Aurelia Butler

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    in Music

    Strauss’s ‘Die Frau Ohne Schatten’ at the Metropolitan Opera

    “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” a dense ode to fertility, may not sound appealing at first. But in this performance, the fairy tale comes movingly to life.It’s not easy to make “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” sound appealing.Believe me, I’ve tried. But when you describe Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s most opulent creation, which opened on Friday in one of its infrequent, glittering revivals at the Metropolitan Opera, the piece always seems dense and ponderous.Starting with the title: “The Woman Without a Shadow.” In this fairy tale, being without a shadow is both a literal condition and a representation of the inability to bear children. The idiosyncratic symbolism only deepens as the plot probes layers of fantastical realms, complete with a singing falcon, a choir of the unborn and the clock ticking down to an emperor’s transformation into stone. Two couples — one human, one demigod — face temptation but persevere through trials to achieve enlightenment and happiness. Oh, and fertility, too.You might think a four-hour allegorical ode to pregnancy isn’t your thing. But I’m here to tell you: Just go.With its formidable length and daunting vocal, instrumental and scenic demands, “Frau,” written around the time of World War I, has much in common with Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, to which it nods. And both tend to seem stilted and overblown when summarized.But like the “Ring,” “Frau” comes alive in performance — its royalty and commoners, flashes of magic and heavy-handed symbols, ending up movingly real and relatable. Hofmannsthal’s elegantly stylized, exquisitely poetic (and, for some, pretentiously contrived) text is warmed by the intensity and compassion of Strauss’s music.Last seen at the Met 11 years ago, “Frau” has always been an event for the company. The Met premiere, conducted by Karl Böhm in 1966, was a historic highlight of the first season in its Lincoln Center home.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Movies

    The ‘Wicked’ Practice of Taking Pictures of the Movie Screen

    Why are so many people snapping photos and taking videos at the movies? Will this trend ever go away?During an opening weekend screening of the movie musical “Wicked,” a woman sitting in front of me reached for her phone during “The Wizard and I,” Cynthia Erivo’s first big number as the misunderstood green sorceress Elphaba. I watched while this person snapped several photos of Erivo as she belted.This behavior both bewildered me and, naturally, distracted me from the film. I became more focused on what exactly was being photographed — and why — than on Erivo’s performance. And yet this disruption is apparently not unusual if you have seen “Wicked” in a theater. Social media has been flooded with images that people have taken during the movie. One post actually prompted others to share their photos as if taking them was a badge of honor. (Even one of the movie’s stars, Ariana Grande, posted an Instagram Reel of her grandmother watching her sing “Popular.” That one we can let slide.)It’s not just “Wicked.” Taking photos and videos of the screen at movies has somehow become a common practice these days. For instance, major spoilers from “Deadpool & Wolverine” were plastered all over X and TikTok shortly after it hit theaters thanks to poor-quality shots from audience members. Blockbusters aren’t the only films getting this treatment: Look hard enough and you’ll find bootleg clips of just about any theatrical release, from the French body horror film “The Substance” to the pope drama “Conclave.”Demi Moore in “The Substance,” another movie at which audiences have been using their phones to snap photos of scenes in the theater.MubiThe problem with cellphones in theaters used to be mostly errant ringing or excessive texting. Now it’s people holding up their devices so they can get bits of the film and post to their accounts. For those of us who just want to watch in peace, letting ourselves be completely absorbed, it’s another way in which moviegoing etiquette has crumbled in the 21st century.But let’s back up: Why is this happening in the first place? While I don’t think I can ever fully understand the desire to participate in the trend, I have a good guess as to why it exists.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Bringing the Magic of ‘Fanny and Alexander’ to the Opera Stage

    A new opera by Mikael Karlsson and Royce Vavrek, directed by Ivo van Hove, aims to capture the lavishness of Ingmar Bergman’s film, in half the time.Ingmar Bergman’s film “Fanny and Alexander” luxuriates in space. In its longest version, a television mini-series that spanned more than five hours, the camera lingers on interiors that in their accumulating details say as much as the characters, who themselves say quite a lot.Bergman made another edit of the film, of a little more than three hours, for theatrical release. But the longer “Fanny and Alexander” spends 90 minutes alone on a single Christmas Eve and morning in the lives of the loving but complicated Ekdahl family in early 20th-century Uppsala, Sweden.Opera, too, is a slow-moving art form that luxuriates, but in different ways. Composers and singers relish sound, not sight. And so, in a new opera based on “Fanny and Alexander,” opening at La Monnaie in Brussels on Dec. 1, that Christmas scene takes half as long as it does in the TV cut. It’s one of several changes that were made for this adaptation, composed by Mikael Karlsson to a libretto by Royce Vavrek, and with a starry team that includes the director Ivo van Hove and the singers Sasha Cooke, Thomas Hampson and Anne Sofie von Otter. (The production will be streamed on multiple platforms on Dec. 13.)The director Ivo van Hove and the singer Anne Sofie von Otter, rehearsing the new opera. Ingmar Bergman, van Hove said, is “a realist about human emotions, but he is also poetic.”Simon Van RompayMost obviously, the opera has a running time of two and a half hours, less than half that of the longer cut of the film. Still, the stage version will be recognizably “Fanny and Alexander,” Bergman’s partially autobiographical coming-of-age tale, in which fantasy lives freely alongside reality as a vast tableau of human experience is seen through the eyes of a child. Bergman, who had planned for it to be his last film, said around its release, in 1982, that it represented “the sum total of my life as a filmmaker.”The film plays on television every Christmas in Sweden, and Karlsson, who is Swedish, said he felt the most pressure to get that holiday scene right. When he, Vavrek and van Hove met early in the opera’s development, van Hove suggested hurrying through Christmas to get to the wedding: the marriage of Alexander’s recently widowed mother to the local bishop, the precipitating event of the story’s darkest dramas.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Angelina Jolie Plays Opera Diva Maria Callas. We Went With Her to the Met.

