The Cinemoperatic Imagination
Adam Joachim Goldmann
Since the birth of cinema, filmmakers have been irresistibly drawn to opera. From Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 silent version of Carmen to Kenneth Brannagh’s forthcoming film of The Magic Flute, the impulse to blend these composite art forms has tempted and frustrated an array of film artists. This is hardly surprising, as both art forms are mass spectacles that use a variety of media to communicate dramatic and emotional content.
Yet, opera rarely translates well to the screen without the feeling that something has been lost. There are many challenges to creating a successful Film-Opera. A director has to find his own solutions to issues of theatricality, spectatorship and ways to deal with what is basically a struggle for supremacy between music (in opera) and image (in film).
This paper explores various techniques and strategies that have been used by filmmakers who have attempted to mend the languages of film and opera together, over the past half-century. It examines such issues as naturalism, artifice, the use of diegenic sound, theatricality, and self-referential mise-en-scène. I also address considerations of genre and the role of actors and singers: the unity or separation of voice and body and the effect this has the effectiveness of a cinematic production. I mention common themes and threads that I find running through the films I explore and note any outstanding features that set certain works apart from others.
The successful Film-Opera is a rare thing and deserves to be treated as a valid work-of-art in its own right. Some feel that live opera has much to fear potentially from a mechanically reproducible art that has the potential to replace it. My own feeling on the matter is that Film-Opera ought to be appreciated in harmony, rather than in competition, with live performance. These issues are only starting to garner serious attention. The rapidly expanding home video and opera DVD markets makes this an especially great time to explore the blending of these two different conceptions of Gesamtkunstwerk.
I. Monumental Opera
By this term, I designate those films in which the filmmaker essays to create a realistic and natural-feeling cinemoperatic world. The hyperrealism of this style has the potential to clash with the extreme artificiality of opera as a medium. Nonetheless, this monumental impulse is far and away the most common one among Film-Operas, in evidence with many of Zeffirelli’s films from the 1970s and 1980s as well as more recent films such as Benoit Jacquot’s Tosca (2001) and Frédéric Mitterand’s Madame Butterfly (1995). It is also the hardest to pull off well. These films utilize either real locations or lavish sets to create a sense of naturalism. This sense can often come into conflict with the naturally very artificial demands of opera and the audience’s expectations.
Franco Zeffirelli’s sumptuous 1986 film of Verdi’s Otello was both a critical and popular success at the time of its release (Citron, p. 69). His film version, very much in keeping with his overblown theatrical aesthetic (see any of his production’s at the Met), illustrates both the successes and dangers of the monumental approach. Zeffirelli assembled a first-rate cast, including Placido Domingo and Katia Ricciarelli under the baton of the reliably traditional Lorin Maazel. Zeffirelli very much wanted his Otello to be appreciated as Film first and Opera second: a desire supported by his belief in “music as handmaiden to the camera” (Zeffirelli quoted in Citron, p. 74). To this end, he made substantial cuts to the score and even reordered some of the arias. While this strategy threatens the purity of Verdi’s work, it is of little concern to the success of the film qua film. In fact, the cuts insure that the film remains under two hours, the standard running time for a film screened without intermission. But despite Zeffirelli’s statement of his aesthetic intentions, much of the film does seem custom tailored to the music: he takes advantage of editing to create a fluid rhythm that matches and illustrates the drama of the music.
Zeffirelli makes extensive use of diegetic sound, including the storm in the opening scene, footsteps, closing doors and even a chilling groan from the dying Desdemona. Here and elsewhere, natural sound is used to take the edge off the artificiality of operatic techniques that are already several levels removed from us. Zeffirelli tries to collapse the distance between singers lip-synching to a pre-recorded soundtrack and the audience sitting in the darken movie theater, using tight close-ups and medium shots of the singers (who do a careful lip-synching job). This has the effect of reinstating a measure of the corporeality that can potentially be lost in any mechanically reproducible medium. Working with a crisp and well-mixed soundtrack (which can be fully appreciated on MGM’s recent DVD release) and using the actual singers in his cast, Zeffirelli’s film – though far from consistent (it drags in places and have some very awkward transitions) – offers some valuable solutions to the problems posed by Film-Operas.
Similar monumentalizing impulses are behind Joseph Losey’s 1979 film of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, an ambitious film undone in large measure by a poorly mixed soundtrack. Like Zefirelli, Losey uses singers (in this case Kiri Te Kanawa and José van Dam) as screen actors. However, the performances are often leaden as well as poorly synchronized to a stilted studio recording of the score (conducted again by Maestro Maazel). One exception are the recitatives, which were recorded live and feel fresher and more vibrant than anything else in the film. Given these pitfalls, the many visual merits (stunning lighting and on-location cinematography in Palladio, stunning architecture and interiors) struggle to be appreciated, and the film as a whole suffers. The most arresting thing about this Giovanni are the opening and closing credits, which are presented to the sound of roaring waves: this hearkens back to Kierkegaard, for whom waves become a metaphor for the Don’s elusiveness. Thus, while Losey is by no means is by no means blind to the potential of film to layer an opera with added meanings, the clunkiness of his film makes it difficult to appreciate his subtler touches.
