MSMI 8:1 Spring 14 doi:10.3828/msmi.2014.3 Gesture, Temporality, and the Politics of Engagement in Opera on Film Penny Woolcock’s The Death of Klinghoffer COllEEn REnIhan Gesture, Temporality, and Engagement in Opera on Film Though many critics believe that opera is at its best when performed and witnessed live, several scholars have suggested the possibility for the presentation of opera on film to expose elements—perhaps fundamental to the themes of these works—that their staged counterparts simply cannot. In this essay, I consider Penny Woolcock’s 2003 filmic rendering of the controversial John Adams/Alice Goodman opera The Death of Klinghofer (1991) with this very possibility in mind. With an interest in the frictions and surprising resonances between Woolcock’s choice of images and Adams’s minimalist score, I focus on the work’s manipu- lation of traditional conceptions of operatic subjectivity, extending this to the listener/viewer’s subjectivity to reimagine the possibilities for engagement with the work. Finally, I ofer a cultural reading of the temporal dimensions of Adams’s score, arguing that the work’s focus on the historical weight of the present moment negates the essence of the Jewish-Israeli historical mode. The narrative aperture created by the tensions between the moving image and Adams’s music (specifically in Leon Klinghofer’s ‘Aria of the Falling Body’) provide the listener/ viewer with opportunities for continued political engagement with the opera’s themes. 1 1 My sincere thanks to Louis Fleck of the Brooklyn Academy of Music Hamm Archive, and to the TOFT department at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The work of Richard Taruskin, Robert Fink, and Ruth Sara Longobardi on the opera provided creative stimulus for the ideas brought forth here. Linda and Michael Hutcheon ofered valuable feedback on an early draft of the paper. The two readers for this journal ofered invaluable suggestions and advice. Finally, I must thank Yayoi Everett for her generous and perceptive comments on a conference paper, which were instrumental in shaping the present article. In a time when opera converts its newest fans and makes its greatest impact in movie theatres, examining the relationship of opera and film is a particularly worthwhile endeavour, one that is made not only more di fcult by the constantly changing nature of its relationship, but also more exciting by the growing body of scholarship that has followed this change. Siegfried