Director Giuseppe Tornatore’s Salvatore weeps alone as he gratefully receives the unexpected gift of a lifetime of edited-out kisses unreeling at the end of Cinema Paradiso (1988); Noah Baumbach’s Jay, accompanied by his agent, vacillates between cool, professional self-critical appraisal and straight-ahead narcissism, seeming almost to struggle to succumb to tears as a lifetime of his performances unreels in Jay Kelly (2025). Both directors’ montages are brave, highly poetic visual quodlibets that appear to be aiming for the elevated emotional reverie of the sustained and examined single emotional state at which opera is particularly good
From my Amelia (2010) work notes I can see that I was already reaching toward operafilm from the direction of music the way that Baumbach and Tornatore were reaching toward it from the direction of cinema. I conceived of the a capella cadenza featuring the entire company at the end of the opera as the doctor held her newborn aloft in the delivery room with Tornatore’s masterful montage in mind. In the sketches, even marked the passage “Unspooling like a montage of kisses.” My vocal ensemble brought together the eponymous heroine’s souls — family both quick and not, imaginary mythological characters, and the professional medicos just doing their jobs — to sing “Anything is possible.” The sequence has always been staged as a tableaux in the opera house, like most operatic scenes of its type. If we had had dancers in Seattle I would have composed the same music and called upon the choreographer to execute Amelia’s stylized memories — reaching toward operafilm. Honor is due Ennio Morricone’s eloquent underscoring of the Paradiso montage, and Curtis’ use of Brian Wilson’s immortal God Only Knows to underpin the closing Heathrow montage of Love, Actually. How keenly I’d like to complete the transition I began at the end of Amelia from opera to operafilm composer by going back and transforming that big ensemble into what it so clearly (in retrospect) wanted to be — not by changing a note of the music, but by integrating the images and live movement that I held even then in my head as I wrote it.
Composed in the late 80s and early 90s during a period when a number of “great person” – sometimes called “CNN operas” – were being written, including Nixon in China (1987), Harvey Milk (1995), Rasputin (1988), and Marilyn (1993), the human cost of unbridled self-actuation was addressed by “me generation” Boomers. Paul Muldoon and I elected, when treating Frank Lloyd Wright’s life in our first collaboration, Shining Brow (1993), to take Wright to the point in his life immediately after the deaths of Mamah Cheney and her children — the point at which he is about to make the choice between his own self actuation and others’ as described by Hermann Hsse: “Ich meine, man könne eine ziemlich scharfe Grenze zwischen Jugend und Reife ziehen. Die Jugend endet mit dem Egoismus, die Reife beginnt mit dem Leben für andere.” (“I mean that one can draw a fairly sharp line between youth and maturity. Youth ends with egotism does; maturity begins with living for others.”) We ask whether leaving an artistic legacy is enough.
Jay Kelly watches as his life’s performances flash before him in what Bazin described as “veritable luminous impression[s] in light” not in Byronic solitary contemplation like Salvatore but accompanied by his manager, with whom he has an exploitative, transactional relationship. Is Ron Jay’s Svengali or is it the other way around? Clips chosen (presumably by filmmaker Baumbach) from George Clooney’s wide-ranging in-real-life catalogue transform the Real-Life actor’s role into the film’s raisonneur, robbing the character he’s playing of agency. It’s a curiously unkind message that the scene is sending, particularly when both characters appear to weep. Ron’s tears are for himself: they mourn the failure to save a loved one from their own selfishness and the knowledge that he and Jay are consequently (and necessarily) quits. Jay’s tears are self-pitying, too: he (evidently) realizes that he’s alone and lonely because he sacrificed being a humane person for the sake of self-actuation. He, like our character of Wright, has all the trappings of adulthood – a partner, children, a career – but he has yet to commit to something larger than himself. “Can I go again? I’d like another one,” he bleats, radiating existential regret. But, whereas architect Wright – like composer Robbie in my operafilm I Hear America Singing (2025) – was a creator and the creator of his own reality, Jay is a re-creator, the executant (or, as Muldoon described Wright’s apprentices, “the pencil in [Wright’s] hand”) of other artists’ visions.
Director Tornatore fashions a dithyramb in the spirit of ancient Greek theater to cinema’s representation of romantic and carnal love. The power of the “kiss montage” sequence in Paradiso is only partly in the order and choice of the strips of celluloid cut from the films by the censorious priest, Father Adelfio. The montage cuts away again and again to track Salvatore’s emotions as we watch him in medium closeup from a nearby seat watching the film unspool. There is an emotionally accessible, plangent love being passed from the blind projectionist (ha!) Alfredo to Salvatore through the years which Salvatore seems to be accepting as an example of the lost past that his own films have tried to replicate, but that now he has come to realize is agape — corporeal, human, messy, tear-streaked, and happy-sad. He’s brave (and mature) enough to allow himself to be vulnerable, taken for a sentimental fool, knowing that, in the final result, it is the real kisses, not the ones on celluloid, that matter — even though his greatest love may well have been film.
The bookending montages of embraces at the beginning, and the literal splitting up into thousands of embraces at the end, of Richard Curtis’ Love Actually (2003), celebrate in their Brené Brown way the same urge to connect, but they aren’t staged like Tornatore’s, or abstractions of their own experience, like Baumbach’s. The ending “Heathrow montage” mixes (as love mixes fantasy and reality) the characters in the story with footage of real passengers at London Heathrow Airport whose unrehearsed and unscripted reunions frame the artifice of the parallel narratives that make up the screenplay. I emulated this approach by surrounding / framing my characters in 9/10: Love Before the Fall (2023) with “real” diners given only a single instruction — to not look at the cameras. My operafilm Orson Rehearsed (2021), of course, is a multi-layered collection of montages operating at different speeds and levels, sometimes from left to right in time, and sometimes simultaneously in what I think of as “vertical Kuleshov.” Combining the “Kuleshov Effect” with “Fosse Time” at least begins to suggest the complexity of the way people understand experience.
Through montage, Orson Rehearsed blends Welles’ real biography and his fictional roles as his life unspools as a “memory palace” of beats; Jay Kelly replays key scenes of the eponymous actor’s life as he makes his way to the tribute event at which he then completes his inner journey by replaying key scenes in his filmography. Cinema Paradiso is about the restoration of memories, while Orson is an exercise in the censorship of self, a creator’s fixation on refashioning experience to the very end. While in Paradiso and Kelly Alfredo and Ron sacrifice themselves for their proteges, we are invited to witness Welles’ destruction of Self (like Robbie’s and American Music’s in I Hear America Singing). Robbie views his life as a perpetual cosmic audition, with his narrative leaping mid-sentence from apartment to theater to park bench. This fluid movement mirrors Baumbach’s Kelly, where the protagonist sits in an audience watching his own life—a fulcrum between art and artifice. It evokes the way the film clips in Paradiso bridge Salvatore’s past and future, or how Love, Actually uses its sprawling locations to suggest that Shakespeare’s stage is, truly, “everywhere."