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Opera can reveal something fundamental about a film, and film can do the same for an opera, argues Marcia J. Citron. Structured by the categories of Style, Subjectivity, and Desire, this volume advances our understanding of the aesthetics of the opera/film encounter. Case studies of a diverse array of important repertoire including mainstream film, opera-film, and postmodernist pastiche are presented. Citron uses Werner Wolf's theory of intermediality to probe the roles of opera and film when they combine. The book also refines and expands film-music functions, and details the impact of an opera's musical style on the meaning of a film. Drawing on cinematic traditions of Hollywood, France, and Britain, the study explores Coppola's Godfather trilogy, Jewison's Moonstruck, Nichols's Closer, Chabrol's La Cérémonie, Schlesinger's Sunday, Bloody Sunday, Boyd's Aria, and Ponnelle's opera-films.

Tony Britten's film Falstaff (2008) is an unusual, even radical opera-film. An updated treatment with a colloquial English translation and a chamber arrangement, and lacking many operatic elements, the film enacts a remediation of opera-film through the medium of television. Remediation, as conceived by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, refers to “the representation of one medium in another,” and its goal “is to refashion or rehabilitate other media.” Britten's Falstaff is strongly influenced by British popular television, especially British situation comedy. Sitcoms that emphasize working-class culture and “lads’ humor”—such as Only Fools and Horses and Men Behaving Badly respectively—resonate conspicuously with this Falstaff. In addition, television features prominently in it by virtue of the fact that protagonist John Falstaff is a former television star. The implications of this remediated opera-film for Verdi and Boito's opera are also of considerable interest. In critical ways associated with music, text, and narrative, the opera is highly suited to Britten's conception. Building on the work of Denise Gallo, I propose that Britten's film marks another moment in the struggle for national ownership of the Merry Wives material. In this sense the film articulates an “Englishizing” of Verdi and Boito's opera. The new kind of opera-film represented by Britten's Falstaff reinforces the idea of “television opera” as a genre that takes advantage of television's medial and aesthetic capabilities, and expands its purview to adaptations as well as new operas.