramount. Preservation funded by The Film Foundation.)