The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) is a unique and important film, both in the history of British cinema and in the history of interdisciplinary art-making. It is the first full-throttle presentation of an opera on screen: a Technicolor exploration of romance, fantasy, and failure, more danced than sung.
In the first single study of this classic film, William Germano argues that though the elaborate theatrical requirements of Offenbach's opera might seem to go against what creative film-making does best, the very constraints of the form liberated Powell and Pressburger imaginatively. Sound and silence, voice and body, image and form: all came together in this film as they had never quite done before.
