Between Opera and Cinema

Jeongwon Joe, Rose Theresa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136534072
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Leading scholars of opera and film explore the many ways these two seemingly unrelated genres have come together from the silent-film era to today.

1
From Méphistophélès to Méliès

Spectacle and Narrative in
Opera and Early Film

Rose Theresa

D URING THE LAST DECADES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, GOUNOD’S Faust was performed more often than any other operatic work, not only at the Paris Opera, but internationally as well.¹ It was also the opera earliest cinematographers turned to most frequently. During cinema’s first decade and a half, Faust made its way to the screen time and time again. Why was this so? The appeal of this opera around the turn of the century can be attributed in some part to they way it “combined spectacle and narrative,” to borrow a phrase from Laura Mulvey.² As Mulvey and others indicate, spectacle and narrative are distinct forms of visual pleasure that realize the circulation of meaning and power with particular force in the cinema. As different ways of seeing, they shape spectators’ rapport with the screen. Through spectacle and narrative, we will see how Faust offered early filmmakers a readymade, proven, and flexible model for establishing and regulating visual pleasure.

For Mulvey, the pleasures of spectacle and narrative and the experiences of filmgoers are structured through sexual difference. Cinema’s ultimate power— particularly in mainstream cinema of the 1930s to the 1960s—is that of the “patriarchal order.” Historians of early film, on the other hand, attend to distinctions between spectacle and narrative to elucidate a transformation in the nature of both cinematic language and spectatorship during the earliest decades of the medium. For scholars such as Tom Gunning, Thomas Elsaesser, and Miriam Hansen, cinema during these years effects a gradual shift from modes of engagement predicated on spectacle to those based on narrative continuity. They read this shift as one aspect of the increasing control of an emerging film industry over the cinematic experiences of its audiences. This essay will briefly consider Faust the opera in light of Mulvey’s feminist analysis of spectacle and narrative before exploring several Faust films in the context of changing modes of early cinematic spectatorship.

MULVEY AND THE GENDERING OF SPECTACLE AND NARRATIVE

In her “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey focuses on spectacle and narrative to discern ways in which sexual difference both structures and is structured by these “two contradictory aspects of looking in the conventional cinematic situation.”³ In her groundbreaking essay, Mulvey analyzes the ubiquitous gaze of the cinema in terms of three secondary “looks,” those of the camera, the characters on the screen, and the spectators in the theater. She argues that it is through this powerful apparatus of interchanging looks that masculine-identified positions are more coherently aligned with narrative procedures, while femininity comes to be equated with spectacle.⁴

Though much attention has been given to defining the nature of narrative in the cinema and to analyzing narrative procedures in individual films, similar work on cinematic spectacle—the predominantly feminine side of Mulvey’s dichotomy—has been generally limited to studies of early film, pornographic genres, and the American musical. In this context, spectacle is often defined in a negative relation to narrative. In the most general terms, where narrative is understood as the figuring of spatial and temporal movement, spectacle is characterized as static, disrupting the narrative flow through direct confrontation with “the here and now.”⁵ For example, Paul Willemen characterizes similarities between musicals and pornographic films in just this way:

In both cases the importance of the generically obligatory sequences makes for a weak narrative as the story is simply there to link the graphic sex/musical numbers with fairly predictably coded transitions from the narrative to its interruptions, with the interruptions functioning as self-contained pieces. Moreover, the need to include such relatively autonomous segments arranged as spectacles “arresting” the look and thus, at least to a significant extent, suspending the narrative flow, makes for films that proceed with a halting rhythm.⁶

Without challenging these notions, Mulvey’s essay shows that spectacle and narrative can also be distinguished more instructively as two different modes of address in cinema, two distinct ways in which cinema implicates its spectator.

Although any film may be read as an interweaving of spectacle and narrative, these two ways of seeing structure the ongoing rapport between spectator and screen in different ways. Spectacle is perhaps the more ambivalent of the two, the more unstable in its effects. With spectacle, there is a sense of direct rapport, an immediacy that invites a merging of spectator and screen image. But, at the same time, the experience of spectacle is necessarily predicated on separation: the spectacle is experienced primarily as other than the spectator. It is, after all, only through separation that “the fantasy of merging, the confused boundaries between self and other” may be posited.⁷

Narrative operations, on the other hand, are effected through an initial sense of sameness and belonging. The narrative mode of address establishes and assumes identification of the spectator with a space constructed and shared from within the fictional world of the film itself. In other words, where spectacle addresses the spectator in a way that says “look at me and see me from where you are,” narrative says “look with me and see what I see from where I am.” Spectacle invites an immediate, direct rapport with the other. Narrative provides a more vicarious experience, in that rapport with the other is mediated through the same. In Mulvey’s words, spectacle “implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen.” Narrative, on the other hand “demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator’s fascination with and recognition of his like.”⁸

In cinema’s gendering of spectacle and narrative, then, the other is female and the same is male. Mulvey exemplifies this gendering of vision through a comparative analysis of specific films directed by Josef von Sternberg and Alfred Hitchcock. She demonstrates that in Sternberg’s films starring Marlene Dietrich—particularly Morocco—spectacle reigns supreme. Mulvey describes Sternberg’s general approach to narrative as one concerned with “situation, not suspense, and cyclical rather than linear time, while plot complications revolve around misunderstanding rather than conflict.” In film after film, Sternberg casts Dietrich in the role of a performer such as a cabaret singer, a character whose profession is to provide erotic spectacle. In this context, a liberal use of close-ups overwhelms the narrative with images of Dietrich—of her face, of her legs—presented “in direct erotic rapport with the spectator.” At the same time, a consistently shallow depth of field focuses visual interest on the pictorial space of the frame, such that “the beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce.”⁹

