There are too many screens, we hear facing the surge of the virtual world on people’s minds. Watching everyone consult their smartphone in the street, in the subway, face to face at a restaurant or in the middle of parties with friends, we agree: yeah, too many screens! Yet, flying soon to Cannes, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this month, I want to celebrate these dreamcatchers that have been a cultural flashback for so long. Their existential crisis between the cellular format and the Imax resembles that of Alice in Wonderland, sometimes giant, sometimes tiny after drinking from funny bottles.
Gone are the days when the cinema reigned as the appointed hostess of animated views. At the beginning of the Cannes meeting haloed by legend, she still triumphed. Later, the arrival of television made certain twilight voices predict the approaching death of cinema. And yet… Since then, we have seen an explosion in the number and size of screens that broadcast it or not. These seem to be dancing a tango in which the partners gaze at each other, court each other, mend each other, step aside or embrace each other.
Cannes does not welcome works from digital platforms such as Netflix and others in its official competition. Last of the Mohicans, will the Côte d’Azur festival defend the seat of the big screen for a long time? The film now lands where it wants, on reflective surfaces of any size, even the most cramped, regardless of the traditions of image sharing under collective emotions. Too many concertina screens? They are popping up everywhere. Even clinging to the body of people on whom tomorrow should grow antennae and more tactile fingers to operate.
The very definition of modernity goes through their shimmering. So when the performing arts want to explore new paths or increase their audiences, they add projections to performers’ performances. Robert Lepage, this visionary, has been doing it for a long time.
Thus, these days, at the Opéra de Montréal, Mozart pays homage to the screen, and vice versa, in The Magic Flute. For its real post-pandemic return, the institution is hosting a virtual staging, inaugurated in Berlin in 2012 with reinforcement of delirious animations. Tribute to the German expressionist cinema of the 1920s such as that of Tim Burton, nods to comics. At the time of marrying with great pomp the sung theater (Singspiel) with the screen, the Collectif 1927 (Suzanne Andrade and Paul Barritt) and the scenographer Barrie Kosky spared neither their trouble nor their sidesteps. The scenic space is only projections, liberties are taken with the recitatives and the music under the baton of these conjurers. Hey there! There is Fantasia from Walt Disney to pachyderms in tutu below. And let them dance for humor and enchantment!
In this orgy of animated effects, a few vocal performances drown. The mechanisms and cogs taken from the Metropolis by Fritz Lang put opera in favor of the seventh silent art. Nosferatu and Buster Keaton offer their quickdraws as food. The eye of the beholder harms his ear. It’s too much, but…
The singers, in voice or not, obviously had fun rehearsing their choreographed and timed movements. Penetrating an animated film through windows hollowed out of the screen wall or light bubbles, these performers have virtual animals as partners: monkeys, ducks, snowy owls and other creatures, skeletal or not. Hats off to the delicious black cat stuck to the sides of the living Papageno! Hearts fly, tarot cards line up, the Queen of the Night cries vengeance for our delights (beautiful voice of soprano Anna Siminska). While the giant spider evokes a Maman sculpted by Louise Bourgeois, the formidable three ladies remind me of the animation The Triplets of Belleville. Everyone places their references there. From the ambient surrealism, conductor Christopher Allen and the Orchester Métropolitain draw lively inspiration.
This magic flute Mozartian full of visual gags has entered the annals of opera as its most cinematic. The improbable Masonic tale, redesigned in the colors of the XXIand century according to models of the XXand, will it arouse the enthusiasm of a new public? Not sure, because I heard voices in the room deploring the (real) misogyny of Emanuel Schikaneder’s libretto, written in the 18thand century in a deeply sexist Europe. The real challenge for the future of our societies cut off from the past will be to encourage viewers not to project their current codes onto earlier periods. In this respect, the omnipresence of screens is not in question. Only better history teaching could remedy this.
This column is interrupted for three weeks due to the Cannes Film Festival.