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“The Legends of Paris: A Tale of the 19th century Artistic Scene” appears have taken buyers by storm even before its official launch at the Unifrance Rendez-Vous market in Le Havre, where it premiered on Tuesday.

Produced by Silex Films and Arte, the four-part series offers an intimate portrait of some of France’s most beloved artistic and literary figures. Taking viewers into the bustling heart of 19th-century Paris, it follows the colorful lives of such legendary artists as Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, Louis-Hector Berlioz, Honoré de Balzac and Charles Baudelaire.

The international interest in the period and personalities is evident: Arte Distribution has already inked pre-sale deals for “The Legends of Paris” with TV Unam in Mexico; The Arts Channel in New Zealand; Swiss broadcaster Srf; Hrvatska radiotelevizija in Croatia; Radio and Television of Montenegro; Georgia’s Lepl Public Broadcaster; and Hellenic Parliament TV in Greece. Arte...

It was weird from the start. 

Sometime in 2008, trailers for J.J. Abrams' upcoming film "Star Trek" began to appearing theaters. This new film, the previews announced this quite clearly, was going to be quite different from the "Star Trek" of yore. This was going to be "Star Trek" -- to employ a dated slang term -- on steroids. Audiences witnessed a young blonde kid in a red convertible Chevy Corvette blasting down a country road, a motorcycle cop on his tail. He charges toward a cliff with no sign of stopping. He dives out just before the car barrels into the chasm below. He is covered with dirt and defiance. When the cop asks him his name, he says he's James Tiberius Kirk. 

It was weird enough seeing a car in the preview -- vintage Chevys were still plentiful enough to go joyriding in by the 23nd century? -- but it became weirder when,...

The orchestra is tuning up.

Netflix has released five images from the set of “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s forthcoming biopic of the late composer/conductor/educator/raconteur Leonard Bernstein, out in 2023. And even though no one’s heard even one note, the “bravo!”s are in, at least as the makeup and costuming is concerned.

The first of the three images show Bernstein as a younger man, with Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealgre, a stage and television actress who married Bernstein in 1951. The second picture is probably shot on location at the Koussevitzky Music Shed at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. (The production did go up there for a time.)

The fourth and fifth pictures are the real stunners from a transformation perspective. Bernstein is shown “at work” (e.g. conducting and agonizing over his art) later in life. You’ll note there is a deep red jacket slung over a chair.

Jessye Norman, a heralded soprano opera singer who won four Grammy Awards and the National Medal of Arts, is no more. She was 74, according to a statement from a representative for her family.

Norman died in New York Monday morning from septic shock and multi-organ failure secondary to complications of a spinal cord injury she had sustained in 2015, according to the statement, reports variety.com.

Also Read:?James Cameron: We discount older women in society

"We are so proud of Jessye's musical achievements and the inspiration that she provided to audiences around the world that will continue to be a source of joy. We are equally proud of her humanitarian endeavours addressing matters such as hunger, homelessness, youth development, and arts and culture education," read a statement from her family.

Norman was raised in a musical family. Her mother and grandmother were pianists, her father a singer, and she grew up singing in church.

Film music has come a long way in the 100+ years since moving images were first accompanied with sound (synchronized or otherwise), but seldom has it ever evolved more radically or aggressively than it did over the last decade. Spurred on by digital technology and/or a general tone of cosmic dissonance, rock and avant-garde musicians like Jonny Greenwood and Mica Levi used narrative projects as inspiration to explore new facets of their genius, while more traditional composers such as Alexandre Desplat and Carter Burwell rose to the challenge by delivering the most beautiful work of their careers. Hans Zimmer went deep into outer space, while Trent Reznor and Atticus Rose plunged head-first into the abyss of being extremely online.

It was a great time to go to the movies, even with your eyes closed.

Earlier this week, IndieWire revealed our list of the 100 Best Movies of the Decade. Now, we...

