Photo By Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

Pl#225cido Domingo stars as Emperor Qin in the Metropolitan Opera's production of The First Emperor.

Legendary film critic Pauline Kael often likened cinema to opera. For her, great movie sequences were like great arias and grand film was like grand opera. When they worked, both were a satisfying coming together of all the visual and performing arts.

Film and opera are coming together in a big way thanks to technology that's now allowing live opera to be seen in movie theaters. This winter New York's Metropolitan Opera is bringing simulcasts of six productions to movie theaters around the world. And two of the productions -- Mozart's The Magic Flute and the world premiere of Tan Dun's The First Emperor -- point to the growing trend of film artists crossing over to the opera stage.

These Saturday matinees, broadcast via satellite and in high definition, are being featured in 60 theaters around the United States. Although no Cincinnati-area theater is currently equipped with the technology for such a broadcast, the Regal Hollywood Stadium 20 at Fairfield Commons in Beavercreek is presenting the broadcast. Other venues are just an easy day trip away in Columbus, Louisville and Lexington.

The first simulcast, The Magic Flute on Dec. 30, garnered a lot of attention and sold out in most theaters. This staging, originally produced by the Met in 2004, is by Julie Taymor, whose credits include such visually arresting films as Titus and Frida. Taymor is also the mastermind who turned Disney's animated The Lion King into a Broadway sensation. (The tour returns to Cincinnati in March.)

The broadcast was of an abbreviated, 100-minute version, performed in English, designed to attract a family audience. The Met is hoping to position this as a holiday perennial much the way ballet companies annually stage The Nutcracker and many regional theaters stage versions of A Christmas Carol.

"It was very enjoyable," says Cincinnati Opera Director of Public Relations Jennifer Bellin, who attended the simulcast in Beavercreek. "Obviously it doesn't feel the same as watching a stage performance. But you were up close, and that's exciting."

And not without first-time problems, as some theaters reported transmission difficulties. Still, audiences -- including many seasoned opera-goers no doubt accustomed to the occasional mishaps of live theater -- didn't seem to mind.

"There were some technical glitches," Bellin notes. "But the theater in Beavercreek was very generous and gave passes to come back for another broadcast."

While in New York over the holidays I had the opportunity to see Taymor's full-length, sung-in-German Flute. It was, in a word, stunning. Like much of her work, this acclaimed production features masks, puppets, lavish costumes, multi-dimensional sets and highly imaginative staging. For me it was even better than The Lion King as her eye-popping techniques were married to first-rate Mozart (at least music-wise) instead of second-rate Disney. Visually and dramatically it surpasses both Ingmar Bergman's famous 1975 film version as well as the Maurice Sendak-designed version staged here in 2002.

This Saturday the Met will simulcast The First Emperor with a score by Tan Dun, the Oscar-winning composer of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The production, sung in English, has been staged by Chinese film director Zhang Yimou (House of Flying Daggers), whose latest samurai epic, Curse of the Golden Flower, opens on Cincinnati movie screens this week. Another Oscar-winner, Emi Wada (Ran), has designed the costumes.

The opera features superstar tenor Placido Domingo as Emperor Qin, who built the Great Wall and gave China its name. The New York run is sold out, so the broadcast is a hot ticket. And at $18 it's a bargain, as Met seats can go for hundreds of dollars.

Film directors staging operas is nothing new. Franco Zeffirelli has been moving back and forth between stage and screen throughout his entire career, even successfully filming operas such as Otello and La Traviata. And when Baz Luhrman made that sensory-overload called Moulin Rouge with Nicole Kidman a few years ago, he was aping the look and feel he brought to the La Boheme he staged in Australia in the early 1990s. That production in turn was mounted to great acclaim on Broadway once Luhrman achieved screen fame.

When maverick film director Robert Altman died November, many noted that his career included staging operas. His most notable collaboration was with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer William Bolcom, who transformed Altman's 1978 film A Wedding into an opera that Altman himself staged for Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2004.

And the list goes on. Exorcist director William Friedkin admits he had never even seen an opera when in 1998 (and in Italy, no less!) he directed Alban Berg's Wozzeck. Last fall his staging of a Bartok-Puccini double bill opened the Washington National Opera's season and featured heavyweights Samuel Ramey and Denyce Graves.

Even Garry Marshall has gotten into the act. Yes, the man who gave the world TV's Happy Days and Pretty Woman directed Offenbach's The Grand Duchess in Los Angeles a couple of seasons back.

Earlier this season the Met presented a new staging of Madama Butterfly by Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-wining director of The English Patient and Cold Mountain. The run sold out and became a cause célèbre. Interestingly enough, Minghella eschewed cinematic technique and returned to his own theatrical roots for inspiration, staging it as a Japanese play complete with Bunraku-style puppets and translucent Shoji screens.

"We are first-time opera makers, it's not for us to revolutionize opera," he told NPR in October. "It's for us to understand it and to bring to bear whatever it is that we can bring to the work."