Cinematization - Text 3
The sound films produced under the label “Vitaphone Shorts” are very good examples of operas recorded on film using a minimal degree of cinematic intervention. Produced in the late 1920s, these films tend towards what we might call a “zero degree of cinematization” and form part of a process which, for André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, could be called “shooting” (which they contrast with that other more complex process, “filming”).[5] Shooting, which is literally a form pure and simple of recording, supposes that “the shooter does not let himself or herself manipulate or transform what is being shot.”[6] Unlike filming, which supposes that a “subject” (the filmmaker or video maker, for example) has recourse to the medium’s expressive potential, to the various registers specific to film language, such that one can say, in the case of opera, that what is being filmed is “cinematized” (rather than restricted to a mere passive recording).
As its name indicates, the Vitaphone Shorts were short films, intended to be screened before the main attraction. These were thus brief displays of operatic bravura or familiar airs[7] which were filmed as such, because the Warner Bros. audio equipment restricted recorded performances to only ten minutes in length. This was the case, for example, of the capture of the Rigoletto quartet entitled “Bella figlia dell’amore” recorded in 1927; in a single wide-angle fixed shot, it shows two couples on either side of a wall seen in cross section dividing the stage in two.[8]
