Shakespeare and World Cinema 9781107003316, 2012018403

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SHAKESPEARE AND WORLD CINEMA Shakespeare and World Cinema radically reimagines the field of Shakespeare on film, drawing on a wealth of examples from Africa, the Arctic, Brazil, China, France, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, Tibet, Venezuela, Yemen and elsewhere. Mark Thornton Burnett explores the contemporary significance of Shakespeare cinema outside the Hollywood mainstream for the first time, arguing that these adaptations are an essential part of the story of Shakespearean performance and reception. The book reveals in unique detail the scope, inventiveness and vitality of over seventy films that have undeservedly slipped beneath the radar of critical attention and also discusses regional Shakespeare cinema in Latin America and Asia. Utilizing original interviews with filmmakers throughout, it introduces new auteurs, analyzes multiple adaptations of plays such as Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, and pioneers fresh methodologies for understanding the role that Shakespeare continues to play in the international marketplace. ma r k th or nto n bu rn ett is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience (1997), Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (2002) and Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (2007; 2nd edn 2012) and the editor of The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe (1999) and The Complete Poems of Christopher Marlowe (2000). His co-edited publications include Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century (2006), Filming and Performing Renaissance History (2011) and The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (2011). He is Director of the Sir Kenneth Branagh Archive, has held fellowships at the Huntington Library and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, and has taught at the Folger Institute on the National Endowment for the Humanities programme ‘From the Globe to the Global: Shakespearean Relocations’.

SHAKESPEARE AND WORLD CINEMA MARK THORNTON BURNETT

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sa˜o Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107003316 # Mark Thornton Burnett 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burnett, Mark Thornton. Shakespeare and world cinema / Mark Thornton Burnett. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-107-00331-6 (Hardback) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616–Film adaptations. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616– Criticism and interpretation. 3. English drama–Film adaptations. 4. Film adaptations–History and criticism. I. Title. pr3093.b876 2012 791.430 6–dc23 2012018403 ISBN 978-1-107-00331-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To Henry John Burnett

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements A note on titles

page viii xi xv

Introduction

1

part i auteurs 1 Alexander Abela

23

2 Vishal Bhardwaj and Jayaraaj Rajasekharan Nair

55

part ii

regional configurations

3 Shakespeare, cinema, Latin America

89

4 Shakespeare, cinema, Asia

125

part iii plays 5 Macbeth 6

163

Romeo and Juliet

195

Epilogue Filmography Bibliography Index

232 239 245 268

vii

Figures

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Makibefo/Macbeth (Martin Zia) confronts his enemies in Makibefo (dir. Alexander Abela, 1999). Courtesy of Alexander Abela. Makibefo/Macbeth (Martin Zia) covets the signs of royalty in Makibefo (dir. Alexander Abela, 1999). Courtesy of Alexander Abela. Souli/Othello (Makena Diop) approaches a knife-wielding Yann/ Iago (Aure´lien Recoing) in Souli (dir. Alexander Abela, 2004). Courtesy of Alexander Abela. Souli/Othello (Makena Diop) communes with Abi/Emilia (Fatou d’Diaye) in Souli (dir. Alexander Abela, 2004). Courtesy of Alexander Abela. Omkara/Othello (Ajay Devgan) shares an intimate moment with Dolly/Desdemona (Kareena Kapoor) in Omkara (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2006). Courtesy of Rex Features. Paniyan/Iago (Lal) triumphs over a distraught Perumalayan/ Othello (Suresh Gopi) in Kaliyattam (dir. Jayaraaj Rajasekharan Nair, 1997). Courtesy of Jayaraaj Rajasekharan Nair and Jayalekshmi Films. Sameera/Malcolm (Masumeh Makhija) greets her father, Abbaji/ Duncan (Pankaj Kapur), at her wedding celebrations in Maqbool (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2004). Courtesy of Photofest. Santiago/Iago (Manuel Landeta) and Julia/Desdemona (Lisset) join in dance, as depicted in the poster for Huapango (dir. Iva´n Lipkies, 2004). Courtesy of Iva´n Lipkies and Vlady Realizadores, S. A. Max/Macbeth (Daniel Alvarado) is appalled by his crime in Sangrador (dir. Leonardo Henrı´quez, 2000). Courtesy of Leonardo Henrı´quez, director, and Cezari Jaworsky, director of photography. viii

28

31

39

46

60

74

80

97

99

List of figures

ix

10 Mrs Lima/Mistress Page (Zeze´ Polessa) and Mrs Rocha/ Mistress Ford (Elisa Lucinda) prove a difficult pair to outwit in As Alegres Comadres (dir. Leila Hipo´lito, 2003). Courtesy of Leila Hipo´lito, Conexa˜o Cinema, Anana˜ Produc¸o˜es and Zohar Cinema. 101 11 Poster for Chicken Rice War (dir. Chee Kong Cheah, 2000). Courtesy of MediaCorp Raintree Pictures Pte Ltd. 133 12 Wu Luan/Hamlet (Daniel Wu) strikes a soulful pose in The Banquet (dir. Xiaogang Feng, 2006). Courtesy of Huayi Brothers Media Corp. 136 13 Lhamoklodan/Hamlet (Purba Rgyal) ponders his future in Prince of the Himalayas (dir. Sherwood Hu, 2006). Courtesy of Hus Entertainment. 142 14 Empress Wan/Gertrude (Ziyi Zhang) plots her next move in The Banquet (dir. Xiaogang Feng, 2006). Courtesy of Huayi Brothers Media Corp. 148 15 A pregnant Odsaluyang/Ophelia (Sonamdolgar) commences her descent into madness during a snowstorm in Prince of the Himalayas (dir. Sherwood Hu, 2006). Courtesy of Hus Entertainment. 151 16 The film director (Andrea´ Smith), playing the role of Lady Macbeth, seizes the bloody dagger while Macbeth (Yahya Hamood Mohsin al-Dhafeeri) looks on suspiciously in Someone is Sleeping in My Pain (dir. Michael Roes, 2001). Courtesy of Michael Roes. 178 17 Poster for Macbeth (dir. Bo Landin and Alex Scherpf, 2004). Courtesy of Bo Landin, Alex Scherpf and Scandinature Films. 182 18 The Capulets and the Montagues are represented as warring township factions in uGugu no Andile/Gugu and Andile (dir. Minky Schlesinger, 2008). Courtesy of Minky Schlesinger and Fireworx Media. 199 19 Dance acts as an antidote to social tensions in Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor/Mare´, Another Love Story (dir. Lu´cia Murat, 2008). Courtesy of Lu´cia Murat and Taiga Filmes. 200 20 Poster, designed for international distribution, for Kanenas/ Nobody (dir. Christos Nikoleris, 2010). Courtesy of N-Orasis Audio Visual Productions. 203 21 Ibo/Romeo (Denis Moschitto) and Titzi/Juliet (Nora Tschirner) experience the challenges of multiculturalism in Kebab Connection (dir. Anno Saul, 2004). Courtesy of Photofest. 205

x

List of figures

22 Poster for Julie et Rome´o (dir. Boubakar Diallo, 2011). Courtesy of Boubakar Diallo and Films du Dromadaire. 211 23 The young lovers, Rome´o (Thomas Lalonde) and Juliette (Charlotte Aubin), escape in Rome´o et Juliette (dir. Yves Desgagne´s, 2006). Courtesy of Photofest. 213 24 Narayan/Romeo (John Abraham) and Kalyani/Juliet (Lisa Ray) relax by the banks of the Ganges in Water (dir. Deepa Mehta, 2005). Courtesy of Photofest. 215 25 Lauri/Romeo (Mikko Leppilampi) and Vilma/Juliet (Laura Birn) savour the applause in 8 pa¨iva¨a¨ ensi-iltaan/8 Days to Premiere (dir. Perttu Leppa¨, 2008). Courtesy of Perttu Leppa¨ and Juonifilmi Oy. 225

Acknowledgements

I owe primary thanks to four institutions which have funded my research. Queen’s University Belfast granted me a semester of study leave, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council provided an additional semester away from teaching and administration under its one-year research leave scheme. Queen’s University has been equally enabling in the form of grants from the Internationalization Fund, the Research and Travel Fund, and the Santander Mobility Scholarships Scheme, while the British Academy assisted in the form of an Overseas Conference Grant. This book was developed during my tenure of a short-term fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and I am grateful to Erin Blake, Gail Kern Paster, David Schalkwyk, Sarah Werner and Georgianna Ziegler for making my stay so pleasant and productive. During my tenure of the award, David Carnegie, Anthony R. Guneratne and Andrew Walkling were generous with hospitality, conversation and counsel. I also spent time at the Folger on a separate occasion as guest faculty on the National Endowment for the Humanities institute programme ‘From the Globe to the Global: Shakespearean Relocations’. For that opportunity, I am indebted to Michael Neill and Kathleen Lynch and to all the participants who engaged with the subject of this book in such a vital fashion. At Queen’s, I have been fortunate in my head of school, Ed Larrissy, who has been tremendously supportive, and in colleagues such as Adrian Streete and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, who have watched a number of the films studied in this book with me and have been magnanimous in critical insight. Other colleagues have sustained me with their friendship, advice and good humour: they include Ruth Abraham, Fran Brearton, Janice Carruthers, Marilina Cesario, Hastings Donnan, David Dwan, Nigel Harkness, Edel Lamb, Debbie Lisle, Edna Longley, Hugh Magennis, ´ Mainnı´n, Milena Mendez, Kevin Murray, Ciara O’Hagan, Mı´chea´l O Des O’Rawe, Andrew Pepper, Caroline Sumpter and Isabel Torres. Further afield, Shakespeareans and non-Shakespeareans far and wide have xi

xii

Acknowledgements

been encouraging and lent a kindly ear; so thank you to Susan Bassnett, Werner Bro¨nnimann, Richard Burt, Maurizio Calbi, Clara Calvo, Andrew Carpenter, Tom Cartelli, Deborah Cartmell, Mariacristina Cavecchi, Juan Francisco Cerda´, Danielle Clarke, Krystyna Kujawin´ska Courtney, Sam Crowl, Susan Crowl, Michael Dobson, Peter Donaldson, Tobias Do¨ring, Jacek Fabiszak, Ewan Fernie, Adam Hansen, Philipp Hinz, Barbara Hodgdon, Ton Hoenselaars, Lisa Hopkins, Russell Jackson, Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Dennis Kennedy, Urszula Kizelbach, Doug Lanier, Courtney Lehmann, Song Hwee Lim, Naomi McAreavey, Luke McKernan, John Milton, Gordon McMullan, Sonia Massai, Ryuta Minami, Vincenza Minutella, Alfredo Michel Modenessi, Andy Murphy, Dan North, Laurie Osborne, Bryan Reynolds, Katherine Rowe, Amy Scott-Douglass, Robert Shaughnessy, Marcel Vieira Barreto Silva, Catherine Silverstone, Jyotsna Singh, Bruce Smith, Lisa S. Starks-Estes, Peter Stoneley, Poonam Trivedi and Li Lan Yong. I would like to mention Pascale Aebischer, N. P. Ashley, Diana Henderson, Peter Holland, Alexander C. Y. Huang, Aimara da Cunha Resende, Daniel Rosenthal, Mariangela Tempera and Greg Colo´n Semenza for extraordinarily helpful and stimulating conversations and courtesies. My interests in Shakespeare and world cinema have been nurtured and refined on the conference circuit. I was delighted to chair a seminar on the subject at the Chicago meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America and to learn much from the keen and knowledgeable individuals who participated. Different versions of some of these chapters have been given as papers or plenaries in New Delhi (St Stephen’s College), Dublin (University College Dublin/Abbey Theatre Shakespeare Lecture Series), Galat¸i (‘William Shakespeare: the National Symposium’), Le Havre (‘Hamlet: Shakespeare a` l’E´cran’ Conference), Ias¸i (‘Shakespeare and Europe: Nation(s) and Boundaries’ Conference), London (London Shakespeare Seminar), Manchester (Annual John Stachniewski Memorial Lecture), New York (Early Modern Seminar, Columbia University), Poitiers (‘Shakespeare et le Spectaculaire’ Conference), Prague (World Shakespeare Congress), Reading (Early Modern University Research Seminar), Sa˜o Paulo (‘Jornada de Estudos Shakespearianos’, Universidade de Sa˜o Paulo), Sofia (British Council and National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts), Stratford-upon-Avon (Thirty-Third and Thirty-Fourth International Shakespeare Conferences) and Washington DC (Cosmos Club and Folger Shakespeare Library). I am indebted to the audiences on those occasions for their informed attention, the organizers of the conferences at which I spoke, and the colleagues who invited me to address their staff

