When Opera Meets Film

Abstract

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.

The Phenomenal Side of the Operatic Performance: Implications of Promotion Strategies on Cinematic Representations of the 21st Century

“…Turning to more recent opera-film encounters, opera produced for film and television in the 1970s and 1980s (opera films), show how opera could be subsumed by the medium of film through, for example, visualizations concealing singing, or, conversely, a sense of opera's spectacular quality could be enhanced through editing (cf. Cachopo, 2014;Citron, 2010). Sitting in a slightly different space from filmic adaptations, recordings of live performances place the attentive spectatorship as an important aspect of operatic presentation.…”

“…3 Marc A. Weiner (2002) and Marcia Citron (2010;2011), in turn, have shown how in Moonstruck (Norman Jewison, 1987), Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990), Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993) and The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994) listening to opera singing in opera houses or via gramophone becomes associated with transcendence and/or interiority through the audio-visual configuration.…”

Looking Back at the (French) Opera-Film

“…This is even reflected in academic scholarship. The early major monographs on the opera film focus on complete films (Tambling 1987, Citron 2000, with subsequent books moving to the occasional and often fleeting presence of opera within films (Joe and Theresa 2002, Grover-Friedlander 2005, Citron 2010).…”

Où (en) est (l’étude de) la musique (au cinéma ?) du film ?

“…Ainsi de : « Où est la musique du film ? » (Brown 1994, Buhler 2010, Cardinal 2008, Chion 1995, Citron 2010, Stilwell 2007. Ce sont de pareilles questions qui font naître une discipline ou une sous-discipline, qui justifient des programmes d'étude et des colloques.…”