This film is beautifull on its own but I find it even more devastating with its soundtrack (entire audio, no just score) replaced with Philip Glass's opera (in 5.1 digital surround!), a great added feature accessible on the Criterion DVD (new edition with the color cover).
Unusual at first, the magnificent audio track slowly digs under your skin and into your heart and turns a great experience into an almost dreamlike one.
GREAT!
I completely agree! I've loved this movie since I was a child, I discovered the opera on the DVD, it's quite an experience!
shareThanks for the tip! I didn't even know this Criterion edition had come out.
I have the movie on an Australian DVD and have played it with the Glass opera "Dark Side of the Wizard of Oz" style, with the CD player going and the TV's sound turned off. This sounds much simpler. ;)
I went yesterday to the cinema to see La Belle et la Bête... with my CD player.
It's not easy to synchronize the opera with the film. This is because singers go quicker than spoken dialogs. However, it can be done, if you are the whole film pausing the CD in order to match the singers with the actors. Most of the dialogs are on the opera, so you can pause the CD when a character has spoken in the audio and wait until it happens in the film.
I enjoyed a lot this experience, it's a total show! With the subtitles, the text can be understood. Sometimes it's really funny. in addition, you can realize how the music match perfectly with the sequences of the film.
I advice you to do it, if you don't mind what the rest of the people in the cinema think of you.
I couldn't agree with you more! The Philip Glass soundtrack makes the watching this film a magical experience. Now, since seeing this, I would not even consider buying the DVD without the soundtack of Philip Glass.
It did have a "dreamlike" quality, someone was playing it and I only caught the last 15 or so minutes, but the beauty of the this impressed me immensely.
Just a quick note to all of you who have replied to this message board.
I was very lucky to attend a live performance of the P. Glass opera version of this film in 1995. It was/is one of those wonderful moments in my life when an artwork that I thought that I knew became something quite different, which is every bit as addicting as experienceing a work of art that you enjoy the first time.
Having said that, it would be sad to think that any of you would never view this film in its original form. I've been seeing this film since 1969 and it is one of the pillars of my love for films.
My compromise is to listen to the original soundtrack at least once out of every five viewings. Just remember without it, Phillip would never have been inspired to create what we adore!!
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...anyone know if this version is available for region 2??
I watched the film for the first time this weekend - amazing piece of cinema, with some of the best imagery I haev ever witnessed in a film!
The only part of the film which is a little dated - in my opinion of course! - is the music, so I would greatly like to watch this with the Phillip Glass soundtrack!
I take it the original dialogue is still retained though?
Thanks.
I was lucky enough to be in Lyon a few weeks ago when Philip Glass conducted his ensemble and singers performed the opera live to accompany the film at an outdoor screening in the Roman amphitheatre at night. It was basically a perfect synchonisation of Glass's lyrics to the actors on screen with a perfect musical accompaniment. Truly magical.
Follow the links (in French)at http://www.nuits-de-fourviere.org/
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I'm probably the odd man out here in that I found the Philip Glass "opera" soundtrack to wear out its welcome very quickly and become tiresome. This is probably due in part to the fact that I am a big fan of composer Georges Auric, who wrote the score for the film (and many other films in France, Great Britain, and the U.S.), and a big fan of this score in particular. In my mind, the images are just too closely wedded to Auric's richly textured and beautiful music for me to see it any other way. Actually, a great feature on a future DVD release would be a new recording of Auric's score, in the same fashion as was done for Prokofiev's score for Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevsky" some years back. In any case, the original sound recording for "LBELB" was never of the best quality, and has only grown worse over time, restoration efforts notwithstanding.
shareI'm with you adalbertus. Why the !@#$ would they tamper with the original way Jean Cocteau presented this? It reminds me of a DVD of Nosferatu I bought which had a soundtrack by the goth metal group Type-O-Negative. Um.... yeah. At least they're not as bad as Philip Glass. (No offense to Philip Glass fans. Well, actually I'm lying. I do mean to offend you.)
shareYour experience with "Nosferatu" reminds me of a video release of Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc" that I saw many years ago (long predating the magnificently restored version on Criterion), with a perfectly dreadful theatre organ accompaniment that used as its principal theme (hold on, now) "La Marseillaise," especially in any scene that alluded to Joan's patriotic sensibilities. The glaring anachronism was so utterly jarring that I eventually had to turn off the sound for the duration of the film. (BTW, I very much like the Richard Einhorn score "Voices of Light" that accompanies "Joan of Arc" on the Criterion DVD.)
shareI'm probably the odd man out here in that I found the Philip Glass "opera" soundtrack to wear out its welcome very quickly and become tiresome.I don't care for it, either. I love Glass' score for The Hours (2002) and I can see how this would be an interesting exercise...but it just sounds like unambitious sing-song against repetitive background notes.
I have the Glass opera on CD and I am getting the film from Netflix. Do you have any advice on how to sync up the two so I can watch the film with Glass' opera as a soundtrack? At what point in the film should I start playing the CD?
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