Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls

[Dave Monroe]

... seeing as I'd already keyed this up for someone else, in some other
context, thought this MIGHT be of interest to some here, in re: opera,
pop music, cinema, Vietnam, postmodernism, et al.  From Timothy
Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991) ...

It is thus fully in keeping with historical returns of contemporary
movies that the complement of its music-hall, popular tunes from the
sixties, are the operatic arias and scores that have dominated so many
films of the last twenty years.  From the films of Syberberg, Schroeter,
and Losey to Prizzi's Honor (1985), Amadeus (1984), Dangerous Liaisons
(1989), the anthology-film Aria (1988), and the sudden rush of
contemporary versions of Carmen (by Carlos Saura in 1983, Francesco Rosi
in 1984, and Godard in 1983), the opertic has become the other song of
postmodern history.  This operatic structure is not, however, the ironic
counterpoint to the popular generational songs that might seem to
dominate contemporary history, but the full extension of what it means
to see history through the generational logic of the popular.  In the
collapse of history, setting the high-cultural spectacles of operatic
crisis (the narcissistic plight of the diva) next to the music halls of
contemporary pop (the romance of democratic utopias) aligns and blurs
those two strains of pre-classical culture to describe and inscribe a
human subjectivity collapsing and dispersing before the narratives of
history.... for them, as for Jean-Francois Lyotard's postmodern, "it is
necessary to admit an irreducible need for history ... not as the need
to remember or to project ... but on ther contrary as a need to forget"
([citing The Postmodern Condition] 28). (Corrigan, p. 39)

See also, for starters ...

Tambling, Jeremy.  Opera, Ideology and Film.  New York: St. Martins,
1987.

You know, I don't listen to much opera (er, The Magic Flute, Erwartung
and Nixon in China, appalling all my opera-going, opera-singing
friends), but I seem to read just about anything I find on it ...