Length: 19:30 mins
Year of production: 2022
Exhibition Format: DCP or Quicktime file
Source Format: 8 mm, super 8, 16mm, HDV and youtube downloads
Cinematography: Lena Soboleva
Language: English and Japanese
Sound Mix: Jochen Jezussek
Synopsis: An imaginary cassette tape repeats a famous piece of music in self-referential loops.
–––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)
–––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)–––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)
–––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)
Awards:
2022 Grand Prix, Uppsala Short Film Festival, Sweden
2022 Best German Film, Hamburg International Short Film Festival, Germany