Focusing on contemporary intersections between opera and fiction film, this paper explores how opera is situated within recent audio-visual trends, including those identified as ‘intensified continuity’ (Bordwell 2002; Smith 2013), ‘corporate classicism,’ and the ‘metaphysical style’ (Reyland 2015). Particular attention is given to The Magic Flute (Florian Sigl, 2022), a film that reflects a 21st-century fascination with adapting W.A. Mozart’s opera into the fantasy film genre, aiming to introduce it to new audiences. The film features an original screenplay interwoven with sections of the opera, blending an original score with pre-existing music and frequently dissolving the narrative into musical numbers. However, in this update of Mozart’s opera for a contemporary audience, the new audio-visual trends are not as clearly discernible as one might expect. Instead, the rendering of vocal numbers demonstrates significant freedom compared to the technologically manipulated production of affective intensities. In addition, the opera’s fairy-tale world acts as a parallel universe to the film’s real-world setting, governed by its own principles. These include a fluid boundary between speech and song, without allowing the performances to transcend into metaphysical moments. Drawing on recent studies of how the film musical has been revitalized and reimagined in alignment with new audio-visual aesthetics in the 21st century (Lewis 2022; Stilwell 2022), I argue that contemporary intersections between opera and narrative feature film present a more ambiguous relationship to these trends. This suggests that opera holds a special position within the context of contemporary Hollywood cinema. 

This article addresses the role played by opera in fiction film by drawing attention to the action film Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie, 2015). Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot (1926) is treated here in a way that makes it appear as something more than a diegetic background and energy reinforcement for action scenes. By taking into consideration Daniel Yacavone’s (2012; 2014) view of film as a combination of a construction and a known world, I argue that the use of opera displays a stretching of the boundaries between fiction and real life, which in turn has implications for how the film can be regarded as an opera–film encounter. The film makes the opera emerge as significant in its own right through an intricate interaction between fictional denotation and engagement with the lived reality of the film viewer. Ultimately, I suggest that Rogue Nation provides an opportunity not only to reconsider a common way of approaching intersections between opera and fiction film, but also to extend and refine Yacavone’s theory.

The role played by the female operatic song when used in fiction film has long attracted attention among scholars and Marc A. Weiner and Marcia J. Citron, among others, have argued that this kind of song is combined with receptive rapture and functions as a unifying and/or transformative force. Along with this usage, the female opera singer is portrayed as a mystical object of desire for both a fictional audience and the film viewer. However, several films from the 2010s, show a use of the female operatic song that at the same time both confirm and challenge this practice, which has implications for the representation of the singer. In this paper I draw attention to two films and a TV series that in similar ways reshape the practice noted by previous scholars and discuss how this affects the portrayal of the opera singer: Marguerite (Xavier Giannoli, 2015), Bel Canto (Paul Weitz, 2018) and Mozart in the Jungle (Paul Weitz, 2016). I argue that the operatic song functions as a means of individualization by turning the singer into an active subject, that is, a feeling and thinking person. This means that the abstract and objectified image of the opera singer and her singing that has been pointed out in previous scholarship is renegotiated in a way that opens up for a mixture of various identities for the female operatic performer. 

In recent decades, scholars have argued that a new way of understanding opera (and other classical music) has been articulated in 21st century feature films through a fragmentary and background-oriented way of using opera performances as well as opera music. Opera functions as an overall atmosphere, which means that a traditional notion of this type of music as a stable whole, and the focus of the listener’s attention, is challenged. In this article, by drawing attention to Benoît Jacquot’s film Tosca (2001), I discuss how this way of using opera affects the representation of the singer. This is a film adaptation of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Tosca that is characterized by an experimental approach to image and sound editing. Through an in-depth analysis of the way the opera’s two main characters are featured in the film in three famous arias, when the singers playing these characters are expected to showcase themselves as performers, I argue that the image of the opera singer is renegotiated by bringing it in line with contemporary feature film aesthetics. Two aspects of the vocal performance that are central for the conception of opera as a stable whole, and as an object of attention, are subverted: the embodiment of an opera character and the showcasing of a singer. The music-image combinations make the singers fade as vocal performers whereas the fictional characters are promoted. However, they are promoted in ways that differ from how these characters are modelled in Puccini’s score.

