Vocal Apparitions: The Attraction of Cinema to Opera (review)

Vocal Apparitions is a book about film's attraction to opera, opera's ongoing presence in film, and opera's ultimate resurrection in a new medium. It is strongly inspired by recent theoretical approaches to opera, especially those by Carolyn Abbate, Michel Poizat, Catherine Clément, Stanley Cavell, and Slavoj Žižek. Perhaps the most striking feature of the book, however, is its audacious range of subject matter. In under 200 pages, Michal Grover-Friedlander takes us on a heady ride. Here Lon Chaney's performance in The Phantom of the Opera is considered alongside Gounod and Lacan; here Cocteau's play La voix humaine is placed in dialogue with a Poulenc opera, a Rossellini film, and the medium of the telephone; here the effects of cinematic dubbing are compared with Verdi's composition technique. Grover-Friedlander's high-low hopscotch is not performed in the labored, self-consciously slumming manner of some critical theorists, but with blithe and witty ease. She deals with the potentially thorny issue of opera "versus" mass culture by simply, refreshingly, ignoring it, allowing her argument and her passion to take her where they will. Her argument about the place of Il trovatore in the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera, to take just one instance, is worth the price of admission alone. The book has its failings as well as its virtues, but its courageous eclecticism is undoubtedly one of its strengths.

Grover-Friedlander often takes up where the best of recent theory has left off, elaborating upon and challenging the critics on whom she draws. Referring to Abbate's provocative notion that "musical pieces seek to manifest themselves repeatedly in the world and propel us into motion at their whim," Grover-Friedlander traces the ways in which the opera of Falstaff seems to inhabit one character after another, almost as though the opera itself were the true player and the characters merely its puppets. She focuses our attention on the "migrating voices" of the opera, the ways in which voices or songs "migrate into someone else's body," or else "float independently in the opera's aural space as though the entire opera has become the diegetic space" (p. 96). Contrasting Verdi's use of this technique with Wagner's use of leitmotifs as well as (typically) the use of disembodied voices in the 2002 movie Scooby-Doo, Grover-Friedlander illuminates how Verdi's opera becomes itself an unruly Falstaffian body that intentionally parodies Wagnerian technique. She then builds on this intriguing analysis to offer an interpretation of Götz Friedrich's 1979 Falstaff film, one that shows how the migrating voices of the original opera are translated and resurrected in cinematic form.

Vocal Apparitions is most convincing when it offers such surprising connections and limits itself to more or less well-defined lines of influence. It is least convincing when it offers an overarching theory of the relation between opera and film. The trouble here is not so much the impossibility of such a theory; perhaps a useful one may yet emerge, and Grover-Friedlander may someday be its author. Rather, the trouble here is that the book's survey is simply too brief and unrepresentative to convince as a general theoretical account of the relationship between opera and film. At times she seems aware of this limitation herself, and she sets herself a humbler goal of simply charting the attraction of certain films toward certain operas. The opening lines of the book, in which she writes that "This book is about cinema's attraction to the operatic voice: not about any and all points of contact between cinema and opera," are reassuring. And yet it quickly becomes clear that the humbler project of charting "cinema's attraction to the operatic voice" rests on some very large claims about the essential characteristics of both media. "Paradoxically," she writes, "cinema at times can be more 'operatic' than opera itself, thus capturing something essential that escapes...