Perhaps the most successful attempt at monumental Film-Opera is Francesco Rosi’s 1983 film version of Bizet’s Camren. Rosi’s use of diegetic sound is even more radical and pervasive than Zefirelli’s, and even includes music other than Bizet’s. The most striking example of this is the credit sequence at a bullfight with a folksy Spanish fanfare playing in the background. Rosi also defies expectations by breaking up the overture, and playing the second section – which introduces the fate music – to a nighttime procession for the Virgin Mary. The treatment of the chorus is interesting, and often what appears to be purely background music turns out to be sung by onscreen performers. By playing with the audiences’ expectations about film and opera, Rosi lures us into his cinematic world.
Like Zefirelli and Losey, Rosi opts for making his singers act. Both of his leads, Julia Migenes-Johnson and Placido Domingo give incredibly physical performances. The performances are often captured in close-up, which helps preserve the link to live performance. This approach succeeds immensely in the Act II duet between José and Carmen and José subsequent Flower Aria. The small and gamine-like Migenes-Johnson lies on a bed suggestively beckoning to Don José, exposing her thighs and rubbing her foot against Domingo’s hairy chest. Her restless seductiveness and careful lip-synching create a perfectly believable and erotically charged scene. The camera follows Domingo to the windowsill, where he sings his aria. The tight close-up captures the energy and feeling in his face and neck, adding to the illusion of live performance.
Yet, Rosi exhibits some ambivalence towards Film-Opera and uses the spoken recitatives of Bizet’s original performing version as diegetic sound that disturbs the flow of the music. The inclusion of spoken dialogue has the effect of taking the audience out of the operatic space it creates. Consequently, the film can feel more like a musical than opera. This is not to diminish Rosi’s achievement; a successful film- musical is also a fairly difficult thing to achieve.
Another important element is the film’s use of natural scenery: in this case the colorful vistas of the Catalonian countryside. This setting has been interpreted in contrary ways. Reviewing the film for The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote that the natural settings are “never merely naturalistic.” “They’re both theatrical and austere, and the striking perspectives provide something that filmed opera needs: the recognition that the singers are not ordinary people performing ordinary tasks – they’re part of a ritualized performance” (Kael, 124). Citron feels that the naturalism comes at the expense of the purely operatic element: “Music is asked to yield some of its functions to other elements, especially noise, spoken dialogue, scenery and movement” (Citron, 192). Both agree, however, that Rosi has come up with compelling solutions to the problems of filming opera. In this way, Rosi’s Carmen represents the fullest success of the totalizing monumental impulse: the most dominant, but by no-means exclusive, impulse in Film-Opera.
II. Opera as Dream
At the opposite end of the interpretive spectrum is the attraction to present opera as a purely aesthetic, hyper-artificial phenomenon. The films that have treated opera in this way do not try and reconcile the visual and the music elements that vie for supremacy but rather use the visuals to provide a wildly imaginative interpretation or illustration of a musical work. This is in distinction to Monumental Opera, where the music seems to be actively realized in the onscreen performances. There is no attempt here to replicate the experience or sensation of a live performance; rather, cinematic contrivances and mise-en-scène are used in synch with the music. In other words, the film animates the music rather than the music animating the film. The two operas that I discuss in this section - Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann and Wagner’s Parsifal - both have heavy magical content that certainly suggested them as suitable candidates for fantastical and dream-like cinema.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1951 film, The Tales of Hoffmann represents the most successful example of this approach. Powell told his conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, that he wanted a “performance, not a recording,” and used non-operatic singers performing in English to give the film a more down-to-earth feel (Michael Powell, quoted in Citron, p. 116). On the commentary track to the Criterion Collection’s DVD release of The Tales of Hoffmann, Martin Scorsese suggests that this helps the audience to get use to the disorienting effects of the nonstop singing (Scorsese, Hoffmann).
Unlike the advocates of the monumental approach, the filmmakers here have no qualms about using non-singing actors and dancers and have no real concern for synchronization. The film historian Bruce Elder suggests that Hoffmann is the perfect marriage of film and opera, since it divorces the singing from the physical demands of the acting. This is turn allows the purely visual elements – choreography, special effects, make-up, sets and so forth – to regain their supremacy (Elder). Ian Christie perceptively suggests that Powell and Pressburger “virtually reinvented the freedom and fantasy of silent cinema while making full use of Technicolor and a stellar cast of dancers and singers” (Christie, Hoffmann).