Jabberwocky

Blu-ray

Criterion

1977/ 1:85 / 105 Min. / Street Date November 21, 2017

Starring Michael Palin, Harry H. Corbett, John Le Mesurier

Cinematography by Terry Bedford

Written by Charles Alverson, Terry Gilliam

Music by Hector Berlioz, Modest Mussorgsky

Edited by Michael Bradsell

Produced by Sanford Lieberson

Directed by Terry Gilliam

The prospect of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky directed by Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam promised a brave new world of sophisticated nonsense; The Mad Hatter meets the Ministry of Silly Walks.

Equally appetizing was the thought of illustrator John Tenniel’s hideous creature brought to life by Gilliam, the Python’s premiere visual satirist. But Gilliam, working in a chaotic British climate that saw Harold Wilson being upstaged by the Sex Pistols, had other ideas, exemplified by the film’s title sequence which rolls by over some of Pieter Bruegel’s most unnerving canvasses.

The Dutch artist was no Pollyanna (his most famous painting was...

Malick fans, listen up! The Brooklyn Academy of Music, aka Bam, is hosting the Us premiere of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life with live orchestra coming up later this month. Bam has announced two nights of The Tree of Life, on November 18th and November 19th, featuring "more than 100 musicians and singers from the Wordless Music Orchestra" performing live over the film. The first version of this live event took place in Dublin back in June, and now it's finally coming to the Us. The score was composed by Alexandre Desplat (read my interview with Desplat from Cannes in 2011), however the film also features additional music by Mahler, Berlioz, Brahms, Mozart and other legends. Tickets range between $35 and $85 for seats on either night, and they will likely sell out fast. This is one of those very rare don't-miss-it special events. The Tree of Life opened in theaters in 2011 after premiering at Cannes,...

“Babe, you made the best choice ever! You won’t regret this, I promise.” Created by Mezco Toyz, this Tiffany doll—based on her look from Bride of Chucky—speaks six phrases and is available to pre-order now. Also in this round-up: a Q&A with Kevin Riepl, the composer of the Cabin Fever reboot, and the Blu-ray details for the 1993 horror thriller The Crush!

Bride of Chucky Doll: From Mezco Toyz: “First introduced in the film Bride Of Chucky, Tiffany was the devoted girlfriend of killer Charles Lee Ray before his soul transferred into the ‘Good Guy’ doll that would come to be known as Chucky. After Chucky ended up in a police evidence vault, Tiffany used her feminine wiles to rescue him. When Chucky electrocutes her in a bathtub, he transfers her soul into a bridal doll. Now trapped in a doll body, Tiffany joins Chucky on his...

In the wake of the terrible attacks in Paris, I found myself listening to a lot of French music and thinking about the Leonard Bernstein quote going around on Facebook: "This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before." This list came to seem like my natural response. A very small response, I know. This list is chronological and leaves off people I should probably include. The forty [note: now forty-one] composers listed below are merely a start.

Léonin Aka Leoninus (c.1135-c.1201)

The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in the 1100s was a major musical center, and Léonin (the first named composer from whom we have notated polyphonic music) was a crucial figure for defining the liturgical use of organum, the first polyphony. Earlier organum was fairly simple, involving parallel intervals and later contrary motion, but the mid-12th century brought...

Boston Symphony Orchestra/Charles Munch Hector Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique (RCA Living Stereo)

Charles Munch was born in Strasbourg in 1891, the son of organist/choral conductor Ernst Münch. It was a musical family; Charles's brothers Fritz and Hans also became conductors. Charles studied violin with Lucien Capet and Carl Flesch and conducting with Wilhelm Furtwängler and Alfred Sendrey. World War I interrupted his musical progress; a sergeant of artillery in the German army, he was gassed at Peronne and wounded at Verdun. After the war ended, he became a French citizen.

Munch first pursued violin professionally; he didn't begin his conducting career until 1932, at age 41. He founded the Orchestra de la Société Philharmonique in 1935 in Paris, was named conductor of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire de Paris in 1938, and stayed in France during the German occupation of World War II. His conduct during this difficult period included French Resistance activities...

