Cinema's Illusions, Opera's Allure The Operatic Impulse in Film

The invention of cinema was ingenious, so much so that virtually no-one quite knew what to do with it. In its earliest stages, especially with the advent of the feature film, it needed models, and opera proved to be especially useful in that regard. The allure of opera to cinema early in the twentieth century held up through the silent era, into sound films, through the golden age of movies, and beyond. This book explores the numerous ways – some predictable, some unexpected, and some bizarre – in which this has happened.

The influence of Richard Wagner on filmmakers has been especially striking, and some have even devised visual images that seem to emerge from a kind of non-verbal Wagnerian essence – a formative, musical urge that can underlie a cinematic idea, defying explanation and remaining purely sensory. Directors like Griffith, DeMille, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Bunuel or Hitchcock have intuited this possibility.

Schroeder provides a fascinating, well-researched and always entertaining account of the influence of one medium on another, and shows that opera can often be found lurking in the background (or booming in the foreground) of an impressive range of films.

Preface
Introduction
Part I – Appropriation of Opera in Early Cinema
1. Silent Opera: DeMille's Carmen
2. D. W. Griffith as a Wagnerian
3. Stage Fright: Phantom of the Opera
4. A Life at the Opera
5. Synesthesia: Alexander Nevsky as Opera
Part II – The Film Score
6. The Leitmotif
7. Titles Music as Operatic Overture
Part III – Cinema Gives Opera the Finger
8. Casting Opera in our Teeth: Chaplin's Carmen
9. Attack of the Anarchists: A Night at the Opera
10. Deflated and Flat: Opera in Citizen Kane
11. Bursting Out Into Opera: Fellini's E La Nave Va
12. The Charming Opera Snob in Hannah and Her Sisters
Part IV – Wagner's Bastards
13. Misreading Wagner: the Politics of Lang's Siegfried
14. Cinema as Grand Opera: Politics, Religion and DeMille
15. Bombarding the Senses: Apocalypse Now
16. Wagnerian Images of Sound and Sensuality
17. Wagner's Ring Cycle for Adolescents: Star Wars
18. What's Opera, Doc?
Part V – Cinema as Opera
19. Dizzying Illusion: Vertigo
20. Carmen Copies
21. Operastruck
22. Outing Opera in Philadelphia
23. Opera Obsession
24. Surrogate Voice: Maria Callas as Medea
25. Orpheus Reincarnated
Part VI – Opera Returns as Cinema
26. Finale: Directors' Operas
Notes
Index

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