A connection could also be made to animation, which has been interpreted by some (included Walter Benjamin) as the purest type of filmmaking. The set design by Hein Heckroth is full of colorful and unexpected touches and trompe d’oeil effects, including a disorienting staircase painted onto a stage. The extensive and intricate choreography for Moria Shearer (Olympia) and Robert Helpmann (The Four Villains) as well as dazzling surreal and disorienting effects make Hoffmann an oversaturated and unforgettable visual spectacle. All this visual richness is possible not in spite of, but because of, the operatic music which it animates.
This visual richness, however, doesn’t’ come at the expense of the music: Powell and Pressburger never forget that they are making a Film-Opera. The opening credits begin to the accompaniment of an orchestra tuning up and playing melody fragments from the opera. The film uses diegetic sound effectively, if sparingly (no howling Zeffirelli-esque storms). Mostly, the filmmakers are concerned with finding the perfect way to match the music and the visuals. Hoffmann succeeds by resisting most of the strategies that Monumental Opera harnesses: natural scenery; imitation of live-performance; and stark, expressive close-ups. Instead, Hoffmann gives us complete artifice, music that seems to come from the ether, and restrained full and wide-shots of the singers, dancers and actors.
A total rejection of monumental tendencies also lurks behind Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s film of Wagner’s five-hour-long final opera, Parsifal (1982). But where Hoffmann dazzles and entertains, Syberberg’s film assaults the senses and dulls the intellect with heavy-handed symbolism and an visual artistic conceit that doesn’t translate well to the screen.
Hoffmann is treated by Powell and Pressburger as bittersweet fantasy, full of gaiety and wonder, alongside its more tragic elements. Parsifal, on the other hand, is a heavy and ponderous meditation on German and Christian mythology and Syberberg interprets it as a dead-serious peek into the German psyche. Whatever exhilarating and vibrant effects fantasy has in Hoffmann become menacingly ponderous and stern in Syberberg’s Parsifal.
Though the visual conceit of the film is arresting (it takes place inside a giant death mask of Wagner and includes back projections of scenes and locations throughout German history), Syberberg doesn’t really know how to mobilize his concept for an exceptionally long film. Like Powell and Pressburger, Syberberg doesn’t use actual singers to act in the film. He pays less attention to synchronization that Zeffirelli and Rosi yet gives us many close-ups of poor lip-synching. Robbed of a reference to the real world and the simulated feel of live-performance, much of Parsifal ends up feeling tortuously static. The exceptions here are the chorus scenes (especially the flower maidens) and orchestral interludes, where a fluid camera moves along with the music and injects some life into the film.
There is one inspired and highly successful ingredient in Syberberg’s film, and that is a female Parsifal who materializes mid-way through the film (and replaces the male Parsifal). The effect of hearing a heldentenor voice emanate from a young women’s mouth is mesmerizing and beguiling. An uncanny and unnatural sight, this female Parsifal is yet one more argument against naturalism in Film-Opera.
III. Hybrid Opera
Between the two extremes of Rosi’s Carmen and Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann is a happy medium of naturalism and artificiality that may be represented by two very different works, Ingmar Bergman’s Magic Flute (1975), from the Mozart opera, and Götz Friedrich’s film of Strauss’ Elektra (1982). Both these films mobilize opera’s theatricality for a successful cinematic product by preserving a close-link to live performance and giving the impression of a world being created.
Bergman frames his Magic Flute as a theatrical performance playing to a live audience. The production he recreates on a movie set is meant to evoke the original production of 1791 at the Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna (Cowie). In her review, Pauline Kael praised this theatrical conceit: “Filmed operas generally ‘open out’ the action or else place us as if we were spectators at a performance, looking at the entire stage. Bergman has done neither – he has moved into the stage” (Kael, 169). The film ushers us onto the stage and into the opera, cutting between the audience and the quaint production and gradually leading us deeper and deeper into the opera.
Bergman handles the overture differently than the filmmakers we’ve examined, with a montage of faces from the audience. The rhythm of the editing only approximates the rhythm of the music film, but establishes the quick tempo of the film. This is a sign of things to come; throughout, Bergman resists the urge to edit the film exactly to the music as if refusing to subjugate the visuals to the soundtrack.
While Bergman gives us a proscenium arch, his film feels far from stagy. Slowly, the action moves further and further backstage until the stage has become the world. Bergman uses arresting close-ups and profile shots of his singer-actors, often training the camera on characters who react rather than act (The Queen of the Night aria is a terrifying example of both devices). The singing seems three-dimensional and alive thanks to a marvelous audio track where “voice emanate from exactly the right positions on set” (Cowie, Flute).
