Operatic Works in Silent Cinema: Toward a Translational Theory of Film Adaptations

Between the 1910s and 1920s, countless film adaptations of operas arose out of the medial competition between cinema and opera. Film adaptations aspired to lend artistic and cultural dignity to the new medium of cinema and, at the same time, actualized operatic subjects, adapting them to the cinema’s sense of naturalism and immediacy. The processes of adaptation carried out by filmmakers could take on a variety of characteristics, as a result not only of the varying practical needs of a particular adaptation but also of different aesthetic paradigms of cinema, that is, the different ways of conceiving its semiotic modes of discourse and the hierarchical configuration of the artistic languages embedded in it. This article compares the adaptational strategies in four films—Cecil B. DeMille’s Carmen (1915), Albert Capellani’s La vie de Bohème (1916), Jacques Feyder’s Carmen (1926), and Richard Strauss and Robert Wiene’s Rosenkavalier (1926)—that represent just as many different modes of engagement with their operatic originals. These instances are interpreted as different solutions to the very same aesthetic problem: How to translate operatic dramaturgy into a cinematic means of expression.