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May 4, 2014 · Abstract. Baz Luhrmann is widely known for his personal vision in his five feature films. Luhrmann has claimed that the first three films have the “Red Curtain” style, and their style is different from his last two films.
- Ana Kristel Gamboa
- 2016
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- Themes
- Superimposition
- The Look of the Narrators
- Colors
- Mise-en-scène
- Closed Form
- Vortex
- Freeze Frame
- Recurring Visual Elements
- Descriptive Syntagm
- Observations
- THE NARRATIVE USE OF THE CHARACTERS
- Christian and Nick
- Satine and Gatsby
- Symbolism
- Seasons
- Jewelry
- Flying
- The Sparkling Sky and Shooting Stars
- Themes
- Impoverishment vs. Wealth
- “Love Cannot Conquer All Things”
- “Foolish” Love vs. Security (Wealth)
- Lifestyles
- CONCLUSION
Les doy un agradecimiento muy especial a mis papas y a mi hermana por su gran apoyo incondicional. CHAPTER I
Luhrmann’s themes are about universal ideas, and, as an authentic auteur, most of his films revisit the same themes. His most prominent theme is love, where the main characters cannot love each other because they come from different backgrounds. The rules of each class or culture lead to social breakdowns or destruction (Ryan, Baz Luhrmann: Intervi...
Luhrmann is very fond of using the superimposition technique, which is to place an image or video over another image or video. This technique is first seen in Romeo + Juliet when Father Laurence (Pete Postlethwaite) explains his plans to Juliet. Laurence is in the foreground, and his words are pictured in a moving montage in the background. Accordi...
Throughout the entirety of the films, Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby, Luhrmann goes back and forth between the narrators, Christian and Nick, writing/typing their stories. and the images they are narrating. In Moulin Rouge!, Luhrmann provides a variety of shots of Christian typewriting the story including many extreme close-ups of the words he ...
The looks of Luhrmann’s films are very colorful and very artificial. The use of colors expresses “narrative and thematic goals” (McClean 51). The colors of Moulin Rouge! are saturated while those of The Great Gatsby are de-saturated, but they are still very heightened. The dominant colors of each film are red in Moulin Rouge! and gold in The Great ...
Mise-en-scène (“placing on stage” in French) is the arrangement of visuals that are constantly in flux. Luhrmann’s most typical mise-en-scène technique is creating symmetrical images and repetition of patterns. The symmetrical images are pictures that if they are folded in two look like a mirror between the two separated images. Luhrmann sets up th...
Closed form, which is commonly used in the Formalist style, manipulates and emphasizes the visual elements to provide information. One of Luhrmann’s most distinguished uses of closed form is that he encloses characters through door or window frames mainly when something torments them. Many times in Moulin Rouge!, Christian is framed by the window o...
Luhrmann says he stages his spectacular scenes in what he and his team call vortex. Luhrmann place the characters in the middle with a crowd or other elements surrounding them. In Satine’s spectacular entrance, she comes down in a swing from the ceiling, inside the center of the Moulin Rouge, while the rich men, performers and courtesans are surrou...
Luhrmann uses the freeze-frame technique for a couple of seconds on medium close-ups on the narrators for the exactly same reason: to show when they first reveal their aspirations. Freeze frame is a single shot that is reprinted a number of times and gives the illusion of being a still photograph (Giannetti 577). Christian wants to become a writer,...
Some visual elements are constantly seen in Luhrmann’s movies. Fan blades are constantly seen in his films, such as the windmill of the Moulin Rouge (Moulin is French for mill) and the multiple fans in The Great Gatsby. Many fans are used at The Plaza hotel when Tom, Daisy and Gatsby are arguing over who Daisy really loves. Luhrmann decided to film...
The descriptive syntagms are “transitions between different shots of the same location that appear simultaneous in time. They often open a film, describing the ambiance and the location where things will happen” (Ben-Shaul 965). Luhrmann uses this editing technique almost exactly in both of his films. At the beginning of The Great Gatsby when Nick ...
In my studies, I found many other editing devices Luhrmann constantly uses in his films: white light or white smoke, clashing through objects, fragmented editing and long dissolves. As repetitive transition devices, Luhrmann uses white light or white smoke. In a scene in The Great Gatsby, Nick and Daisy are talking outside in her mansion in West Eg...
The characteristics and narrative use of the characters, between Christian and Nick and Satine and Gatsby, are impressively similar, which makes it a highly relevant feature of Luhrmann’s auteurism. Although The Great Gatsby is a story from Fitzgerald, the trait of his characters may have appealed to Luhrmann since they are similar to his original ...
The narrative use of Christian from Moulin Rouge! and Nick from The Great Gatsby resemble each other; they are both writers, the internal narrators, and have similar beginnings. Both films are about them remembering their best moments in their new settings, and how they progressively end up with their tragic conclusions. The film starts with a depr...