By contrast, the narrative mode of address dominates the films of Hitchcock, where suspense is expertly generated and resolved through patterns of mystery, intrigue, investigation, recognition, and disclosure. Though female characters provide instances of erotic spectacle, in some films they also embody the narrative’s primary enigma or mystery-to-be-solved. The title characters of Marnie, for example, or Vertigo‘s Judy/Madeleine become motivating objects of curiosity not only for the film’s male protagonists, but also for the cinematic spectator.

Throughout Hitchcock’s films, and irrespective of a female character’s status as central enigma, it is predominantly—though never exclusively—from the perspective of male characters that the gaze implicates the spectator. As Mulvey explains, “Hitchcock’s skillful use of identification processes and liberal use of subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist draw the spectators deeply into his position.”¹⁰ Rear Window provides a most obvious example of this tendency in that, throughout the film, the spectator generally sees what Jeffries, the male protagonist (played by Jimmy Stewart), sees as he peers through his rear window. In Mulvey’s words, the spectator is “absorbed into a voyeuristic situation within the screen scene and diegesis which parodies his own in the cinema.” The spectator is thus positioned to share this situation with the protagonist who drives the narrative from within the film’s fictional world.¹¹

It is remarkable the degree to which Gounod’s operatic characters Faust and Marguerite embody, if through quite different means, the visual dynamic outlined by Mulvey: “Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look.” Time and again throughout the opera, Faust gazes upon Marguerite who is presented as a spectacular vision to behold. The first appearance of the two characters together onstage provides an obvious example of the opera’s gendering of spectacle and narrative. This takes place in the extended middle section of the first-act duo between Faust and Méphistophélès. It is the moment when Faust is about to sign away his soul. Méphistophélès presents him with a black parchment, but Faust balks, his hand trembles, and Méphistophélès responds to Faust’s indecision:

What will it take to persuade you?
If it is youth that you desire,
dare to gaze upon this!¹²

With a wave of Méphistophélès’s hand, the far wall of Faust’s study, a painted curtain, rises to reveal Marguerite at her spinning wheel.¹³ Faust looks, exclaims “O merveille!” and, after a general pause in the orchestra, the horns introduce “O nuit d’amour,” one of the opera’s most lyrical melodies to accompany Marguerite’s spectacular first appearance.¹⁴

The visual apparatus of the theater is put into play to accentuate Marguerite’s status as spectacle. She appears deeply upstage, removed from the main area of the stage by a sheer blue curtain.¹⁵ From this enclosed space she poses mutely at her spinning wheel, in the manner more of a figure in a painting than a character in an opera. Marguerite’s stage space, beyond the study and behind the transparent blue curtain, is also brightly illuminated. Faust and Méphistophélès remain downstage, left along with the audience in relative darkness. The spectator is thus positioned, through staging and focused lighting, to gaze along with the male characters upon the spectacle of Marguerite.¹⁶

Faust’s role here is to look, and look he does until Marguerite disappears from view as magically as she appeared. While she is still onstage, Faust asks for the parchment and signs it. Méphistophélès offers his new conscript a celebratory drink. With goblet in hand, Faust toasts the vision of Marguerite, “to you, charming and adorable phantom,” and proceeds to drink.¹⁷ During all the acting out of this stage business, Faust gazes continuously upon the vision of Marguerite, his eyes never wavering from the spectacle. Even with the goblet at his lips, he does not turn away from the apparition.¹⁸ Faust’s visual engagement with the female character, here and across the opera, comes to channel the spectator’s visual engagement with the opera. As I have argued elsewhere, there are few operas of the nineteenth-century repertory that so “neatly” combine spectacle and narrative through sexual difference.¹⁹ In this opera, the gaze is male.

Was it this gendering of visual pleasure in Gounod’s Faust that appealed to early filmmakers? I would say yes, but it was mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Critical and Cutural Musicology
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 FROM MÉPHISTOPHÉLÈS TO MÉLIÈS: Spectacle and Narrative in Opera and Early Film
• 2 “THERE AIN’T NO SANITY CLAUS!”: The Marx Brothers at the Opera
• 3 THE TALES OF HOFFMANN: An Instance of Operality
• 4 THE CINEMATIC BODY IN THE OPERATIC THEATER: Philip Glass’s La Belle et la Bête
• 5 WHY DOES HOLLYWOOD LIKE OPERA?
• 6 OPERA IN FILM: Sentiment and Wit, Feeling and Knowing: The Shawsbank Redemption and Prizzi’s Honor
• 7 IS THERE A TEXT IN THIS LIBIDO?: Diva and the Rhetoric of Contemporary Opera Criticism
• 8 THE ELUSIVE VOICE: Absence and Presence in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s Film
• 9 VERDI IN POSTWAR ITALIAN CINEMA
• 10 CHINESE OPERA, GLOBAL CINEMA, AND THE ONTOLOGY OF THE PERSON: Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine
• 11 SOUNDING OUT THE OPERATIC: Jacques Rivette’s Noroît
• AFTERWORD: In Appreciation
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX