The Death of Klinghoffer

Last night saw our first meeting at my place and we pulled out all the stops for a full on contemporary opera-meets-documentary-meets-feature film inauguration.

The Death of Klinghoffer is a film directed by Penny Woolcock 'around' the opera by John Adams (with Libretto by poet Alice Goodman) and it's certainly an odd hybrid. I for one could see more though. Ages ago I saw Penny Woolcock speaking about the film and showing some clips and I've been meaning to track it down ever since.

"The opera deals with the hijacking of the Achille Lauro, a Mediterranean cruise ship, by Palestinian terrorists in 1985. The tragedy culminated in the murder of a Jewish American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer."

I found the whole structure and construct of the film fascinating and as usual we followed the actual screening with 'the making of' ... containing some amazing 'amateur' footage of how they actually made the thing! Basically Adams directed the orchestra and laid down the score and was filmed conducting, then an amazingly agile 'stand in conductor' shadowed Woolcock on the set (a moving ship!) and whilst watching the video of Adams conducting on a mini-monitor attached to the score (on a make-shift sort of ice-cream sales style carrier) he conducted the singers to match the music whilst they sang, acted and moved about ... all very complex but somehow it worked. Almost all the singing in the film was recorded on the ship during the shooting of the drama rather than in the studio.
There was also a nice moment when Woolcock explained that in a way her own naivety about what is 'normally' involved in filming opera was the making of the film ... by the time she realised how complex it would be it was too late and by then the singers, cast and musicians had bought into the slightly crazy experimental process.

I would recommend it - even if John Adams or Woolcock aren't your cup of tea, it's such an interesting project - not least because somehow Jan Younghusband persuaded channel 4 to commission it (& hire the cruise ship to film it on!) - I fear this sort of genuine experimentation is probably now from a lost era.