MFAH Film Restorations & Revivals: From Mayerling to Sarajevo (De Mayerling Sarajevo)

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents the Restorations & Revivals film series. Enjoy these classics from world cinema on the big screen in Brown Auditorium Theater!

From Mayerling to Sarajevo
De Mayerling à Sarajevo
Directed by Max Ophüls
1940, in French with English subtitles
France
B/W
97 minutes
35mm

Coinciding with the Habsburg Splendor exhibition (on view through September 13), this lavish, historically inspired period drama was directed by the great Max Ophüls (Lola Montès; The Earrings of Madame de . . .).

The film investigates the circumstances around the infamous incident that set off World War I: How did Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, end up in Sarajevo on the fateful day in 1914?

“In Max Ophüls’s telling, Franz Ferdinand’s liberal plans to transform the (Austro-Hungarian) Empire into the United States of Austria put him in conflict with the aged and authoritarian Emperor Franz Joseph, and so did his passionate marriage to a minor Czech aristocrat, Sophie Chotek—and that struggle between personal and political, was the fault line of history.” —The New Yorker