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Sounds Like The Sound of Music
Gray Kapernekas Gallery, 2005
Sounds Like The Sound of Music (2005) draws from two distinct and seemingly unrelated Hollywood film classics, George Lucas’ Star Wars trilogy (specifically, the Reagan-era Return of the Jedi) and Robert Wise’s 1965 musical, The Sound of Music. Both films express Hollywood’s associations to political narratives of their times: The Sound of Music dramatized Post-War nostalgia for European ideals at the dawn of the Nazi regime; and Star Wars’ depiction of the “good vs. evil” ethos surrounding the final years of the Cold-War era. These relationships to war and cultural imperialism are of great interest to Yonemoto, especially when filtered through the Hollywood entertainment machine.
Filmed in Cuzco, Peru, Yonemoto’s video recreates the opening sequence from The S ound of Music, replacing the Austrian Alps with the Peruvian Andes, the village of Salzberg with Incan ruins and Julie Andrews with a young Andean boy. Sweeping aerial views and a solitary figure accompany the soundtrack, sung by the Andean boy. His song is a translated version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s infective melody into the indigenous Incan language of Quechua, spoken by 13 million people throughout the Andes and South America. Yet the language is probably best known through its place in popular culture; George Lucas’ villain Jabba the Hut (an icon of “Orientalized” evil; a late-Twentieth-Century Godzilla), spoke this disappearing language.
Yonemoto’s work further complicates binary approaches to expressing post-Colonialism by incorporating many ingredients: escapist Hollywood cinema and aspirational Broadway musicals; youth culture and optimism; landscape and cultural artifact; indigenous voices and melodic universality; Europe, Asia, and the Americas; Pre-War, Post-War and Cold War. The resulting mixture is equally complex: beauty and romance, memento and memorial, personal and political.
PLAY VIDEO: Sounds Like the Sound of Music
Bruce Yonemoto
Sounds Like the Sound of Music
2005
Video
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