Reorchestrating the Past

Taking its title from Australian novelist Alexis Wright’s description of her novel Carpentaria as a ‘long song, following ancient tradition’, this chapter considers how antipodean relations of place interrupt abstract notions of globalization as a financial system. The first section exemplifies this by focusing on Australian/American director Baz Luhrmann, whose version of The Great Gatsby (2013), filmed in Sydney, resituates Fitzgerald’s classic novel within an antipodean context. The second section develops this through consideration of Wright’s fiction, along with that of New Zealand/Maori author Keri Hulme, so as to illuminate ways in which spiral conceptions of time, where ends merge into beginnings, contest Western epistemological frames. In the final section, this ‘long song’ is related to the musical aesthetics of Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe and English composers George Benjamin and Harrison Birtwistle. The chapter concludes by arguing that musical modes are an overlooked dimension of postmodernist culture more generally.

tragedy tailored to the spirit of the times – Romeo and Juliet as interpreted by Franco Zeffirelli and Baz Luhrmann

This article discusses two film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, i.e. one directed by Franco Zeffirelli and the other by Baz Luhrmann. It covers the following aspects: the structure of both the drama and its two film adaptations, the characters’ creation, the choice of setting and screen time, and the function of tragedy. Shakespeare’s language is characterised by unparalleled wit and powers of observation, and the final form of his plays is a clear indication of his ambivalent attitude towards tradition and the rigid structure of the drama. By breaking with convention, favouring an episodic structure, and blending tragedy with comedy, Shakespeare always takes risks, in a similar vain to the two directors who decided to make film adaptations based on his plays. Each technical device the adaptors selected could have turned out to be a wonderful novelty or a total disaster. The strength of both Zeffirelli’s and Luhrman’s adaptations is their emphasis on love and youth, which thanks to their directorial skill is perfectly in tune with the spirit of their respective times.

Amitabh Bachchan

Amitabh Bachchan (b. 1942 in Allahabad) is perhaps the most enduringly iconic figure of Bollywood. He has appeared in nearly two hundred films and made cultural impacts as television presenter, stage performer, spokesperson, brand ambassador, and social media influencer. “Big B” possesses a tall physique, heavy-lidded visage, and sonorous multilingual voice. After onscreen debut in the epic Saat Hindustani (dir. K A. Abbas, 1969), his reputation and fame were established with anti-hero action roles as corruption-fighting police inspector-turned-vigilante in Zanjeer (dir. Prakash Mehra, 1973), as good-hearted thief in “curry western” Sholay (dir. Ramesh Sippy, 1975), and as tragic gangster in crime drama Deewar (dir. Yash Chopra, 1975). Bachchan’s composite personae represented the populist “angry young man” at a time of political/social/economic crisis. In the pioneering “middle cinema” of director-screenwriter Hrishikesh Mukherjee, including Anand (1971) and Namak Haraam (1973), Bachchan co-starred with the “original” Hindi film superstar Rajesh Khanna, ultimately eclipsing Khanna’s screen currency with his own class-crossing, genre-bending charisma. Bachchan appeared as characters all named Vijay (victorious) in Salim-Javed scripted films directed by Yash Chopra, Chandra Barot, and Ramesh Sippy. He executed his own action stunts, dances, and baritone playback tracks for numerous screen performances. An array of “double” roles, as well as comic films like Amar Akbar Anthony (dir. Manmohan Desai, 1977) displayed his expanding acting range. In addition to classic “buddy”/multihero pairings, Bachchan first shared the screen with actress Jaya Bhaduri in 1973, the year they married. Rumors of relationships with female stars provided abundant gossip fodder, culminating in a love triangle storyline in Silsila (dir. Yash Chopra, 1981). Bachchan’s status as superstar/national symbol was confirmed via public concern after a near-fatal injury during the filming of Coolie (dir. Manmohan Desai and Prayag Raj, 1982), widely covered in the press. Thereafter, Bachchan’s controversial foray into politics representing his home city in Uttar Pradesh, resulted in a screen hiatus and, later, attempted comeback. In the 1990s, his titular production company faced bankruptcy; however, the star accrued new currency in film and across media platforms, topping the BBC News online millennium poll as greatest star of stage or screen and becoming the host of a popular glocalized television game show. His son Abhishek and daughter-in-law Aishwarya Rai Bachchan exemplify next-generation stardom. Amitabh Bachchan has meanwhile remained a fixture in the Indian star firmament as the global Bollywood landscape continues to expand in the 21st century. His socially mediated utterances, advertising campaigns, and philanthropic endeavors regularly become part of public discourse. Bachchan portrayed multiple silver-bearded patriarchs in blockbuster millennial films emphasizing traditional family values, but his contemporary catalogue also includes rogues, renegades, curmudgeons, and outsiders. Bachchan’s contributions to Bollywood’s intertextual richness and influence are also demonstrated by his cameos in Hindi movies, Indian regional language films, and in the postmodern adaptation/remake of The Great Gatsby (dir. Baz Luhrmann, 2013), his Hollywood debut.

