Panel 1
November 9
10h-12h00
Chair: Paulo Ferreira de Castro
(CESEM– FCSH/UNL)
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Cinema, Liveness and the Limits of Criticism
Dan Wang
(The University of Chicago, USA)
Critical assessment of opera (which includes, but is not limited to, analysis) has tended to preclude its visual and dramaturgical dimensions in favour of a focus on music and text.
It is primarily opera’s liveness that is responsible for this imbalance in critical focus, since opera’s visual dimension is not fixed or synchronized with music and text in a score. The recent flourishing of interest in opera and film (Citron, 2000, 2010; Joe and Theresa, 2002; Grover-Friedlander, 2005) is a testament to the productive affinities scholars have found between these art forms, but it may equally arise from the fact that film, in fixing opera’s
visual dimension in relation to music and text, has given us the ability to finally engage in a truly multimedial operatic criticism.
Yet even as film’s intervention in operatic aesthetics represents advancements on the critical front, caution must be urged. Though the sacrifice of operatic liveness in favour of film’s reiterability may open new possibilities for analysis and discussion of opera’s visual domain,
liveness, I argue, is a quality of opera that must be accounted for, rather than suppressed, in critical encounters of opera and film. Such an accounting need not result in a music- and text-centric view of opera criticism; rather, reading film in the context of operatic liveness reveals deeper ways in which film’s claim to privacy and immediacy bears comparison to opera’s claim to publicity and community.
Liveness, this paper argues, is not simply an inert fact about mediums (i.e. that opera is live and film is not), but is rather an ontological state that actively influences the kinds of data we admit as criteria for analysis. Responding to work by Stanley Cavell, Carolyn Abbate, and others, I aim to trace some of the critical horizons that an attention to liveness in the encounter between opera and cinema makes possible.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Opera’s Screen Metamorphosis: the Resilience of a Genre or a Matter of Translation?
João Pedro Cachopo
(CESEM – FCSH/UNL, Portugal)
Might the screen provide a genre like opera, in our age of mechanical and digital reproduction, with a kind of new skin? Is it then reasonable to surmise that the current survival/afterlife of opera hangs on a metamorphosis of that sort? Though I will not discuss all the implications of these questions, I assume that they permeate, at least implicitly, most of the recent (and less recent) research on the relationship between opera and cinema. So one might keep them in mind, so to speak, as a non-diagetic conceptual background for my argument.
Instead I will develop the hypothesis that Benjamin’s theory of translation provides a challenging framework within which to tackle the problems associated with the film/opera encounter, especially when it comes to dealing with film-operas or screen-operas. The fact that Benjamin likens the task of the translator to the exercise of criticism makes it all the
more useful for my purpose, which is to address the question of how successful a given filmic treatment of a given opera can be, without losing sight of the connection between the aesthetic, historical and political aspects of the work.
The success or failure of a certain rendering of an opera, I will argue, would depend neither on how faithful it is to the operatic “original” nor on the extent to which it becomes thoroughly cinematic, but rather on whether or not it succeeds in doing justice to the historical and
political complexity of the work, by means of the interplay between both its cinematic and operatic dimensions. At least one conclusion – not without consequences for the questions addressed above – is to be drawn from this discussion: that the meaningfulness of a particular film-opera is in principle independent from a more general judgement, whatever it might be, about the fate of opera as a genre.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Horse in Motion: On Opera/Film as Investigative Device
Ulrich Meurer
(University of Viena, Austria)
Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway’s opera Rosa: The Death of a Composer (premiered 1994 at Het Muziektheater in Amsterdam) and Philip Glass’s mixed media chamber opera The Photographer (first performed in 1982 at Amsterdam’s Royal Palace) are both conceived as pieces of ‘musical investigation’: the test arrangement Rosa examines the alleged assassination of a Uruguayan composer for Hollywood Western music in 1957; The Photographer reenacts the homicide of a drama critic, shot by Eadward Muybridge in 1874. However, forms of operatic (re-)presentation are hardly acknowledged as strategies of documentation – and much less criminal detection – but reputed to indulge in “concepts and illusions too preposterous to be tolerated in any other form” (P. Greenaway). To compensate for, and reflect on their seeming artificiality and lack of ‘realism’, both operas assimilate diverse representational systems which are closely associated either with scientific discourse or the technical reproduction of physical reality; on a content-related, formal, and medial level, Rosa and The Photographer employ the ‘cinematic’ (or ‘pre-cinematic’) as a means of deduction. Moreover, in both instances the tension or commutation between musical drama and discursive reconstruction seems to be emblematically subsumed in the figure of a horse, Juan Manuel de Rosa’s black mare in a treadmill-cradle on the one hand, the famous chronophotographical series “Horse in Motion” by Muybridge on the other. In this context, the paper focuses on the operas as self-reflexive investigations not so much of two cases of death, but of the representational potential of different media or dispositifs. It aims at the possible ‘reality effect’ of opera as well as the ‘theatricality’ of cinema’s moving images in order to determine the interplay of image/imaginary and real/reality.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
The Phantom of the Movies:
Some Notes on the Politics of Opera’s Heritage in Film Music
Manuel Deniz Silva
(INET-MD – FCSH/UNL, Portugal)
The influence of opera in film music has been often presented as a natural cultural transfer, undertaken by the founders of its classical paradigm in Hollywood, like Max Steiner or Erich W. Korngold, that had been musically trained in Central Europe and had a solid operatic background.
