A Night at the Opera

 Sergei Loznitsa's A Night at the Opera is a 20 minute documentary produced under the auspices of the Opera de Paris.  It is part of a series of short films commissioned by the cultural institution and first shown in 2020.  Loznitsa is a great filmmaker -- his monumental and appalling State Funeral about Stalin's obsequies is unforgettable.  Loznitsa is a materialist film maker, at least when it comes to documentaries.  (He has made two dramatized feature films which I have not seen).  Loznitsa accumulates footage, edits it together without overt commentary, and lets the images and montage communicate the meaning of the material presented.  This technique makes his films susceptible to very different interpretations..  One picture that he directed, Austerlitz, showing tourists strolling the grounds of a German concentration camp exemplifies the ambiguity in his method.  One can interpret the film as evidence of callow disregard for human tragedy, as a portrait of how masses of people move through a landscape, as evidence of the limitations of memory or, even, as a joyous assertion of people's ability to entertain themselves despite the horror of history -- all of these meanings are demonstrably present in the film.

Ordinarily, Loznitsa works with duration and, often, makes his points by the sheer length, and tedium in some cases, of his material.  (State Funeral is about three hours long and hammers home its points by a sheer, mind-numbing accumulation of footage.)  A Night at the Opera is much more spritely, briskly edited to provide an abstract, as it were, of what it was like to observe people at an opera in the late fifties and early sixties.  With one startling exception, the footage is all newsreel material, black and white.  We see crowds gathered outside the Palais Garnier Opera house in a glistening film noir night.  Celebrities arrive to the music of Mozart's Magic Flute overture and ceremonial procession music from Aida.  We glimpse DeGaulle, Brigitte Bardot, Grace Kelly, Stravinsky and others.  These luminaries are shown in repeated shots decorously ascending the great steps into the auditorium.  Then, we watch them take their seats.  The Marseillaise is sung and the curtain open.  Maria Callas appears singing an aria by Rossini in recital -- the actual performance shown is not  from a staged opera and we have the sense that this gala, perhaps, is a fundraiser of some sort.  (In fact, the film compiles images from probably a dozen events.)  Callas' is filmed in a close-shot.  Of course, she's famously plain but her singing is hypnotic -- it seems effortless and weirdly unmediated:  for some reason, we have the sense that she is not singing but being sung, that is, that the music is flowing through her and animating her features as it passes from her.  The performance is astonishing and, probably, the main reason the film exists.  After Callas' aria, the movie indulges in a single color shot -- a great chandelier virtually quivering with light against a painted rococo ceiling.  The film ends with fireworks that are shown in black-and-white.

The movie is light and vaguely comical -- certainly, there is an intentional allusion of the Marx Brothers comedy of the same name.  There isn't much substance to the film but I think it's well worth watching.