Movies, Moves and Music - The Sonic World of Dance Films - Mark Evans
Across the Universe and Nostalgia: Re-presenting the Beatles Through Moving Images and Dancing Bodies
Movies, Moves and Music - The Sonic World of Dance Films - Mark Evans
Colleen Dunagan [+]
California State University Long Beach
Roxane Fenton [+]
Independent Scholar
Description
In her 2007 film Across the Universe, director Julie Taymor combines a simple narrative of youthful love with a complex layering of visual and aural elements. The sophisticated interplay among the music of the Beatles, film work (camera and editing), dance, and other visual elements makes the film a rich site for the investigation of ways in which movement, music, and movie making work together. Through close readings of several songs/scenes from the movie, we argue that the merging of sound and image in Across the Universe activates nostalgia (both for the U.S. in the 1960s and for the mythology of the Beatles) in order to create a visual and aural tribute to the philosophical outlook conveyed in the Beatles catalogue. Or, to put it differently, the film argues that the pop music of the Beatles (a commercialised and commodified form) offers larger philosophical lessons relevant to American history. It suggests that love, both romantic and within a community of friends, provides an answer both to the turbulence of the 1960s and the unsettled world of the post-9/11 era of the film’s release.