Cinematization - Text 1
With the live transmissions taking place since 2006, large opera houses have ended up having considerable effect on movie-theatre exhibition by providing them with new content and attracting new audiences of music lovers. Each of the large opera houses to have promoted the transmission of its productions in move theatres usually asserts the supposed equivalence between the show it provides on stage and that projected onto a screen. Not only is the opera projected in movie theatres at the same the moment (the same instant, in fact, to put it more precisely) in which the action unfolds on the opera stage; in addition, everything is done by the promoters of these transmissions to persuade film viewers that the performance they are watching belongs, broadly speaking, to the category “live show,” in the same way as the on-stage opera which is the subject of the on-screen transmission. In circumstances such as these, what the promoters promote, of course, is the live aspect of the performance and its transmission. It is thus not surprising that we find this notion in some of the marketing slogans or “trade marks” of such transmissions in cinemas. This is how, to take two major examples, the Royal Opera House, in London, advertises its “live cinema season” and the Metropolitan Opera its The Met: Live in HD series (sometimes adding a layer with titles such as “Live on screen in cinemas”).