In this presentation, I would like to address the precise meaning of that heritage, and its political implications. The starting point for these consideration will be the paradoxical fate of William Walton’s music in film and in the opera house. In the 1940’s and 50’s, his collaboration in the shakesperean films directed by Laurence Olivier was highly praised, while his first operatic attempt (Troilus and Cressida, 1954) was severely criticized as “hopelessly out of date”. The contrast between these two opposed receptions of Walton’s work, despite the use of a common musical language, suggests that the aesthetical divide between film music and the concert hall or the opera theater was not simply a matter of composition techniques. During the post-war period, musical avantgards were radically deconstructing the established relations between music and dramatic narrative, and proclaiming the “death of Opera” while, on the other hand, film industry was providing a creative musical field receptive to pre-modernist musical practices and functions. Film music kept alive, like a precious heritage, the nostalgia of that previous musical world, where music and narrative had not yet been radically separated. In the phantasmagoria of film industry, although, this remembrance could only survive as a hidden ghost, effective but not supposed to be noticed or heard.
Opera, in film music, is the name of that ghost. It’s the name of the idealized union of music and drama denounced by Igor Stravinsky in his famous diatribe against film music in 1946. But the traditional framework opposing modernity to conservatism, I will argue, fails to grasp all the political meanings of such a survival. In the conclusion of this paper, I will suggest that Jacques Rancière’s critique of the notion of “aesthetical modernism” can be useful to clarify the terms of the debate. His identification of different “regimes of visibility” of the arts allows us to focus beyond the classification of particular sets of artistic procedures. Because what is at stake in this heritage, and what constitutes its politics, it is not the transfer of certain stylistic or formal traditions, but the very identification of what music is and what music does.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
November 9
10h-12h00
Chair: Paulo Ferreira de Castro
(CESEM– FCSH/UNL)
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Cinema, Liveness and the Limits of Criticism
Dan Wang
(The University of Chicago, USA)
Critical assessment of opera (which includes, but is not limited to, analysis) has tended to preclude its visual and dramaturgical dimensions in favour of a focus on music and text.
It is primarily opera’s liveness that is responsible for this imbalance in critical focus, since opera’s visual dimension is not fixed or synchronized with music and text in a score. The recent flourishing of interest in opera and film (Citron, 2000, 2010; Joe and Theresa, 2002; Grover-Friedlander, 2005) is a testament to the productive affinities scholars have found between these art forms, but it may equally arise from the fact that film, in fixing opera’s
visual dimension in relation to music and text, has given us the ability to finally engage in a truly multimedial operatic criticism.
Yet even as film’s intervention in operatic aesthetics represents advancements on the critical front, caution must be urged. Though the sacrifice of operatic liveness in favour of film’s reiterability may open new possibilities for analysis and discussion of opera’s visual domain,
liveness, I argue, is a quality of opera that must be accounted for, rather than suppressed, in critical encounters of opera and film. Such an accounting need not result in a music- and text-centric view of opera criticism; rather, reading film in the context of operatic liveness reveals deeper ways in which film’s claim to privacy and immediacy bears comparison to opera’s claim to publicity and community.
Liveness, this paper argues, is not simply an inert fact about mediums (i.e. that opera is live and film is not), but is rather an ontological state that actively influences the kinds of data we admit as criteria for analysis. Responding to work by Stanley Cavell, Carolyn Abbate, and others, I aim to trace some of the critical horizons that an attention to liveness in the encounter between opera and cinema makes possible.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Opera’s Screen Metamorphosis: the Resilience of a Genre or a Matter of Translation?
João Pedro Cachopo
(CESEM – FCSH/UNL, Portugal)
Might the screen provide a genre like opera, in our age of mechanical and digital reproduction, with a kind of new skin? Is it then reasonable to surmise that the current survival/afterlife of opera hangs on a metamorphosis of that sort? Though I will not discuss all the implications of these questions, I assume that they permeate, at least implicitly, most of the recent (and less recent) research on the relationship between opera and cinema. So one might keep them in mind, so to speak, as a non-diagetic conceptual background for my argument.
Instead I will develop the hypothesis that Benjamin’s theory of translation provides a challenging framework within which to tackle the problems associated with the film/opera encounter, especially when it comes to dealing with film-operas or screen-operas. The fact that Benjamin likens the task of the translator to the exercise of criticism makes it all the
more useful for my purpose, which is to address the question of how successful a given filmic treatment of a given opera can be, without losing sight of the connection between the aesthetic, historical and political aspects of the work.
The success or failure of a certain rendering of an opera, I will argue, would depend neither on how faithful it is to the operatic “original” nor on the extent to which it becomes thoroughly cinematic, but rather on whether or not it succeeds in doing justice to the historical and
political complexity of the work, by means of the interplay between both its cinematic and operatic dimensions. At least one conclusion – not without consequences for the questions addressed above – is to be drawn from this discussion: that the meaningfulness of a particular film-opera is in principle independent from a more general judgement, whatever it might be, about the fate of opera as a genre.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Horse in Motion: On Opera/Film as Investigative Device
Ulrich Meurer
(University of Viena, Austria)
Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway’s opera Rosa: The Death of a Composer (premiered 1994 at Het Muziektheater in Amsterdam) and Philip Glass’s mixed media chamber opera The Photographer (first performed in 1982 at Amsterdam’s Royal Palace) are both conceived as pieces of ‘musical investigation’: the test arrangement Rosa examines the alleged assassination of a Uruguayan composer for Hollywood Western music in 1957; The Photographer reenacts the homicide of a drama critic, shot by Eadward Muybridge in 1874. However, forms of operatic (re-)presentation are hardly acknowledged as strategies of documentation – and much less criminal detection – but reputed to indulge in “concepts and illusions too preposterous to be tolerated in any other form” (P. Greenaway). To compensate for, and reflect on their seeming artificiality and lack of ‘realism’, both operas assimilate diverse representational systems which are closely associated either with scientific discourse or the technical reproduction of physical reality; on a content-related, formal, and medial level, Rosa and The Photographer employ the ‘cinematic’ (or ‘pre-cinematic’) as a means of deduction. Moreover, in both instances the tension or commutation between musical drama and discursive reconstruction seems to be emblematically subsumed in the figure of a horse, Juan Manuel de Rosa’s black mare in a treadmill-cradle on the one hand, the famous chronophotographical series “Horse in Motion” by Muybridge on the other. In this context, the paper focuses on the operas as self-reflexive investigations not so much of two cases of death, but of the representational potential of different media or dispositifs. It aims at the possible ‘reality effect’ of opera as well as the ‘theatricality’ of cinema’s moving images in order to determine the interplay of image/imaginary and real/reality.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
The Phantom of the Movies:
Some Notes on the Politics of Opera’s Heritage in Film Music
Manuel Deniz Silva
(INET-MD – FCSH/UNL, Portugal)
The influence of opera in film music has been often presented as a natural cultural transfer, undertaken by the founders of its classical paradigm in Hollywood, like Max Steiner or Erich W. Korngold, that had been musically trained in Central Europe and had a solid operatic background.
In this presentation, I would like to address the precise meaning of that heritage, and its political implications. The starting point for these consideration will be the paradoxical fate of William Walton’s music in film and in the opera house. In the 1940’s and 50’s, his collaboration in the shakesperean films directed by Laurence Olivier was highly praised, while his first operatic attempt (Troilus and Cressida, 1954) was severely criticized as “hopelessly out of date”. The contrast between these two opposed receptions of Walton’s work, despite the use of a common musical language, suggests that the aesthetical divide between film music and the concert hall or the opera theater was not simply a matter of composition techniques. During the post-war period, musical avantgards were radically deconstructing the established relations between music and dramatic narrative, and proclaiming the “death of Opera” while, on the other hand, film industry was providing a creative musical field receptive to pre-modernist musical practices and functions. Film music kept alive, like a precious heritage, the nostalgia of that previous musical world, where music and narrative had not yet been radically separated. In the phantasmagoria of film industry, although, this remembrance could only survive as a hidden ghost, effective but not supposed to be noticed or heard.
Opera, in film music, is the name of that ghost. It’s the name of the idealized union of music and drama denounced by Igor Stravinsky in his famous diatribe against film music in 1946. But the traditional framework opposing modernity to conservatism, I will argue, fails to grasp all the political meanings of such a survival. In the conclusion of this paper, I will suggest that Jacques Rancière’s critique of the notion of “aesthetical modernism” can be useful to clarify the terms of the debate. His identification of different “regimes of visibility” of the arts allows us to focus beyond the classification of particular sets of artistic procedures. Because what is at stake in this heritage, and what constitutes its politics, it is not the transfer of certain stylistic or formal traditions, but the very identification of what music is and what music does.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::