Annotation
The encounters of opera and cinema date back to the latter’s inception. Opera served as a source of gripping stories for silent movies, and it was not only revered but also ridiculed by the new medium, as in Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera (1935).
Canonic works of opera (Bizet’s Carmen, Mozart’s The Magic Flute) were successfully adapted for the screen by iconic directors such as Franco Zeffirelli and Ingmar Bergman, and later Kenneth Branagh and Peter Sellars. Moreover, opera left its mark on both the Hollywood blockbuster production (think Pretty Woman, for example) and European art cinema.
Last but not least, television opera was developed as a new intermedial genre devised specifically for the small screen. In recent years, increasing scholarly attention has been paid to these developments, with several book-length studies devoted to opera on screen.
The present course draws on this scholarship to explore some of the best-known examples of the diverse encounters of opera, cinema and television. The course is designed to provide students with audio-visual experience of the selected works and with theoretical and analytical tools to approach them.