In this essay, an interdisciplinary group of researchers sets out to address the period 1780–1840 in Sweden in a new way, by placing nature at its centre. With the help of ecocritical and transcultural theory, combined with renewed attention to the Swedish fine arts, learned discourses, and practices, we suggest a new approach to these revolutionary decades. The perceived dissonance, the interplay between climatic conditions and cultural template in early modern and modern Sweden, has not been fully addressed in current research, despite the fact that the relationship between humankind and the environment is a central issue in contemporary society and scholarship. Representations of nature situate the nation, they negotiate the relationship between a sensed reality and an ideal, between human and more-than-human beings. We suggest a focus on the unpredictable space created by negotiations of nature in Swedish representations during this crucial period, and, furthermore, on the ways in which this creative space is charged with utopian possibilities in the early Anthropocene. This is the background and the driving force of the planned research project ‘Cool Nature: Utopian Landscapes in Sweden 1780–1840’.

During recent decades, scholars have paid attention to the ways in which marketing strategies surrounded the participation of professional opera singers in 1930s/1940s Hollywood films. Opera singers used cinema to promote themselves as film stars, while Hollywood, in turn, made use of real-life celebrities in order to market films containing opera to a wider audience. Recent cinema, just like films from this earlier period, reflects cross-promotion strategies between cinema and the classical music industry through the participation of professional opera singers. When considering these singers; audio-visual appearances and the roles their performances play within the film plots, some films reveal interesting connections with the historical predecessors. This article investigates the use of cross-marketing strategies in three recent films and queries the broader tropes they adhere to through the configurations of the singers; performances and their roles in the fictional situations. Through exploring these films, I argue that they promote a representation of opera that combines two specific tropes in the process of marketing. An audio-visual display of the singers as real-life celebrities points to an elaboration of the aspect of singer promotion seen in films from the 1930s and early 1940s. Beyond this, the more recent trope of associating opera with an audience listening with rapt attention is included, which casts the opera singer in a new light and enhances this bodily promotion of the singer.

During the last decade scholars have paid increasing attention to how traditional aesthetic values associated with opera are deconstructed in contemporary digital cinema (Kramer 2013, Citron 2011). Instead of manifested as a work of art underwriting a unified aesthetic experience, opera is employed to create atmosphere and is thereby ascribed a primarily semiotic value. Nonetheless, recent films display an intriguing complexity when it comes to contemporary ideas of opera. This paper focuses on how the utopian ideals historically associated with opera are negotiated in contemporary cinematic representations. Discussing some central scenes from recent films I argue that operatic music is displayed very much in line with contemporary marketing strategies of popular music, and that they are so in a way that both promotes an operatic ontology and creates critical distance to values and beliefs traditionally associated with opera as high art. 

Recent scholarship has shown how classical music, including opera, is re-conceptualized in films of the digital age (Citron 2011, Kramer 2013). It has also been pointed out, however, that opera is a cultural object whose meaning has fluctuated throughout history (Till 2012). This paper draws attention to the audio-visual representations of opera in contemporary action film, with specific focus on Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015). I analyze how the film combines representations of a particular operatic performance with distinctive action sequences. This analysis is then compared with similar combinations in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) and Marc Forster’s Quantum of Solace (2008), leading me to the conclusion that McQuarrie’s film constitutes a representative example of how conceptualizations of opera are negotiated in contemporary popular media. Even though the operatic performance is clearly adapted to the typical narrative structures of the action blockbuster and the effects made possible by digitalization, the film articulates concepts of classical music, and opera in particular, belonging firmly to the aesthetics of the 19th- and the early 20th centuries.

The topic of this article is the intersection between media genres in 1960s Sweden. In a case study of Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968) it is shown how the music contributes to intermedial qualities through the film’s connection with opera. It is argued that the film, by how the music is related to sound effects and images, can be seen as an example of formal imitation. The imitation of opera is created through technical media of film, such as foregrounding of media in the audio-visual space, and manipulations of sounds, music, and images. Of special interest is how, by alternating between synchronicity and counterpoint between images, sound effects, and music, Bergman attracts attention to the media as visual and sonic experiences and creates formal structures that deviate from the overall character of the film. The intermedial dimension of the film revealed by the analysis is contextualized in relation to the historical discussion of mixed versus pure medialities. The film is seen in the light of an interest in media genre mixedness versus media genre specificity in 1960s Sweden.