Acknowledgements

xiii

and students. Notably, I am greatly obliged to N. P. Ashley, Odette Blumenfeld, Gabriela Colipca˘, Jerome de Groot, Pascale Drouet, Jane Grogan, Sarah Hatchuel, Jean Howard, Kate McCluskie, John Milton, Michelle O’Callaghan, Ligia Paˆrvu, Gail Kern Paster, Veronica Popescu, Stan Semerdjiev (that trip to the Rila mountains in Bulgaria was truly memorable and inspiring), Alan Stewart, Ann Thompson and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin. This book has benefited hugely from the formative input of the world film community. For answering calls and aiding explorations, I am beholden to film directors Sherwood Hu, Pauli Pentii, Slava Ross, Michal Shabtay and Roberta Torre. The following directors and screenwriters were invaluable in that they both facilitated my research and agreed to be interviewed, offering wonderful insight into the filmmaking process: Alexander Abela, Dimitri Athanitis, Shyam Benegal, Rosihan Zain (Dhojee), Boubakar Diallo, Leonardo Henrı´quez, Leila Hipo´lito, Chenaktshang Dorje Tsering (Jangbu), Bo Landin, Perttu Leppa¨, Iva´n Lipkies, Lu´cia Murat, Jayaraaj Rajasekharan Nair, Michael Roes, Alex Scherpf, Minky Schlesinger, Mark Tan and Andibachtiar Yusuf. Whether as accountants, administrators, assistants, casting directors, distributors, festival organizers, musicians, performers, photographers, producers, programmers, promoters or writers, related film industry representatives were accommodating and responsive in multiple ways, and they are: Shanti Kumar Aaytee, Paul Callanan, Marc Cases, Uma da Cunha, Una Domazetoski, Marco Gilles, Miki Goral, Ulrich Gregor, Manfred Hagbeck, Meg Hamel, Jarkko Hentula, Lianne Hu, Hui Hui, Ranjit Karthikeyan, Katri Kervinen, Harsha Koda, Rahul Koda, Ga´bor Kova´cs, Michiko Kumagai, Tom Magill, Revathy Menon, Milja Mikkola, Ron Mulvihill, Mamoru Nojiri, Sonya Oleynik, Lana Peng, Punam Sawhney, Keith Shiri, Frida Spathaki, Basil Tsiokos, Haije Tulokas, Melissa van der Schoor, Sonia Villar, Tiina Virtanen, Sue Wuetcher and Loreley Yeowart. Archivists Lisbeth Richter Larsen and Tommi Partanen provided expertise and materials. Colleagues and friends – Viju Kurian, Rosa Marı´a Garcı´a Periago and Patricia Schiaffini – have been particularly adept and expert in assisting me with translations. Previous incarnations of parts of this book were published in Shakespeare Quarterly, 62.3 (2011), 396–419; Shakespeare Studies, 38 (2010), 114–22; and Shakespeare Survey, 61 (2008), 239–55. I am grateful to Cambridge University Press, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and the Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reproduce some of that material.

xiv

Acknowledgements

A special thank you must go to Sarah Stanton of Cambridge University Press, who has believed in this project since its infancy and advised on it wisely and distinctively. Last, but by no means least, I thank Louis Thornton Burnett and Henry John Burnett for agreeing, with not too much protest, to abandon computer games and jigsaws and, instead, come and look at ‘Shakespeare’s bones’, dig up ‘Shakespeare’s garden’ and watch a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Their love for life has reminded me of what is properly important. For Ramona Wray there are the most heartfelt thanks: she provided illuminating reflections on, and understanding of, how the manuscript might be improved: without her, this book would never have seen the light of day.

A note on titles

How film titles are referred to is a notoriously inconsistent business. For first citations, I have used the non-English title followed by the English translation provided for international distribution. In subsequent references, I use the non-English title alone. There are some world cinema titles that go only by an English-language title; in these instances, there is no necessity for translation. Other films, possibly because they never received international distribution, are referred to by a title in the original language. There is inevitably a certain amount of titular variation in response to local contexts and conventions.

xv

Introduction

As the opening decade of the twenty-first century recedes, what might be termed a discipline of Shakespeare on film is firmly rooted in the educational curriculum. Shakespeare films are widely taught in schools, colleges and universities; indeed, they are increasingly the first port of call for a student encounter with the Bard. Most institutions will advertise a course or courses on Shakespeare and his film manifestations or Shakespeare and the history of adaptation. In terms of range and depth, criticism of Shakespeare films is entrenched: academic conferences boast dedicated sessions to the subject and feature premieres of works intended for commercial cinema release. There are conferences devoted to the fortunes of a single play on screen, journals that run special issues on Shakespeare on film, and essay collections that, to illustrate a larger theme, prioritize a contribution on a particular Shakespeare screen interpretation. Rapidly, but inexorably, Shakespeare films have assumed canonical positions, while commentary has developed in aspiration, volume and effect. In part the popularity of Shakespeare on film is imbricated in the dramatist’s status as a global icon. On both sides of the Atlantic, it is Shakespeare’s ability to function as a collocation of meanings that resonate with the world that is repeatedly emphasized. For Suzanne Gossett, speaking in her capacity as President of the Shakespeare Association of America of how ‘the Bard and his works . . . are transported and globalized’, ‘Shakespeare stimulates scholarly and artistic activity throughout the former empire and beyond’.1 Her remarks are matched in the press release for the ‘Shakespeare: Staging the World’ exhibition at the British Museum that accompanied the 2012 Olympics. A ‘celebration of Shakespeare as the world’s playwright’, the exhibition showcased how ‘Londoners perceived the world when global exchange and other aspects of modernity originated’.2 These are large claims for Shakespeare that testify to a broad ownership, a widespread importance and a universal imaginative spark. Yet, strikingly, in commentary on Shakespeare films, there has 1

2

Shakespeare and World Cinema

been no equivalent attempt to detail how, where and with what results the plays are translated into the idiom of world cinema. The so-called ‘revival of the Shakespeare film genre’ in the period from the late 1980s onwards, the period on which this book concentrates, has excited a plethora of criticism, but, almost without exception, attention focuses on exclusively English-language or Anglophone productions.3 Emblematic here are Michael Greer and Toby Widdicombe’s remarks in a 2010 study of Shakespeare on film that their ‘filmography . . . does not include films . . . in languages other than English . . . If you are looking for foreign films . . . we recommend searching the Internet Movie Database’.4 More direct still is Michael Anderegg’s statement in his volume on the subject that ‘Shakespeare films should include Shakespeare’s words spoken in English’.5 This limiting imaginary has been borne out in a large number of accounts, including my own, in which a narrow sample of work, whose representational provenance accords with a US–UK axis, is foregrounded.6 In part, the networks of distribution and exhibition through which films are identified are to blame: as Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan state, all too often a ‘cultural flow’ is unidirectional and travels only ‘from the “west” to the “rest”’.7 But, whatever the reasons, it is clear that an international sense of Shakespeare’s plays on film is lacking: the critical field has yet to take due account of worldwide depth and diversity. There are, however, suggestions that things are starting to change. A small number of the examples discussed in this book have been either explored or alluded to in several recent studies.8 Particular sites of representation, especially Asia, have begun to be understood as playing a role in the revitalization of a cinematic Shakespeare.9 And the benefits that accrue from recognizing the individual contributions of non-Anglophone filmic adaptations are increasingly registered.10 Critic Greg Colo´n Semenza seems to summon the mood of the moment when he anticipates that ‘world cinema is likely to be the next, if not the final, frontier for Shakespeare on film scholarship’.11 Certainly, as we enter an era in which the Bard is cementing his place as a global marker, a more ambitious awareness of Shakespeare’s international screen presence is called for. During the period that has been dominated by Kenneth Branagh and his ilk, there has been a corresponding glut of Shakespeare films outside English-language parameters. Shakespeare films have been produced in, among other locations, Africa, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Malaysia, Sweden, Tibet and Venezuela and, in their scope and inventiveness, these works constitute a revealing and distinctive body of material. What is

Introduction

3

required to support an intellectual appraisal of this material is an approach that takes us away from the separate bracketing of the ‘foreign Shakespeare’ and towards a new sensibility. For the seventy-three nonAnglophone films that are explored in this study to be accommodated and enjoyed requires an alteration in the canon of Shakespeare on film. In turn, this transformation necessitates a praxis of interpretation which would allow us to challenge the ‘channels though which we have access to’ Shakespearean production and to engage with plurality.12 Only then might we be able to arrive at a responsible grasp of Shakespearean cinematic expressions that ‘cannot be seen as “the other”, for the simple reason that they are us’.13 It is an endeavour in which issues of definition are important. Quite what constitutes world cinema, for example, is worth pausing over for a moment. At its most essential, it is argued, world cinema represents a mode of filmmaking that takes place outside the Hollywood mainstream.14 For some film critics, this broad classification can be sophisticated: world cinema is, according to a more specific schema, non-English or non-European and, vitally, non-western in either origin or aesthetic achievement.15 Other definitions concentrate on world cinema’s capacity to cross borders; others still understand the term as itself a methodology and a discipline.16 And then there are those discussions that aspire to see all cinemas as world cinema in the interests of polycentric understandings and an avoidance of artificial binary constraints.17 While sympathetic to this latter paradigm, Shakespeare and World Cinema subscribes to the first of the definitions outlined here, arguing that, in the context of the general relegation or bypassing of the non-Anglophone Shakespeare film, an account that eschews the domination of Hollywood – and the English language – is a political obligation. For the time being, at least, we are in the territory of the not now, not yet. And there are particular virtues to investigating Shakespeare and world cinema according to such rubrics. Prising the Bard away from Hollywood, as will be shown, allows for other kinds of interconnections – and transnational commerce – to come into view. It facilitates adjustments to enshrined visions and it means that a more generous remit for Shakespeare studies can be endorsed. Margaret Jane Kidnie writes that ‘strongly motivated interventions in the politics of the canon’ have the advantage of making ‘alternative critical practices potentially available’.18 Certainly, a world cinema template, because it is concerned with the alternatively accented film product, invites us to be attentive to issues sometimes neglected in Shakespeare and film scholarship, which would include histories of reception and the types of cultural

4

Shakespeare and World Cinema

literacy to which global audiences have access. Crucially, by addressing what has been deemed marginal to established interpretation, we may be impelled to acknowledge that ‘media images’, as Richard Kearney notes, carry an ‘ethical charge’ and that the business of Shakespearean criticism of this kind is, in some ways, an ethical undertaking, one that requires, as Geoffrey Galt Harpham notes, ‘a practice of judgement involving a nuanced assessment and negotiation of social norms, cultural habits, and community values’.19 In the same way that we are required to reflect on what world cinema is, so must we think rigorously about what kind of Shakespeare is being promulgated in these pages. Much ink has been spilled in recent years debating the most appropriate language to capture the relationship between the Shakespearean ‘original’ and its filmic reinvention. For Julie Sanders, ‘adaptation’ is a particularly useful term in that it signals an ‘attempt to make texts “relevant” . . . via . . . proximation and updating’ and a ‘transposition’ that ‘takes a text from one genre and delivers it to new audiences . . . in cultural, geographical and temporal terms’.20 Other critics have suggested ‘appropriation’, noting, however, that this alternative might be questioned on the basis that it implies ‘a hostile takeover, a seizure of authority’.21 A final body of opinion holds that no one taxonomy can encompass the multifarious ways in which Shakespeare is recast in new forms: there is no all-purpose expression, the argument runs, not least because film itself frequently blurs the distinctions that we, as critics, seem so anxious to uphold.22 Shakespeare and World Cinema favours a terminology of adaptation, contrasting this, where necessary, with citation or quotation, while recognizing that any descriptor operates with a degree of flexibility. Is, for example, a Shakespeare film an adaptation when not explicitly billing itself in this fashion? In a sense, it is unimportant if this kind of identification is avoided, for, as I argue here, it is via the mode of reception – the field of circulation – that a particular film product takes on Shakespearean qualifications. There can, then, be no fixed hierarchy between a play and its surrogate language or languages. In the particular cases with which this book deals, where there is no English lexicon to attend to, we are invited to be responsive to other verbal registers, to narrative strategies and to emotional contours. These elements recall the plays, but not with any precise equivalence, meaning that we concentrate not so much on issues of nomenclature as on questions about how categories of the Shakespearean are mobilized. Or, to put the point in another way, the discussion elaborated here centres on the extent to which Shakespeare, variously explained and capaciously

Introduction

5

imagined, functions in terms of cultural (and economic) capital. A further premise underlying this study is that the work of adaptation is creative. Art inheres in the act of translation and in its attendant multiplication of meanings. As Colin MacCabe states, an important principle is that through the ‘adaptation . . . process’ films accrue in ‘real value’.23 When a film is generated from a play, a new text is fashioned out of an old one, and we are sensitized to how both interrelate. Fredric Jameson sees this as inherently competitive, proposing that ‘the individual works, either as external adaptations or as internal echo chambers of the various media, be grasped as allegories of the never-ending and unresolvable struggles for primacy’.24 It is as a two-way struggle, with points of contestation and complementarity in between, that I seek to explain how plays and films reinforce and enlighten each other. This book is divided into three sections. Part One, ‘Auteurs’, explores Shakespeare and world cinema from the perspective of auteur theory. If current thinking takes an auteur to be an individual craftsperson possessed of a distinctive vision, ‘the singular and great author of the text’, world cinema throws up an abundant yield of potential candidates.25 The astonishingly inventive and singularly ambitious work of a French-based director is discussed in Chapter 1, ‘Alexander Abela’; here, the creativity of Makibefo (1999), or Macbeth, and Souli (2004), or Othello, is appraised in the light of both films’ relocation of Shakespeare’s action to Madagascar and involvement of a non-professional cast in a communal and intercultural performative experiment. The prevailing idea was to secure, through this unique undertaking, a fresh appreciation of the transferability of Shakespeare’s archetypal stories. Notably, an auteurial presence is refracted in the films’ referencing of visual features, charms approximating the contents of the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth, a pen and paper pointing to Othello’s absorption in narrative, and a recurrent zebu or ox indicating a more general preoccupation with wealth and status. Distinctive to Makibefo and Souli is a combination of specific traditions and motifs and an overarching directorial conception: Shakespeare, in this particular manifestation, is richly revealing of the collaborative experience more recently recognized as lying behind auteurial definitions. Chapter 2, ‘Vishal Bhardwaj and Jayaraaj Rajasekharan Nair’, addresses two directors from the northern and southern parts of India, who, in their contrasting styles, offer alternating responses to how the auteur may construct himself in relation to the subcontinent’s film industries. The strategies of adaptation adopted by Bhardwaj and Jayaraaj, I argue, are an index to the competing demands of their situations as regionally marked

