Word: opera
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...until very recently, simple technical problems stood in the way of decent opera films. Movie theater sound systems couldn't deliver the dynamic range of operatic performances without unbearable distortion; directors didn't know how to dub singing voices convincingly; the acting of singers showed embarassing flaws under the close scrutiny of the movie camera. Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni is remarkable not because it records a worthy performance--it's rifled with musical problems of evert sort--but because it solves the worst of the artistic problems that have kept opera off the screen. With any luck future directors...
Ingmar Bergman's Magic Flute, always cited as the best-realized opera film prior to Don Giovanni, neatly sidestepped all the conceptual problems of the hybrid genre--it pretended to be a filmed record of a performance in a provincial opera house, with shots of the audience thrown in to be sure you understood the universality of Mozart's message. Losey never wavers from his no-holds-barred outdoors staging, using the Palladio villas near Vicenza as an occasional refuge from the bright sun that over-exposes many of the scenes...
Losey's breakthrough is the meticulous attention he gives to sonic perspective. Many made-for-TV opera films ludicrously maintain the same concert-hall acoustic whether the singer is standing in a bedchamber or a wheatfield. In Don Giovanni, when the camera zooms in on a singer's mouth, the voice becomes more distinct and louder--and you can tell simply by listening whether a singer is indoors or out. Losey's dubbing technique, too, seems more precise and less distracting than most, including Bergman's. Only one singer, Malcolm King as Masetto, suffers from the "disconnected mouth" disease endemic...
...prospect of juggling the schedules of international opera stars, a conductor, and a symphony orchestra on top of the usual scheduling troubles of any film have generally daunted directors; Losey has shown that it can be done. It now remains for someone to do it, better--because this is not a Don Giovanni anyone would be happy with as a standard or even acceptable version...
Despite the musical ambition implicit in the international cast and the Paris Opera name (Bergman used an all-Swedish cast for his Magic Flute), this Don Giovanni is musically undistinguished. Lorin Maazel's conducting sounds muddy and sluggish throughout--which could easily be the fault of the Exeter Street's Rocky Horror-blasted sound system. None of the singers does very much of the ornamentation most music scholars today believe was a critical part of performances in the composer's time. Most of all, there's a surprisingly lackadaisical air about Mozart's music as Losey presents it--as though...