Bill Nestrick made his passion for opera infectious; in his final seminar, his students sang scales, thrilled to the gall of a tenor attempting a second high C, and pored over sheet music for the clockwork rhythms of Olympia's aria in The Tales of Hoffmann. How fitting then to show in Bill's memory an opulent film production of Jacques Offenbach's rousingly melodic, hauntingly lush operatic adaptation of E.T.A. Hoffmann's supernatural tales of strange and thwarted love. Ostensibly a disjointed medley of stories-William K. Everson wrote that it "might be termed the Big Sleep of ballet and opera"-Tales of Hoffmann ambitiously unites the themes of creation and identity, desire and death. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the pair behind the classic ballet film The Red Shoes, turn Offenbach's opera into an extravagant Technicolor concoction of ballet, music, and film techniques, called by the New York Times "the most glowingly ambitious attempt ever made to recreate classical opera upon the motion-picture screen."-AB, MH, NS Anh Bui, Monica Heredia, and Niels Swinkels were students in William Nestrick's seminar on Literature, Film and Opera, which he was teaching at the time of his death.