OPERA & MOVIES : Lights . . . Aria . . . Action : Movie directors staging operas. Opera directors making movies. Composers writing operas about film stars. Is the opera house becoming more like the movie house or what?

Opera and film might not seem as if they belong together. They are, respectively, our most exclusive and most democratic art forms. One was born from an aural impulse; the other, visual. One has the ability to capture the inner world through music; the other to photograph the outer world. One tends to operate on psychological time; the other’s orientation is more narrative.

Yet try to keep them apart, so infatuated are the two media with each other. The relationship began almost with the birth of film--amazingly, a number of silent films were made of operas, while movies began influencing operas and opera staging early in the century--and it has continued, however gingerly or clumsily, ever since. Today, however, the traffic in both directions between sound stage and opera stage is practically a clogged freeway.

Filmmakers film opera and also direct it on stage. Opera directors put film on the stage and make movies. Composers write operas about film stars and turn films into opera. Opera stars appear in movies; movie stars make occasional guest appearances on the lyric stage. Opera is used in movie soundtracks, which attracts new audiences to recorded opera, and sometimes even the opera house. A burgeoning video market for filmed opera is starting to replace, not just supplement, audio recordings for experiencing opera at home. Even the opera house itself has become increasingly informal and unintimidating, essentially more movie theater-like, with diminished dress codes and the use of supertitles, adapted from the subtitles of foreign films.

Here are a few examples of what has been going on lately: Herbert Ross, the Hollywood director of “Turning Point” and “Steel Magnolias,” was responsible for the production last fall of “La Boheme” opening this Los Angeles Music Center Opera season; the ever outrageous Ken Russell directed Strauss’ “Salome” in Bonn, Germany, basing his production on the film version he once made of the Oscar Wilde play; and the director of German art films, Werner Herzog, created a new production of Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Hollander” (“The Flying Dutchman,”) for the Bastille Opera in Paris. Meanwhile, Dominick Argento recently unveiled his latest opera, “The Dream of Valentino,” in Washington. (Its final performance is today; next season it moves to Dallas and also will be broadcast on PBS.)

Three of the most-hyped opera occasions in New York thus far this season have been the world premiere of Ezra Laderman’s “Marilyn,” a literal soap opera about Marilyn Monroe; a production of Philip Glass’ latest opera, “Orphee,” which is a musical setting of the screenplay, complete, from Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film; and the first American screening of a restored version of a silent film of Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier,” for which Strauss wrote a special orchestral score and which the American Symphony Orchestra played as accompaniment to the projected film.

And now at the neighborhood cineplexes. One of the more talked-about scenes in a current film happens to be that of Tom Hanks, in “Philadelphia,” swooning to the voice of Maria Callas singing an aria from “Andrea Chenier.” Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese opened his “The Age of Innocence” . . . where else but at the opera?

This kind of thing has been going on for a long time. The glamorous soprano Grace Moore was breaking down operatic barriers as early as 1934, thanks to her popular film “One Night of Love” (which, incidentally, was directed by a composer, Victor Schertzinger, who also wrote the title song). In the ‘50s, the Russians were filming “Prince Igor” as if it were “Ben-Hur.” One of that era’s greatest Italian filmmakers, Luchino Visconti (“Death in Venice,” “The Leopard,” “The Damned”), was also equally famous as an opera director, and is especially remembered for his productions with Maria Callas at La Scala.

But a number of factors have come together now to make the interaction between the opera and film worlds much livelier than ever before. One is the growth of the home video market. Another is the abatement of European art films, which has sent such directors as Herzog and Lina Wertmuller (who directed a controversial “Carmen” in Naples a few years ago) looking for other work.

No one, of course, can predict where all this operatic cinema and cinematic opera will lead. But film inevitably will continue to assert greater and greater impact upon how opera will be made, staged and experienced; movies are too powerful a force in our culture not to. The influence opera will exert on the movies will likely be far less critical, but it may not be negligible. More important is the question of whether the consequences, in both directions, will be artistically rewarding or regressive, since there is tremendous potential for both.