Method-ising Cognitive Truth: The Paradigm of Subtext in Baz Luhrmann’s Silver-Screen Vision of Romeo and Juliet’s Wedding

A case study of the wedding scene in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet directed by Baz Luhrmann 1996, this article is a hermeneutic exploration of the truth pursuits within the subtext from the empirical perspective of a practicing director and a semiotician, in accordance with the principles of the Method acting technique. The author proposes a new, space-negotiated definition of subtext as a separate cognitive unit, based on the multilayered interdependences within the directorial semiotic triad of word–emotional action–mise-en-scène. In a minute shot-by-shot analysis, the author examines the hermeneutic collocations in-between the elements of the triad, and demonstrates the ways cognitive spaces become subtextual statements within each shot, as well as how the internal subtexts shape the metasubtext of each shot in order to arrive at the megasubtext of the scene — and subsequently the total subtext of the entire story in a cultural text. Aspects of the evolution of the subtext representations are analyzed within the triad of word–emotional action–mise-en-scène, against the backdrop of the epistemological pursuits of the truth. How do we reach the truth in a cultural text? What components of the film language rule the expression of the truth in a cultural text?

Un ejemplo de postmodernidad cinematográfica: la estética del pastiche en Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)

En este artículo comentamos y analizamos los recursos formales del film Moulin Rouge en función de su pertenencia a un discurso específicamente posmoderno, y en el que una estética propia de un lenguaje ajeno al cinematográfico -el del videoclip- se combina con los presupuestos propios del contemporáneo lenguaje de la posmodernidad, revelándose así como un clarísimo ejemplo de ésta.

Partying in The Great Gatsby: Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime

The first party sequence in Baz Luhrmann’ s The Great Gatsby (2013) counts as one of the most opulent, densely articulated, and extravagant in film history. On its release critics noted its ‘frenetic beauty’, ‘orgasmic pitch’, and ‘Vincente Minnelli-style suavity with controlled vertigo’. Décor, costuming, sound, movement, and colour come to the fore because the sequence’s spatial layout can’t be determined until its end. The mélanged soundtrack itself refuses to grant the viewer a sense of ground. What distances might this musical sample brook? Who’s performing and who isn’t? To which period and community does this music speak? Why this snippet against that? Sounds’ sources and imagined spatial locations seem to cross and overlap with elaborate vectors. This analysis plumbs the ways nineteen aural and visual techniques pull the viewer affectively and proprioceptively in different directions, helping, with the aid of digital technologies, to construct an extravagant rhetoric appropriate for our unfortunate gilded age. Considering Gatsby provides a way to further understand audiovisual aesthetics, the newly emergent role of soundtracks, contemporary cinema, and our time.

The Great Gatsby: Love and the Accumulation of Financial Capital and Symbolic

This paper aims to highlight the capital relations that permeate the story the Great Gatsby, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, considered here as the hipotexto, founding text on design of Gerard Genette (2010) and your the most recent film adaptation, hypertext (GENETTE, 2010, p. 12) that works as transposition and/or updating the previous text made by the Australian Director Baz Luhrmann in 2013. In this sense, from the theoretical formulations proposed by Pierre Bourdieu (1996) about the art as social, historical and cultural phenomenon, the product of a structured and stratified society, we use the concepts of capital and symbolic power to highlight the logic financier that articulates the personal relationships and emotional in the narrative of Fitzgerald, above all, from a reading of their analytical structural elements. In this analysis, we focused on conflict cells established between the characters, the Narrator, the spaces and the temporal dynamics established in hipotexto interaction written with filmic hypertext.O Grande Gatsby: Amores e o Acúmulo de Capitais Financeiros e Simbólicos O presente trabalho se propõe a evidenciar as relações capitais que permeiam a narrativa O Grande Gatsby, de Francis Scott Fitzgerald, considerada aqui como o hipotexto, texto fundante na concepção de Gerard Genette (2010) e sua adaptação cinematográfica mais recente, hipertexto (GENETTE, 2010, p.12) que funciona como transposição e/ou atualização do texto anterior realizada pelo diretor australiano Baz Luhrmann em 2013. Nesse sentido, a partir das formulações teóricas propostas por Pierre Bourdieu (1996) acerca da arte como fenômeno social, histórico e cultural, produto de uma sociedade estruturada e estratificada, utilizamos as noções de capital e poder simbólico para evidenciar a lógica financista que articula as relações pessoais e afetivas na narrativa de Fitzgerald, sobretudo, a partir de uma leitura analítica de seus elementos estruturais. Nessa análise, enfocamos as células de conflito estabelecido entre as personagens, o discurso do narrador, os espaços e a dinâmica temporal que se estabelece na interação do hipotexto escrito com o hipertexto fílmico.

Parody and the gas station in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2017v70n1p177O filme de 1996 de Baz Luhrmann, Romeu e Julieta de William Shakespeare, é uma adaptação pop da peça do final do século XVI. As referências cruzadas e transgressões das alusões e sua afirmação subversiva pós-moderna, juntamente com a extrema intensidade com que esses elementos aparecem no ato um, cena um, e especialmente na cena colocada em um posto de gasolina, produzem uma ironia autodirigida em uma combinação de referências que define o filme como paródia no sentido pós-moderno. Assim, este artigo examina o primeiro ato, com uma atenção especial à sequência de postos de gasolina, e analisa-o à luz das definições acadêmicas da paródia pós-moderna por Linda Hutcheon, John W. Duvall e Douglas Lanier e de pastiche por Fredric Jameson . Uma vez estabelecida a hipótese da paródia, o artigo analisa o que o filme parodia, de que maneira, e qual são o objetivo e o impacto do humor aplicado.

Ontological Shivers

This essay explores major movements in film history through the lens of Romeo and Juliet adaptations, including films by Irving Thalberg and George Cukor, Renato Castellani, Franco Zeffirelli, Baz Luhrmann, and Deepa Mehta. More specifically, the essay offers a critical examination of theoretical developments in the notion of realism—including classical realism, neorealism, realismo rosa, and post-realism.