Delphine Vincent

Film into Opera

Film into Opera: From Operatic to Cinematic Dramaturgy explores a new trend in contemporary opera: film-based operas. Far more than a mere revamping of opera, this proliferating repertoire of films turned into operas challenges the assumption that adaptation is a unidirectional move from stage to screen. In the few critical essays on this most recent phenomenon, film-based operas are often labelled as cinematic and presented as diverging from operatic tradition. This book questions such assumptions with a dramaturgical study of this new operatic genre. Addressing the adaptation process, it seeks to determine to what extent film-based operas are different from the more traditional form and whether the change in operatic source is sufficient to substantially modify dramaturgy. This book deals with these dramaturgical questions in two parts. The first, theoretical part challenges a current critical discourse which relies on cinematic tools for the analysis of operatic repertoire, and offers a definition of what cinematic opera is and what is not. This first section also considers the appropriate tools to use when analysing the dramaturgy of film-based operas. The second part of the book is formed of case studies and investigates three film-based operas which represent different ways of turning film into opera: Philip Glass’s Orphée (1993), André Previn’s Brief Encounter (2009) and Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel (2016), respectively based on Jean Cocteau’s, David Lean’s and Luis Buñuel’s eponymous films. These three case studies present a comparative analysis of the film and the opera and a reflection on the adaptation process. While focusing on just three works, this section offers tools for evaluating the dramaturgy of other film-based operas and challenges the concept of cinematic dramaturgy. As film-based opera could become the major type of contemporary opera, it is capital to address this new and fascinating operatic genre with full knowledge of the diversity of its relationships to film in order to fully appreciate its richness.