ABSTRACT
This chapter examines cinema's general attraction to opera as a sonic enhancement of its death scenes. It focuses on theories about opera's versatile relationship with death as explored by such scholars as Michal Grover-Friedlander, Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, and Slavoj Žižek. The chapter also considers the Grover-Friedlander's notion of the operatic voice is significantly informed by Michel Poizat's Lacanian theorization of the operatic voice. Poizat considers the voice the essence of opera, and the highest form of the operatic voice a pure sound beyond its signifying function. Poizat argues that, in opera, the voice does not express the text; on the contrary, opera's death-driven plots embody 'a logic of vocal jouissanc' that is, the logic or fate of the operatic voice destined to the cry and die into silence. Grover-Friedlander, in addition to Poizat's concept of the operatic voice, draws our attention to the Orphic myth to explicate her argument for the inevitable association between opera and death.
