LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN: Nostalgia, Irony, and the Nature of Love

The subject of this monograph is the 1948 film directed by Max Ophuls, Letter from an Unknown Woman. In it, I treat my subject from the point of view of philosophy. I talk about the ideas in the film, and about the position it takes regarding one of the perennial questions of philosophy, one that is literally as old as Plato. This question is: What is love? I will also be touching on the question of how the ideas in the film are related to those of some classic theorists of this question: namely Plato, Stendhal, and José Ortega y Gasset. In addition, I discuss the process by which this film was made in order to undermine the mind-set sometimes known as "the auteur theory": the notion that a film cannot be great unless it is dominated y a single human personality. This is one great film that, demonstrably, is not an auteur film in this sense. Thoughout, my overriding purpose will be to clarify and enrich the experience of viewing this beautiful work of art. © 2018 Lester Henry Hunt

By clicking on "Preview" above you can see an MSWord version of the opening pages of the monograph.

Keywords: Max Ophuls, Howard Koch, John Houseman, Stefan Zweig, classic Hollywood films, auteur theory