ABOUT THE BOOK

Operafilm is a new word for an emerging, auteur-led gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, in which music, film, and performance are combined to sustain intellectually and aesthetically coherent metamodernist narratives. In this form of storytelling, every element, including score, image, and performance, is given equal attention.

Daron Hagen is the first to compose, write, storyboard, direct, and edit full-length operafilms, shifting authorship away from screenwriters and towards the “auteur composer-director” that embodies the depth of the genre. Hagen’s Bardo Trilogy offers an exploration of operafilm, conjuring the inner life of Orson Welles at his moment of death, a magical-realist last supper with four New Yorkers on the eve of 9/11, and the final days of a composer who sees song and life as a cosmic audition. This book explores the origins of the emerging genre, highlighting Hagen’s own process as the single screenwriter, director, and composer of the works discussed.

Praise

“A spectacular plea for operafilms, Exploring Operafilm — just the sort of memoir-essay I like about how one works, makes, and creates. …and using the notion of auteurism to re-situate the creative process from the ‘book’ writer to the composer driven and directed total film.” — Craig Saper, Professor of the Language, Literacy, and Culture Doctoral Program, UMBC, Baltimore, Maryland

“Read all through the night. One high note after the other. Hagen is the professional’s professional. As literary as he is musical, he bridges the gap between two tribes. How this book does soar!” — Benjamin Taylor, award-winning author of Here We Are and President of the Edward F. Albee Foundation.

“This majestic volume deeply explores the exciting new form called operafilm by its original practitioner. It combines the visual and musical vocabulary of opera, drama, and film in profound and original ways. Hagen reveals the deep and literate relationships, sometimes spanning across decades, that bring together every element of his operafilms—even, for instance, a paragraph where Schoenberg’s string quartets are related to Madonna’s ‘Like A Virgin.’ The prose is both rich with detail and conversational, and it is a fascinating read.” — David Rakowski, Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Composition, Brandeis University

“Hagen moves energetically from a spot on appraisal of Angelo Badalamenti’s importance in shaping the operatic visions of David Lynch to hands on advice about how a film composer navigates post production in a book that is bound to engage filmmakers and composers of all kinds, as well as cinephiles and film theorists.” — Miles Hankins, film composer and producer, A Quiet Place, Long Shot, and Burn Notice

“A fascinating travelogue of Daron Hagen’s journey from composer/librettist/conductor to composer/librettist/conductor/director, from lyric theatre to operafilm. The terminus of the ten-year expedition is Hagen’s Bardo Trilogy, three operafilms in which the visual, musical, textual and staging ideas are generated simultaneously by Hagen and then directed and film edited by him. He navigates using an encyclopedic knowledge of masters and masterpieces in fields ranging from cinematography to theology to psychology to music theory and across centuries from ancient to (post-?) modern. The writing manifests a deep understanding and humble respect for those who have journeyed before or with him in a quest to understand the ways in which art helps us discover personal truths and grapple with the universal mysteries that pulse in all our hearts. Hagen’s boundless imagination and insatiable curiosity — so evident in all of his music — leap from every page of Exploring Operafilm.” — Rudy Marcozzi, professor and dean emeritus, Chicago College of Performing Arts, Roosevelt University.

“Hagen has crafted something genuinely post-genre, a work that honors opera, indie cinema, and documentary while subordinating all three to a fiercer commitment: bearing witness to the artist as mortal being, to creativity as both salvation and self-immolation. In an era of algorithmic content and demographic targeting, Hagen’s Bardo Trilogy stands as bracing proof that cinema can still be alchemical, dangerous, genuinely new. This is operafilm as terminal diagnosis and love letter, Whitman’s America singing itself into beautiful, necessary extinction.” — Adrián Pérez, founder and festival director of Lonely Wolf International Film Festival

“There’s an old adage … ‘if you knew what went on in the sausage factory, you’d never eat a sausage.’ Well maybe, except that sausages are a global culinary staple with nearly every culture developing its own variation over thousands of years ― a combination of meats, local spices and preservation methods. Daron’s masterful Exploring Operafilm ought to become such a staple. The combination of ingredients, flavors, and the need for posterity of the cinematic, theatrical and musical kind come together as the highest form of art: entertainment and education all at once. A fan of Daron’s operafilms, I’ve now become a fan of his thoughtful dissertation on the history of a very particular art form, his Exploring Operafilm but also of his very present and active way of explaining the making of art itself. Exploring Operafilm is a must have and a must read for opera lovers, cinema lovers, art lovers, and anyone who really wants to know how a really great sausage ― one of the world’s most beloved treats ―  is made. ― Hershey Felder, filmmaker, actor, pianist, composer, producer, and playwright

Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 258
Bibliographic Info: ca. 5 photos, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2025
pISBN: 978-1-4766-9956-1
eISBN: 978-1-4766-5807-0
Imprint: McFarland