Much of what passes for artistic interaction between opera and movies is, of course, nothing but glitz, each media viewing the other enviously. Opera, so expensive and always on the lookout for new money, can always use some Hollywood attention; Hollywood has the money and glamour but every so often likes to justify itself with a modicum of the class and elegance that opera can bring to it. When opera is used as soundtrack, for instance, it is often just a classier means to the same sentimental ends that typical Hollywood schlockmeister composers produce, only better done. Such opera composers as Puccini or Giordano (who wrote “Andrea Chenier”) were special masters at melodramatic sentimentality, and they had no small impact on generations of film composers. Better still, they are in public domain--so the appearance of their scores on current celluloid may have little to say about the actual merging of opera and film.

But even here there can be surprising repercussions. One of the most celebrated uses of operatic music in film was Francis Ford Coppola’s employment of Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries” in “Apocalypse Now” as arresting accompaniment for the helicopter strafing of Vietnam. The scene is shocking thanks to the music’s puissance alone, notwithstanding what it represents in wartime context, given the Nazis’ appropriation of Wagner. But the music here works especially well because it is the actual music Robert Duvall is listening to while piloting his warship. (Similarly, Callas’ singing in “Philadelphia” becomes foreground, with Tom Hanks listening, and responding, to it.)

Now, in a new production of Wagner’s “Die Walkure,” staged by Lyric Opera of Chicago this season, director August Everding has credited this scene from “Apocalypse Now” as an inspiration for his own opera house staging of “The Ride of the Valkyries,” which includes aerial versions of Wotan warrior-daughters lobbing comets as they leap on trampolines.

But just because a Coppola might use opera music effectively in film doesn’t necessarily translate to film directors automatically having something to offer on stage. In fact, given the contrary demands of film and opera, just the opposite can easily be the case, as evidenced by Coppola’s own cautious operatic debut staging Gottfried von Einem’s “The Visit of the Old Lady” in San Francisco in 1975.

What film directors do seem to offer is the ability to bring narrative techniques to the stage, which can be popular with an audience wanting easy accessibility, even if it is at the price of what opera does best, which is to allow characters time for reflection. The history of opera is not exactly as noted for wonderfully plotted librettos as it is for memorable characters and for profound insight gained into the human condition. But the necessity of narrative and of visual sophistication cannot be overlooked as more and more live opera productions at major houses are designed with an eye for distribution on home video.

Among the more successful filmmakers turned opera director turned video director is Liliana Cavani, a current favorite of conductor Riccardo Muti at La Scala. Although she once, in a forgotten 1977 film, “Beyond Good and Evil,” depicted German philosopher Nietzsche dreaming a nightmare ballet between Good and Evil, she has been far more conventional on the La Scala opera stage. In an award-winning video she directs of her production “La Traviata,” recently released by Sony, she offers an elegant and clearheaded period drama that looks just right, in a “Masterpiece Theatre” sort of way, on television.

The opposite also holds, however, when a filmmaker decides to bring wide-screen spectacle to the opera stage, as Franco Zeffirelli has famously done at the Metropolitan Opera. Zeffirelli’s productions, as Patrick Smith notes in a recent Opera News editorial, have become a New York tourist attractions on a par with such Broadway extravaganzas as “Miss Saigon.” The sets, like those of a ‘50s Hollywood biblical epic, are the attraction at the expense of all else.

Occasionally an ambitious filmmaker will actually accomplish something truly cinematically adventurous and rich on stage, which in turn will look just awful on video. In his one occasion of staging opera, Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky offered a magnificent vision of a decaying post-apocalyptic Russia in his interpretation of “Boris Godunov” that continues the themes of his late films, like “The Sacrifice.” Unfortunately that production--created for Covent Garden a decade ago, when the filmmaker was exiled from his homeland as a dissident artist, and later brought to post-Perestroika St. Petersburg after Tarkovsky’s death--has not been well served at all on video. In a new London release, directed for television by Humphrey Burton, practically none of the full stage picture or the director’s alarming vision survives intact.