There is a fair amount of spoken dialogue in Mozart’s Singspiel, which Bergman makes his singer-actors whisper in a way that both slows things down and reminds you of film’s power to capturing subtle human psychology. That Bergman marries this potential to opera’s searing emotionalism is part of what makes his Magic Flute one of the finest of all Film-Operas.
While there is no proscenium in Friedrich’s terrifying and unrelenting Elektra, the overtly theatrical set design implies an arch hidden from view. Friedrich uses harsh diegetic sounds – rain, whips, scrubbing – a gray-blue palette with jarring interruptions of red, and shocking instances of violence and bloodletting to create a perfect visual accompaniment to Strauss’ relentless and visceral music.
The recording is conducted by Karl Böhm and features the fiery Leonie Rysanek in the title role. Rysanek and her peers also act with an expressionistic and heightened manner that gives the film - which is impeccably dubbed – the feel of a live-performance. Through the electrifying soundtrack, effective use of flashbacks, gripping violence and intensity of the performances, Friedrich uses theatrical and cinematic devices in tandem to create an aesthetically and emotionally overwhelming experience. His insistence, along with Bergman, to “move onto the stage,” (borrowing Kael’s language) shows a third way in which the artificial stylized of opera and the realistic demands of cinema can be reconciled.
Having explored these three modes of making Film-Operas, we might acknowledge that genre can play a role in determining which of these approaches a filmmaker chooses: it might be as difficult to imagine the Magic Flute being treated as monumental as it is to imagine Otello treated like fantasy. The modes that I have outlined have been the dominant options for filmmakers of the past sixty years, but they are by no means the only options. Advances in technology and changing styles of opera production and filmmaking all the potential to influence how Film-Operas is made. Already, there is a wildly original and highly successful film of John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer (2003) shot in a pseudo-documentary style that brings to mind the gritty drama of directors like Paul Greengrass and Alejandro González Iñárritu. A handheld camera captures the singer-actors, who sing in the naturalistic, often-declamatory style of Adams’ music. The razor-sharp editing and crisp sound keeps the tension rising and rising. Call it Opéra Vérité.
The new HD broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera point one way to the future of Film-Opera. The richness, color-saturation and crispness of HD Video could theoretically bridge the traditional gap between opera on film and on video. Technology has the potential to can greatly enhance Film-Opera, but only if mobilized along with a host of established cinematic contrivances and strategies. For without artistry, one ends up merely producing a document of a live performance.
Given the historical and aesthetic similarities that exist between film and opera, it is surprising that the subject hasn’t enjoyed greater scholarly interest. Perhaps this is due to a lingering ambivalence towards the status of Film-Opera as well as the danger of it replacing live performance altogether. In Opera on Screen, Marcia J. Citron airs a related query: “When a Film-Opera tends so strongly toward realism, does in run the risk of self-destructing?” The question assumes that the stage is the proper domain of opera. It is hospitable to the notion of Film-Opera being treated as legitimate opera in its own right. If anything, I feel that the history of Film-Opera over the last half-century gives the lie to such a view.
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Bibliography
Citron, Marcia. Opera on Screen New York: St. Martin’s Press. 1987
Kael, Pauline “The Current Cinema” The New Yorker Nov. 17, 1975 (pp. 169-171), Oct. 29, 1984 (pp. 122-125)
Filmography
Aida Dir. Clemente Fracassi. Perfs. Sophia Loren et al. 1953 Film.
Carmen Dir. Francesco Rosi. Perfs. Placido Domingo et al 1983. Film. Gaumont. 1983
The Death of Klinghoffer. Dir. Penny Woochick. Perfs. Sanford Sylvan et al. Film 2003. BBC 4
Don Giovanni Dir. Joseph Losey. Perfs. José van Dam, Kiri Te Kanawa. Film. Gaumont. 197?
Elektra. Dir. Götz Friedrich. Perfs. Leonie Rynsanek, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. 1982. Deutsche Grammophon. Film
The Magic Flute Dir. Ingmar Bergman. 1975. Sveriges Radio AB. Criterion Collection DVD 2004. Essay by Peter Cowie.
Otello Dir. Franco Zeffirelli. Perfs. Placido Domingo, Kattia Ricciarelli 1986
Parsifal. Dir. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Film. 1982
The Tales of Hoffmann. Dirs. Michael Powell, Emerich Pressburger. Perfs. Moria Shearer, Robert Helpmann. Film. Studio Canal. 1951. Criterion Collection DVD 2006. Essay by Ian Christian. Commentary by Martin Scorsese and Bruce Elder
