Vocal Apparitions : : The Attraction of Cinema to Opera / / Michal Grover-Friedlander.

Cinema and opera have become intertwined in a variety of powerful and unusual ways. Vocal Apparitions tells the story of this fascinating intersection, interprets how it occurred, and explores what happens when opera is projected onto the medium of film. Michal Grover-Friedlander finds striking affi...

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Superior document:Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
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Place / Publishing House:Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2014]
©2005
Year of Publication:2014
Language:English
Series:Princeton Studies in Opera ; 37
Online Access:
Physical Description:1 online resource (216 p.) :; 10 line illus. 24 halftones.
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Other title:Frontmatter --
Contents --
List of Illustrations --
Acknowledgments --
Introduction --
Part I. Silent Voices --
CHAPTER 1. The Phantom of the Opera: The Lost Voice of Opera in Silent Film --
CHAPTER 2. Brothers at the Opera --
PART II. VISIONS OF VOICES --
CHAPTER 3. Otello's One Voice --
CHAPTER 4. Falstaff 's Free Voice --
PART III. REMAINS OF THE VOICE --
CHAPTER 5. Opera on the Phone: The Call of the Human Voice --
CHAPTER 6. Fellini's Ashes --
NOTES --
INDEX
Summary:Cinema and opera have become intertwined in a variety of powerful and unusual ways. Vocal Apparitions tells the story of this fascinating intersection, interprets how it occurred, and explores what happens when opera is projected onto the medium of film. Michal Grover-Friedlander finds striking affinities between film and opera--from Lon Chaney's classic silent film, The Phantom of the Opera, to the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera to Fellini's E la nave va. One of the guiding questions of this book is what occurs when what is aesthetically essential about one medium is transposed into the aesthetic field of the other. For example, Grover-Friedlander's comparison of an opera by Poulenc and a Rossellini film, both based on Cocteau's play The Human Voice, shows the relation of the vocal and the visual to be surprisingly affected by the choice of the medium. Her analysis of the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera demonstrates how, as a response to opera's infatuation with death, cinema comically acts out a correction of opera's fate. Grover-Friedlander argues that filmed operas such as Zeffirelli's Otello and Friedrich's Falstaff show the impossibility of a direct transformation of the operatic into the cinematic. Paradoxically, cinema at times can be more operatic than opera itself, thus capturing something essential that escapes opera's self-understanding. A remarkable look at how cinema has been haunted--and transformed--by opera, Vocal Apparitions reveals something original and important about each medium.
Format:Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
ISBN:9781400866748
9783110442502
DOI:10.1515/9781400866748
Access:restricted access
Hierarchical level:Monograph
Statement of Responsibility: Michal Grover-Friedlander.