Porn Style?: Space and Time in Live Opera Videos

In October 2008 a blog post reporting that the high-definition simulcast of Jürgen Flimm's Metropolitan Opera production of Strauss's Salome was not to show the protagonist's fully naked body at the end of the Dance of the Seven Veils elicited the following anonymous comment:

We miss so much anyway, watching these HD broadcasts. The cameras frequently aren't showing what I would like to see.

I would like always to see everything on the stage, please. My own eyes will follow and focus as required. Would that they had one camera angle only, fixed somewhere in the house to broadcast the production exactly as a live audience sees it.

The fancy camera work (zooming, hovering, etc.) is sometimes visually interesting, but it detracts from the experience. The camera thinks for me and decides for me where my interests lay, and I don't appreciate that. So much is lost when a camera zooms in, when, really, a character needs to be seen and heard as part of the whole and not focused upon, porn style, in the most exciting moments.¹

This comment is fairly typical of the general attitude toward videos of live performances, at least on the part of those who regularly attend such performances and are generally the most vocal contributors to the discussion. The attitude itself is a component of the more general discourse on opera in the modern world, in which the mystique of the live event plays a fundamental part. This mystique encourages a widespread suspicion of video recordings, normally viewed as at best "mediations," at worst "betrayals" of what should really matter, that is, the live performance. As a consequence, videos of live performances have received relatively little attention by critics and scholars, especially when compared with opera films and studio productions.² And yet, in the last decade, the arrival of DVDs, and more recently of the so-called HD simulcasts to movie theaters, have placed videos at the center of the experience of opera in contemporary society, including for those regularly attending live performances, who in general watch videos with equal regularity.

It seems high time, then, to give such objects the attention their current relevance demands. Such attention could focus on a number of important issues, among them the relationship between live videos and the media by which they have been carried and through which they have been consumed; the multiple meanings of their claim to "liveness," and therefore of their categorization as constitutionally different from opera films and studio productions; or the visual, cultural, and social contexts in which live opera videos are produced and consumed.³ The topic that has attracted most of what little attention has been devoted to these videos, however, is their relationship with the performances they are purported to record. In what follows I focus on this relationship, with the aim of offering a contribution to the development of a critical vocabulary for discussing it, one that may help go beyond the rhetoric of "fidelity" that tends to dominate past and present discourse. I begin by surveying a few theoretical positions on the topic, and then proceed to advance some suggestions of my own, which I test on a particularly interesting example in the third section of the article. The fourth and final section is devoted to a few concluding thoughts, concerning especially the ways in which videos handle space and time, and their correlation with the spaces and times of theatrical performances.

The connection between a live performance and its video recording has been most frequently examined for the degree of liveness that the latter may or may not succeed in communicating, and for the measure of its success in preserving the "spirit" of the former. This means that even those who explicitly acknowledge a video as a separate and ontologically different object from a performance, with particular technical features and more or less privileged connections with different media, always consider it from the point of view of its relationship to the performance. In this sense, the theoretically alert observations of German mediologist...