Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Till, Nicholas

Titel

Space, Time and Gender in the Film d'Art Carmen of 1910

Ist Teil von

• Critical studies (Amsterdam, Netherlands), 2005, Vol.24, p.9-21

Erscheinungsjahr

2005

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Sociological Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The Film d'Art Carmen of 1910 was one of a number of films in which the Film d'Art company sought to give cultural status to the new medium of film through the high-art connotations of opera, effecting a natural transference of the melodramatic stage-style of opera to the newly evolving dramatic language of silent film. As in most Film d'Art productions, the company employed already acknowledged stage performers, including a well-known contemporary performer of the role of Carmen from the Opera Comique, & sets copied from the original 1875 staging of Bizet's opera. The essential paradox of silent-movie opera is here rendered especially pointed by the fact that Carmen is figured as 'singer' in Bizet's opera. However, as popular singer Carmen represents cultural energies that must be suppressed. The silent movie assures these ends, depriving Carmen even of her voice. Her muteness is compensated by an extreme physicality that fights to assert itself against the tightly constrained stage-set spaces of the film. This paper will offer a reading of the Film d'Art Carmen's physicality as a transgression of accepted gender roles that thematizes social concerns about the challenge to conventional ideas of masculine & feminine space in early modernity. The paper will also offer an analysis of the narrative construction & mise en scene of the Film d'Art Carmen in the context of the deployment of space & time in related pre-1910 films, examining this issue in relation to the gendering of space & time in traditional art forms. The paper will argue that the character of Carmen in the Film d'Art film figures the problematic spatialization (& hence feminization) of narrative action in early film, suggesting that the destruction of Carmen prefigures the eventual triumph of the 'masculine' principle of narrative action over 'feminine' spatial inertia in what film historians describe as the 'institutional mode of representation'. References. Adapted from the source document.