1968 was an important year for the cinema of Ernst Lubitsch. In February, Cahiers du Cinema published a special issue on Lubitsch, which included French translations of existing essays and a filmography, as well as new essays by Francois Truffaut and Jean Domarchi. Later that year saw the publication of Herman G. Weinberg's The Lubitsch Touch: A Critical Study, the earliest book-length work on Lubitsch in English. Then, late in 1968, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held what was at that time a complete retrospective of the director's films. In a review of this retrospective Kirk Bond wrote:

But the expected wave of scholarship on Lubitsch failed to arrive, and, in any event, the critical response to Lubitsch was far from equal to that generated by the films of F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang. Of course, Lubitsch's success and fame are undeniable, even recognized: Lubitsch was commended by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his outstanding contributions to the art of the motion picture. Yet the scholarly investment in his work remained relatively meager. The director whose films exerted an influence on film pioneers such as Buster Keaton and Sergei Eisenstein and was admired by Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, John Ford, Billy Wilder, Jean Renoir, and Truffaut, has received less critical attention than the masters of cinema who acknowledged his work's importance. Lubitsch's American films (1922–1948) remain an under-populated terrain; scholarly engagement with his German work in film (1913–1923) is sparse, his works understudied. The director's place in the history of the Hollywood musical and the romantic comedy also requires elaboration. This holds true as well for the history of early German cinema, where popular cinema has received short shrift.

The word “ineffability” is first cousin to the French expression “je ne sais quoi,” both in the area of literal taste – in gastronomy, say – or in the reception of a work of art. In its primary meaning, then, “ineffability” suggests a certain something that exceeds our linguistic grasp. A secondary meaning associates the term with the Bible, where it occurs in formulations such as “the ineffable name of Jehovah,” which is taboo. Ineffability's connection to both religion and art brings to mind Walter Benjamin's notion of “aura.” Benjamin connects aura with the traditional artwork, which, in its earliest forms, was a cult object used in ritual. To the term “aura” there accrue multiple definitions in Benjamin's writing: time and again he encircles it with descriptive language that never fully grasps it, that never fully elucidates its meaning. In The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility, aura famously appears as a “strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be,” a formulation that likely derives its terms from Georg Simmel's observation that “all art brings about a distancing from the immediacy of things: it allows the concreteness of stimuli to recede and stretches a veil between us and them just like the fine bluish haze that envelops the mountains.” But when for Simmel, I suggest, a veil stretches between observer and the work of art – when he describes it as enshrouded by a veil — Benjamin, in turn, relies on a Romantic metaphor from a fragment by Novalis, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (1798).