Terry Gilliam is reportedly having a hard time getting excited about reuniting with the other members of the pioneering comedy troupe Monty Python. "I find it depressing that we’re getting back together again," he said in a recent interview with the London Evening Standard. "We worked so hard to get careers beyond it, to get to this stage, and now we’re being dragged back again."

Who Are the 50 Funniest People Right Now?

After the group's final performance together in 1980, Gilliam – the American-born member of the group who made...

CBC Radio 2, hosted by Tom Allen, has put together a fantastic look at how the medievel chant, "Dies Irae" (meaning the song of death) has wormed its way from 600 Ad into the films of today including John Williams' score for Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, Dimitri Tiomkin's score for Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, Howard Shore's score for The Lord of the Rings and even inspired Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells", which are heard at the beginning of William Friedkin's The Exorcist. The following video takes you through the history of the chant from its beginnings to Hector Berlioz's 1820 "Symphonie Fantastique" and Sergei Rachmaninoff's 1940 "Symphonic Dances". Even Hans Zimmer's score for Disney's The Lion King makes an appearance. Check out the video below. yt id="dLgvKwOYniY" width="500" One of the world's oldest songs isn't about love, sex or even power.

Opera is waking up to the power of video. For his new production of Don Giovanni, the Royal Opera House's Kasper Holten collaborated with a designer who turned U2 tours and the 2012 Olympics into visual spectaculars. Stuart Jeffries goes behind the screens

"Don Giovanni is called the director's graveyard," says Kasper Holten. "It's impossible to do a perfect production. The existential moral journey of the seducer to hell is hard enough to make convincing – without having to juggle all the farcical elements, too."

So why is Holten, the Royal Opera House's director of opera, returning to Mozart's work for the third time (he has already directed it on stage and on film)? And why is he ratcheting up the risk with some of the tricksiest, most perilous video design ever seen on the British opera stage?

"It makes sense marrying video technology and Mozart," he explains. "If he were alive,...

Angelina Jolie takes on Sleeping Beauty while Terry Gilliam tackles Berlioz as the stars come out to confound our expectations in the coming year

Film

Angelina Jolie in Maleficent

Hollywood's most formidable leading lady is back after a relatively quiet spell, in a role playing on her scariness and seniority. This reinvented fairytale is a twist on The Sleeping Beauty, and Jolie is not playing the insipid dormant heroine with her crybaby attitude to finger-pricking but the evilly magnificent Maleficent, the sorceress who casts a spell on the demure young Princess Aurora. How did she get that way? Everything will depend on the script – but Jolie is always a great turn. Peter Bradshaw 30 May.

Natalie Portman in Jane Got a Gun

Natalie Portman is a Hollywood A-lister who first came to prominence in George Lucas's Star Wars prequel trilogy. She was compellingly vulnerable in Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan,...

Agreement with Altive Media will include a production from director Terry Gilliam.

English National Opera (Eno) has secured a partnership with alternative content distribution company Altive Media that will screen productions throughout the UK and in cinemas worldwide.

The partnership, dubbed Eno Screen, is set to broadcast the operatic productions in up to 300 cinemas across the UK and Ireland as well as selected cinemas around the world.

The first live screening will be Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes on Feb 23, directed by David Alden.

It will be followed in June by Hector Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini, directed by Terry Gilliam, best known for directing films such as 12 Monkeys and Brazil as well as being part of the Monty Python troupe.

The technical and creative team behind the broadcasts will be headed by award-winning MTV director Andy Morahan (Jls: Eyes Wide Open 3D) and producer Dione Orrom (Phantom of the Opera 25th Anniversary).

Altive Media will oversee...

London — The English National Opera's 2013-14 season will include a world premiere of Oedipus-inspired opera "Thebans" and the return of Monty Python's Terry Gilliam to direct a new production, the company announced Wednesday.

"Thebans," based on the tragedies of Sophocles, is a first opera from composer Julian Anderson, with libretto by Irish playwright Frank McGuinness. It opens in May 2014.

Gilliam, who directed "The Damnation of Faust" at the Eno in 2011, will lead a production of Hector Berlioz's "Benvenuto Cellini" in June 2014.

