When Opera Meets Film (review)

When Opera Meets Film is Marcia Citron’s second monograph on the subject of opera and film, following her Opera on Screen (New Haven, 2000). This book inverts the subject matter of the earlier one. Whereas the first volume dealt with versions of opera on film, Otello, Tales of Hoffmann, Parsifal, Carmen, and Don Giovanni in particular, with an added chapter on Peter Sellars, this new book looks at the uses of opera in film, and so is less concerned with operatic texts in themselves. It is adventurously interdisciplinary, and that makes it an achievement in itself. Attention is given, primarily, to The Godfather, Aria, the television opera films of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, Chabrol’s La Cérémonie, Moonstruck, Sunday, Bloody Sunday, and Closer; though the examples may occasionally seem arbitrary, she could have drawn on many more. The scholarship is evident in the detailed accounts Citron gives of the operas and films she treats, and the questions the book raises are often fascinating.

Citron notes the growing interest in the interrelationships between opera and film, with reference to such studies as the collection edited by Jeongwon Joe and Rose Theresa, Between Opera and Cinema (London, 2002)—she could now add Jeongwon Joe and Sander Gilman’s collection, Wagner on Screen (Indianapolis, 2009) and might have considered Michael Grover- Friedlander’s Vocal Apparitions: The Attraction of Cinema to Opera (Princeton, 2003). The subject has appeared in numerous chapters of edited collections, either addressing film, or, more often, opera. Citron is also generous enough to acknowledge warmly my own work following my Opera, Ideology and Film (Manchester, 1987). Perhaps her consideration of opera and film could be put more into the context of new critical approaches to opera, often informed by gender studies, psychoanalysis, and film studies. Indeed, it was precisely because opera study was previously so locked into formalist description that scholars began to draw on tools such as those used for film. It suffices to name Catherine Clément, Edward Said, Paul Robinson, Stanley Cavell, Samuel Weber, David Levin, and Slavoj Žižek and the other Slovenian Lacanians, and the fresh work done on Adorno, to think how much opera in the last thirty years has received important extramusical attention, and this does not even touch on the number of studies of music based on questions posed by queer theory, such as Corinne E. Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith’s edited collection En travesti, or the work of Terry Castle, Wayne Koestenbaum, Sam Abel, and Philip Brett.

Many of these names are invoked by Marcia Citron, herself a formidable voice within this new discursive treatment of opera, whose roots it would be interesting to probe. Perhaps it might be founded in opera performance, in which case I would draw a marker in the sand with the Chereau/Boulez Ring of 1976, with its deliberate anachronisms and emphasis on modernity, and the logic it gained when it was filmed. Opera productions have themselves moved closer and closer to film; opera as metaphor (like theatre) has become more comparable to film as the art of metonymy in the recent Covent Garden Tristan und Isolde (2009), directed by Christof Loy, where almost everything, apart from the lovers, was occluded from the audience’s sight, either by a curtain, by lighting, or by positioning the chorus so distantly that they appeared as strangers in another world. It is now almost standard, too, for opera productions to use film projections, or to involve filmic moments. Indeed, Stanley Cavell’s sense of film as the successor to opera, after Gramsci, which Citron quotes (p. 57), now needs to be rethought: if cinema succeeds the novel, which seems more likely, in terms of popularity, narrative, and pace, then opera has something more like a chiasmic relationship to film, with only a qualified ability to convey a narrative; even many nineteenth-century operas require the audience to be familiar with the text from which the opera derives—say Scott, Schiller, or Shakespeare...