Oh, Butterfly!

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–––her most sensuous and perhaps most beautiful yet. (Don O'Mahony, program notes, Cork Film Festival)

–––A work that subjects Puccini's exoticizing opera to a critical commentary in multi-layered, superimposed image, text and sound quotations. (Silvia Hallensleben, TAZ)

––– The awarded film dissects the legacy of American Imperialism in Japan via a multifaceted and ingenious reworking of the various media incarnations of Madama Butterfly. The filmmaker is interweaving audio and film clips from performances of Puccini’s opera with personal archive footage and intergenerational conversations about the Orientalist implications of this wellknown narrative. The Uppsala Grand Prix 2022 goes to Oh, Butterfly! by Sylvia Schedelbauer. (Uppsala Short Film Festival, Jury statement by Skadi Loist, Ren Scateni, Inès Girihirwe)

–––Waves roll under an echoing lament for a lover across the ocean. The jury awards a multi-layered work of exhaustive research that places family history in dialogue with one of the most frequently reproduced works of twentieth century opera. The filmmaker uses archive footage organically to create a vivid and ornate palimpsest, touching on themes of race, Empire, migration and performance. This is a work of both rigour and excess; we applaud the filmmaker’s ambition, sensitivity and mastery of her material. The German Short Film Award goes to Oh, Butterfly! by Sylvia Schedelbauer (Hamburg International Short Film Festival, Jury statement by Genne Speers, Matt Lloyd, Andreas Fock)

–––In her most recent work, Oh, Butterfly! (2022), Schedelbauer orchestrates a symphonic and multifaceted critique of American imperialism via the Orientalist story of Madama Butterfly (1904), blending in elements of her own family history, which thematically connects the work to [her first film] Memories. Based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Pierre Loti, Madame Chrysanthème (1887), and the short story ‘Madame Butterfly’ (1898), by John Luther Long, Giacomo Puccini’s opera recounts the tragic story of Cio-Cio-San, a young geisha who marries a US Navy officer and eventually commits suicide after being abandoned by the man. Similarly to her previous works, Oh, Butterfly! combines superimposed images – archive footage of a nineteenth-century steamship, various opera productions and film adaptations of Madama Butterfly, 8mm home movies of Schedelbauer’s family – with text and sound to construct a kinetic palimpsest weighing in on a larger discourse on multiracial love and its historical connotations, often dictated by colonialist power dynamics. Audio clips and scenes from David Cronenberg’s subversive M. Butterfly (1993) tessellate the film and perhaps illuminate a different and quite radical interpretative path, in light of Cronenberg’s upending of common tropes of Western dominance and Asian submission. Eighteen years after the critical commentary of Memories, Schedelbauer rearticulates her personal mythology by releasing problematic markers of national and gender identity to the warm embrace of a communal psyche. (Ren Scateni, Art Review)

–––Schedelbauer often works on two or more levels. Her films lend a certain power to the images she captures, as she often does her best to turn these images inside out and show their inner power. For Oh Butterfly, she used a similar technique, only this time it is her own self that is being turned inside out. As with many experimental films, trying to describe them as a kind of narrative misses the point; and their description could border on iconology from second to second. Schedelbauer skillfully combines both approaches, however; her study of Giacomo Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly and its various iterations is a chance to look into her family history and understand the racial and social implications of a widely used cultural object. This approach leads her to the archive and to the possibility of going through various adaptations of the opera, an object that she seems to conclude represents a false universalism, or a particular that masquerades as universal. A story not based on the authors' own experiences with Asian cultures, but created from afar as a love story with problematic features that eventually achieved the status of a "story as old as time" and was adapted accordingly. Throughout the film, Schedelbauer reflects on words, phrases, sentences said and sung by specific characters in the play, iteratively playing with their form and meaning. The result is a charged film, both on the level of meaning and in terms of the images shown, which sometimes overlap, turning the screen into a kind of constantly changing desktop in which the eyes can get lost. What is not lost, however, is the cultural history of the opera and its reflection in Schedelbauer's personal story, whose film takes the universal as merely particular and answers: I am here too. (Giancarlo M. Sandoval, Filmlöwin)

