Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

When Opera Meets Film. By Marcia J. Citron.

2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ml/gcr140

1477-4631

Jeremy Tambling,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

When Opera Meets Film is Marcia Citron's second monograph on the subject of opera and film, following her Opera on Screen (New Haven, 2000). This book inverts the subject matter of the earlier one. Whereas the first volume dealt with versions of opera on film, Otello, Tales of Hoffmann, Parsifal, Carmen, and Don Giovanni in particular, with an added chapter on Peter Sellars, this new book looks at the uses of opera in film, and so is less concerned with operatic texts in themselves. It is adventurously interdisciplinary, and that makes it an achievement in itself. Attention is given, primarily, to The Godfather, Aria, the television opera films of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, Chabrol's La Cérémonie, Moonstruck, Sunday, Bloody Sunday, and Closer; though the examples may occasionally seem arbitrary, she could have drawn on many more. The scholarship is evident in the detailed accounts Citron gives of the operas and films she treats, and the questions the book raises are often fascinating.