Julie Taymor

Describing the closing credits of The Tempest, Jonathan Bate borrows Wagner’s term, Gesamtkunstwerk, to praise Julie Taymor: “In the hands of a master director at the height of her magical powers, this is a total work of art” (“Enter Ariel” 11). This declaration of Taymor as a Shakespearean auteur is richly merited, and her feature film adaptations bear the proof.

After studying in Paris, America, and Indonesia, Taymor first turned toward Shakespeare in 1986, directing The Tempest at the Theater for a New Audience (TFNA) in New York (Blumenthal 34). Six years later, she directed Titus Andronicus there.¹ Both of her Shakespeare films derive fairly directly from these stage productions. She chose Titus (1999) as her first feature film despite its lesser-known status. By the time Taymor was filming The Tempest (2010), one of Shakespeare’s best-known texts, she had crafted her reputation through Frida (2002), and had wrestled with recent legends in her Beatles homage, Across the Universe (2007). Importantly, she developed a cinematic signature originating in her theater work that made each film uniquely hers.

In her introduction to the published screenplay of The Tempest, Taymor articulates the guiding principle of her cinematic vision:

Revealing the mechanics of the theater creates its own alchemy, its rough magic, and the audience willingly plays “make-believe.” In cinema, however, where one can actually film on real locations and create seemingly naturalistic events, the temptation is to throw away the artifice and go for the literal reality. There is something inherently sad about this. Even in fantasy cinema the audience expects the worlds that are created to feel “real,” or at least plausible, and it is not required of viewers that they fill in the blanks or suspend their disbelief.

(“Rough Magic” 14)

Adapting Shakespeare on film, Taymor values the fantastic by preserving the “rough magic” of the theater, requiring her audience to do the work of suspending disbelief, rather than striving always for cinematic realism. In her “Director’s Notes” appended to Titus’s illustrated screenplay, Taymor describes the film’s prologue as a depiction of violence transforming from “entertainment to horrific reality” as the young boy at play with tin soldiers in his kitchen suddenly confronts real soldiers in the Colosseum (178–79). But these soldiers are not wholly real: they remain fantastical through performing an elaborate martial dance. Similarly, speaking of Marcus’s dramatic discovery of the ravished Lavinia, Taymor comments, “[t]he result is surreal and poetic, thus keeping with my vision of the work and not falling into the trap of utter realism” (“Director’s Notes” 180). Here is what makes Taymor an auteur: her manipulation of the camérastylo² involves developing a visual language signifying both stage magic and screen realism. This signature can be separated into three component elements: the ideograph, the Penny Arcade Nightmare, and timelessness.

The Ideograph

Taymor studied under Herbert Blau, who “charged the performers to find ‘ideographs’ of the actions [….] a theatrical sign language that facilitated the layering and counterpointing of subtexts” (Blumenthal 12). Blumenthal cites Taymor claiming this concept “has informed absolutely everything she has done in the theater since then” (12). Translating this theatrical mode to film, she crafts cinematic ideographs from carefully-designed settings, explaining “location is metaphor and represents the essence of a scene in a visual ideograph” (“Rough Magic” 18). This term appears in both Taymor’s “Director’s Notes” on Titus and her “Introduction” to The Tempest, referring to locations that convey the spirit of Shakespeare’s text and her own interpretation of it. Taymor’s mise-en-scène is entirely dependent on the locations where she chooses to film. Two examples demonstrate the power of her cinematic ideograph: Tempest’s island, and Titus’s swamp. Taymor argues the “surreal and highly theatrical” Hawaiian island settings of The Tempest “represented the inner landscapes of the characters inhabiting them” (“Rough Magic” 18–19). Others have read the claustrophobic interiors of Milan as visually opposite to the...