Both will be conducted by Eno Musical Director Edward Garner.

The season includes 10 new productions, including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Cosi Fan Tutte," directed by Katie Mitchell, a Calixto Bieito-directed production of Ludwig van Beethoven's "Fidelio" and Mozart's "The Magic Flute" directed by Simon McBurney – a co-production with the Netherlands Opera.

The company also plans revivals of recent successes including David Alden's production of...

"See the lonely boy, out on the weekend. Trying to make it pay." – Neil Young

Greetings from the apocalypse, and welcome to the new weekly feature where our lone warrior gives you the play-by-play for how your filmgoing weekend can unfold, Friday-to-Sunday, morning-to-night.

No, the Mayan doomsday didn't actually come to pass, but we are in the moviegoing wasteland known as January. Get out your grandfather's Geiger counter buried under the porno mags in his fallout shelter, because the risk of contamination is high from the radioactive lineup of post-Christmas studio dumps. As our nation does a "Thelma & Louise" over the fiscal cliff, we're diving head-first into the cinematic 'pockyclypse that is 2013, and with my help you just might survive the long nuclear winter.

Friday, January 4

Nothing says "dog days of January" like a sequel to a remake to a warmed-over horror franchise from the studly '70s. "Texas Chainsaw 3D...

Damon Albarn and Terry Gilliam launch Eno's new audience expansion scheme to attract younger audience to art form that many consider 'too stuffy, too posh, too expensive'

In 1998, Sir Colin Southgate, the former Royal Opera House chairman, infamously gave his verdict on what to wear to the opera. "I don't want to sit next to somebody in a singlet, a pair of shorts and a smelly pair of trainers".

But the English National Opera was today making an effort to be a little more relaxed at the launch of an initiative to attract younger audiences. "Come in shorts, armour, jeans, pumps, anything!" said artistic director John Berry.

The scheme, Undress for the Opera, was inspired by the success of Damon Albarn's Doctor Dee which played at the Coliseum in the summer and where 60% of the ticket buyers were new to Eno. Berry and Albarn were joined at the launch...

To the Wonder will finally, finally unveil itself at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday, and reviews from scenic Italy would, normally, be the most substantial reports on the film so far. A few days out from its first screening, after all, the closest thing to an update involves those who didn’t make it past Terrence Malick’s editing scissors.

Update: The first reviews have arrived from Venice, check them out here and read on for more details below.

Before that, we’ve got something which, if you’ll excuse the overwhelming bravado, peels back far more layers than anything else up to this point, possibly more than anything short of seeing the actual film. “That’s not saying much,” one could argue, and they’d be right — again, you only know Rachel Weisz probably won’t attend the premiere — so how about a full synopsis, eye-opening comments from Ben Affleck,...

Dystopian fantasy will star Christoph Waltz of Inglourious Basterds, with pre-production set to begin in next few days

Terry Gilliam fans rejoice! The maverick director, who has spoken candidly about his funding problems in recent years, has finally been given the money to make a new feature film. An existential fantasy starring Oscar winner Christoph Waltz as an eccentric computer genius trying to discover the meaning of life, The Zero Theorem is set to enter pre-production in Bucharest over the next few days.

Gilliam himself revealed Waltz's casting on his Facebook page. "Announcement!" he wrote, next to a photograph of the Austrian actor in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. "I'm heading off to Bucharest to start work on my new film, The Zero Theorem. It stars everybody's favourite Nazi, the great Christoph Waltz. Very original script about a man waiting for a telephone call that will give meaning to his life.

This Wednesday the Northern hemisphere celebrated the best of the solstices. Why best? Because unlike the winter solstice, when the sun's low position on the celestial sphere results in a day with less light than any other all year, the summer version is gloriously, wisely inverted, responsible for making the day it falls on last longer than any other all year. Light stretches on, free spirits hold hands over at old Stonehenge (and umbrellas, this year), and every single person in the 'sphere starts to think of dance parties and popsicles.

