Profile: Director & Writer Julie Taymor
Last week I saw Julie Taymor’s film Titus (1999), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. I had no idea what it was about, but a blue-painted & affectless Anthony Hopkins mug on the cover seemed to draw me in. I guess I was in the mood for something serious?
Well, if you know anything about that Shakespeare guy, you know that he’s got two kinds of properties: comedy and tragedy. This is one of the tragedies, it was easy to figure out pretty quick. And the only thing I knew about Julie Taymor was her name, and I was trying to figure out if I was merely confusing it with “Jeffrey Tambor.”
Anyway, I stepped into the film with no idea of anything about it. It’s been on my mind since seeing it, and I just looked up Taymor’s birth data (12/15/52, Boston, MA, 10:06 AM) to try to put a vocabulary to my reaction to the film, which has to do with the particular flavor of vision that informs the production design, timing and the framing of many of the visuals - the shots.
The first things I note are the aspects to the nodal axis:
-true Black Moon Lilith (BML) on the Leo/7th South Node
-the asteroid Lucifer (1930) in Scorpio/9th square the axis
-retrograde Jupiter in Taurus in the 3rd house square the axis and opposing Lucifer
-Venus in Aquarius/12th and Mars in Aquarius/1st, both conjunct the North Node
-Descendant conjunct the South Node
This is just one conversation, in more or less fixed grand-square fashion, yet it needs to be broken down. What she knows a lot about is Leo BML in the 7th, as anything on the South Node indicates something we come into this life understanding much about. BML here points to an understanding of the power of one’s primal creativity, and the effect such expressions can have on other people. And conjunct the Descendant, ways of exploring how to achieve balance and harmony are well-understood.
The unresolved issues (squares to the nodes) are Lucifer in Scorpio/9th and rx Jupiter in Taurus/3rd, indicating a conversation between the urge to get to the bottom lines of, via & with ideas (Scorpio/9th) and the desire to slow down the mind in order to get clearer about what it is that’s worth expressing (rx Jupiter in Taurus/3rd).
And then this business on the North Node - Venus in the 12th, Mars in the 1st and the Ascendant, all in Aquarius. Perhaps her karmic past includes a getting caught up in the collaborative expression (SN Leo/7th) that left out her unique creative vision (Venus in Aquarius/12th on NN), leaving her feeling she didn’t get to assert herself creatively as a true expression of her independence (Aquarius Ascendant & Mars in Aqua/1st on NN).
The 3rd-9th axis has something to say about how information gets in and out (and what kind of information it is), and Taurus-Scorpio as an axis has much to do with power: Taurus is about learning to run under the steam of self, while Scorpio is about pooling steams and running with others.
She certainly seems to have learned to integrate that stuff on the North Node - nothing she does looks even remotely like what others are doing, and it’s the last thing you’d expect. She seems also to have found a balance between that Leo SN and the Aquarius NN in doing that unique thing that makes her work stand out and be immediately recognizable, yet not having left behind her skills and strengths of working collaboratively with others.
Tom is available for soul-centered astrology consultations. See http://tdjacobs.com for more information and to sign up for his mailing list.
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January 25, 2008 By Tom Jacobs
January 25th, 2008 at 2:07 am
[...] Tom Jacobs added an interesting post today on Profile: Film Director & Writer Julie TaymorHere’s a small reading [...]