Fogarty & Evans/Movies, Moves and Music, 10. Across the Universe and Nostalgia: Re-presenting the Beatles Through Moving Images and Dancing Bodies

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How to Cite: Dunagan, Colleen; Fenton, Roxane. 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. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 184-206 Jan 2016. ISBN 9781845539580.

Full 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 turbulen

  • type
    Image
  • created on
  • file format
    jpg
  • file size
    38 KB
  • container title
    Movies, Moves and Music: The Sonic World of Dance Films
  • creator
    Colleen Dunagan; Roxane Fenton
  • isbn
    9781781793657 (eBook)
  • publisher
    Equinox Publishing Ltd.
  • publisher place
    Sheffield, United Kingdom
  • rights
    Equinox Publishing Ltd.
  • series title
    Genre, Music and Sound
  • doi