    The Metropolitan Opera House was awash in pearls and tuxedos on a recent gala evening. Socialites traded political gossip by the bar, and bankers discussed coming vacations in the Maldives.Then a golden elevator door slid open and a glamorous figure slipped out.Heads turned, cellphones clumsily emerged and people began to talk. Is that really her? What is she doing here? She seems taller in person. Look at those tattoos!I had invited Angelina Jolie to the Met to see a performance of Puccini’s “Tosca” ahead of the release of “Maria,” a new film starring Jolie as opera’s defining diva, Maria Callas.Jolie and Larraín at the Met. “There’s an authenticity here that is beautiful,” Jolie said. “There’s a poetry to it all.”Jolie is one of the most recognizable people on the planet, commanding attention wherever she goes. But her night at the opera got off to a bumpy start. She had a problem with her dress, a black, floor-length Yves Saint Laurent with a velvet cape. (The seamstresses in the Met’s costume shop were summoned, but Jolie soldiered on without help.) And when I met her in the foyer, she seemed to be having last-minute doubts about me shadowing her, saying it might spoil the experience.“I just want to enjoy the evening,” she told me. “I want to take it all in.” More

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    Best Movies of 2024

    Our film critics rank their 10 favorites this year.As you browse, keep track of how many movies you’ve seen or want to see. Find and share your personalized watch list at the bottom of the page.Manohla DargisDazzling in Plain SightEvery year, as I start the herculean (and absurd!) task of winnowing down a year’s worth of movies into a top 10, I also sift through a lot of grim media coverage about the terrible, horrible, possibly salvageable state of the entertainment industry. In the movie world, things are always looking up (maybe) unless they’re catastrophically down, a cycle of boom and bust that has gripped the industry for much of its history and always convinces someone, somewhere, that the movies are dead. It’s a familiar charge with a changing cast of murder suspects: synchronized sound, television, cable, streaming and, of course, corporate idiocy.Despite their continued decline, the big American-based studios still dominate the mainstream media coverage and what little attention an increasingly fragmented, distracted audience has remaining. To that end, nearly every week another megadollar production comes hurdling toward us, gobbles up all the media interest, rakes in fortunes or becomes just another tax write-down or write-off. Some of these movies are OK, others are bilge; a scant few are memorable. Yet as my hardworking colleagues and I eagerly share in our reviews for The New York Times, the movie world is much vaster than what these companies offer, and good, great and miraculous work often flies under the radar. Here’s a sampling of the bounty.1. ‘All We Imagine as Light’ (Payal Kapadia)This delicate, achingly wistful story about empathy is an example of the same, and centers on two female nurses and a cook, friends who work at the same hospital in Mumbai. Over the course of the movie, Kapadia shifts between these caregivers who together and separately experience ordinary pleasures, face painful difficulties and find comfort, support and companionship in one another. Every so often, Kapadia, who has also made documentaries, incorporates images of everyday people milling through the city, images that connect her characters to a sea of humanity and, by extension, to those of us watching. (In theaters)____2. ‘Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic’Some of the most transporting movies that I watched this year were in a retrospective of Gehr’s work in March at the Museum of Modern Art. Generally short and now shot in digital, these moving images have no scripted dialogue and nothing resembling a plot. Liberated from the stranglehold of story, Gehr’s movies instead present and re-present outwardly ordinary places, objects and moving bodies — white clouds drifting across a stretch of blue city sky, people walking in front of a windowed storefront — that Gehr turns into heady studies of energy, chance, light, surface and space. Your perception of the world change when filmmakers like Gehr show it to you through their liberated lenses and frames. These are movies that expand and, at times, gloriously blow your mind.____ More

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    Puccini Died 100 Years Ago. So Did the Great Opera Tradition.

