Cinematization - Text 5
At the same time, by inserting (in the introduction mostly, but also in certain selected moments in the film) close-up images of viewers seated in the opera house where the action was supposedly captured (although this was not at all the case), Bergman gives the illusion of an effective joint presence of the (supposed) show and the viewing subject. In this way, the opening sequence makes it possible to forge (fictitious) connections between the stage (where nothing is yet happening, as the curtain has not been raised) and a good number of viewers.
The film La Traviata, written, scripted and directed in 1982 by the filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli based on the opera by Verdi, offers an example of cinematization on an even greater scale that that of Bergman’s The Magic Flute. The great opera singers Teresa Stratas (soprano), Placido Domingo (tenor) and Cornell MacNeil (baritone) “play” their character not on a stage (like the Vitaphone films) or even on what looks to be a stage (like the singers in The Magic Flute), but in real spaces in the real, extra-cinematic world: a real ballroom, a real chateau in the countryside, a real house in Paris. These, then, are not speaking actors; rather, they are singing ones, who do not meet all the codes of the opera stage (rather than speaking “normally” they sing, as in a film which meets the codes of a musical comedy). Zeffirelli has put aside the stage convention, which Bergman preserves, and in a sense makes of this Verdi opera a film more faithful to history (to the time described in the story told) than to the opera itself (and at the precise moment when the opera in question was to be executed, as is the case with any operatic remediation based on a dated depiction, or, to be clearer, to a “date-stamped” depiction). The same is true of the Met’s operas which, once they are available as videos on demand, indicate the precise date, not in any way variable, of the performance which in the beginning had borne the consequences of being transmitted to movie theatres.
