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Velázquez, Wagner and the Red Skull. Intermediality and the Genesis of Meaning in a Particular Scene of Captain America: The First Avenger

Velázquez, Wagner and the Red Skull. Intermediality and the Genesis of Meaning in a Particular... AbstractIn the 2011 superhero movie, Captain America: The First Avenger (produced by Marvel Studios, directed by Joe Johnston) the main opponent of the title character is a Nazi officer, Johann Schmidt, who turns out to be a kind of superhuman entity, the Red Skull. Throughout the movie, viewers can follow the process of him gradually leaving behind his identity as a Nazi officer, and presenting himself as the leader of the occult-high-tech terrorist organization, the Hydra. At a certain point we can see him visited by one of the scientists working for him, Doctor Zola, whom he puts wise to his plans. During the conversation a portrait is being painted of the Red Skull, but we cannot see his face, only that the artist uses a huge amount of red paint. In the background, excerpts of Wagner’s operas are being played, which is very unusual in a Marvel movie. The question is, should the viewer recognize the diegetic music and notice the possible reference to the painting Las Meninas by Velázquez? How the detection of these intermedial references and the awareness of the act of trespassing media borders would affect the semiotic processes of interpretation? And also, how would the more precise identification of the cited materials change the semiotic modality of intermediality here? The article tries to answer these questions by interpreting the scene and the role of the references in question within the entire film through the prism of intermedial semiotics. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies de Gruyter

Velázquez, Wagner and the Red Skull. Intermediality and the Genesis of Meaning in a Particular Scene of Captain America: The First Avenger

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Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2021 Dániel Nagy, published by Sciendo
eISSN
2066-7779
DOI
10.2478/ausfm-2021-0008
Publisher site
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Abstract

AbstractIn the 2011 superhero movie, Captain America: The First Avenger (produced by Marvel Studios, directed by Joe Johnston) the main opponent of the title character is a Nazi officer, Johann Schmidt, who turns out to be a kind of superhuman entity, the Red Skull. Throughout the movie, viewers can follow the process of him gradually leaving behind his identity as a Nazi officer, and presenting himself as the leader of the occult-high-tech terrorist organization, the Hydra. At a certain point we can see him visited by one of the scientists working for him, Doctor Zola, whom he puts wise to his plans. During the conversation a portrait is being painted of the Red Skull, but we cannot see his face, only that the artist uses a huge amount of red paint. In the background, excerpts of Wagner’s operas are being played, which is very unusual in a Marvel movie. The question is, should the viewer recognize the diegetic music and notice the possible reference to the painting Las Meninas by Velázquez? How the detection of these intermedial references and the awareness of the act of trespassing media borders would affect the semiotic processes of interpretation? And also, how would the more precise identification of the cited materials change the semiotic modality of intermediality here? The article tries to answer these questions by interpreting the scene and the role of the references in question within the entire film through the prism of intermedial semiotics.

Journal

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies – de Gruyter

Published: Mar 1, 2021

Keywords: superhero movies; intermedial references; diegetic music; semiotics; genesis of meaning

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