This year HuffPost Culture thought we'd address your dance-and-popsicle-party-throwing needs with a playlist. This is not just any playlist. Every single tune on it is classical. That means violins and pianos and to our knowledge, not a single instance of auto-tuning.

In attendance are Maurice Ravel's "Jeux D'Eau," or "Fountains," for cooling purposes, the dirty sounding but musically literal "He's Mounting Up,...

In the arts world Shakespeare stole the show (again) – but no one caught the eye quite like Dave St-Pierre's dance troupe

For British arts organisations, 2011 was without question a year of financial worry, cutting back and, in some cases, fighting for survival. But did that mean audiences were short-changed? Far from it: it was a year of striking ambition, excellence and often quite astonishing success.

The National Theatre was one of many to be hit with a 15% cut in money from Arts Council England, but what a year it had. It even managed to make up the financial shortfall because of the eye-spinning commercial success of War Horse, which transferred to London's West End and then Broadway.

It is on to another money-spinner with One Man, Two Guvnors, Richard Bean's laugh-out-loud adaptation of Carlo Goldoni's 18th-century play, which the Guardian's Michael Billington called "one of the funniest productions...

Clouzot and Romy Schneider on the set of L'Enfer

"Watching a film by the French master Henri-Georges Clouzot, you often feel as if the walls were closing in on you — even when there are no walls," writes Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times. "The Wages of Fear (1953), the movie that opens the Museum of Modern Art's Clouzot retrospective [today], takes place almost entirely out of doors, yet it's as claustrophobic as a stretch in solitary confinement…. It is perhaps fortunate, for the sanity of his viewers, that he managed to complete only 11 features between 1942, when his deceptively light-hearted L'Assassin Habite au 21 (The Murderer Lives at No. 21) was released, and 1968, when his last movie, La Prisonnière, came out.... All 11 will be screened before the series ends on Dec 24, along with odds and ends like a couple of early-40s pictures for which he supplied screenplays and a 2010 documentary, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno,...

Filmmakers -- especially French ones, and especially those working before the 50s -- are often overly romanticized amongst cinephiles. We love a great film, but we really love the underlying legends and myths of the artist and the creative process, struggling and screaming and clawing to get each film made, centralized on a whirligig of backstabbing, betrayal, and romance. Failed projects, lusty affairs, bouts with depression, creative absences, controversial ideologies, and tragic deaths: it's the stuff that makes the singular genius of the director all the more untouchable; all the more storied. Enter, then, Henri-Georges Clouzot, the 'French Hitchcock' - perhaps the most improbable canonized auteur of them all. The Tiff Bell Lightbox in Toronto won't be spotlighting him with an 'art' exhibition ala Fellini's photo show last summer, but they will be giving his modestly sized filmography a run-through from mid-October to November 29. Unpretentiously titled The Wages of Fear...

Varese Sarabande has announced the details of the soundtrack release for the British drama Will. The album features the original score from the film composed by Nigel Clarke and Michael Csányi-Wills (The Little Vampire, The Thief Lord). The music was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and Choir in Abbey Road’s famous Studio One. The soundtrack will be released on iTunes on November 1, 2011. A physical version of the album is also coming out in Europe on the same day. Will based on the historic “Miracle of Istanbul” is directed by Ellen Perry and stars Bob Hoskins, Damian Lewis, Perry Eggelton and Kristian Kiehling. The film chronicles an orphan’s journey across Europe to the 2005 Champions League Final in Istanbul. The movie will be released in the UK on November 4. No domestic release date has been announced.

Here’s the track list of the album:

1. Anfield (2:41)

2. Memories of Liverpool Fc (1:34)

3. Lélio,...

Read the winning entries from 2010

Overall Winner

Film, 14-18s

Alice in Wonderland by Rebecca Grant, 15

Tim Burton has snatched the beautifully eccentric odyssey that we once lovingly knew as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, wrung it dry of anything resembling the endearingly capricious originality of the children's classic, and slung the disgusting dregs into a pretentious, Disneyfied quest movie replete with, frankly, un-special effects.

