Moulin Rouge!

: an Homage to the Musical Genre through Intertextuality

Homage to Musical: Intertextuality and Meaning in Moulin Rouge!

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Signature elements of the Hollywood musical and postmodern film are readily iden
tifiable in Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! (2001). Its characters not only sing a
nd dance; they do so in the traditional guises of the film mysical. Songs funct
ion as narrative, as dialogue, and in the special manner of the backstage musica
l- as show-within-a-show production numbers. Similarly, Luhrmann;s abundant use
of pastiche, a typically humorless or blank treatment of pre-exisitng material,
exemplefies postmodernism as defined by Fredric Jameson. Combined with his disj
ointed camera work- one manifestation of the fragmentation also recognized by Ja
meson and others as a hallmark of the postmodern-and his unconvetional treatment
of time and place-the story is set in paris circa 1900, but any sense of histor
ical context is minimized by anachronistic references 0 the film seems an unusua
lly strong candidate for the label postmodern. But if it is a musical and if it
is postmodern does it follow that MOulin Rouge is a postmodern Hollywood musica
l?
By breaking apart the film into each individual song, Van der Merwe provides a c
omprehensive analysis of Luhrmann s work with music as well as the influence of th
is music on the visual aspects of Luhrmann s work. Van der Merwe also includes dis
cussion of postmodernism, an important idea that leads to understanding Luhrmann s
stylistic choices in both music and visual effects. This article is significant
to the discussion of music s impact on film because it represents a scholarly dis
cussion about the influence of music on Lurhmann s specific work. This article als
o contributes to a larger discussion of Baz Luhrmann s work in the digital forum,
as scene with other references to his work in the context of this discussion.
Very much a product of the intellectual atmosphere in film studies of the mid-la
te 1970s. That ios to say it was influenced by the idea that spectators were po
sitioned by the text, by Brechtian conceptions of modernism and by structuralist
notions of genre, even as it attempted to be more culturalist and more historic
al in its conception of the musical was based on the classic Hollywood studio fi
lms.
In this chapter, Feuer aims to divulge the socio-cultural environment where the
musical will emerge from in the 70s. This is critical to understanding the type
of musical that will be made available in the 90s. There are those that say th
at Brechtian conceptions of modernism and structuralist notions of genre were ba
sed on the classic Hollywood fims. This eventually leads to a discussion about
the evolution to postmodernism.