Wagner, Cinema, and Redemptive Glee

Abstract

Imagine that you are in Jersey City, a seaport east of Newark. We are at the Loew’s Grand Cinema, a half-restored, half-ruined 1920s picture palace that seats two thousand, has marble and velvet in the lobby and Turkish alabaster chandeliers in an auditorium with a ceiling at least one hundred feet up. I have decided that my sons need an “authentic” cinematic experience, so I have taken them to see The Thief of Baghdad, a 1939 Technicolor epic (co-directed by Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell, and Tim Whelan) that is being shown in a 35 millimeter print, projected on period equipment with no modern concessions—no Surround sound or Dolby, for instance, just old speakers, all behind the screen. The audience is made up of people who have traveled to get here (Michael Powell devotées, Sabu fans, old movie palace fans, Orientalists), alongside a local Jersey City crowd, émigré middle Easterners of all ages in mixed East-West apparel. At least one family member is ready to be entertained by absolutely everything on hand. But not four minutes into the film a Wagner proximity alarm goes off. I hear a musical allusion to The Flying Dutchman [Der f liegende Holländer ], more specifically, to measures 32–64 of the overture. And, despite telling myself that I was off duty, I later noted two leitmotivic repetitions of this music about an hour in.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.