Burton's insistence that his film was not a re-imagining or sequel to other "Alice movies" made me wonder whether he had actually read the book at all. Nineteen-year-old Alice, played by the apparently tranquilised Mia Wasikowska, spends a disproportionate amount of time at the beginning of the movie prancing around in a tediously twee caricature of Victorian high society. When the dopey antagonist finally wiggles her way into Wonderland, we are ambushed by the White Rabbit, the Dormouse, the Dodo, Tweedledum and Tweedledee all at once,...

One of Terry Gilliam's many recent non-feature projects is The Wholly Family, a short film funded by Italian pasta company Garofalo. The company commissioned a set of short films set in or otherwise concerning Naples, and Gilliam is one of the people tapped to take advantage of the option. We haven't seen anything from the film since some stills [1] hit in February, but a teaser trailer hit the web a week or two back, and you can see it below. This is weird-looking stuff. When some of the characters trundle out plates of food the commercial aspect becomes pretty dominant, but I wonder how apparent that will really be in the full short. There is some deliriously weird-looking footage here. Some shots look like part of a fever dream that captures the spirit of early scenes of Time Bandits. I have no idea what we're in for here, but...

Getty Composer Alexandre Desplat

Creating the music for “The Tree of Life,” Terrence Malick’s epic spiritual drama that recently won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, was a unique challenge for veteran composer Alexandre Desplat.

“It was perilous,” said the four-time French-born Oscar nominated composer (“The King’s Speech,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) in Cannes last week, where Malick, the reclusive filmmaker, was a no-show at press events. “But it’s good to be in danger,...

His abiding Cannes audience may not have been waiting as long as the cosmic eons translated on screen in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. But even a year’s delay probably felt like eternity for some in the throng that began queueing up at 7:30 a.m. today on a classically sunny Cote d’Azur morning for the first screening of Malick’s avidly anticipated new movie.

What this pro-Malick, 7:30 a.m. queue participant saw: A (typically) fascinating but confounding jumble of two works in one. Under the circumstances, I’ll call them the microcosmic and the macrocosmic.

Goethe cursed attempts to set Faust to music – but composers kept trying regardless. As Terry Gilliam's version opens, Stuart Jeffries recounts a litany of depression, devils and duels

There is a curse on any composer rash enough to set Goethe's Faust to music. The German literary genius declared only Mozart capable of adapting his epic drama of damnation, sexual betrayal, witchcraft and freeform philosophic meditation. Selfishly, Mozart had died in 1791, almost 20 years before Goethe completed part one. So forever after, we have been doomed to suffer Faustian adaptations that the author would have disdained.

Perhaps Goethe's curse was issued because of That Thing he had with Beethoven. When Goethe met Beethoven (What a film! Hugh Bonneville as genteel, bewigged Goethe; Russell Crowe as Beethoven, surly and spoiling for a fight), the former bowed like a courtier; the latter didn't even remove his hat. You can see how...

French actor, novelist and director who starred in films by Truffaut and Buñuel

Those who followed the adventures of Antoine Doinel (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) in a series of lyrical and semi-autobiographical films directed by François Truffaut – incorporating adolescence, marriage, fatherhood and divorce – will know that Doinel's first and (perhaps) last love, Colette Tazzi, was played by the stunningly beautiful Marie-France Pisier, who has been found dead aged 66 in the swimming pool of her house near Toulon, in southern France.

Doinel and audiences first caught sight of Pisier in Antoine et Colette, Truffaut's enchanting 32-minute contribution to the omnibus film L'Amour à Vingt Ans (Love at Twenty, 1962), during a concert at the Salle Pleyel in Paris of Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. She is conscious of Antoine's stares, and pulls down her skirt. We soon realise that Colette is going to break Antoine's heart.

Léaud and Pisier were born in...

So we're a few weeks away from when the world will get their taste of Terrence Malick's highly anticipated "The Tree Of Life." Nearly every scrap of information has been pored over in the run up to the film, and while the film boasts huge talents behind the camera on the screen, composer Alexandre Desplat has been a bit left behind thus far. The composer has been talking pretty freely about his work on the film as far back as 2009 and late last year said that the soundtrack will use musical cues from 19th century romantic composer Hector Berlioz…...

