The spectacle of violence in Julie Taymor's Titus

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KurzbeschreibungCan the son’s eye behold his father bleed? There’s meed for meed, death for a deadly deed. Despite its gruesome catalogue of atrocities, Shakespeare’s violent revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus has been performed successfully all over the world. Julie Taymor, the acclaimed director of the film Frida, adapted it for the screen in 1999. Her film Titus draws on numerous cultural and iconographic references to create a complex network of meanings, thus exploring violence from a great variety of perspectives. Giving its spectators food for thought, it plays with the thin line between beautifying and denouncing the barbarous deeds in the text. The purpose of this work is to lay bare the mechanisms by which the film dissects how we experience, perpetrate and look at violence. Without losing sight of the ethical implications, I wish to focus on and explore the aesthetics of the violent spectacle. The work was awarded the Prize for the Master’s Dissertation of the French Shakespeare Society.