Cinematic Shakespeare (Genre and Beyond: A Film Studies Series)
Language: English
Pages: 248
ISBN: 0742510921
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Cinematic Shakespeare takes the reader inside the making of a number of significant adaptations to illustrate how cinema transforms and re-imagines the dramatic form and style central to Shakespeare's imagination. Cinematic Shakespeare investigates how Shakespeare films constitute an exciting and ever-changing film genre. The challenges of adopting Shakespeare to cinema are like few other film genres. Anderegg looks closely at films by Laurence Olivier (Richard III), Orson Welles (Macbeth), and Kenneth Branagh (Hamlet) as well as topics like "Postmodern Shakespeares" (Julie Taymor's Titus and Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books) and multiple adaptations over the years of Romeo and Juliet. A chapter on television looks closely at American broadcasting in the 1950s (the Hallmark Hall of Fame Shakespeare adaptations) and the BBC/Time-Life Shakespeare Plays from the late 70s and early 80s.
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Peter Greenaway (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Peggy Phelan, “Numbering Prospero’s Books,” Performing Arts Journal 41 (1992); James Tweedle, “Caliban’s Books: The Hybrid Text in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books,” Cinema Journal 40 (Fall 2000): 104-26; Maria Nadotti, “Exits and Entrances: On Two Tempests,” Art Forum 30 (1991): 20-21; Suzanna Turman, “Peter Greenway” [sic], Films in Review 43, no. 3-4: 1992): 105-8. 27 Peter Greenaway, Prospero’s Books: A Film of Shakespeare’s
1960 Macbeth ended up not quite grand or exciting enough to be cinema, while it was not intimate enough, too “distanced” from the viewer, to be television. In the chapters that follow, I will develop the topics mentioned above by taking a closer look at selected Shakespeare films. Chapter 2, which continues and expands on the question of how theater is incorporated into film, looks at how “Shakespeare,” the person and the theatrical energies his name represents, has been constructed
was the gloomier aspects of the play that most interested Cukor. Whatever the reason, Howard, like Romeo, achieves a convincing gravitas as the narrative approaches its catastrophe. Romeo and Juliet in Italy Italian directors Renato Castellani (1954) and Franco Zeffirelli (1968), in their versions of Romeo and Juliet, created a highly specific social environment for their protagonists, paying homage to the “neorealism” prevalent in postwar Italian cinema by constructing a stylized but
acceptable modern terms is to make what is public in the play private on the screen. Juliet’s reception of the news of Tybalt’s death and Romeo’s banishment, a seriocomic scene of misunderstanding—the Nurse, as usual, cannot seem to get to the point—is, as noted above, deeply cut. What remains of it is transformed into an internal meditation by Juliet alone in her bedroom. What is passionate intensity in Shakespeare’s play is a passive, puzzling reflection in the film. Juliet suffers most from
with an unmoving camera and with the actors seemingly glued in place for fear of moving out of the camera’s range. The productions directed by Jonathan Miller suffer from this approach, which was especially unfortunate for scenes containing a good deal of exposition, such as the opening scene (the Christopher Sly “Induction” was cut) of Taming of the Shrew: Lucentio and Tranio stand fixed in one spot, facing each other, framed in medium close-up; neither they nor the camera moves for some forty