Opera novice Mike Figgis is taking charge of Lucrezia Borgia at the Eno. Trouser parts and Renaissance porn were part of a steep learning curve

Mike Figgis is about to make his debut as an opera director at English National Opera. But his production of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia is hardly the fulfilment of a dream for the 62-year-old Oscar-nominated director. "I was never an opera-goer growing up. I was a jazz musician. I'd go and see Miles Davis. It would never cross my mind to go to the opera. My only preconceptions about opera were based on clips I had seen, to be honest." He smiles sheepishly beneath his mop of hair. "I only went to my first opera three or four years ago, when my girlfriend took me to the Met in New York."

Figgis is the latest in a long line of Eno's recruits from the worlds...

London, April 16 – Screenwriter/director Terry Gilliam is said to be taking a break from moviemaking to direct an opera.

Gilliam, 69, will be taking charge of ‘The Damnation of Faust’ by Hector Berlioz in a new production for the English National Opera’s (Eno) 2010/11 season.

“If it doesn’t work we’ll blame Berlioz. It’s just my perverse nature. I thought let’s do an opera that’s seldom been successful,” the Daily Express quoted him as saying.

“I just liked Eno. It seems to be far more.

Terry Gilliam has been announced as the director of The Damnation of Faust at the English National Opera (Eno). The 12 Monkeys director will helm his first opera with an adaptation of Hector Berlioz's peice next summer, The Guardian reports. Eno artistic director John Berry said of winning over Gilliam: "I crept up on him so that he eventually found himself in a situation where he was committed." Music director Edward Gardner added: "You have to create a (more)...

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote isn't the only Terry Gilliam project we have to look forward to. Although Quixote has been an on-going project for years, eliciting all sorts of fan anticipation, something is coming to steal its thunder. The Playlist reports that Gilliam is making his opera debut with Hector Berlioz's 1846 opera The Damnation of Faust, which will be performed at the English National Opera in London next year.

Is there any aspect of this news that is not killer? It's right up Gilliam's alley, setting aside the devilish pacts of Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus for an operatic take on a true classic, Goethe's Faust, where the old and weary doctor is dazzled by the promises of Mephistopheles , for the love of Marguerite. The best part is also, sadly, the worst -- I can't imagine much that would rival an in-person experience with Gilliam's artistic vision,...

Terry Gilliam is taking a break from the "difficult and unpleasant" process of moviemaking to direct an opera.

The filmmaker will take charge of The Damnation of Faust by Hector Berlioz in a new production for the English National Opera's (Eno) 2010/11 season.

And Gilliam is looking forward to the change of genre - as he finds Hollywood so tiresome.

Gilliam says. "If it doesn't work we'll blame Berlioz. It's just my perverse nature. I thought let's do an opera that's seldom been successful.

"I just liked Eno. It seems to be far more relaxed and playful and less bureaucratic. There's no pretension. I love the idea that it's not an opera house but (started as) a music hall.

"Moviemaking has become really difficult and unpleasant and everyone has been at me (asking me) to do opera for so long I thought maybe it was time."...

Robert Lepage has elevated the Metropolitan Opera's La Damnation de Faust to a new level--four of them, actually.

The set, introduced last year and revived this season, is four stories partitioned off by five columns, a Hollywood Squares-style wall backed with 24 cubicles of drama and activity. It's a captivating innovation for modern, plugged-in theatergoers used to watching multiple screens, browsers, tabs, and windows. The cells are configured to either frame the main scene, so viewers don't have to squint at tiny figurines parading around up- or down-stage, or flood the set with action on all four levels.

And that's just the beginning. Lepage and his design group Ex Machina takes Berlioz's hybrid work (conceived as a concert piece, not an opera) many steps further. He covers each cubicle in a scrim that, when slid open, becomes a screen on which various architectural and organic video is projected. The...