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Reviewed by:
  • When Opera Meets Film
  • Laura Basini
When Opera Meets Film. By Marcia J. Citron. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. [xviii, 324 p. ISBN 970521895750. $95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, filmography and videography, index.

Over the course of the last six years, the Cambridge Studies in Opera series has presented a stimulating range of monographs that have greatly enlivened and strengthened the field. One of its most recent offerings, Marcia J. Citron's When Opera Meets Film, continues the series' tradition of expanding study of operatic influence in various aspects of culture, in this case proposing that "the more ways we can approach [the opera/film encounter] the better will be our sense of opera's place in contemporary society" (p. 249). Citron, who has published widely on the relationships between film and opera, is well positioned to take on this task. In this volume, three previously published essays on Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy (1972-90), Norman Jewison's 1987 Moonstruck, and the filmed operas of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (1972-88), are interspersed with three chapters of new material focused on Don Boyd's 1987 Aria, Claude Chabrol's 1995 La Cérémonie, John Schlesinger's 1971 Sunday Bloody Sunday, and Mike Nichols's 2004 Closer (for the earlier essays, see "Operatic Style and Structure in Coppola's Godfather Trilogy," Musical Quarterly 87, no. 3 [Fall 2004]: 423-467; "Subjectivity in the Opera Films of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle," Journal of Musicology 22, no. 2 [Spring 2005]: 203-240; and " 'An Honest Contrivance': Opera and Desire in Moonstruck," Music and Letters 89, no. 1 [February 2008]: 56-83).

As Citron is well aware, this range of repertory dictates an ambitious scope for her investigations, taking into its purview not only "mainstream film" but also full-length opera film and "postmodernist pastiche" (p. 4), several national traditions, and a number of extremely diverse film directors, film composers, and opera composers, over a thirty-year historical span. Citron's project in this book, however, is not to emphasize historical similarities, but rather to study the "factors that produce meaning" when opera is present in film (p. 13), in order to show, through a range of case studies, how "opera can reveal something fundamental about film, and film can do the same for an opera" (p. 1). While acknowledging that "the circumstances [End Page 392] of a particular situation generate the theory and categories that fit the work," and that therefore the volume "is fundamentally a 'perspectives' study [that] shies away from any sort of unitary viewpoint" p. 13), she nonetheless proposes across the chapters a "framework that can lead to larger observations and encourage comparative discussion" (p. 7) based on Werner Wolf's terminology of "intermediality"—"a simple and elegant system to categorize the relative importance of media when they combine" (p. 7). With this emphasis on theoretical consistency, but across an array of contrasting repertory, Citron seems to be addressing some of the few criticisms of her first full-length study of opera and film, Opera on Screen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000; see for example Byron Nelson's complaints in Opera Quarterly 17, no. 4 [Autumn 2001]: 718-21). Citron herself sees When Opera Meets Film as part of a "second generation of scholarship" on film and opera (p. 1), one that "refines and expands our approaches to opera and film, adds important repertoire to the scholarly purview, and advances our understanding of the aesthetics of the opera/film encounter" (p. 1).

The diversity of the book's subject matter is balanced by the somewhat formulaic structure of the volume: each chapter provides a brief introduction to the film or films in question, a review of Citron's goals, and a detailed description of the work from a general and visual perspective prior to a discussion of its music. Citron amply demonstrates her capabilities in visual analysis and her thorough knowledge of film studies, making When Opera Meets Film aptly titled; unlike some other studies of music in film, the non-musical film analysis presented here is thorough and insightful. To this reader, at least, these introductory discussions of visual and textual...

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