0797fOrpheusEurydice_LuhrmannHudson
NOTES:
Hudson, Elizabeth. 2011. Moulin Rouge! And the Boundaries of
Opera The Opera Quarterly 27:256-82.
256: the composers work: to rearticulate the familiar repackage in
various forms our experience of familiar musical texts.
257: [Luhrmann] reorient[s] our thinking
about current modes of operatic performance
257: the musical is back the film set out
to reinvent the genre of the Hollywood film musical
258: Moonstruck as Bohme with
listing of overt references, i.e. wooden/cold hand che gelida
manina
259: Luhrmanns posed question/problem of the technologically
mediated representation of the subject in cinema and music that MR sets
out to explore
260: Luhrmann engages the audience on
operatic terms, i.e. non-realistic singing
Plot drawn from Bohme, Traviata,
and
The Orpheus myth (synopsized pp. 260-61)
IS IT REALLY HERE? OR just PERCEIVED by Hudson?
References or Inferences?
For
Luhrmann the representation of Orpheus song was the
essential dilemma of the film
Thus: Can opera or the emotional immediacy of operatic song as a tool for
engaging with the subjects and stories of a narrative text be refigured through
film today?
262-63: I may get a little bit lost tracing the operatic mode
266: in MR! musical performance becomes the focus. Through
refiguring the myth of Orpheus, the concept of voice in technological
reproduction is thematized, contested, and debated.
And the terms of Orpheuss representation simultaneously highly the dilemma and
pose a solution: for by setting up Orpheuss song as immediately recognizable
quotations from a panoply of rock/pop stars, the source of emotional response
is signaled as not residing in the cinematic text, but rther
in the act of reception.
Orpheus authorial voice = quotations
=277: emotional/musical memory [is] created through the very
experience of watching the film. Thus the terms of the myth of Orpheus have
been refigured in twenty-first century terms.
What Luhrmann
achieves, I believe, is the reconstitution of Orpheus/opera in cinematic terms,
in which at least a partially subjective musical expression relying on personal
effective memory is recaptured as possible through the tools of mechanical
reproduction.
278: Love, connection, and emotional expression can be
discovered in the Moulin Rouge and in mediatized representations of operatic
performance.