Cinematization - Text 2
In fact the goal is to make film viewers believe, wedged into their seats, that their experience will be analogous to that of music lovers in the opera house kilometres away, in perfect synchrony – perfectly attuned, even. The show that the film viewer audio-visually consumes is thus the same show, neither more nor less, as that acted out on stage, and is made available, live on screen, by means of sophisticated digital capturing and transmission equipment. The screen is thus transformed into a kind of virtual window, looking onto the Met stage, on the exact day on which the live capturing-transmission of a given opera is carried out for the benefit of the thousands of film viewers gathered and seated, all at the same time – simultaneously – in movie theatres around the world.
At the Met, the way operas are captured privileges frontal and oblique shooting angles by cameras whose area of operation generally rules out any point of view from the wings or the back of the stage. In fact the capturing devices normally do not cross the imaginary line across the stage separating it (and thus the actors) from the stalls (and thus the viewers), thereby offering film viewers a point of view most often compatible with that of the audience in the opera house. There is in addition an aspect which the promoters of these transmissions do not attach much weight to: that the supposedly live show to which the film viewer is entitled is, at the very least, an augmented live show. Indeed the battery of audio and visual capturing equipment pressed into service[1] cannot help but “augment” the original message of a series of effects which are foreign to the show being captured: the action is broken down in a shooting script into a multitude of shots, captured from a variety of angles and subject to a constant range of scales, up to and including the close-up. Not to mention the frequent presence of camera movements. Hello cinema!, we might say.
What is transmitted thus loses a part of its operatic integrity and slips into the cinematic. Opera is passed through the mill of cinema: there is cinematization.[2] The capturing-restoring of an opera could, in fact, be nothing more than a strict recording, like that carried out by a surveillance camera. But in the operas which have been transmitted to movie theatres since 2006-7 by means of digital equipment the capturing set-up has been mobilized on such a large scale that it literally transcends a mere recording. The capturing devices are masterfully handled by a film directing crew which does not settle for being the “mere witness of theatrical action.”[3] The unavoidable consequence is that the agent determining the “putting into images” superimposes on the original work a second-level “plastic” interpretation of an audiovisual nature, part-way between television and cinema.
In addition to a live experience, the large opera houses also offer their film-viewer clientele pre-recorded, re-transmitted opera screenings. The diverse elements of the capture are in fact recorded digitally at the same moment the show is performed and transmitted live. This makes it possible to offer a pre-recorded screening of the opera in question, either at the same time on a specified date throughout the “participating” movie theatres (this is the case for example with the Met’s model, The Met: Live in HD Encore), or at different times on various platforms or media on demand (the Internet, video on demand, DVD, television broadcasts, etc.). In this case the show is no longer presented live (being no longer transmitted live), although this does not prevent most opera houses from pretending that such performances nevertheless remain live, if only because, even though it is not transmitted at the precise moment it is acted out on stage, the opera itself was captured live.
In the case of pre-recorded performances, the use of the concept live in promotional documents thus seeks to emphasize the stage event itself, as it was captured at the precise moment it occurred, rather than the digital imprint. Especially since making this imprint is the result of a process of remediation which does not always respect the codes of the originating institution (the opera house), as it is subjected, if only minimally, to the codes of the receiving institution (the movie theatre). It is thus not surprising that what one of the first critics reviewing these operas had hoped to find on screen, above all else, was a “calmly documented”[4] work. Indeed for anyone wishing to remain loyal to the world of opera, the ideal, we might suppose, would be to enable film viewers to attend, in their remote seat, a screen event which would conform to the original stage event as received by the music lover seated in the opera house, as if what was projected on screen were not the product of a remediation, with the screen serving as a mere relay.
