Moulin Rouge – Elephant love medley

Moulin Rouge is one of my favorite film. I love the songs, actors and costumes, but the way it was filmed is also gorgeous. The part I choose to analyze is my favorite scene, “Elephant Love Medley”, where Christian confess his love to Satine. The scene uses a lot of cuts for its transition. It shows Christian and Satine simultaneously in different angles and distance, using subject to subject and aspect to aspect transitions, create a very much of movement although the characters are mostly staying on the top of the Elephant Room. My favorite moment in this scene is when Christian steps up onto the head of the Elephant Room(2:00), and the camera goes around to film him in almost 90 degrees around. This also happens at the moment when the two start singing together in the room (3:30). The camera goes around in 360 in circle while the background behind the characters dissolves into magical looking starry scene and dissolves back to the scene of the room. The movie uses this method a lot, where the camera  moves to follows the character as the character moves within the scene, or to show the character in different angles and distance. Also, at the end of the clip (4:23) they use wipe method with the windmill to change the scene to where the narrator(?) of the movie sings in the same place, but different time and mode. In Moulin Rouge, they often use this wipe method to move from past to present in same place since the movie moves along while Christian is looking back on past when Satine and he were together.