Analysis Of Moulin Rouge: Film Technique

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Film genres help familiarize the audience with the film’s plot. Professor Jon Sufrin, in his lecture at York University, defines genre as “[the] grouping of texts with similar distinct and reoccurring patterns of writing (i.e. Romance, Western, […] etc.)” (Sufrin). The audience finds comfort in this pattern of reoccurring themes, character tropes, plot progressions, and general elements. As a result, many films follow the genre’s conventions with little to no deviations from the plot tropes. One genre of film that rarely deviates from its predictable patterns is the romance film genre.
Romance films often tell the love story of two (typically young and white) heterosexual people who overcome many circumstances that separate them – often a disapproving family, racial, economic and social discrimination, diseases and death (supernatural powers) – to be in an intimate relationship with each other. Moulin Rouge! is a film that embodies everything about the romance genre – specifically the romantic-drama. Thus it maintains all the predictability of the romance film genre, including tropes such as: love at first sight, a man …show more content…

It constantly reminds the audience that it is all about love and it rests on this theme alone. In his review of Moulin Rouge, Roger Ebert argues, “He [Luhrmann] constructs "Moulin Rouge" with the melodrama of a 19th century opera, the Technicolor brashness of a 1950s Hollywood musical and the quick-cutting frenzy of a music video” (Ebert). Ebert observes this film’s flamboyance and credits it to the director, Baz Luhrmann’s film style. Furthermore, the constant choppy cuts, and speedy zooms from one frame to the other match the quick, exited pace of the film’s plot and characters. Another commendable feature that highlights the exaggeration of love in this film is the vivid, blinding colours (with lots of intense reds to symbolize

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