A Semiotic Analysis of the Cinema of Baz Luhrmann’s "Romeo and Juliet"

• Main Authors: Chang, Han-Chen, 張涵榛
• Other Authors: Hu, Hsiu-Wei
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/76551649424232418288

碩士 === 玄奘大學 === 大眾傳播研究所 === 104 === The movie director Baz Luhrmann emerged in the 90s, and he compiled one of William Shakespeare’s masterpieces, which was a beautiful but heart-rending love story, “Romeo and Juliette”. He changed it into a post-modern film and the film was popular among the audience. However, his way of shooting the film also aroused controversy, and Baz Luhrmann shot to fame with the film at that time. This research interprets Baz Luhrmann’s film text of “Romeo and Juliette” with semiotics. Based on the semiotics related research, we tried to highlight the internalized symbol in the film by analyzing the plot and atmosphere of the story, the scenes of the film, and the movie role. Baz Luhrmann extensively used the 70s Punk, Disco, sci-fi, comics, music and the visual and lighting effects of Baroque style. The audience immersed in the story not only emotional, it also presented the meaning of the film and gave the audience a deeper rational thinking. According to the research of “Romeo and Juliette”, the symbols were mainly around three topics” hatred, spoiled, love”, and Baz Luhrmann connected the story with some hidden symbols in order to create a different love story. Thus, I believe that it’s an inevitable result to integrate the semiotics into the film of the day. It can raise the connotation of the film text, but also makes the works come to life and become more interesting and unique.