SCREENED OPERA

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 27, 23 April 1927, Page 23 (Supplement)

SCREENED OPERA

NEW ART FORM NEEDED The recent showing of “Carmen” at the Capitol has once more set people talking on the general question of “screened opera ” On the side of the public there is a general tendency to overlook the fact that the two techniques—of the opera and of the film—are not merely different, but radically opposed. In opera the action is artificially delayed to give opportunities to singers and composers. On the screen it is artificially quickened to enhance the connection between cause and effect; that is to say, to make the consequences of any particular action ensue before tho impression made by it has dimmed. To fill the allotted period there must therefore be many more times as much action in the film as in the opera. Pro-

ducers, fully alive to tills, do not take their stories from the operas themselves, however popular they may be. They adopt their scenarios from the sources whence the opera story was adapted. For a Siegfried film they go not to Wagner’s music-drama but to the old saga of the Xibelung;?. For “Faust” they go not to Gounod’s librettist but to Goethe. For “Carmen” they went to Prosper Merimee, the original author of the story. Only by applying their screen technique to the original material can they find sufficient incident. If they went to opera they would have to invent three-fourths o:! the plot. Therefore any attempt to link the music of an opera with a film version of the same story is bound to be a comI promise. The only true mating of the | two would have to be photographed with a slow motion camera. ! Taka, for instance, tie immortal story ’ of “Tristan and Isolde.” In the various j traditional forms of the legend there is j enough incident to make a glorious film. Any ambitious producer would jump at I it. But if he had to produce the principal episodes in a way that would permit Wagner’s music to be used he would “cry off” at once. That love scene in the second act would alone be enough to drive him to suicide. The fact is that the cinema will eventually have to create a new art form which will be to the screen what opera is to the stage.