6

Shakespeare and World Cinema

Shakespearean interpreters. In the case of Jayaraaj, for example, adapting Antony and Cleopatra and Othello as Kannaki (2002) and Kaliyattam (1997) respectively, Malayalam is the language of choice, while, in the case of Bhardwaj, Hindi, Hindi dialects and Urdu are the default positions to occupy in adapting Macbeth and Othello, as his Maqbool (2004) and Omkara (2006) indicate. Although these two figures are similarly compelled to traverse such themes as ritual, custom and identity, as is shown in a mutual attraction to Othello, they do so from diverse points on the local–global axis.26 For, where Jayaraaj subscribes to an essentially rural and timeless ‘India’, Bhardwaj approves one that is urban, destabilized and multilocal. These readings are symptomatic of other kinds of uncertainty and of auteurs who entertain a range of myths of their country for different kinds of cultural consumption. In taking an auteurial approach to Bhardwaj and Jayaraaj, this chapter is responsive to those commentators who have avoided the nation as a category of analysis and who argue for the demerits of its constructivist characteristics.27 In a related development, film critics have contended that there is no such thing as a stable or autonomous ‘national cinema’, particularly given the cross-currents of funding and co-production ventures that are increasingly a filmmaking norm.28 Conscious of the need to find an alternative paradigm that admits of the transnational, film critics and political interpreters alike have suggested the ‘regional’ as a formulation that helpfully straddles a number of requirements. Dudley Andrew’s suggestion, for example, is that the ‘intermediate concept’ of a ‘regional cinema’ nicely conjures the ways in which films inhabit local and global or ‘glocal’ spheres of interaction, and he is joined by Paul Bowles and Henry Veltmeyer, who note that ‘regions [are] . . . the units through which globalization’s effects and impacts are felt’.29 It is within such a framework of the ‘regional’, I argue, that the national and cultural characteristics of cinema can be apprehended without succumbing to a unitary modality which would favour only the nation-state as an option for analysis. Accordingly, the second section of this book – ‘Regional Configurations’ – is comprised of two chapters which, centring on Latin America and Asia, investigate world cinema representations in the light of contrasting regional criteria. Chapter 3, ‘Shakespeare, Cinema, Latin America’, discovers how, in films such as Sangrador (dir. Leonardo Henrı´quez, 2000) – a Venezuelan adaptation of Macbeth – As Alegres Comadres (dir. Leila Hipo´lito, 2003) – a Brazilian adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor – and Huapango (dir. Iva´n Lipkies, 2004) – a Mexican adaptation of Othello – responses to mediations of Shakespearean

Introduction

7

metaphor are encouraged by the concentration on a localized mise en sce`ne. Emerging from a purposeful utilization of distinctive environments (the Venezuelan Andes, the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil and the Huasteca region of northeastern Mexico), the plays’ animal references are indigenized to illuminate changing structures of sexuality, power and prestige. Such reworking carries an ideological charge: Sangrador, As Alegres Comadres and Huapango reveal the affective qualities of particular milieux by exploiting recognizable typologies of character, such as the romanticized brigand (Max/Macbeth is a mountain bandit), the malandro (Fausto/Falstaff is a confidence trickster) and the jefe or chief (Otilio/ Othello is a cattle rancher), identifying the political and postcolonial determinants of their acts of national self-expression. Where Sangrador uses Macbeth’s alliance with political tragedy to contemplate Venezuelan militaristic authoritarianism, As Alegres Comadres aims, through carnival, at a vision of social organization characterized by festive accommodation and inclusivity. Cast in a less idealistic mould is Huapango, which pushes at the black–white racial dichotomies of Othello to test the ties that bind ethnicity and conquest. In all three films, Macbeth, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Othello are marshalled to expose the vexed ties that bind historical institutions and popular consciousness in modern Latin America. ‘Shakespeare, Cinema, Asia’, Chapter 4, shows that issues of homeland and belonging are vigorously aired in Asian Shakespeare films: this body of work reflects, variously, upon the global pressures that determine hybridized selves, the need for new ways of seeing, and the difficulties of taking political action in the social world. Not surprisingly, Julius Caesar (the Malaysian Gedebe [dir. Nam Ron, 2002]) and Romeo and Juliet (the Singaporean Chicken Rice War [dir. Chee Kong Cheah, 2000]) are prominent here, but so too is Hamlet, as is suggested in the chapter’s discussion of The Banquet (dir. Xiaogang Feng, 2006), a visually sumptuous Chinese adaptation of the play, and Prince of the Himalayas (dir. Sherwood Hu, 2006), an extraordinarily resonant Tibet-based adaptation of the drama invigorated by its message of forgiveness, Buddhist ideas of reincarnation and epic aesthetics. Shakespeare, for all these filmmakers, becomes a resource through which some of the anxieties and preoccupations characterizing contemporary Asia can be freely ventilated. Of course, the opportunity to practise what has been termed ‘locality criticism’, which is ‘inflected or marked by specificities of a given cultural location or knowledge derived from a specific geocultural region’, is not entirely straightforward.30 As Walter D. Mignolo argues, ‘“Latin”

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America is not an objective’ phenomenon, but a ‘political project formed by Europeans’.31 By the same token, ‘Asia’ is hardly homogeneous; the various countries of Asia do not share, as Dennis Kennedy and Li Lan Yong note, a ‘single market’ or a common ‘cultural economy’.32 Qualifications notwithstanding, regional labels are enabling devices in film criticism work on the market and, hence, possess a certain utility. If deployed in the sense of configurations rather than impositions, moreover, and applied with a due self-consciousness, these kinds of descriptor can precipitate questions about relations that run along East–West as well as north–south axial lines. As Marit Melhuus and Kristi Anne Stølen state in a study of Latin American gender imagery, ‘a regional focus is important – not just because it concurs with indigenous views, but also because it sets an agenda’.33 As will be clear, these four chapters deal with a variety of Shakespearean dramatic examples. Part Three, ‘Plays’, homes in on the playtext to consider, in an international arena, how and why particular Shakespearean dramas have proved resiliently popular as objects of filmic treatment. In attempting to ascertain the unique appeal of a single title, there would appear to be, at least at first sight, some leeway for choice. Hamlet is an obvious contender. Films such as the Finnish Hamlet Goes Business (dir. Aki Kaurisma¨ki, 1987) – noted for its deadpan humour and moody mien – the Russian Fat Stupid Rabbit (dir. Slava Ross, 2006) – which finds a comparable comic cause in the fabliau of a children’s performer who, to combat the boredom of playing a rabbit in a rundown theatre, experiments with the ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy – and the Serbian Hamlet (dir. Aleksandar Rajkovic´, 2007) – whose stunning effect can be traced to its rendering of the ‘rank and gross . . . garden’ of Elsinore as a Belgrade rubbish tip – if nothing else, evidence how the play operates as a resource for quotation, revisionism and critique.34 Similarly, the alternately romantic and anti-romantic potentialities of A Midsummer Night’s Dream provide another point of entry, not least as these are discovered in films including The Midwinter Night’s Dream (dir. Goran Paskaljevic´, 2004) – an excoriating disquisition on the wars in the Balkans that, through an internal production of the play, exposes ‘a venal brand of ethno-religious nationalism’ – and A Midsummer Okinawan Dream (dir. Yuji Nakae, 2009) – which suggests a ‘Japanese nostalgia for a utopian vision of its own pre-modernity’.35 On the basis of the numbers of adaptations and patterns of narrative repetition, however, it is Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, and not some other assembly, which represent the world cinema Shakespeare play examples par excellence.

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Chapter 5, ‘Macbeth’, juxtaposes three examples so as to illuminate the range of ways in which the play has been reconfigured by a series of ambitious arthouse directors. Discussion of Yellamma (dir. Mohan Koda, 1999) – a Telangana-language adaptation of the play set in the state of Hyderabad – Someone is Sleeping in My Pain (dir. Michael Roes, 2001) – which centres on a fictionalized attempt to film Macbeth in Yemen – and Macbeth (dir. Bo Landin and Alex Sherpf, 2004) – a Sa´mi-language adaptation made in the Arctic Circle – reveals that the drama represents a point of contact for emergent cultures negotiating minority rights, shifting frontiers and the legacies of imperialism. In their aesthetic felicities, political articulacy and complementary approaches to textual issues, these productions, I maintain, allow for reflections on hegemonic structures as defined in language, histories that have occluded indigenous traditions and ongoing tensions between global powers. At their most striking, and as instances of a recurring fascination, this cluster of films opens up for scrutiny a reification of Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 adaptation of Macbeth, as the canonically entrenched ‘foreign language’ world cinema reading of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy. Chapter 6, ‘Romeo and Juliet ’, investigates how, in twenty-eight recent film adaptations, Shakespeare’s play proves the spur to addressing concerns about demographic change and generational disputes in relation to gender and race. That familiar Shakespearean construction of the ‘starcrossed lovers’, I suggest, is deployed to point up both the contradictory ways in which the transgression of cultural and national borders is imagined and the place of mobility and diaspora in already mediated versions of romance.36 This is a play, the chapter contends, that, in its adapted forms, exhibits a remarkable capacity for generic transformation. For, as a number of consistently conceived films reveals, cinema brings into visibility the prospects of a better social dispensation, and an acclimatized world order, notably through timely rewritings to the classic tragic denouement. The structure of the book as a whole, then, makes available an interpretive system that tests the advantages and disadvantages of particular approaches. While each section is written from a particular perspective, all three approaches allow for the intersection of key concerns and enable comparison to be made between issues of setting, genre, periodization, cinematic technique and industrial context. Just as the book is conscious of alternative ways to address the chosen material, so is it possible to contemplate alternative case studies. The Chinese director, Xiaogang Feng, whose 2006 film, The Banquet, an adaptation of Hamlet, is

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discussed elsewhere in this book, could well qualify, for example, as an auteur, particularly in the light of the ‘prestige’ with which his ‘celebration pictures’, directed at ‘a rising bourgeoisie of entrepreneurs and entertainers, aspirational opportunists in show business and the arts’, have been associated.37 Other auteurs would include the nonagenarian Portuguese cinematic figurehead, Manoel de Oliveira, styled ‘the last of the great early filmmakers’, ‘profound’ and ‘paradigmatic’, who, in the French-language film, Je rentre a` la maison/I’m Going Home (dir. Manoel de Oliveira, 2003), something of a swansong, details the doomed efforts of character actor Gilbert Valence (Michel Piccoli) to find, in the part of Prospero, relief from family trauma.38 Or the focus could alight on Juan Luis Iborra, the productive and pioneering Spanish film director who has been at the vanguard of the European queer cinema movement: his Valentı´n (2003), in which an all-male theatre troupe’s rehearsals of Antony and Cleopatra, Othello and Romeo and Juliet, among other plays, come to infiltrate ‘real life’, makes a striking impression in its delineation of inter-cast rivalry and sexual passions that run tragically awry. And, if we are looking for an authorial mandate, we might do no better than to turn to Chan-wook Park, Korean ‘auteur-director’ and ‘transnational . . . celebrity’, and his viscerally extreme Oldboy (2003), with its heavy lacings of Titus Andronicus.39 In that process whereby a filmmaker is credited with an auteurial designation, Shakespeare, it seems, very often performs a contributory role. In the regional approach to Shakespeare and world cinema, similarly, Latin America and Asia are not the only constructs that might be summoned. Such is the depth and extent of the territory that any number of examples could be chosen from the various films discovered in this book and put together in an alternative constellation. For instance, works such as Romani Kris: Ciga´nyto¨rve´ny/Gypsy Lore (dir. Bence Gyo¨ngyo¨ssy, 1997) – a Hungarian adaptation of King Lear that trades upon saturated landscape shots, deep-focus photography and flashback narrative technique to elaborate a parable of retribution and atonement – Le Grand Roˆle (dir. Steve Suissa, 2004) – a French film that figures an actor’s failure to secure the part of Shylock against a backdrop of anti-Semitism and personal catastrophe – and Iago (dir. Volfango de Biasi, 2009) – an Italian adaptation of Othello which, revolving around intrigues between architecture students at the University of Venice, makes the titular character a wronged hero so as to play up concerns of nepotism, meritocracy and social injustice – might be seen to belong to a pan-European cinematic trajectory. This is a book, then, about neglect and recovery but also about