–––This tour-de-force union of an imagined cassette tape playing Puccini's Madame Butterfly as interpreted by 60+ singers magically flits and flutters between archival footage from Edison to numerous Madame Butterfly films to 8mm home movies shot by her parents. This viewer also wonders whether the combination of these home movies and Schedelbauer herself repeatedly walking into frame alongside the mostly Western interpretations of Puccini's opera is also a personal reflection on Sylvia's bi-racial-ness and the realities of straddling both Asian and Western European histories. Watching Sylvia's films is the equivalent of a deep conversation with a trusted comrade/friend/lover -- it deeply touches my heart and my gut, and "Oh, Butterfly!" is no exception; truly a film to savour and savour again, ideally on a bright big screen with maximum operatic sound capabilities. (Scott Miller Berry, Letter from Oberhausen, pt 2)

–––Sylvia Schedelbauer created an enchantingly unstrained essay on the overstrained topic of "cultural appropriation:" Oh, Butterfly! shows dozens of opera divas in 20 minutes – from Leontyne Price from Laurel, Mississippi, to Anna Netrebko from Krasnodar in southern Russia: all in the role of the deceived "Madama Butterfly.” During the credits, in the aftermath of the painful aria, two Japanese women talk about Giacomo Puccini's opera and its template, the "Butterfly" narrative by the American John Luther Long: neither [author nor composer] had ever been to the original location in Nagasaki. (Ralph Wilms, WAZ)

I loved this operatic yet deeply personal work, an ornate palimpsest touching on themes of race, Empire, migration and performance. My fellow jurors and I awarded it the prize for Best German Film at Hamburg in May, and I was thrilled to be in town to see it take the Grand Prix at Uppsala in October. Schedelbauer draws on - and expertly cuts together - multiple performances of Un bel dì, vedremo from Madame Butterfly to interrogate Orientalist attitudes and her own family history. It's a work of both rigour and excess. (Matt Lloyd, Letterboxd)

–––A finger presses play on a tape recorder–Madama "Buttterfly" sings. The sea surges again–the U.S. naval officer Pinkerton travels across the Pacific to Nagasaki. Schedelbauer's melancholy, ecstatically dramatic montage of Puccini's opera heroine Cio-Cio-San and 60 of her interpreters, of picture postcard motifs, geisha portraits, film historical footage from Thomas Edison to David Cronenberg, and her familial fantasy and private mythology creates a film of sublimely physical texture. Condensate of her creative work. (Andreas Wilink, kultur.west)

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Excerpt from an interview Ejla Kovačević did for UltraDogme:

Oh, Butterfly! particularly struck me. It’s such a complex, multilayered work. You use the orientalist story of Madame Butterfly as a base, which is about a romantic relationship between a U.S naval officer and a 15-year-old Japanese girl. It seems to be your take on the relationship between your parents, your father being German and your mother Japanese, who were children during the Second World War. But the fictional story is actually quite sad and reflects uneven, colonialist power dynamics, as well as a trope of a submissive orientalized woman, as is seen in many excerpts from various films which were based on the book. Can you tell me more about this work and why you chose Madame Butterfly to explore interracial love?

I’ve been interested in the history of Western-Japanese subjectivities and their representation in visual culture for a very long time, having grown up with a perceived lack of said representations. And when dealing with this particular history, there was no way around the myth of Madame Butterfly. I never really liked the opera; I remember watching it with my parents once in Berlin and hating the orientalist depictions, and everything about the story and representations. Yet, the melody of the famous aria “Un bel dì, vedremo” seems engraved in my primal memory. It’s odd because these memories aren’t necessarily bad—on the contrary, there are happy impressions associated with them: that of my dad enjoying weekend down time, my mom emphatically humming along with the music. And the aria itself is abstract if you don’t speak Italian—that is, if opera language can be understood at all, since the delivery of language is already abstracted to a degree. So as listeners we didn’t necessarily grasp anything beyond, perhaps, that there was a sense of longing in the music.

There are a lot of ways to unpack the Madame Butterfly myth, and a vast amount of critical examination has been produced. There have been many attempts at trying to ascertain how much of the story was true—if anything was true at all—and numerous texts attest to that. A number of historical women have been named in an attempt to frame who the story was based on. There is a former private residency turned into a museum in Nagasaki, Japan, called Glover Garden, which has nothing to do with the opera. But because it looks as if it could have been the setting, it is informally named the Madame Butterfly House and bronze statues of Giacomo Puccini, the composer, and Japanese soprano Miura Tamaki are in the park near the Glover House.

There have been spin-off narratives that reimagine the myth in China (The Toll of the Sea) or in the Vietnam War (Miss Saigon), there has been a Broadway musical (M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang) and a cinematic interpretation of the same (M. Butterfly by David Cronenberg). There has been a lot of academic writing, as well as amateur musings, along with novels that even try to picture the continuation of the story. I felt like anything and everything that could ever be said about the opera had already been said and done. But I knew that I still wanted to take this subject matter on, and for me, the best way to approach it was from a personal perspective.