Another area where success is rare is the true opera film. Several attempts have been made to film opera on a cinematic scale--with outdoor locales, big battle scenes, sound effects, screen actors lip-syncing prerecorded opera singers, the works. A few of the more sensitively and imaginatively done ones have been popular, most notably Ingmar Bergman’s lyric and musical “The Magic Flute.” (Bergman is another film director who works periodically on the opera stage.) But it always requires a rare cinematic poetry to overcome the hazards of cinematic detail, which, along with the dubbing, so often make filmed opera look simply foolish.

Indeed, what really spoils most attempts at making such opera films are the sound effects: The enhanced sonic reality is often more magic-destroying than any picture, or any off-putting close-up of a singer’s quavering epiglottis. And so, perhaps it is not as surprising as it might first seem that the most interesting and the most radical influence film has had on opera has been from silents--an influence that continues unabated to this day.

Actual silent films of operas, whether something like Ernst Lubitsch’s “Carmen” or the “Rosenkavalier” adaptation that extends the plot, were little more than historical curiosities. But if they work at all, it is because silents can more readily adapt to musical time than can talkies, which are paced by theatrical dialogue. The camera can take its time to get long, long reaction shots.

Silent films, one needs always remember, were never silent. They were always shown with live musical accompaniment, and frequently shot to live musical accompaniment, with musicians on the set providing mood music. (Strauss even played his “Rosenkavalier” score on the piano during shooting of the film.)

The balletic movement, the leisurely time frame, the mime of silents can, in fact, be seen as an important influence on two of the most venturesome American opera directors: Robert Wilson and Peter Sellars.

Wilson has closely studied the timing of Charlie Chaplin, in particular, and Chaplin reputedly had been an admirer of Wilson’s.

Sellars has been increasingly using film or video on stage. In a new video production of Kurt Weill’s “Seven Deadly Sins,” taped last year in Lyons with Teresa Stratas (though not yet seen in this country), Sellars continually jump-cuts between film and stage footage. Sellars has also gone so far as to attempt a silent film, “The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez,” starring Mikhail Baryshnikov, though without much critical success.

And two of the most creative opera films ever made are also directly inspired by silents. Speaking on an alternate soundtrack of a recent Criterion laser disc release of Michael Powell’s gorgeous 1951 film, “The Tales of Hoffmann,” none other than Martin Scorsese describes how Powell shot the film as if it were a silent, using the music to control the speed of each shot, but Scorsese also emphasizes just how thoroughly he has studied the film and the important impact it has had on his own work--”Raging Bull” in particular. Powell, whose previous film had been “The Red Shoes,” also relied much upon dance to create a fanciful world that cinematically extends the stage rather than replaces it with the screen. In a more avant-garde manner, Hans Jurgen Syberberg did much the same thing with a highly stylized, Brechtian version of “Parsifal,” made a decade ago.

Silents have even had impact on operas being written. One of the most successful new American operas of recent seasons, William Bolcom’s “McTeague,” premiered in Chicago last year, was inspired not just by Frank Norris’ book, but by “Greed,” Erich von Stroheim’s film of it. As evidence of this, film director Robert Altman, who directed the opera production and collaborated on the libretto, made a recent documentary shown on PBS that intercut scenes from the film with the staging, showing not only their similarities but that there were moments when the opera could be credibly played in sync with the silent.

Such a bold approach is being taken even further still by Philip Glass. Following “Orphee,” Glass is currently setting another Cocteau screenplay, that for his most famous film, “Beauty and the Beast.” But this time he is writing the opera to be performed along with film. While the film is projected (without its original soundtrack), singers and an instrumental ensemble will perform a concert opera in synchronization to the screen.

Meant as an opera that Glass can tour with his ensemble, without any of the hassle of transporting a production, and also meant to capitalize on the ever-powerful combination of film and live music, Glass is proposing something that is neither opera film nor filmed opera. Rather it is to be a complete merging of the two into a single experience. Look for it at your local concert hall next year as we enter the postmodern future of opera--virtual opera, silent and sung.