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possibility. The volume of titles that might be classified as belonging to a Shakespeare and world cinema phenomenon, as the filmography illustrates, testifies to a fecund and expansive territory of interpretation and representation. At the core of the subject are manifold opportunities for exploration and ways of engaging with an exciting array of resources. To the arguments developed in this book there are implications both for the Shakespeare on film discipline and for Shakespeare studies. World cinema Shakespeare films not only pose questions about value, quality and exemplarity, they also insist on the application of paradigms suited to addressing the ‘Shakespeares’ of today. There is the immediate issue of the films’ itineraries – their real and imagined journeys within and without national borders. To a greater or lesser extent, for all of the filmmakers investigated in this book, Shakespeare is a force that enables certain kinds of transnational cinematic traffic. Thus, in simplified subtitles for Shakespearean dialogue, we see displayed a consciousness of the comprehension of international film festival goers; or, in the online postings of particular directors, we find inscribed the realities of funding and exposure, crucial elements in the recognition value of a particular film product.40 Or, to put the point in another way, for all they subscribe to localized imaginaries, world cinema Shakespeare films invariably reach beyond themselves to contemplate other kinds of mobility, transaction and market-driven economies. There are also, of course, very different kinds of viewing experience that obtain in different situations. Stylization for one constituency may not be the same as for another; genres cannot necessarily be judged in an identical fashion. Two instances illustrate the point. In India, some audiences took exception to the demotic bad language of Omkara, the adaptation of Othello earlier referred to, meaning that the film fared ill at local box offices.41 By the same token, in China, the provincial reception of The Banquet, the Hamlet adaptation discussed later in this book, was far from positive, with audiences laughing at the stilted dialogue and the intertextual resonances of actors familiar from earlier comic roles.42 The Shakespearean imprimatur does not, it seems, guarantee cross-cultural veneration, for interpretation is invariably bound up with local knowledges. Critical engagement, of necessity, must beware of homogenization and be alive to the shaping role of context-specific modes of response. Likewise, in a discussion of this field of representation, it is important to guard against the projection of our own investments. How far does the category of ‘world cinema’ appeal because it holds out the possibility of, as Gary Needham states, excavating ‘texts and directors like treasures whose

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value lies in their very otherness and relative obscurity’?43 The question is a salutary one, for where there are challenges to horizons of expectation there are dangers of fetishization. Tempting as it might be, it is surely erroneous to approve the notion that world cinema, and Shakespeare and world cinema products in particular, consistently expresses either progressive or oppositional ideologies. To identify a ‘purer vision’ or indeed a ‘purer people’ in the materials introduced in this book is to succumb to mystification rather than to respond to intricacies of narrative content.44 Inside a political context, for example, a western response might wish to see Prince of the Himalayas, the Hamlet adaptation explored later in this book, as an unadulteratedly Tibetan statement, a uniquely indigenous realization of a culture that has conventionally been idealized in the popular imagination. In fact, behind the film, parts of which were made at a resort owned by the Jiuzhai Paradise Group, lies the US-trained Chinese director and screenwriter Sherwood Hu and the Tibetan screenwriters Trashidawa and Chenaktshang Dorje Tsering (Jangbu), making it very much a sum of various national parts. The film’s central protagonist, Lhamoklodan/Hamlet (Purba Rgyal), came to prominence via the Chinese television show My Hero (a version of American Idol ): his trajectory both complicates easy assumptions about authenticity and invites reflection upon issues of cultural dominance. Certainly, the possibility of a Tibetan film industry in charge of its own agenda was discounted by Chenaktshang Dorje Tsering ( Jangbu) in 2003 when he stated, ‘no . . . Tibetans have taken . . . major roles in filmmaking . . . not a single film representing what . . . Tibetans wish to show and say has yet been seen or heard’.45 To encounter this Asian Shakespeare film, then, is also to take into account key issues of provenance; to resist romanticized eulogies to particular interests; and to bear in mind the complex interplay between expectation and the material realities of filmic practice. Of course, some films do cultivate archaic expressions and adopt what Sukanta Chaudhuri and Chee Seng Lim have termed a ‘ploy to tickle foreign palates’; the challenge, as in all studies of this kind, is to learn to distinguish between what a film does and how we may wish to read it.46 ‘Does translating Shakespeare’, asks Alexander C. Y. Huang, ‘empower those for whom English is a second language, or reinforce cultural hegemony?’47 The either/or nature of the question reminds us of a final credo to call to account: the idea that world cinema constructs Shakespeare homogeneously. As this book demonstrates, no two examples are identical and no single film conforms to a template. Shakespeare, in the case studies that this book presents, is consistently differently inflected:

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if, for one filmmaker, he is a means to effect an historical reversal, for another he is the way in which a language might be preserved. Where one group of representations approves the ethereal pedigree of Shakespeare, a complementary group is more attentive to the sanction that his association with merchandizing grants. Some networks of interest aim to escape English, endorsing in its place localized poetic utterances; others move to embrace it, seeing in Shakespeare a passport to membership of a global community. Energies surrounding Shakespeare in his world cinema manifestations are both centrifugal and centripetal in orientation. Nowhere is the spectrum of opinion where Shakespeare is concerned better expressed than in the words of the directors and screenwriters themselves; for this reason, Shakespeare and World Cinema uses original commissioned interviews throughout and finds in names as diverse as Boubakar Diallo, Perttu Leppa¨, Minky Schlesinger and Mark Tan, among others, a comparably rich tapestry of response. What these subjective views indicate is that there is no overarching philosophy inhabiting the Shakespeare that is mediated in film; there are only idiosyncrasies and hallmarks that are fascinating in their variation from each other. Differences among the voices that this book rehearses, and even specificities of engagement, do not occlude the fact that these are films very much rooted in the present moment. Indeed, the kinds of representation explored, it will be shown, are significant because, in them, we find inscribed a political history of the contemporary world. Political freight is attached to the ways in which Shakespeare is absorbed and mediated. Global and local questions are debated inside the framework the films utilize; alternative models for a more productive sense of belonging are proposed; and reciprocal models for collaboration are contemplated. What emerges from these various exchanges is a Bard who is more mobile, inflected and elusive than previously imagined and paradigms which, in helping to expose current inequities of space and place, stand as testimony to the valences of a global Shakespearean citizenship. Experiencing Shakespeare in such a fashion, we find affirmed not so much a filmic presence that belongs to a general grammar but, rather, a set of representations always already mediated through, and elaborated from, local ideologies, content and contexts. In order to access what lies outside a UK–US axis, we look further afield, and go where we have not been accustomed to explore, in the interests of developing a commonality of Shakespearean horizons. An experience of Shakespeare films understood and articulated according to an expansive purview allows for dialogue; it liberates arguments about what Shakespearean cinema is and yet might

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be; and it forces us to think about pertinent questions of fidelity and authorship, authority and evidence. Exposed to Shakespeare in a range of guises, we critics and teachers learn and grow not only by scrutinizing currently available methodologies, but also by accepting an invitation to pursue comparative analyses. Within a schema of what one commentator has described as ‘ethical transnational relationality’ the characteristics of a world Shakespeare are undoubtedly something not only to shout about but also to celebrate.48 NOTES 1 Suzanne Gossett, ‘Letter from the President’, Shakespeare Association of America Bulletin, January (2012), 2. 2 ‘Shakespeare: Staging the World’, www.britishmuseum.org (accessed 10 January 2012). 3 Samuel Crowl, Shakespeare at the Cineplex: the Kenneth Branagh Era (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), p. 1. 4 Michael Greer and Toby Widdicombe, Screening Shakespeare: Understanding the Plays Through Film, 2nd edn (Harlow: Pearson, 2010), p. 141. 5 Michael Anderegg, Cinematic Shakespeare (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), p. xv. 6 See, for example, Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray, eds., Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Sie`cle (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Barbara Hodgdon, ed., ‘Screen Shakespeare’, a special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, 53.2 (2002); Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks, eds., Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema (Madison, WI and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002); Lisa S. Starks and Courtney Lehmann, eds., The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory (Madison, WI and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002); and Anthony R. Guneratne, ed., Shakespeare and Genre: from Early Modern Inheritances to Postmodern Legacies (New York: Palgrave, 2011). The position outlined is also reflected in a related tendency, which is to cite a small number of ‘foreign’ Shakespearean filmic instances in surveys of the field as representative. Inevitably, it is that erstwhile duo of Grigori Kozintsev and Akira Kurosawa that is summoned here, with the unfortunate result that these Russian and Japanese directors come to surrogate for all cinematic representation across the historical continuum. See, as instances, Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Film (Harlow: Pearson, 2005); Stephen M. Buhler, Shakespeare in the Cinema: Ocular Proof (State University of New York Press, 2002); Samuel Crowl, Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008); Sarah Hatchuel, Shakespeare, from Stage to Screen (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Diana E. Henderson, ed., A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006); Maurice Hindle, Studying Shakespeare on Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); Russell Jackson, ed., The Cambridge Companion

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8

9

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12 13

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to Shakespeare on Film, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2007); and James M. Welsh, Richard Vela and John C. Tibbetts, eds., Shakespeare into Film (New York: Checkmark, 2002). Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, ‘Introduction: Transcultural Feminist Practices’, in Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 12. See Anthony R. Guneratne, Shakespeare, Film Studies, and the Visual Cultures of Modernity (New York: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 71–2, 255, 257; Daniel Rosenthal, 100 Shakespeare Films: BFI Screen Guides (London: BFI, 2007), pp. 38–40, 51–2, 114–20, 123–6, 132–3, 184–91, 229–30; and Robert Shaughnessy, The Routledge Guide to William Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 394, 404. See, for example, Richard Burt, ‘Shakespeare and Asia in Postdiasporic Cinemas: Spin-offs and Citations of the Plays from Bollywood to Hollywood’, in Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose, eds., Shakespeare, the Movie, II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 265–303; Alexander C. Y. Huang, ed., ‘Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective’, a special issue of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, 4.2 (2009), www. borrowers.uga.edu (accessed 17 June 2010); Adele Lee, ‘“Chop-Socky Shakespeare”?!: the Bard Onscreen in Hong Kong’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 28.4 (2010), 459–79; Poonam Trivedi, ‘“Filmi” Shakespeare’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 35.2 (2007), 148–58. Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘Screen Shakespeares: Knowledge and Practice’, Critical Quarterly, 52.4 (2010), 48–62; Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe, New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), pp. 17–18, 37–40; Sonia Massai, ‘Defining Local Shakespeares’, in Sonia Massai, ed., World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 5; Ramona Wray, ‘Shakespeare on Film, 1990–2010’, in Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete and Ramona Wray, eds., The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 519–20. Greg Colo´n Semenza, ‘Introduction’, Shakespeare Studies, 38 (2010), 23. Semenza’s prediction accords with Ramona Wray’s plea, in a reflective piece on the discipline, for ‘enfolding, integration or polysemy’ (‘Shakespeare on Film in the New Millennium’, Shakespeare, 3.2 [2007], 279). Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London and New York: Verso, 1992), p. 45. Lu´cia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah, ‘Introduction’, in Lu´cia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah, eds., Theorizing World Cinema (London and New York: I. B. Taurus, 2012), p. xxiii. See Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer, ‘Introduction’, in Linda Badley, R. Barton Palmer and Steven Jay Schneider, eds., Traditions in World Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 1; Shohini Chaudhuri,

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Shakespeare and World Cinema Contemporary World Cinema: Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, South Asia (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 1; John Hill, ‘General Introduction’, in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, eds., World Cinema: Critical Approaches (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. xiv. See Paul Cooke, ‘Introduction: World Cinema’s “Dialogues” with Hollywood’, in Paul Cooke, ed., World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 7; Annette Kuhn and Catherine Grant, ‘Screening World Cinema’, in Catherine Grant and Annette Kuhn, eds., Screening World Cinema: a ‘Screen’ Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 1. Dudley Andrew, ‘An Atlas of World Cinema’, in Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, eds., Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (London and New York: Wallflower, 2006), p. 20; Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, ‘Situating World Cinema as a Theoretical Problem’, in Dennison and Lim, eds., Remapping, pp. 6–7. Nagib, Perriam and Dudrah, ‘Introduction’, in Nagib, Perriam and Dudrah, eds., Theorizing, pp. xxii, xxiii. Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 6, 9. Richard Kearney, ‘The Crisis of the Image: Levinas’ Ethical Response’, in Gary B. Madison and Marty Fairbairn, eds., The Ethics of Postmodernity: Current Trends in Continental Thought (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), p. 22; Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 259. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 19–20. See also Linda Hutcheon’s view that ‘adaptation’ involves ‘an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works’ (A Theory of Adaptation [London and New York: Routledge, 2006], p. 8). Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, ‘General Introduction’, in Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, eds., Adaptations of Shakespeare: a Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 3. See Fischlin and Fortier, ‘General Introduction’, pp. 2–3; Shaughnessy, Routledge Guide, p. 403. Colin MacCabe, ‘Introduction: Bazinian Adaptation’, in Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray and Rick Warner, eds., True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 8. Fredric Jameson, ‘Afterword: Adaptation as a Philosophical Problem’, in MacCabe, Murray and Warner, eds., True to the Spirit, p. 232. David A. Gerstner, ‘The Practices of Authorship’, in David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger, eds., Authorship and Film (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), p. 4. In Othello (dir. Roysten Abel, 2003) is a further film that suggests the fascination of Othello for Indian directors. For a discussion, see Mark

