Projecting an Aria, Singing the Cinema: In search of a shared vocabulary for opera and film studies

In 2007 I found myself facing 'the future of sound studies' in the middle of an ice storm at the University of Iowa. A colleague and I had organised an interdisciplinary conference titled 'Studies in Sound: Listening in the Age of Visual Culture' that, at some level at least, demonstrated the ways in which we had stopped 'listening' to one another. While we praised the diverse collection of scholars that populated each panel, the one paper that worked the hardest to integrate multiple approaches was also met with the most suspicion. On that frosty February day, a musicologist delivered an analysis of the opera Carmen that imported ideas from feminist film theory.¹ 'But', the audience was quick to point out, 'Carmen isn't a film!'. The group was far more interested in the ontological status of the video clip that the presenter used as illustration than in the music and voices she asked it to reveal. It seemed the 'age of visual culture' had snuck in the back door after all. Frozen with their disciplinary tools, those in attendance were unable to conceive of a serious connection between opera and cinema that allowed for a modification of the procedures of one field to suit a text from another. Yet before I dismiss these reactions completely, I should note that in trying to establish the significance of this video clip the listeners were performing a rather important task. Carmen has, of course, been filmed numerous times and for many different reasons; whether it is preserved for historical documentation, cinematic adaptation, or performance analysis, the 'meaning' of the opera and the status of the film on which it has been recorded has been changed. This short conference presentation thus encapsulates a much larger problem that lingers in the exchange between opera and film studies: when we talk about opera and cinema, should we broaden our theories to embrace both media or narrow our techniques to focus on the intricacies of each individual text? Whether we approach the interaction for the purpose of textual analysis or make a stab at theoretical expansion, the conflict over Carmen makes it clear that we must account for the particular historical conditions that make both ideas and media possible if we are to establish an effective dialogue for studies in sound.

Historically, musicologists (who tend to produce much of the work included under the aegis of 'opera studies') and film scholars speak very different dialects. Perhaps the response of those at the Carmen panel (most of whom were film professors and graduate students) can be explained as a reflex to protect against a perceived pillaging of cinematic discourse by the uninitiated. While the last decade has witnessed an encouraging rise in scholarship that explores the relationship between 'film' and 'opera', lying dormant in much of this discourse are assumptions about what these words really mean. This lack of specificity ultimately fails to account for the special status of opera onscreen during particular periods and within individual national cinemas or film genres. For example, one need only note that contemporary connotations of the term 'opera' are strikingly different from those that circulated in early twentieth-century America, when arrangements and translations of operatic arias were familiar to people from a variety of social classes. Moreover, an opera was not necessarily considered an autonomous entity, but was instead drastically altered to suit the location of performance.² Thus the particularities of these operatic exhibitions, like those of early film screenings, often shifted the source of meaning from the composer's hand to the local experience.³ When we try to explain the 'nature' of a medium like opera or cinema, whose significance drastically alters as it interacts with changing technological and social conditions, we do a disservice to theoretical approaches designed to make sense of a unique experience.

A consideration of the distinctness of its sound transmission, however, often fails to make its way into discussions of opera on film. For example, Michal Grover-Friedlander's work on cinematic depictions of the opera defines 'opera...