Considering that cinema is generally regarded as a distinctly popular art form while opera is regarded, at least nowadays i the anglo-saxon world, as "high art", it is interesting to note the huge importance for cinema played by a small group of operas that provided texts constantly adapted for and referenced in films. In Italy of course opera has always been a popular form; in Brazil at this period it was fanatically so (the great majority of early Brazilian films wre operatic arias - how performed- live or recorded or a mixture of the two - we do not know. But opera and operetta were much more popular forms everywheere in the nineteenth and early part of the twenteith century and four operasstand out - Faust, Madam Butterfly, La Bohème and of course Carmen.
It was not just the film versions of Carmen themselves - short versions by British Gaumont 1907, Pathé 1907 and 1908 and an Italian version in 1909, then Cecil B DeMille's full-length version in 1915 (and Chaplin's rather feeble burlesque of the same year) followed by Lubitsch's distinctly better version in 1918 but the whole range of gipkitsch spin-offs and imitations of which this is one and at least the second to have been made that same year in Britain alone (F. Martin Thornton's A Romany Lass had come out a few months before). The first is tosh but this one, despite some very reasonable cinematography, some spectacular Welsh scenery and quit a good creepy performance by the director as "the hunchback", is if anything even tosher.
It was not just the film versions of Carmen themselves - short versions by British Gaumont 1907, Pathé 1907 and 1908 and an Italian version in 1909, then Cecil B DeMille's full-length version in 1915 (and Chaplin's rather feeble burlesque of the same year) followed by Lubitsch's distinctly better version in 1918 but the whole range of gipkitsch spin-offs and imitations of which this is one and at least the second to have been made that same year in Britain alone (F. Martin Thornton's A Romany Lass had come out a few months before). The first is tosh but this one, despite some very reasonable cinematography, some spectacular Welsh scenery and quit a good creepy performance by the director as "the hunchback", is if anything even tosher.