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Thornton Burnett, Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 129–57. Benedict Anderson argues that the nation is only ever ‘an imagined political community’ (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn [London and New York: Verso, 1991], p. 6). See also Graham Day and Andrew Thompson, Theorizing Nationalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), p. 87. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, ‘General Introduction: What is Transnational Cinema?’, in Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, eds., Transnational Cinema: the Film Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 1. Films may debate nations but are not exclusively defined by them and are, instead, subject to other determinants that are not primarily shaped by national considerations. See Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, ‘Introduction’, in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds., Cinema and Nation (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 4; and Robert Stam, ‘Fanon, Algeria, and the Cinema: the Politics of Identification’, in Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, eds., Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. 34. Dudley Andrew, ‘Islands in the Sea of Cinema’, in Kevin Rockett and John Hill, eds., National Cinemas and World Cinema (Dublin: Four Courts, 2006), p. 15; and Paul Bowles and Henry Veltmeyer, ‘Introduction’, in Paul Bowles, Henry Veltmeyer, Scarlett Cornelissen, Noela Invernizzi and Kwong-leung Tang, eds., Regional Perspectives on Globalization (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 4. Alexander C. Y. Huang, ‘Shakespearean Localities and the Localities of Shakespeare Studies’, Shakespeare Studies, 35 (2007), 186–7. See also Michael Neill’s plea for the ‘importance of the local in critical practice’ (‘PostColonial Shakespeare? Writing Away from the Centre’, in Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, eds., Post-Colonial Shakespeares [London and New York: Routledge, 1998], p. 167). Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 129. Dennis Kennedy and Li Lan Yong, ‘Introduction: Why Shakespeare?’, in Dennis Kennedy and Li Lan Yong, eds., Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 6. See also Anne Tereska Ciecko, ‘Introduction to Popular Asian Cinema’, in Anne Tereska Ciecko, ed., Contemporary Asian Cinema (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), pp. 4–7; Dimitris Eleftheriotis, ‘Introduction’, in Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Gary Needham, eds., Asian Cinemas: a Reader and Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 1; and Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, ‘National/International/ Transnational: the Concept of Trans-Asian Cinema and the Cultural Politics of Film Criticism’, in Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen, eds., Theorizing National Cinema (London: BFI, 2006), pp. 245–5, 260. Marit Melhuus and Kristi Anne Stølen, eds., ‘Introduction’, in Marit Melhuus and Kristi Anne Stølen, eds., Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas: Contesting

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Shakespeare and World Cinema the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery (London and New York: Verso, 1996), p. 8. Hamlet, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 3.1.58, 1.2.135–6. Hamlet Goes Business is one of the few world Shakespeare films that has attracted sustained commentary. See, for example, Melissa M. Croteau, ‘Aki Kaurisma¨ki’s Hamlet Goes Business: a Socialist Shakespearean Film Noir Comedy’, in Richard Fotheringham, Christa Jansohn and R. S. White, eds., Shakespeare’s World/World Shakespeares (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 193–206. A number of examples of Hamlet and world cinema are also discussed in Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, eds., Shakespeare on Screen: ‘Hamlet’ (Le Havre and Rouen: Publications des Universite´s de Rouen et du Havre, 2011). See Hamid Naficy, ‘Framing Exile: from Homeland to Homepage’, in Hamid Naficy, ed., Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), p. 7; Mika Ko, ‘Representing Okinawa: Contesting Images in Contemporary Japanese Cinema’, in John Hill and Kevin Rockett, eds., Film History and National Cinema (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005), p. 37. The trope of an internal Shakespeare play production or performance is a recurring one in world cinema; see The Story of Richard, Milord and the Fine Firebird (dir. Nino Akhvlediani, 1997), in which a troubled teenager finds solace after taking on the role of Richard III, Shylock (dir. Michal Shabtay, 2008), in which Tubal (Cahid Olmez) expresses dissatisfaction at his marginalization, and Bibliothe`que Pascale (dir. Szabolcs Hajdu, 2009), in which a prostitute is forced to enact various Shakespearean heroines. As an expose´ of the plight of an ´emigre´e, Bibliothe`que Pascale is particularly notable for suggesting how ‘the recent round of European “enlargement”’ has led to ‘Romanian and other Eastern European women’ becoming ‘hot objects of exchange, packaged in a variety of wrappings’ (Anca Parvulescu, ‘European Kinship: Eastern European Women go to Market’, Critical Inquiry, 37.2 [2011], 189). Romeo and Juliet, in Norton Shakespeare, Prologue, 6. Darrell William Davis and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, East Asian Screen Industries (London: BFI, 2008), pp. 56–7. See Joa˜o Be´nard Da Costa, ‘Manoel de Oliveira’, in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ed., The Oxford History of World Cinema: the Definitive History of Cinema Worldwide (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 603. See Nikki J. Y. Lee, ‘Salute to Mr Vengeance!: the Making of a Transnational Auteur Park Chan-wook’, in Leon Hunt and Leung Wing-Fai, eds., East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film (London and New York: I. B. Taurus, 2008), pp. 205, 217. Mohan Koda, director of Yellamma, posted an online announcement in 2001 ‘asking for suggestions about how he might distribute his film in the West so he could recoup his costs’. See Richard Burt, ‘All that remains of Shakespeare in Indian film’, in Kennedy and Yong, eds., Shakespeare in Asia, p. 102.

Introduction

19

41 Susanne Gruss notes that ‘the Uttar Pradesh dialogue as well as the frequent swearing were used to explain the film’s comparative failure . . . families avoided Omkara due to the constant swearing’ (‘Shakespeare in Bollywood? Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara’, in Sarah Sa¨ckel, Walter Go¨bel and Noha Hamdy, eds., Semiotic Encounters: Text, Image and Trans-Nation [Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009], pp. 225, 235). Rajiva Verma makes the point more delicately when he states that Omkara captures ‘with a great creativity the colloquial, idiomatic and often bawdy language of the original’ (‘Shakespeare in Hindi Cinema’, in Vikram Chopra, ed., Shakespeare: the Indian Icon [New Delhi: Reader’s Paradise, 2011], p. 755). 42 Davis and Yeh, East Asian Screen Industries, p. 176; Alexander C. Y. Huang, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 234; and Jason McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 197. 43 Gary Needham and I-Fen Wu, ‘Film Authorship and Taiwanese Cinema’, in Eleftheriotis and Needham, eds., Asian Cinemas, p. 360. 44 Andrew, ‘Atlas of World Cinema’, p. 26. 45 Chenaktshang Dorje Tsering (Jangbu), ‘Reflections on Tibetan Film’, in Robert Barnett and Ronald Schwartz, eds., Tibetan Modernities: Notes from the Field on Cultural and Social Change (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2008), p. 279. 46 Sukanta Chaudhuri and Chee Seng Lim, ‘Introduction’, in Sukanta Chaudhuri and Chee Seng Lim, eds., Shakespeare Without English: The Reception of Shakespeare in Non-Anglophone Countries (New Delhi: Pearson, 2006), p. xii. 47 Alexander C. Y. Huang, ‘Shakespeare and Translation’, in Burnett, Streete and Wray, eds., Edinburgh Companion, p. 69. 48 Shu-mei Shih, ‘Towards an Ethics of Transnational Encounters, or, “When” does a “Chinese” Woman become a “Feminist”?’, in Franc¸oise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 76.

part i

Auteurs

chapter 1

Alexander Abela

At a time when Shakespeare on film studies begins to diversify, and to reflect upon the various forms that Shakespeare film can take, it is perhaps salutary to remember the producers as well as the products, the creative forces as well as the final statements. Makibefo (1999), a Malagasylanguage production which identifies itself via an on-screen translation of its title as an adaptation of Macbeth, is a case in point. Arresting in publicity are the ways in which the French director Alexander Abela has been constructed, with the introduction to the booklet accompanying the DVD release of the film stating: After months of trying in vain to convince television editors to commission one of his projects, Alexander Abela . . . finally arrived in Madagascar in October 1998 to shoot . . . Makibefo. For his de´but, Alexander Abela decided to break away from the conventions contemporary filmmakers take for granted. Instead, he chose to work under similar conditions as those of the early silent film period . . . Abela has therefore returned not only to the origins of cinema, but also to the origins of storytelling in general.1

The account represents the director as a lone pioneer in the industry, an artist who is remarkable for working independently and against the grain. In contradistinction to a constellation of plural and anonymous forces, Abela is individualized and characterized by a singular vision. His initiative is seen as recalling a founding fable: his endeavour facilitates reflection on the beginnings of the filmic medium and, because associated with entrepreneurialism and a lack of deference to established institutions, suggests a revolutionary elan. Throughout the DVD booklet, the director’s name is prioritized: from ‘Alexander Abela’ we move to ‘Abela’ before pausing, at the close, on the more familiar ‘Alexander’. Uses of name as a commercial tag have become a staple of postmodern cinema: the identity of the director forms part of related promotional ventures and marketing appeals.2 Abela, in fact, and as the emphasis given to the term ‘de´but’ 23

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implies, is envisaged as nothing less than an auteur – a directorial personality who, in Robert Stam’s gloss on the concept of auteurism, exercises a ‘creative’ function and is primarily responsible for ‘a film’s aesthetics and mise en sce`ne’.3 As classic theorizations maintain, auteurist filmmakers demonstrate a unique stylistic vision and thematic concerns which are consistently revealed across a body of work.4 In addition to Makibefo, Abela directed Souli (2004), a Malagasy- and French-language work advertised in the end credits as ‘librement inspire´ d’Othello de William Shakespeare’, and, across both films, as this chapter argues, the Bard is accessed via comparable approaches and particular personal agendas. Macbeth the director takes to the Antandroy people of Faux Cap in the southeast corner of Madagascar; Othello he transposes to the fishing village of Ambola on Madagascar’s western shoreline. In this, Abela resembles a type of adventurer-colonialist: indeed, it may not be accidental that, in the popular consciousness, at least, as the animated feature Madagascar (dir. Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath, 2005) indicates, the island in the Indian Ocean is envisioned as the last unknown, having displaced Africa as an imaginative frontier.5 Both films access Shakespeare via performative transplantation, which is defined, according to the director, by the participation of ‘individuals isolated from the rest of the world’.6 Makibefo was enacted by fishermen and herdsmen, while Souli combined a professional, non-native cast with local players. The directorial rationale was that, from a communal and intercultural experience, fresh readings of Shakespeare would emerge. The auteur is further glimpsed in Makibefo and Souli in the reliance upon a shared visual vocabulary – in particular, I suggest, repeated motifs of coastal landscapes direct attention to subjects in process and worlds in a comparable state of transition. Who speaks and on whose behalf? Are communities able to survive intact or do they require communication with other systems outside their purview? And what outcomes are attached to such encounters? These are among the questions posed by Abela via a cinematographic style that consistently finds in Shakespearean narratives indexes of transnationalism, border crossings and interchange. Throughout these representations, constructions of authorship are privileged: the films place on display issues of lineage, transmission and textual authority as part of their identification of local–global problems and possible solutions. Crucially informing Abela’s filmic method is a quasiethnographic dimension. Felicitous as a means of Shakespearean translation, the use of native symbols foregrounds the ethics of his quest to

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return to ‘origins’, an enterprise that carries with it the potential for cultural and material deformation. As Keith Richards states, ‘whether [indigenous] cultures are used as thematic background or as object of study, film appears doomed by its very nature to misrepresent and even betray its chosen other’.7 Certainly, the voice of the auteur is regularly instanced (in on-screen announcements and in the practicalities of translation, for instance), and in such a way as to force us to think both about an ongoing colonial history and the binding energies of Shakespeare – the collaborative significance of the Bard’s Madagascan manifestations. The tradition of ‘Shakespeare the Author’, writes Courtney Lehmann, has ceded place to a concept of ‘“Shakespeare” the apparatus’, and, in the same way that the Bard has been rethought as one element in a larger network, so has the auteur.8 For, as both Makibefo and Souli make clear, the generation of new ‘Shakespeares’ from old is dependent upon the conjunction of a number of different interpretive constituencies. As this chapter argues, through dialogic processes, Shakespeare comes to speak to the histories of possession and dispossession that have dictated both the fortunes of Madagascar and other colonially governed countries. Exchanges across assumed divides lie behind the films’ representation of alternative imaginative landscapes that challenge present inequities. The formulation of such perspectives bears out the ways in which the auteur, in the working practices of film, is apprehended through ‘numerous other factors’, including ‘codes of genre . . . technicians [and] culture’, that reflect the inherently ‘collaborative nature of the medium’.9 Abela is aided in the promotion of his vision by, among others, actors and crew: his membership of a team is integral to the association with an auteur status. Of course, as commentators have frequently noted, there are precious few auteurs per se.10 Countering any purist reliance on a construction of the auteur as a free-floating type have been discussions that testify to discrete cinematic activities as an effect, a context, a moment, a site of biographical encounter.11 On his father’s side hailing from the Lebanon and Malta, and on his mother’s side hailing from Greece, Italy and Syria, Abela, who was born in Britain, in his own (joking rather than plaintive) reflections on his biographical lineage, ‘belong[s] nowhere. I feel English but in England I’m not accepted as an Englishman . . . [the] Lebanese . . . don’t really accept me, and in Greece or Italy I don’t feel at home’.12 This chapter resists an easy identification between the life and the work; it does suggest, however, that the peregrinations of the director may be symptomatic of some of the broader geographical displacements that Makibefo

