'Now is a time to storm': Julie Taymor's Titus (2000)
2002; Salisbury University; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoIf you think you know Shakespeare...think again.' Julie Taymor's Titus is a quintessentially postmodern adaptation: playful, selfconscious, heterogeneous Like other postmodern directors, Taymor plays with makebelieve or illusionist conventions of cinema. featuring stagy scenes, editing discontinuity, and subjective camerawork rather than filming straight, objective reality. Such Brechtian, distancing devices are typical of demystificatory postmodern art.2 But Taymor describes Titus in anti-postmodern, perhaps mystificatory terms. as a total, cross-cultural narrative encapsulating violence of last two centuries. Also, ending of Taymor's Titus, pointing toward a world beyond her postmodern fni.se-en-scene, is (tentatively) Romantic. I will focus on postmodern form of Titus as well as Romantic conviction behind its making. I shall also explore how Taymor combines theatrical and filmic modes of presentation, collapsing distinctions between artificial and real because, for Taymor, Shakespeare's timeless work prefigures twentieth-century events. Like Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1997), Taymor's Titus is an eclectic collage--she features heterogeneous film iconography, an international cast, and her hybrid mise-en-scene emphasizes temporal and cultural differences rather than cultural homogeneity. Rather than re-creating Rome, 400 A.D. Taymor's mise-en-scene evokes various epochs, an ancient world of ritual, mausoleums and orgies along with elements of modern America. Tanks. horses and carriages, limousines, bows and arrows, machine guns, and electric Olympics-style torches are shown in close-up. Taymor and her production designer, Dante Ferretti, feature imposing monoliths. Roman aqueducts along with twentiethcentury fascist architecture, government buildings of Mussolini's time built to recreate glory of ancient Roman empire.3 The costumes by Milena Canonero are not for a costume drama, but an anachronistic combination of togas and runway chic, business suits and leathers, ancient and ultra modern. Titus (Anthony Hopkins), for example, begins wearing ancient battle dress and war paint, changes to an Eisenhower jacket, to a baggy gray jumper and corduroy pants, to his all-white cook's outfit-the clothes mark his changing role from austere victor (vulnerable in assuming his invulnerability), a politician, an avuncular old man, to a picture of professionalism executing revenge. By contrast, Lavinia (Laura Fraser) is first dressed like a Grace Kelly from 1950s or an Italian Katherine Hepburn, a good girl in little black gloves and a full bell skirt, but after she is ravaged, Lavinia's torn and bloodied petticoats and her painterly beauty evoke Degas's ballerinas (Taymor 181 ). The eclecticism of this Titus may be inspired by famous drawing by Henry Peacham, only surviving Elizabethan illustration of a Shakespearean play. The drawing, perhaps drawn from a production of Titus, shows a mix of costumes and postures, rather than revealing any attempt toward an authentic holistic and unified presentation of ancient Rome. Titus wears a toga but his soldiers are Elizabethan men-at-arms with halberds, while Tamora's dress is vaguely medieval. As Jonathan Bate writes (in his editorial introduction to Titus Andronicus), there could be no better precedent for modern productions which are determinedly eclectic in their dress, combining modern and ancient, present as well as past (43). Bate also discusses illustration's emblematic quality, fitting with the way in which characters in play so often seem to become emblems, to be frozen into postures that are very picture of supplication, grief or violent revenge (43). In Taymor's film, actors use Stanislavskian, method-acting techniques (for example, in his DVD commentary, Hopkins says that Titus's superobjective becomes revenge), but they are also sometimes shown frozen in emblematic gestures-this combination of naturalistic and stylized acting is discussed in more detail below. …
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