The Case of Barbara Willis Sweete, Film Director for The Met: Live in HD - Text 2
When Gelb invited Willis Sweete to join his team in 2008, she had already scripted, directed and produced more than twenty-five films for television. With a predilection for opera and ballet, Willis Sweete had filmed several studio performances and made documentaries, on classical music in particular, and fiction films, including with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma. She had worked very little in making films directly from a stage. It was thus not surprising that she had continued on her path and wanted to make cinema with the material she was given.
The scandal of Tristan und Isolde made clear the limited room for manoeuvre enjoyed by the director of opera transmissions, who must manipulate a complex shooting set-up without making visible choices around the framing, camera movements, shooting angles or image mixing. An operation such as this, carried out continuously, is not something done without preparation. Long before the live performance, the film directing team studies the libretto, the staging and the musical score closely in order to take from them a shooting script similar to one made for a film. From this close reading, the team determines the shot scales, variations in the depth of field, camera movements, the rhythm of the assembly, and the order and duration of the shots for each camera. The emotions evoked by the music dictate the visual architecture of the capture. That could mean, for example, that when the music soars the shift from one shot to the next accelerates. In addition, the libretto and the staging are studied to bring out on screen certain elements of the story, for example a close-up of a seemingly secondary element, but one essential to future understanding of the story.[5]
Willis Sweete underscores the decisive importance in her directing choices of working live: “When you send out live, you have to play it safe to a certain extent.”[6] Because the live feed does not make it possible to go back and re-do a mistake, she is from the outset part of the shared experience:[7] “If you don’t get it right, it at least shows the audience that they are sharing the risk with you and the performance. With live, if you make a mistake, you move on to the next shot.”[8] Everyone involved in the stage event and transmission are thus connected through the norms of live shooting, sharing the risks with singers, musicians, the filmmaking and technical crew and the global audience. Two simultaneous and interdependent events take place in real time: the event on stage and the event screened in movie theatres. Because the emphasis is on the stage content more than the filmic content, the cinema audience has the impression of participating in the experience unfolding within the walls of the Metropolitan Opera while at the same time forming part of a global community whose privilege is to see the sole version put into images by the directing agent.
