Film into Opera: From Operatic to Cinematic Dramaturgy explores a new trend in contemporary opera: film-based operas. Far more than a mere revamping of opera, this proliferating repertoire of films turned into operas challenges the assumption that adaptation is a unidirectional move from stage to screen. In the few critical essays on this most recent phenomenon, film-based operas are often labelled as cinematic and presented as diverging from operatic tradition. This book questions such assumptions with a dramaturgical study of this new operatic genre. Addressing the adaptation process, it seeks to determine to what extent film-based operas are different from the more traditional form and whether the change in operatic source is sufficient to substantially modify dramaturgy. This book deals with these dramaturgical questions in two parts.