Maria Callas in the 1950s, as seen in Maria by Callas (TIFF)

For many, soprano Maria Callas (1923–1977) is the gateway into opera. Sixty years after her heyday, she’s still the benchmark for singing actors and one of the most soulful classical musicians, though her voice is not necessarily known as conventionally beautiful.

According to reviews of the period, she almost single-handedly brought back the art of character interpretation to the operatic stage and helped resuscitate the bel canto repertory from oblivion. Though she left behind an extensive discography, not one of her operatic performances was filmed in its entirety. Filmmaker Tom Volf has undertaken a celluloid scavenger hunt, tracking down film and audio from archives that highlight both her voice and her magnetism, on stage and off. (Some of it was filmed from the balcony; it’s not unlike watching a bootleg DVD at times.)

The film luxuriates in her voice, and star power. It begins with her ever-quotable 1970 interview with the dapper David Frost, which forms the bedrock of the elliptical narrative—she speaks in a soft mid-Atlantic dialect, not unlike her fellow 1950s fashion plate Audrey Hepburn. Volf discovered this footage through Callas’s butler, who had videotaped the segment. The time line tracks her globe-hopping itinerary from 1952, when her career began peaking, to its sharp decline. The highlights are unquestionably her performances, where the camera remains focused on Callas throughout an entire aria without cutting away, allowing us to see her character’s transitions; there’s no need to know the opera’s backstory.

Especially transfixing is her rendition of “Casta Diva” at her Paris Opera debut, a recital in front of an audience that included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Brigitte Bardot. Even before she has sung a note, she’s in character, in-tuned with Bellini’s score from Norma, and an excellent example of an artist who is internally and externally expressive. Gestures that might come across as presentational or as too demonstrative by some singers are made credible by Callas. She fully commits; she is a stage animal through and through.

Excerpts from other interviews (prominently her vocal teacher and mentor Elvira de Hidalgo) and voice-overs of her letters, diaries, and an unpublished memoir form a tenuous outline of her private life. Her writings are read by Joyce DiDonato, who remarkably sounds like Callas. However, opera fans will fill in the gaps of what’s not mentioned, such as her years living in Athens during the German occupation or her dramatic physical transformation in the early 1950s. (The film captures her in glamour goddess mode). There’s no background of her marriage to Giovanni Battista Meneghini or her breakout feat in 1949, performing within one week two diametrically disparate roles: the strenuous dramatic soprano part of Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Die Walküre and the complex coloratura of Bellini’s I Puritani, after learning the score in six days.

The archival footage well captures the press’s fascination with the diva who was rumored to be difficult; her firing from the Metropolitan Opera by Rudolph Bing was front-page news. Almost as mesmerizing as the performance pieces are the newsreels of Callas disembarking from an airplane, along with her diva dog, a black poodle, greeting a clamor of reporters. She works the tarmac like a catwalk, dressed in the height of mid-century haute couture.

Terrence McNally’s 1995 play, Masterclass, depicts Callas as a lioness instructing cubs in a class at Juilliard. One of her admonitions to a student is to curate an individual style. In Maria by Callas, you see her fashion flare in full display, and you’ll feel underdressed. The play also underlines the idea that Callas, as a diva, was a conscious, self-invented creation, a theme that is discussed in Callas’s interview with Frost. There, she compartmentalizes her two identities: Maria and the artist Callas, which the film’s title alludes to. And speaking of McNally, audiences will see grainy footage of Callas as Violetta in sync with a (presumably) clandestine recording from Lisbon, in a benchmark performance that was the sacred MacGuffin in the playwright’s 1989 play The Lisbon Traviata.

The movie serves an eye-opening introduction for newcomers, and you don’t have to be an opera queen to swoon. It’s a rich course for late arrivals and a feast for fans.

Maria by Callas is screening this week at the Toronto International Film Festival and then other fall festivals, such as the New York Film Festival.