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SAMKUL-Samfunnsutviklingens kulturell

Novels on the Music Stand: The Creation of a Multimedia Object

Awarded: NOK 0.70 mill.

The project consisted in the production of a documentary film that tells the story about research findings concerning French opéra-comique in the eighteenth-century and how the genre, together with the musical novel, developed key features of modern multimedia and also paved the ground for music as a mass phenomenon leading up to the French Revolution. Through interviews with musicologists and historians of literature the film shows how there was a revolution in aesthetical forms prior to the French Revolution and how this change in aesthetics challenged the politically controlled forms of expression. The film tells the story about the birth and development of the new genre of opéra-comique and presents analysis from several different scholars concerning the relation between the development of this new genre and the movements that occurred during the French Revolution. At the same time, the films focuses on the literary genre of the novel, which, in this period, became closely linked to the theatrical genre of opéra-comique. In the novel, just in the same way as in those opéra-comique plays, music became an integrated part of the literary work in some significant cases. The film presents the research that led to the discovery of this combined literary and musical genre as a broad eighteenth-century phenomenon. Here, the novel becomes an object of multimedia with text, images and music. The film reflects upon the very nature of this phenomenon and confronts what happened in the eighteenth-century with recent developments in multimedia as an object of art in present day society.

Prosjektet består i produksjon av en dokumentarfilm som tar for seg et av de mest interessevekkende forskningsresultatene i prosjektet Opéra-comique: secularization, commercialization and mass-culture (OPCOM), nemlig hvordan opéra-comique førte utviklingen av bøker som et multimedialt objekt på slutten av 1700-tallet. Filmen viser hvordan denne samfunnsendringen reiser spørsmål om omveltninger innen multimedia i dag. Prosjektet er utarbeidet i samarbeid mellom prosjektlederen, filmselskapet CERIGO og orkesteret Trondheim Barokk. Dokumentaren vil utformes som et selvstendig TV-program på 52 minutter.

Funding scheme:

SAMKUL-Samfunnsutviklingens kulturell