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and Souli anatomize. In the particularity of the films’ concerns, I argue, we see shadowed the forms of a lived experience. That lived experience unfolds inside a particular economic reality. In a filmic environment that has tended to privilege Anglophone versions of Shakespeare, Makibefo and Souli initially slipped off the compass, falling into the category of productions that, as Ramona Wray notes, because ‘global conversation inhibits the knowledge transfer’, run the risk of remaining relatively anonymous.13 The ‘strong regulatory framework with a well-established support system’ that French cinema enjoys meant that both films enjoyed theatrical runs in France and festival exposure, with Abela benefiting from the ways in which import quotas and government subsidies create a climate favourable to work perceived as auteur-marked and culturally distinctive.14 Neither film, however, subsequently went on to that vital worldwide commercial release. In addition, even within France, and despite garnering the so-called ‘Golden Triangle’ of press plaudits, Makibefo initially played only in one theatre for a three-week period. Similarly, although Souli toured festivals on a global basis, distribution was problematic.15 ‘The production company went bankrupt’, comments the director, ‘Souli got stuck . . . I ended up getting the film back, having the opportunity to re-edit’. Such a careful exercise of artistic control is arguably a necessity in an economically determined world cinema system that pushes directors and their creations into close proximity. At the time of writing, Souli has indeed been re-edited by Abela, but the complex and combined demands of local theatres, broadcasters and television networks have prevented a subsequent release. ethnographic encounters It is clear from Makibefo that the reimagining of the play derived from a non-textual encounter with Shakespeare, and this is confirmed in the director’s observation that a ‘comic strip . . . and photographs’ were initially used by him to encourage local explanations of the Bardic narrative. Hence, Makibefo’s name is pronounced in different ways through the film, suggesting a varying index of a heard English signifier and encoding a glimpse into the ways which unfamiliar cultural alignments prompt additions to an already mediated Shakespearean script. Names in Souli are equally inconsistent: the fiction concerns the attempts of Carlos/Cassio (Eduardo Noriega), a doctoral student, to recover the story of Thiossane: to this end, he seeks out the guardian of the tale, Souli/ Othello (Makena Diop), an African writer. Primarily discovered as an

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ethnographer, Carlos functions in the film as a figurative manifestation of the West’s cultivation of the indigenous author: ‘I’ve travelled over twelve thousand kilometres to meet you!’ he announces, his indignant boast testifying to a process one critic describes as the ‘mystification and reification of [the] . . . other’s seemingly authentic experiences’.16 Ethnography in Souli belongs with the film’s thematic content; in Makibefo, by contrast, an ethnographic component is apparent at the level of sound and image. ‘People . . . think it’s an anthropological film!’ notes a surprised Abela in interview, yet the reaction is understandable given Makibefo’s representation of Malagasy villagers dressed in loincloths as well as the traditional lamba or wrap-around printed sheets: the clothing decision, coupled with Abela’s preference for black-and-white cinematography, encourages an illusion of a society at a pre-modern stage of development. Certainly, the gaze of the ethnographer might be detected in those scenes in which a Shakespearean sequence is remodelled to suit Antandroy mores and beliefs. Thus, at the moment where the (male) witch (Victor Raobelina) draws charms (ody) from a pouch in order to trace Makibefo/Macbeth’s (Martin Zia) fate on the sand, the film makes a virtue of gesturing towards the cultural prominence of the healer or ombiasy who, as John Mack states, is ‘also a diviner . . . skilled at foretelling the future’.17 The conjuration of an ethnographic perspective is most powerfully felt in the suggestions of documentary realism with which the film is suffused. A construction of an undiluted cultural encounter is communicated in Makibefo’s reliance upon a representational mode that is not so much linguistic as sensory in orientation: the director’s distinctive vision is revealed in the ways in which the ear is exercised (heavy breathing is overlaid with the crash of waves in a syncopated, rhythmical fashion) at the same time as the eye is appealed to (an opening shot of funerary sculptures gives way to the image of tribesmen picking their way across the dunes). At times, this diegesis operates in a particularly transformative narrative capacity, as when the new king, Makibefo/ Macbeth, is realized sacrificing an ox in a scene intercut with the murder of Bakoua/Banquo (Randina Arthur). In the protagonist’s lifting to the sky of the decapitated, horned head of the zebu is communicated both a diabolical association (Makibefo/Macbeth metaphorically crowns himself with the sign of his evil) and a totemic suggestion (because the frequently seen totems are also horned, a manipulation of the local cult is implied). Once again, the whole is animated by sublimated ethnographic associations, for, as one commentator remarks, ‘sacrifice’ in Madagascar ‘has as its overt purpose the seeking of ancestral blessing’.18 In its reworking of

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Auteurs

Figure 1: Makibefo/Macbeth (Martin Zia) confronts his enemies in Makibefo (dir. Alexander Abela, 1999).

tribal practices and the Shakespearean plot, Makibefo here hints at the auteur’s parodic deployment of tradition: the bloody protagonist is figured as impersonating the authority of the previous royal incumbent. Ethnography depends upon dialogue, and, at the level of the individual narratives of Makibefo and Souli, one effect of a variety of off-screen conversations is the generation of felicitous Shakespearean parallels and translations. The substitution of the windswept Faux Cap dunes for the barren heath of Scotland is obvious, as is the way in which the coming of a flotilla of pirogues stands in for the movement of ‘Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill’.19 Given the general stripping of language from the films – Abela tends to erect his individual narratives on a scaffold of Shakespearean remains – a related series of alterations and expansions is introduced to explain and encapsulate. The familial claim of Bakoua/ Banquo to the throne is not predicted; rather, the character is represented as an expert wrestler whose local reputation precipitates Makibefo/ Macbeth’s motivation to murder. In other translations lurk the ghosts of the Shakespearean word. For example, shortly before Danikany/ Duncan (Jean-Felix) arrives in a progress at Makibefo/Macbeth’s hut to be royally entertained, we are granted a shot of the protagonist sitting on the beach next to a boat looking out to sea. The composition suggests

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both Makibefo/Macbeth’s passage by water to a type of Hades (he is, of course, shortly to dispatch his guest) and a version of the infamous, oceaninspired deliberation, ‘But here upon this bank and shoal of time, / We’d jump the life to come’ (1.7.6–7). Souli is no less economic in the means whereby it references the word of the ‘original’. In this connection, the role of Yann/Iago (Aure´lien Recoing), the unsympathetic white French trader who dominates the coastal community, is relevant. Commanding his black girlfriend, Abi/Emilia (Fatou d’Diaye), to bestow herself in the back of the Land Rover when he drives, Yann/Iago is discovered as subscribing to a particularly violent brand of ghettoization, one that both inverts the ‘black ram . . . tupping your white ewe’ construction of Othello and brings to mind the continuing manifestations of colonial policy.20 More generally in Souli, the elaboration of a Yann/Iago who feels overlooked accords with the play’s realization of an ‘ensign’ (1.1.32) unsuccessful in his bid to become ‘lieutenant’ (1.1.9). Hence, in the mise en sce`ne Abela places emphasis on the ways in which the protagonist’s companion is neglected as a possible disciple who may inherit the story of Thiossane. Matching Iago’s social dissatisfaction is, of course, Othello’s cultural unease: Souli’s translation of the ‘Moor’ (1.1.127) as ‘extravagant and wheeling stranger’ (1.1.137) makes itself felt in the filmic idea of a writer who, as the director states, is ‘not at home . . . he’s called the Senegalese . . . [he’s] an African immigrant. In African films we tend to see the white man as immigrant. It’s very rarely the Africans who get displaced’. Abela here finds in the removals and relocations of the contemporary world a conceptual equivalent for the dramatic character’s sense of isolation and alienation. Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson remark that ‘border crossings . . . can be both enabling and disabling . . . [they] implicate the twin narratives of inclusion and incorporation on the one hand, and of exclusion and dispossession on the other’; as a result, the commentators continue, ‘people who cross international borders must . . . re-evaluate many of their own notions of culture and identity’.21 Certainly, such a scenario is glimpsed in the conjuration in Souli of a writer-protagonist who, in the wake of moving in and between nation-states, is constructed as inhabiting a condition of psychic divisiveness. At once, it is implied that the character’s literary reputation and village status are mutually reinforcing. The most palatial residence – complete with well-positioned desk – is occupied by Souli/Othello, and it is he who leads the community’s fishermen. Simultaneously, however, the film makes clear that Souli/Othello is as much disempowered as he is empowered by his experiences: Souli/Othello fishes for Yann/Iago and is in his employ. Caught

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between communities and professions, and cast adrift inside polarized positions of inferiority and superiority, Souli/Othello is envisioned as an exile, an author who is paradoxically robbed of a sustaining and meaningful relation to his world. At first sight, Makibefo would appear to trade in no such clear conceptions of a split or disunited self. A seeming manifestation of the ‘milk of human kindness’ (1.5.15) feared by his wife, Makibefo/ Macbeth is initially drawn as exemplifying compassion, tending the wounds of his captives, resisting his wife’s blandishments and, because the speech is excised, rather than reflecting unfeelingly that ‘She should have died hereafter’ (5.5.16), actively grieving her passing. His probity distinguishes him from the ruthless Malikomy/Malcolm (Bien Rasoanan Tenaina), who is seen dispatching the traitor, Kidoure/Cawdor (Boniface), in a fit of anger. The episode, in its compromising of other claimants, seems to legitimate Makibefo/Macbeth’s own bid for power. However, a parallel tendency throughout points up Makibefo/Macbeth’s potential for moral deterioration. He sports a talisman representing a crocodile’s tooth, a superstitious adornment which associates him both with the diabolic and with the ‘insignia worn by high-ranking Merina’, the dynastic class of rulers who dominated Madagascan society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.22 Otherwise identified as an ‘ordinary man’, in the director’s words, and merely as a ‘good and true’ common soldier, according to the voiceover, this individualized Makibefo/Macbeth is seen as revealing in the cultivations of his appearance his predilection for aristocratic dominion. As a preface to its representation of larger developments, Makibefo draws the central player as transgressing the systems of categorization designed to keep his loyalty – and subordination – intact. The representation of Valy Makibefo/Lady Macbeth’s (Noeliny Dety) more obvious agitation for greatness carries in its wake the cultural specificities of the histories of Madagascar and the place of women in the local economy. Electing to live outside the village, Valy Makibefo/ Lady Macbeth, it is implied, entertains an alternative perspective on the world to that of the other villagers. Her alacrity in painting the local symbol of royalty on her husband’s forehead, and the emblematic devices displayed on her togalike shawl, announce her will to betterment. Printed with images of a coliseum, crowns and the fleur-de-lis, the lamba advertises both enduring monarchical ciphers and the attractions of empire, systems of rule that are simultaneously temporally anterior (classical civilization) and nationally distant (the fleur-de-lis is traditionally associated with the French royal family). Identified through migrant signs from other topographies, Valy Makibefo/Lady Macbeth is consistently

Alexander Abela

Figure 2: Makibefo/Macbeth (Martin Zia) covets the signs of royalty in Makibefo (dir. Alexander Abela, 1999).

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discovered as displaying a need to be something other than what she is: here, it is notable that she wears no traditional jewellery around her neck as if in rejection of an indigenous affiliation. Her suicide by drowning accords with the Malagasy belief that, as Aidan Southall states, ‘submergence [underwater] signifies failure or expulsion’, yet it is also thematically resonant in view of the character’s disconnection from community and suggested projection of self on to cultures not her own.23 The filmic attention that the director dedicates to Valy Makibefo/Lady Macbeth accords with the ways in which women in Makibefo are granted more prominent roles. Typical, for instance, is the invention of Valy Kidoure (Dety) and Valy Danikany (Todia), wives respectively for the Cawdor and Duncan equivalents. Yet, despite inclusion, and notwithstanding Valy Kidoure’s public lamentation for her husband’s murder, such women make little difference to broader narrative outcomes or dispensations of authority. In Valy Makibefo/Lady Macbeth’s social stasis, and in scenes that show her, in common with other women in the film, waiting or immobile, a ‘reproduction of gendered inequalities’, in Aihwa Ong’s phrase, is consistent.24 A scene from Souli encapsulates a comparable logic. Abi/Emilia enters the women’s co-operative that manufactures toy animals for tourist export only to find that she is mocked and castigated as a ‘city girl’ who will not ‘dirty her hands’. Here, an idea of honest and productive women’s ‘work’ is set alongside the suggestion that Abi/Emilia’s ‘work’ with Yann/Iago is degrading and dishonest. Also a type of Bianca, with her European style of dress and carefully managed braids, Abi functions as a potent signifier of prospective mobility: hers is a ‘black . . . gendered . . . body’ primarily imagined, to adopt a formulation of Katherine McKittrick, as ‘an indicator of spatial options and the ways in which geography can indicate racialized habitation patterns’.25 For Abi/Emilia, however, the film insists, the choices are restricted once she has been sexually distinguished, with Souli spotlighting the exclusion of the character from male trajectories of movement and underlining the limited spaces within which she operates. Border crossings may permeate the fabric of the narrative, but they do so, to judge from the thematic that is pursued by the auteur in both films, in socially ostracizing ways and in relation to larger shifts in the distribution of power and privilege. other worlds The distinctive conjuration of an absorption in other cultural environments is epitomized in the ways in which Makibefo and Souli allow their audiences to glimpse what lies outside the local worlds upon which they

