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276 MUSICAL FORMS
is determined by the music) will in most cases impress the audience as an impossible, a ridiculous contradiction. For this reason, when filming a classical opera, it is mostly advisable to present it as a reproduction of an ordinary operatic performance. In this case the most operatically stylized performance will still give a realistic picture, because it will be the faithful reproduction of a familiar reality, and gestures and deportment which would strike us as ridiculous if seen in a real street, do not appear ridiculous, and are perfectly acceptable, if we see the stage on which they happen.
Of course even in such operatic films, technique can do much to loosen up the old-fashioned rigidity which is scarcely tolerable even on the stage to-day. For even though what is being photographed is not nature but a stage performance, close-ups, changing set-ups and angles, and good editing can do much dramatically to enliven the opera and make it more palatable to the present-day spectator.
From the beginning films often contained scenes enacted on the stage or platform, especially if the hero of the film was an actor. Such scene were scenes of real life no less than any street scene and their unnatural style was natural, for everyone knew that here was a stage and that this was what stages were like. Nevertheless such scenes were shot with every trick of the trade and a good director would make use of the specific media and technique of the film with which to stress the theatrical quality of the stage, very often in a satirical vein. Rene Clair was never more specifically filmic than when he parodied the grotesquely unnatural character of stage style in his films.
But even if a film is intended to present the operatic performance seriously in all its classical, original style, it should still do so in the language of the modern film. The original style must be preserved in the first place because, as has already been said, the music demands it. Classical music may be cut if need be, but cannot be changed. But the classical operas were written to old, much-stylized libretti, the archaic dramatic structure of which they must thus immutably preserve. If on the operatic stage two mortal enemies stand face to face with drawn swords and instead of going for each other hammer and