melodie-avant-mots - Lacheret

Conclusions
The success of the interior voice in its narrative work is due largely to
Ponnelle’s dependence on cinematic point-of-view.With its strong articulation of
observer status, the device as deployed by Ponnelle creates a visual interplay of
persona and character that fills out the multiple agencies implied by the use of the
interior voice. The interior voice would be little more than a cute gimmick without this
expressive visual device.
One way of understanding Ponnelle’s use of interior and exterior singing
comes via another medium, the novel. Ponnelle draws on the novel’s narrative
potential to multiply voices and create personas capable of expression at varied levels
of consciousness, from varied subject positions. The rhetorical stance can shift with
agility from first-person to third-person to direct interaction. The solution eases
tensions between film and theater—film with its impetus toward speed, theater its
predilection for character—by allowing for an enlivened dramatic pace in moments
focused on character. The novelistic mode also overcomes dramatic limitations of
playback and postsynchronization by reveling in the dissonance between what is seen
and heard, and moving us to a realm that Michel Chion calls "en creux"—in the gaps.
These gaps are not the normal places of film, opera, or theater, but they establish new
realms of normalcy in this film.
During the overture Ponnelle hints at literary intentions when he shows us
books by Voltaire and Montesquieu: the written word as key to this filmic
interpretation. Thus Ponnelle restores the literary roots of Figaro. Even thought they
are not its literal roots in a play, the enriched narrative potential in Ponnelle’s filmic
treatment approaches that of Beaumarchais’s talkative play Le mariage de Figaro.
This does not mean Ponnelle slights music in favor of literature. It means a literary
sensibility becomes a feasible way of enacting this opera as film—and this, as we
know, is no mean feat given the divergent tendencies of opera and film.
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