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are so seemingly centred. With Makibefo, the suggestion of a different viewpoint is summoned via the figure of the narrator, who delivers speeches from Macbeth on the beach. In Souli (in the latest cut), an impression of an additional interpretation is introduced through the periodic appearances of the flute player, who provides a melodic accompaniment to the action from a busy port location. Each framing commentator looks to camera, suggesting an overseeing omnipotence, and each enjoys a choric, authoritative importance. In contemporary approximations of the Shakespearean language, Makibefo’s narrator summarizes and explains, substituting for the actors and becoming, in the process, a participant. Thus, at the point where the ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ (5.5.18) soliloquy is sounded, the narrator’s face is blank: his own voice overlays his impassive countenance, suggesting emotional identification and subjective involvement. The flute player in Souli is less obviously implicated in the narrative, but here, too, revealing connections are made, as when the film pauses at those moments concerned with the story of Thiossane – Carlos/Cassio rhapsodizes about ‘a coming of age story . . . it’s never been written down’ – only to cut to the musician plying his lonely trade on a windswept jetty. The flute player, too, even if verbally silent, tells a story, and the effect is to reinforce the filmic preoccupation with questions about discipleship and inheritance. Crucially, both narrator and flute player gain in intensity via their associations with African oral traditions. In Western Africa, in particular, the storyteller was conventionally known as the griot, a poet, distributor of news, praise singer and minstrel who, attached to important families, had as a chief responsibility, according to David Murphy and Patrick Williams, recounting the past ‘in terms of . . . values . . . considered essential to cultural cohesion and stability’.26 A further role comes into play when we consider the view of Ousmane Sembe`ne, the Senegalese director, that ‘the African filmmaker is like the griot . . . the conscience of his people . . . he has a definite social function to fulfill’.27 In the reference to the filmmaker’s ethical dimension can be discerned the cinematic auteur; indeed, the repeated bringing into play of western and nonwestern modes of representation in discussions of non-Anglophone cinema has produced a third term, the griauteur, a hybrid figure who stands at the intersection of competing and complementary ways of perceiving the world. Abela, it may be suggested, conjures through his internal storytellers the interrelations between folk culture and indigenous cinema and, in so doing, reflects on his own commitments as an auteur and takes a glance at what is at stake in his professional practice.

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Yet, Makibefo and Souli would seem to suggest, this hybrid figure is not necessarily an enabling one. The conjunction of two types creates disjunction, is reductive and lessens authority, a process which reflects some of the tensions and differences inherent in the griot and auteur categories.28 For, as the films demonstrate, whatever power inheres in these alternative tellers of Souli and Makibefo is ultimately compromised. In this sense, the representation illuminates how the ‘African heritage of oral traditions and memory’, as Mbye Cham argues, allows for ‘a critical and purposeful reflection on the ways history – in its varied constructions and uses – is inextricably implicated in systems of domination [and] subjugation’.29 The metal grille against which the flute player leans points up a construction of imprisonment, and, while narrator and flute player may shape and determine audience response, they labour, it is suggested, beneath the burdens of lent representational credentials. Held together with tape that mimics the colours of the French flag, the peule flute in Souli stands as a metaphor for a damaged African musical tradition beholden to other national priorities. A parallel idea is pursued in Makibefo. Because the narrator speaks a language (English) different from that of the Malagasy filmic drama, the implication is that he inhabits an exilic condition. Attired in a ubiquitous orange manual worker outfit, the flute player similarly brings to mind the typical e´migre´ and his menial employment. Extra filmic contexts are supportive here. Ali Wague´, who takes the part of the flute player, hails from the Republic of Guinea, formerly French Guinea; Gilbert Laumord, a dancer and actor who plays the narrator’s role, was born in Guadeloupe, an overseas department of France and an island scarred with struggles for black independence. The film’s account of displacement and dispossession in Souli is also, it might be argued, the fictional musician’s autobiographical trajectory, while Makibefo’s tale of tyranny, deepened via the narrator’s delivery, awakens memories of the agitations of European colonial practice. Touched with the energy of their real-life histories, narrator and flute player appear as destabilized types who, in the same moment as they circulate their stories, are locked in cycles of narrative compulsion and repetition. On the one hand, the suggestion is that these Shakespearean tellers have left their homelands behind; on the other, it is implied that, despite engagements with the present, such a movement has resulted only in the endless rehearsal of the pasts which they unwittingly incarnate. In the process of telling their tales the griauteurs of Makibefo and Souli have been recolonized: they have lost a sense of authorial agency. Such histories are glimpsed again in Souli and Makibefo in the ways in which both films imagine quasi-colonial processes as part of their

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narrative content. Part of the effect of Souli, in particular, hinges upon the representation of a variety of proto-capitalist themes. A common denominator is the predilection for profit, as when, for example, Buba (Ravelo), who stands in as local commentator and clown, tricks Carlos/Cassio into buying some warm beer: at once a replay of the gulling of Cassio by Iago and the ‘put but money in thy purse’ (1.3.338–9) refrain, the episode illuminates, too, the villager’s projected insertion of himself into a western economic modality. In the reverberations set up by the incident, the film goes on to chart the extent to which all of its players are in some senses exploitatively enmeshed. Hence, Abi/Emilia is discovered as seeing both Yann/Iago and Carlos/Cassio as passports to an alternative existence, and, while Carlos/Cassio is adamant that he seeks the story of Thiossane purely for academic reasons (‘It’s for my thesis’, he states), a parallel suggestion is that its acquisition would indissolubly involve him in wider networks of consumption. ‘Our friend is eager to sign the preface of a best-selling tale’, observes Souli/Othello, a judgement that underscores some of the means whereby narrative operates as another form of commodity. Tales connote trade, the argument runs, and are inextricably entangled in related functions of a global market mentality. What is played out in miniature is mirrored in the film’s more obviously enunciated contests and conflicts. So it is that Yann/Iago is imagined as having lost Mona/Desdemona ( Jeanne Antebi) to Souli/Othello and, hence, as having been sexually supplanted. The suggestion works, first, as a reanimation of the ‘it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets / [Othello] has done my office’ (1.3.369–70) imputation and, secondly, as an explanation for the compensatory energy with which Yann/Iago throws himself into his unscrupulous lobster export business. ‘I won’t give up my place so easily . . . not a second time’, reveals a Yann/Iago who chafes at the prospect of other economic competitors. Mona/Desdemona’s introduction of an icemaking machine to her fair trade collective spells an end to the trader’s monopoly and, in the interplay of characters that the film details, the figures of Mona/Desdemona (a latter-day version of the Allie Fox character from Paul Theroux’s 1982 novel, The Mosquito Coast) and Yann/Iago are consistently pitched against each other as overarching signifiers of a drive to deploy natural resources and perceived opportunity. The proto-capitalist meanings of these forms of enterprise are borne out by a directorial emphasis upon motifs of transport and concepts of place. Souli abounds in scenes that concern movement between one location and another, whether enabled either by Yann/Iago’s Land Rover or Mona/Desdemona’s ox cart. Ironically, of course, the ox cart proves

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more dramatic in terms of an effect on the local economy, but the more pressing point is that both means of conveyance analogize larger displacements and transactions between communities, cultures and even nations. In a discussion of the despatialization of global relations, Ulrich Beck argues that ‘social communities, and political action based upon them, can no longer be understood from the point of view of a single location’.30 Souli refracts this reading in hinting at the filaments that bind situation and mobility. The port where the flute player pursues his musical story, for example, is Dunkirk, a maritime conurbation that, even as it substitutes for Shakespeare’s Venice, connotes par excellence a history of global conflict, the excesses of industrial production and a place of embarkation and transit for human cargo. ‘Shakespeare’ is not too far removed here, with the associations of the port bringing to mind the film’s suggestion that small-scale operations (such as ice manufacture) can precipitate the evolution of larger-scale corporations, inequitable distributions of wealth and political privilege/protest. Such a sense of transformation is implied in the cinematography’s concentration on Dunkirk’s foundries, complexes, of course, primarily organized around making, moulding and fusing processes. Quasi-colonial endeavours (even ethical and salutary ones) are tied in Souli to their postindustrial incarnations and consequences. Neither Yann/Iago nor Mona/Desdemona, the film maintains, are satisfactory symbolic ciphers: both are at odds and, in view of the bloody denouement, both leave desecration in their wake. At base, Souli suggests, there is little difference between a women’s co-operative that makes toy giraffes (instructions on the hut wall betray that this is an imposed, rather than an indigenous, cultural practice) and the ways in which Yann/Iago arranges showings of generator-powered action movies to entertain his workers. Each species of activity is ensnared in the capitalist logic that spells other forms of dispossession and despoliation; each interchange is premised upon a system that divides and organizes in the ultimate interests of the dominant majority. The ‘characters are mythical’, states the director, ‘of the ways in which the West and Africa interact with each other’, and, in a realization of this analogy, Souli demonstrates that such interactions are apprehended both in the representation of outward locations and in the glimpses into an isolated society’s internal operations. Place and motion form a more forceful alliance in Makibefo’s realization of episodes of flight and return. With Kidoure/Cawdor, for instance, the attempted usurpation of Danikany/Duncan is granted far less attention than the condition the rebel inhabits as a fugitive. The society of Makibefo is portrayed primarily as one anxious about its borders,

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concerned with its own self-sufficiency, and threatened by the possibilities of depopulation and development. It is entirely in keeping with this perspective, therefore, that Danikany/Duncan is filmed always seated, and that Kidoure/Cawdor is branded a ‘traitor’ because he defects. Maureen Covell’s description of traditional Malagasy systems of rule emphasizes ‘fokonolona [or] . . . self-policing and self-defence’: this resembles what Anthony Giddens describes as a version of ‘the kinship system . . . organized in terms of place, where place has not yet become transformed by distanciated time–place relations’.31 Yet that effort to insist upon and institute the laws and practices of the local community might also be seen as a globally aware response to wider change. Ulf Hannerz notes that ‘countries may pursue policies of cutting themselves off . . . a kind of active anti-globalization which is in a dialectical relationship with globalization itself’, while Stephen Castles identifies ‘reactive moments’ in the global economy that ‘try to rescue myths of autonomous national communities and unitary identity’.32 By extension, it might be argued, Makibefo’s ultimate concern is with forms of organization that cannot offer a sustaining programme. With contacts and relations fractured and distributed, the society upon which the narrative centres is imagined as afflicted by a disjunction between territory, subjectivity and social intercourse: no longer do these constituents of community productively coalesce. In Makibefo/Macbeth and Valy Makibefo/Lady Macbeth’s assumption of Danikany/Duncan and Valy Danikany’s royal places these suggestions find a particularly succinct statement: the newly crowned couple are pictured presiding over a village that has lost its inhabitants. The image of an abandoned ox cart implies a hurried removal, while an accompanying shot of empty houses points up a sense of desolation and deprivation. By the close of the action, it is suggested, the fugitive experience has become a collective theme: Makidofy/Macduff ( Jean-Noe¨l) leaves the landmass altogether; Makibefo/Macbeth evolves from a fugitive-catcher to a fugitive-maker; and a politics of terror holds sway over a shrunken and dwindling populace. ‘Ours’, Dennis Kennedy writes, ‘has been the century of global disruption, the century of the refugee’, and what Abela moves towards underscoring in the final stages of Makibefo is just such a scenario, a state of affairs in which the individual is, in Anthony M. Messina and Gallya Lahav’s words, obliged to leave ‘his or her country due to fear of persecution’.33 If Madagascar, in the director’s conceiving of his subject, can also conjure Africa, then the representation of the society of Makibefo might be seen as suggesting some of the demographic crises of non-western regions and the particularities of enforced unsettlement.

