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FILM OPERA 281
may show us the real nature of fairyland, but must never depict our workaday world by means of painted scenery. It has already been said why a similar illusion is required to make the acting seem real.
In the film opera, which will also not tolerate stylization, the most difficult problem to be solved will not be the scenery and direction but the music itself. The reason for this is that musical expression, expression in words and expression in feature-play and gesture, are of unequal duration. The most profound and complicated emotions may appear all at once in a single movement of facial muscles or one gesture, taking up only a second or two of time — or to put it in film language, a few feet of film. To express the same emotion or state of mind in words would take more time and more footage. But while the character in question is talking about his feelings, he preserves them precisely by speaking of them, and the accompanying facial expression may remain on his face all the time he speaks of the same emotion.
To express the same emotion in melody takes longer. Even a few bars take more time and footage and by the time the film gets through with it, the character, if it moves at a natural speed, would long be expressing a different mood by means of a different facial expression and gesture. It was not without good reason that Wagner, in directing his operas, made his singers move much slower than would have been natural. The tied stylized periods of the antique drama were spoken by actors on thick-soled buskins, which also slowed down movement; it is a known fact that opera was born in the sixteenth century out of the attempt to find a style and manner suitable for the staging of the antique tragedy and the singing of the recitatives seemed a suitable means of slowing down the action.
Why such stylized slowing-down is possible on the stage and impossible in the film has another deeper reason as well.
When Senta and the flying Dutchman first meet in Wagner's Flying Dutchman, they stare at each other in motionless silence. This spell of motionless silence, which lasts nearly twenty minutes, escapes being a lifeless patch on the stage, because the music of the orchestra expresses the dramatic