Oedipus and the Riddle of the New Media: François Girard at the Canadian Opera Company

university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 4, fall 2003 P I A K L E B E R A N D J Ö R G B O C H O W Oedipus and the Riddle of the New Media: François Girard at the Canadian Opera Company Canadian film director François Girard’s joint production of Igor Stravinsky ’sSymphony of Psalms and Oedipus Rex for the Canadian OperaCompany was a visual feast, filled with what used to be called coups de théâtre. Yet compared with Atom Egoyan’s staging of Richard Strauss’s Salome and Robert Lepage’s mises en scène of Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung (and even more with Lepage’s other theatre productions), Girard’s stagings used relatively few immediate multimedia effects: an invisible handwriting of names on a screen; a sinuous line drawing in the background; colour and lighting effects; the linking of the narrative by cuts or fades. All of these striking visual effects not only revealed Girard the filmmaker but also helped to bring the two static Stravinsky works alive and make them accessible to a younger generation, brought up on television, movies, and videos, and thus used to getting their stories in a visual mode. In doing so it offered them a bridge in the form of an aesthetic language with which they are at home. We would argue, however, that the three Canadian Opera Company productions by Canadian directors mentioned above can be seen as a continuation of a late nineteenth-century radical reform of the visual language in opera and theatre, as envisioned by Adolphe Appia and Edward Gorgon Craig. In his Music and the Art of Theatre, first published in French and German in 1899, Appia demanded that the theatre ‘renounce what is called scenic illusion. [Once] the limits of the scenery need no longer be concerned with [such] illusion, they can now obey the superior injunctions of the poetic-musical text, and provide if necessary a material flexibilitycorrespondingtothatofthescore’(71). Similarly Craig developed models for non-illusionistic set-designs by using light as an ‘immaterial’ means. As Appia stated: ‘Light is to production what music is to score: the expressive element to literal signs; and like music, light can express only what belongs to “the inner essence of all vision”‘ (72). Light is the ontological foundation of photography and film as both are ‘molding(s), the taking of an impression, by the manipulation of light’ (Bazin, 12). This was the foundation for the production of Oedipus Rex by Girard and his designer Michael Levine and it gave the stage production a filmic transparency and fluency. Opera in the twentieth century had already, however, since 1900, become part of the new audiovisualdiscourse and its main artifact – cinema. By 1902 opera pieces were already trans- 818 pia kleber and jörg bochow university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 4, fall 2003 formed into audiovisual media products by the combination of gramophone with camera and projector. In this way, opera productions as art works entered what Walter Benjamin famously called the ‘age of mechanical reproduction.’ The synchronized technology of both machines (gramophone and projector) made possible, at least virtually, the mass distribution of ‘high art’ productions. On the other hand, cinema soon seemed to replace opera as a ‘total art work’ and was proclaimed as the new synthesis of all existing art. Significantly , the first manifesto of the ‘Sixth Art,’ written by Ricciotto Canudo and published in Paris in 1911, copies opera composer Richard Wagner’s idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Film was to become the art of the total synthesis, seen as the ‘new Festival ... where ... all men can forget in greater or lesser measure, their isolated individuality’ by means of ‘that stunning mixture of chemistry and mechanics, that extraordinary creator of emotions ’ (64–65). Unlike traditional opera productions where audio and visual components are all enacted live on stage, the film screenings of the 1910s and 1920s merged live performed music and comments with the recorded visual images and written inserts. Montage, the synthesis of distinctive, asynchronic,separate elements, determinedthe aestheticsoffilmatthetime when StravinskyandCocteauwereworkingontheiropera-oratorioOedipus Rex. Given that Girard’s production...