There were two main angles that I focused on: first, how the myth created various biases, and how I may have internalized some of these biases in the way I have imagined my parents’ history. The second angle was the child born between Butterfly and Pinkerton, outrageously called “Trouble,” both in the original novel and in the opera. This touches upon another issue that I already mentioned, that historically speaking, transnational children were often considered a problem. So, in the second half of the film, there is a montage of scenes with the child. The Butterfly narrative is terrible, and has been critically deconstructed in many ways. What seemingly hasn’t been paid too much attention to is the child in the story. What about the child? The name “Trouble” seems to summarize it all. If this were a comedy, that may have been funny. But how is he represented? What happens to him, how he is shown and how he is supposed to feel and identify in this messy transnational affair?

Thinking around these questions allowed me to insert Super 8 footage of my parents, but also footage of me as a child and as an adult. On one hand, my parents and I become proxies of sorts in the film. On the other hand, inserting footage of myself as an adult became my way of commenting on the various elements that are overlayed in a kind of palimpsest. I also hoped to create a relation between the personal and the myth, between the viewer and the material.

I really like that you juxtaposed many versions of the opera by Puccini—that is, you solely used footage of female opera singers. For me it was a very powerful, if not an emancipatory, moment seeing performing all together, as if all these women from different parts of the world took over the narrative of Madame Butterfly. Was it something you had in mind?

I’m glad to hear that you felt an emancipatory moment with the soprano singers! I wondered about that while editing, whether it was possible at all to imbue the singers with any kind of subversive agency. Given the problematic role they perform, and the gender issues in the operatic genre, I wasn’t convinced it was possible.

When I started working on this project, I knew that I wanted to include the famous aria “Un bel dì, vedremo.” At the beginning, I knew very little about opera in general, but in the process of collecting footage, I started to get a basic understanding of this particular piece of music. First and foremost, I was perplexed by the fact that Madame Butterfly continues to be performed around the world, in any city that has an opera house. There are many women from Asia and the Global South who have performed the role as Butterfly, some to great international success. “Un bel dì, vedremo” is one of the most popular pieces in the soprano repertoire, and mastering it is considered a demonstration of artistic virtuosity—perhaps this explains the continued popularity of the opera.

Over the course of the editing process, I got to appreciate the various performers. It was fascinating to get a feeling for how the singers all have their own interpretations, tempo, dramatizations, and that they sing in different registers of soprano—some higher, some lower, some faster, some slower. Editing them together created a patchwork of these different performances, and as such, in my film, the aria developed its own logic in the sense of pacing, tonality and texture.

I edited the aria so that every performer sings one word. And that brings us back to the content: ostensibly, the main character, Cio-Cio-san (Madame Butterfly) pictures the return of her absent love. But the words are awful because they imagine a docile, subservient, naive woman, and the representation of her is racist and culturally ignorant. There is a stark discrepancy between the content of what the sopranos actually sing and the powerful performances of the singers. I was also interested in the various notions of performances that seemed to be at play: the sopranos are supposed to be performing the role of a naive 15 year-old Japanese woman, then they are performing a certain operatic archetype, then they are performing their own feminine personas, and many of them are divas.

In the end of the film we hear you and your mother talking about the story of Madame Butterfly, explaining the context of it. Why did you choose to insert this conversation?

I approached my film as a material collection of text, sound, music and cinematic representations of all that I could find relating to the Madame Butterfly myth. So the film displays just that—a collection of references, to which I add my own editorial interventions of interweaving, juxtaposing, superimposing and commenting on the material. My point of departure was a scene taken from David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly, which, along with the eponymous Broadway play, is one of very few subversive interpretations of the racist stereotypes that are reproduced over and over in the opera. As I worked on the project, I realized that while many people knew the melody or even the name of the opera, not that many knew what the story was about. So I thought audiences might benefit from being reminded, or learning about the synopsis. First, I wanted to include a freestyle conversation with my mother, but that turned out to not work at all. I recorded our conversation, which was much too long and unfocused to include in the film. I extracted the main points that she brought up, and scripted the epilogue according to our respective opinions. I hoped that these would offer a small range of readings of the opera, as some may agree with my mother, that it’s simply a sad love story in which the woman gets deceived. On the other hand, there are those who criticize the opera, which is reflected more in my voice as the interlocutor.

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Awards:
2022 Grand Prix, Uppsala Short Film Festival, Sweden
2022 Best German Film, Hamburg International Short Film Festival, Germany