' MOULIN ROUGE ! AT 25 ' : FILM HONOURS SNIPPET

WIDE ANGLE : MOULIN ROUGE ! At 25. How Baz Luhrman reinvented the movie musical.

THIS YEAR marks the 25th anniversary of Moulin Rouge!, Baz Luhrmann's reinvention of the movie musical.

There is little doubt that the movie musical was on the decline in the 1980s and 1990s. The only real contender during that period was Disney [ which released Beauty and the Beast in 1991 and The Lion King in 1994 ].

The musical was slowly being replaced by what contemporary clinics called the '' musically oriented film '', starting with Saturday Night Fever, then Fame [1980], Flashdance [ 1983 ] and Footloose [ 1984 ].

This trend extended to films whose soundtracks proved irresistible. Think Top Gun [1986], Quentin Tarantino’s bold soundtracks [ Pulp Fiction in 1994 and Jackie Brown in 1997], alongside Nora Ephron’s nostalgic throwbacks in Sleepless in Seattle [1993] and You’ve Got Mail [1998].

These poppy soundtracks — full of songs you know but haven’t heard in a while — provided the perfect platform for Luhrmann to introduce a new kind of jukebox musical.

Not only did Moulin Rouge! pack an extraordinary number of songs into its duration - over 20, when a classic musical such as 1935's Top Hat might contain as few as five tunes - it did so in a way that no musical had ever done before.

Traditional musicals tended to construct their song and dance sequences via long takes, while also maintaining a good distance from performers.

This was in order to preserve the integrity of the number. It was thought important to capture a dancer's full body so as to appreciate the athleticism and wholeness of a performance.

The World Students Society thanks Professor Richard Rushton, who teaches Film Studies at Lancaster University in the UK.