A Preliminary Study On Western Opera Film

The paper is a preliminary study on the screen opera.Screen opera, based on opera stories or opera performances and adapted the performances on screens instead of on stages, is one of the small categories of film types. The screen opera appeared earlier than the sound movie, and is an irreplaceable role in the 100-year-old movie history. In order to satisfy fixed opera- lovers, the screen opera is adapted for the screen, helping to popularity of opera to the public and at the same time retaining the classical opera works. My paper focuses on opera films, so the films containing opera segments and stage opera documents is not within the border of my paper.My paper discusses the definition of screen opera at first, under the four opera history periods:the silent era, the sound era, the television times and the modern times. Then, In order to understand the artistic features, I research several important opera works:Madama Butterfly, Otello, Carmen, Tosca, Don Giovanni and Turandot. Comparing the differences between stage edition and screen edition, I discuss the matter of time and place, the shot angles and the influence of sound and music. Besides, my paper also introduces the impact of screen opera. The research on Peter Sellars’s settings of Mozart and Handel continues the discussion of modern media’s capabilities as a medium. At last, I suggest the impact of screen opera to Chinese opera movies by comparing these two kind of film types.