How Satine and Gatsby are introduced, and their characteristics are also quite similar. They are seen as mysterious characters until they make their big entrances. Gatsby is seen in a silhouette, mostly from his window and the dock. People speculate about Gatsby, and they all have different versions about him. The first shot of Satine shows her in ...
In this chapter, I analyze how Luhrmann conveys the same ideas through the same symbols in both films: seasons, jewelry, flying, and the sparkling sky and shooting stars. In seasons, summer is used when the narrators arrive to their new places while winter is used to represent their melancholic state. Jewelry represents security while flying, and t...
Seasons play important roles in both films. As mentioned earlier, it is summer at the beginning of the movies when the narrators excitedly arrive at their new locations, and autumn arrives when the films are already getting to their approaching climax, as the falling leaves suggest. When Gatsby is waiting for Daisy to call, with Nick, he is at the ...
Luhrmann is particularly interested in glamorous jewelry. According to him, courtesans were traditionally given jewels by the rich men, and he wanted to emphasize this in the film. Luhrmann conveys this historical fact by introducing Satine with her musical number, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Satine is seen as superficial for wanting jewel...
Luhrmann’s films are concerned with the theme of reaching dreams, and he symbolizes dream fulfillment through flying. In The Great Gatsby, the symbol is a plane flying over the city which symbolizes unlimited dreams. Luhrmann might have been inspired by the following passage in Fitzgerald’s Echoes of the Jazz Age: In the spring of ’27, something br...
Luhrmann uses the sparkling sky and shooting stars to also show the characters wanting to reach their dreams. When Nick is narrating Gatsby’s past, there is a symbolic and superimposed image of a full shot of a young Jay Gatsby walking towards a sparkling sky, which means that he is walking towards his dream of becoming successful. Luhrmann also in...
Luhrmann explores the same themes in both movies. The films emphasize the contrast between the impoverished and the wealthy people. They also show that love does not conquer all, and that the character’s struggle between choosing love or security. Lastly, I show how Luhrmann conveys the lifestyles of the time periods of each film in an exaggerated ...
The films show a great contrast between penniless and wealthy people. The penniless in Moulin Rouge! are Christian and the bohemian artists who are willing to live in poor conditions in order to follow their artistic ambitions. Also, the prostitutes from the Moulin Rouge fall to the indigent group since they have to prostitute themselves in order t...
Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby are both romantic stories, so love is the main theme and Gatsby and Christian are obsessed with the women they love. Daisy is already married, while Satine is a prostitute. Gatsby and Christian do foolish things; Christian risks his job as a writer by being with Satine while Gatsby throws parties just to see if Da...
Ultimately, wealth versus love is one of the dominant themes in Luhrmann’s films. In Moulin Rouge!, there is a clash of different ideas between Christian and Satine. “All you need is love,” sings Christian as Satine responds, “A girl has got to eat.” Christian keeps singing, “All you need is love,” but Satine replies “She’ll end up in the streets.”...
Luhrmann demonstrates the lifestyles of the Bohemian Revolution in Moulin Rouge! and The Jazz Age in The Great Gatsby in a very exaggerated and modernized way. Nick goes to crazy and extravagant parties such as at Tom’s secret apartment and at Gatsby’s mansion while Christian is bewildered by the Moulin Rouge. The Moulin Rouge has an exaggerated nu...
The purpose of this study was to see if Baz Luhrmann is an authentic auteur even if he has claimed that his first three films are exclusively part of the Red Curtain style. Therefore, his last two films have a different style. Through this detailed examination of the visuals, the editing, the narrative use of the characters, and symbols and themes ...
- Ana Kristel Gamboa
- 2016
Corpus ID: 192799868; The Auteurism of Baz Luhrmann: An Analysis of Moulin Rouge! And The Great Gatsby @inproceedings{Gamboa2016TheAO, title={The Auteurism of Baz Luhrmann: An Analysis of Moulin Rouge!
Jun 29, 2019 · In film, the auteur theory is a theoretical concept that applies to a filmmaker (most typically a director) that creates a film from his or her singular version with significant or total creative control over the project.
Sep 1, 2011 · Baz Luhrmann is a fascinating figure for scholars working across a range of fields, from Australian film studies and theories of transnational cinema, to the study of adaptations and the musical genre, to conceptualizations of the contemporary post-auteur.
Auteur theory is a critical framework in film studies that views the director as the primary creative force behind a film, often likened to an “author” of a book. This theory suggests that a film reflects the personal vision, style, and thematic preoccupations of its director, making him the central figure in its creation and interpretation.
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Auteur theory gives critics a way to associate film authorship to a single entity. The moments, scenes, and sequences that impact the audience are the work of the director because he is responsible for working with the talent, cinematographer, and editor to tell a story that he sees in his head.
