Lola Montez in Berlin

Directly inspired by Max Ophüls' film (Lola Montès, 1955) and based on the artist's appearance as Lola Montez at the Cabuwazi circus in Berlin (2014), this film explores the narration of the self as a show-producing factory, through the staging of the fragmented biography, oscillating between reality and fiction, of the scandalous 19th century dancer and adventuress, who was the mistress of Franz Liszt and Ludwig I of Bavaria.

Lola Montez in Berlin is part of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s larger project M.2062, in the artist’s words, a prospective and fragmented opera that incorporates “not only literature, movies and music but also quotations, adaptations, juxtapositions, games, and identities. It is an opera with author-characters such as Emily Brontë and Edgar Allen Poe, fictional characters drawn from movies and novels, and also real people who inspired extraordinary films that feature opera.” Since October 2012 Gonzalez- Foerster has impersonated several historical and fictional characters. The figures she has chosen have often been mediated by their cinematic depiction by iconic and/or brilliantly eccentric actors.