    There’s a knock at the door.A poor young poet is struggling to write in his attic apartment when he is interrupted by the sickly seamstress who lives downstairs. Her candle has gone out; can he light it?Barely 15 minutes later, these two strangers are singing ecstatically about their love. Implausible, right? But when a performance of Giacomo Puccini’s “La Bohème” is working its hot magic, nothing could be more believable.And nothing could be more essentially operatic than such a scene, with the emotions compressed and heightened through music. Puccini, who died 100 years ago, on Nov. 29, 1924, proved himself again and again a master of moments like this: unleashing a Technicolor extravagance of feeling while at the same time conveying plain, simple truth.A painter assuring his jealous girlfriend that her eyes are the most beautiful in the world. A prince, pursued by a city desperate to know his name, promising that it will remain a secret. A teenage geisha convinced her husband will come back to her.Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) was the Dickens of opera, able to manage the elusive combination of nearly universal accessibility and deep sophistication.A. Dupont/Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs DivisionOnce you know these passages, just thinking about them can bring you to tears. Spoken, the texts would be generic, sentimental, even laughable. Set to Puccini’s music, they suggest the most sincere and profound experiences that humans are capable of. More

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    Looking for Quality Indie Cinema? Try Ovid.

    The streaming service is a great place for independent films off the beaten path.Over the past several months, we’ve examined and recommended several streaming services for the discriminating movie lover — sites and apps for those whose tastes run toward titles a bit more esoteric than the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Our latest entry spotlights a terrific subscription streamer for independent film fans.When the streaming service Ovid launched in March 2019, it aimed to fill a gaping hole in the online cinematic landscape. An initiative of Docuseek, L.L.C., Ovid’s founding distributing partners (Bullfrog Films, First Run Features, The dGenerate Films Collection, Distrib Films US, Grasshopper Film, Icarus Films, KimStim, and Women Make Movies) had watched services like Netflix, which were initially happy to host independent movies, turn away from smaller films in favor of splashier mainstream fare and their own, in-house offerings. At Ovid (and a few other streamers we’ve spotlighted in this column), those titles could find a home for viewers with an interest in cinema from the fringes.The service initially housed 350 titles, most of them from the nonfiction space. It now boasts 2,282 titles, and has expanded from those initial eight distribution partners to over 60 from around the world. The library remains heavy on documentary, with films helpfully curated into categories of (among others) biography, arts and culture, politics, the environment, L.G.B.T.Q.+ issues, civil rights and, of course, movies about movies. The service also curates specialized collections, including films about basketball, journalism, the Vietnam conflict, jazz music and “dead French philosophers.”Ovid isn’t merely for doc-heads, however; the service has also grown its library of narrative films, primarily from the worlds of independent and international cinema. Their offerings include contemporary award-winners like Gaspar Noé’s “Vortex,” Jem Cohen’s “Museum Hours” and Sophia Takal’s “Always Shine,” as well as recently rediscovered and restored gems like “The Strangler,” “Delta Space Mission” and “The Tune.” And bingers will find an assortment of fine television shows as well, from the docuseries likes of “The Story of Film: An Odyssey,” “With God on Our Side” and “Reporters Against Power,” along with some less-expected titles (such as the BBC series “Do Not Adjust Your Set” and “At Last the 1948 Show,” which featured various members of Monty Python before they teamed up for that troupe).The interface is smooth and intuitive, and picture quality is sharp, even for older, presumably long-neglected titles. And the service is priced quite competitively — a great deal at $6.99 per month, or at a discounted rate of $69.99 for a full year, one of the most competitively-priced specialty streamers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Mark Duplass Reprises a Killer Role in ‘The Creep Tapes’

    The murderer with the unnerving smile from the “Creep” movies is back, this time in a found-footage-style series on Shudder. Keep the camera rolling.It has been almost 10 years since Mark Duplass put on a monstrous smile in “Creep,” a found-footage horror movie about a serial killer named Josef who lures videographers to his home and slaughters them mercilessly on camera.It’s a universe removed from his Emmy-nominated performance as the high-strung Chip in “The Morning Show” — but it’s a role he seems to relish. Following a “Creep” sequel from 2017, Josef is back again in Shudder’s “The Creep Tapes,” a TV rarity in that the entire series was done in the found-footage style. Not that Duplass knew that he was doing anything particularly new going in.“If there’s anything fresh about what we’re doing it’s because there is an ignorance to the form,” he said in a recent video interview from his home in Los Angeles. “It didn’t strike me that it would be groundbreaking.”Patrick Brice, who with Duplass created the series and wrote and starred in the original “Creep,” directed all six half-hour episodes of “The Creep Tapes.” (The first two episodes debuted on Shudder and AMC+ Nov. 15; new ones arrive on Fridays through Dec. 13.) In a separate interview, he said that he had drawn inspiration for the “Creep” franchise from Jim McBride’s proto-found-footage horror film, “David Holzman’s Diary” (1967), and from the 1980s anthology series “Tales From the Darkside.”“The Creep Tapes” itself is based on an anthological concept: Every episode is purported to be footage from one of the many videotapes that Josef, as revealed in the first movie, has been amassing in his closet, each labeled with a victim’s name.Basing the show on a depraved VHS library, Brice said, allowed him and Duplass to explore more “Creep” but “not have to fully commit to a third film.” But there was another benefit.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More