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Both Makibefo and Souli appear to respond to the realities of global movements by subscribing in their respective conclusions to the mores and belief systems of traditional communities. A typical instance is the way in which Makibefo/Macbeth, after some initial resistance, is pictured bowing before Malikomy/Malcolm as a prequel to his sacrificial death. The episode highlights a filmic rendition of the cult of fomban-drazana or ancestral practice; as John Mack explains, ‘the foundation of Malagasy ideas is the notion that everyone by virtue of the date and time of their birth inherits a particular destiny (vintana)’.34 In submitting to his own death, Makibefo/Macbeth, it is suggested, finds that a preordained system has run its natural and institutionalized course. Cast in a similar mould is the scene in which Souli/Othello, after he has murdered Mona/Desdemona in a fit of jealous rage (the key property that triggers the denouement is not the handkerchief but a bracelet that ends up on Carlos/ Cassio’s arm), is knifed to death by Yann/Iago in a bloody embrace. The episode links directly to the film’s opening and to a sequence intended for the re-release of the film: in the director’s words, ‘Souli slowly walks towards the camera through a “mystical” passage of tall cactuses. As he advances we hear his voiceover. We understand he’s doing the dance of the passage – the transition from earth to heaven.’ This constitutes, then, a self-consciously anticipatory moment in which Souli/ Othello is primarily identified through nation- and culture-specific discourses and conventions. To adopt a formulation of Sea´n McLoughlin, there is, in this separation of the ambiroa (soul) from the body, a ‘nostalgic emphasis on the particular “chains of memory” . . . associated with “tradition” and “community”’ as a means of restoring ‘certainty in the face of cultural “translation”’.35 At another level, the films’ endings are shot through with traces of the very non-traditional developments that they have paradoxically both resisted and entertained. The return of Malikomy/Malcolm in Makibefo, for example, might be seen as a pertinent illustration of what Roger Rouse has termed ‘migrant circuits’ – the movement of individuals or communities away from and back to their place of origin.36 What Makibefo/Macbeth destroys, the film maintains, can be renewed, but only in the context of cultural cross-pollination and the importation of energy from elsewhere. Souli/Othello, too, is not unilaterally imagined: the peace that he asks for in a voiceover at the start is in shocking contrast to the violence of his demise, while the slow prelude to the death itself hints, as in Makibefo, at a knowing personal decision and a suicidal will. Yet this is not necessarily to argue that the films’ engagement with conflicts precipitated by an experience of other

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Figure 3: Souli/Othello (Makena Diop) approaches a knife-wielding Yann/Iago (Aure´lien Recoing) in Souli (dir. Alexander Abela, 2004).

environments is wholly disabling. Here, Abela’s envisioned ‘passage’ episode in Souli is once again central, since it simultaneously demonstrates that, according to the director, the ‘ancestors are welcoming’ the protagonist: before he joins them, however, he ‘must tell his story’. In a discussion of ‘incommensurable differences’, Homi Bhabha writes that ‘interstitial’ and ‘disjunctive’ spaces of ‘late capitalism’ are ‘crucial for the emergence of new historical subjects’: with this statement in mind, Souli, it might be suggested, aspires to establish the emancipatory personal and representational possibilities that the encounter with borders facilitates, even if at this precise moment that aspiration is not fully realized.37 Despite his lived cultural confusions, Souli/Othello in death, it is implied, enters a communicative third space which, because immortalized, may have the potential to involve other audiences beyond a strictly limited national and cultural purchase.

local histories No doubt linked to the will to move from the local to something broader is the way in which Abela conceives of his work as possessing a universal relevance. In interview he agitates for a filmic modality that ‘can be

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understood anywhere’, while, in press releases for Makibefo, the ‘universal reach of . . . Macbeth’ is highlighted as a prime Shakespearean characteristic.38 A similar take on Macbeth is offered in the narrator’s opening presentation of ‘a land washed by the waves’ where ‘a tribe of people lived in sight of sands’. The lack of geographical reference, coupled with the evocation of eternal values, work to guide the Bard towards a realm defined by generality, transhistoricity and semi-mythical familiarity. Yet, as Dennis Kennedy argues, ‘universality . . . derives not from . . . transcendence but from . . . malleability’, and such is the way in which Shakespeare is shaped and adapted in Makibefo and Souli that the local and the indigenous, ghostlike, keep coming back.39 When a French vocable occasionally strays into the Malagasy flow of Makibefo, or when the hired murderer is seen puffing at a temporally incongruous cigar, for instance, an eruption of the particular becomes strikingly apparent. The particular is specifically identified in one of the concluding on-screen announcements to Makibefo, which runs: The Antandroy people of Madagascar who played the characters and helped in the making of this film are an ancient tribe with a truly great sense of pride, honour and tradition. A poor people in what is already a poor country, they have few possessions and little knowledge of the outside world . . . The majority of the actors have never seen a television let alone a film, and have never acted before in their lives.

The statement demonstrates a discrete trajectory of exclusion and ostracization, yet it also illustrates the director’s commitment to teasing out the continuing resonances of his chosen location’s history. Behind the overarching longings of the filmic endeavour lies a fractured and still evolving narrative of deterritorialization and disequilibrium: the universal in Makibefo and Souli is inevitably confronted by the particular, and in such a way as to illuminate the characteristic complexions of Madagascan modernity. Madagascar in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as one historian remarks, can be described as a ‘disarticulated economy’ with ‘a non-articulated communications system’.40 In part this is a by-product of an earlier history of conversion and conquest: in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries French slave traders attempted settlement; over the course of the nineteenth century Christian missionaries arrived; and in 1896 the Malagasy National Movement, the Menalamba, was founded and the state finally ceded place to institutionalized French control and dominion.41 An armed rebellion of 1947 in which over a hundred thousand died had as its stated aim the achievement of an independent state,

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while the violent response that came in its wake engendered a traumatic legacy.42 Full independence was only granted in 1960, but that event in turn was the prelude to a series of internecine contests and continuing social unrest.43 In the contours of present-day Madagascar these and other conflicts are adumbrated: the nation is host to two main linguistic systems; it exhibits a belief system split between Christian and ‘traditional’ paradigms; and it consistently makes visible social and geographical economic polarities. Previous sections of this chapter have suggested some of the passing ways in which the director encodes the histories of Madagascar in Makibefo and Souli; a more general sense of his preoccupation with the country’s past is evidenced in a repeated emphasis upon the previous existences of individuals or artefacts. Not only is Makibefo, for example, framed by images of totems that, as John Mack states, declare ‘the wealth and status of the dead’; the film is at the same time phrased in the anterior tense and concerned with what is via a contemplation of what was.44 Souli, too, centres upon how the present is played upon by the past, not least in the representation of the search for a story that, although ‘ancient’, is resolutely of the moment. Such an attention is made all the more obvious in the light of the films’ corresponding concern with the future. Whatever is anticipated, however, is tinged with a muted sense of reservation. Typical is Buba’s prediction in Souli that Abi/Emilia will enjoy ‘a good life, but [that she will also] pay the price’. Characteristic, too, is Makibefo’s incarnation of Malikomy/Malcolm, who at the close is flanked by warriors and a small fleet of ocean-confident boats, pointing up both the Malagasy idea that ‘emergence [from water] signifies success’ and the contemporary notion that ‘new communities . . . are likely to be increasingly’ non-local ‘in scope and power’.45 That this is simultaneously a state of play that evokes Madagascar’s past is made clear in the director’s gesture to a stereotypical kind of ethnography – the paired images of an erect, mobile and technologically superior Malikomy/Malcolm and a crouched, reduced and still Makibefo/Macbeth, who, metaphorically trapped by nets and a beach-bound boat, seems to have reverted to a species of ‘primitivism’. The second major way in which Abela allows Madagascan history to seep into the films is at the level of language. Typical of arthouse films targeted at international audiences, Makibefo and Souli subtitle the dialogue. Souli is particularly dense in this respect, stacking on top of each other both French translations of Malagasy and English translations of French in a visible rendering of the film’s linguistically hybridized setting

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and subject. Such a procedure, it might be suggested, bears out Homi K. Bhabha’s claim that ‘in the act of translation the content . . . is . . . overwhelmed and alienated by the form of signification’; one might also argue, as does Naoki Sakai, that, in view of the supplanting of one set of systems for another, the films’ subtitles constitute a ‘political manoeuvre’ that is ‘always complicit with the building [and] transforming . . . of power relations’.46 Certainly, the hypothesis might be supported by the director’s admission, in interview, that, in Makibefo, the ‘subtitles are not the exact words they say in Malagasy . . . It’s closer to what I was asking them to say. It’s in between’. Or, to put the point rather more bluntly, Abela speaks for the culture and, via the provision of alternative readings, condenses and distorts.47 To hold this against the director, however, would, I think, be a mistake. The reification of auteurism in some circles notwithstanding, no author ‘employs a completed language system’; in addition, as Dirk Delabastita in a study of the ethics of translation asserts, ‘the scholar has to direct his/her attention to the conditions and constraints in the receptor culture that create the terms in which this reconstitution of the foreign text takes place’.48 As the director explains, ‘[we wanted] to do a talking film in a foreign language without subtitles. It was to be a film where dialogue would become noise, not to transport emotion or explain an action.’ Of course, the film in its current manifestation is not cast in this mould, yet a trace of the utopian project remains in the ways in which Makibefo – during its theatrical run, at least – resists subtitling the opening and closing score, the chant at the meal to welcome Danikany/Duncan and the song that accompanies the wrestling competition. In presumed resistance to the distancing effect of translation, and via a move that plays down the discriminations that subtitles potentially generate, Abela excuses himself and elects to dispense with the recasting of language altogether, favouring a filmic method that speaks for itself.49 If the subtitle, in Amresh Sinha’s words, is a ‘superimposition’ that ‘tears’ the audience away from the ‘visual and acoustic matrix’, in Makibefo, at least, in one version of its existence, it is disallowed from exercising a totalizing control.50 Inconsistency in subtitling creates interest in those voices that are not affected. ‘Who speaks? Where do they speak from? And for whom?’ asks Robert Carr in a discussion of postmodern feminisms, and his questions are particularly germane to films which, because made in Madagascar, implicitly concern themselves with linguistic hierarchies.51 The preoccupation is held in play in the questions surrounding the narrator’s voice in Makibefo and is extended into a constituent narrative component in Souli:

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Carlos/Cassio, for instance, regrets that his hero chooses not to be ‘edited anymore’ in a statement that makes unwittingly visible the white frames of reference that determine the reception of postcolonial utterances. Via Souli/Othello, who notes that he ‘only writes for myself now: it’s a way of protecting myself’, the film points up the process whereby the nonAnglophonic voice is both commodified – what Rustom Bharucha has labelled elsewhere a form of ‘cultural tourism’ – and manipulated and misused.52 Powerfully implied is the bruising of Souli/Othello at the hands of the western literary establishment, and it is perhaps not accidental that several scenes show Mona/Desdemona anointing or massaging her lover: his body, it seems, is in pain. ‘If we are to understand the social figure of a globalization of personal life,’ writes Ulrich Beck, ‘we must focus on the oppositions involved in stretching between different places.’53 An insistent element of Souli/Othello’s fame is a sense of linguistic splitting or stretching: the world, we are led to understand, has welcomed him, but in such a way as to damage and ultimately oppose continuing modes of public articulation. ‘From the point of view of . . . modern societies,’ writes Zygmunt Bauman, ‘all . . . “exchange” is unequal and must remain unequal.’54 It is perhaps too great an argumentative leap to suggest that Abela also reaffirms in his exchanges with Madagascar the postcolonial and global themes that are his subject; nevertheless, in part because of the films’ ethnographic subtexts, the need to discuss his role arises. One of the most famous ethnographic films, Nanook of the North (dir. Robert Flaherty, 1922), acquired a pejorative reputation when it emerged that the ‘protagonists enact a lifestyle on screen that no longer corresponds to actuality’: in the absence of drama, the director’s decision was to elect to imagine it.55 Abela’s aesthetics and, in particular, his improvisation in Makibefo of a species of tribal dress – the Antandroy ‘didn’t have those loincloths’, he states, ‘the sound engineer brought a huge sheet . . . to make a reflector . . . he cut strips out and painted and printed . . . patterns’ – could be seen as part and parcel of this practice and indicative of a slippage, in the director’s mind, between a modern and a mythic Madagascar. ‘If the generally accepted (material, sedentary) manifestations of civilization do exist, then an ethnographic template is laid over them’, states Keith Richards in a discussion of filming in Third World locations and the cineaste’s unconscious paternalism.56 Does Makibefo, then, represent a type of ‘travel cinema’ in which imperial history is recreated?57 And to what extent are those legacies conjured at the level of a visual imaginary?58 These kinds of questions are highlighted in the director’s admission that

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‘the Antandroys’ . . . initial motivation was the prospect of earning some money’, which prompts speculation about the implications of the economic transaction and a potential disruption to the systems of the community – the effects of a Shakespearean baptism.59 Certainly, at one point during the production of Makibefo, conflict was in the air: ‘the film needed another two weeks of shooting, which I had to cut short’, states the director, continuing, ‘there was a group who . . . were suspicious . . . jealousy started to come . . . people . . . said “Can we be in the film now?”, and we said “Sorry, it’s too late, you can’t be in the film”, and they couldn’t understand why . . . I felt we had come to a danger point, and we had to go, it was . . . very sudden’. The details are not elaborated upon, but the implication is clear: dialogue had broken down, with a construction of Shakespeare’s timeless pertinence provoking an historically specific dispute over meaning, interpretation and authority. From another perspective, however, the ultimate effect of both Makibefo and Souli is less confrontational than this reading suggests. If the current ‘model’ of the auteur, as Rosanna Maule argues, is ‘collaborative’, then this is reflected in the ways in which Makibefo is conceived of as a space of exchange and participation.60 As the film’s concluding on-screen announcement states: ‘We would like to thank the Antandroy people for their co-operation, their enthusiasm and their hospitality . . . Without them Makibefo would never have lived.’ Implicit here is a type of cultural polysemy, with the encounter between the filmmaker and the people appearing to operate in a back-and-forth fashion that bespeaks a shared endeavour. As the director states, commenting upon his method, ‘we devised a script together, and Macbeth soon became Makibefo, a work of two cultures united by Shakespeare’.61 Although it is Abela’s mediating voice which dominates (the auteur might seem the point of creativity), the film also makes available the perspective of the Antandroy in the enterprise, as in the refrain to the accompanying song, ‘Olo ty tadidy / We will remember a man’, which runs, ‘If you like to follow it to the end, / We will remember that story together’ – the invitation is for an harmonious recreation. Moreover, arguably in a move that went against the commercial dictates of the industry, Abela took the finished film of Makibefo back to Madagascar for a week-long tour, which was inaugurated by an on-thebeach ‘world premiere’. The activities suggest a nexus of mutual ties and demonstrate that the reworking of Shakespeare can forge unexpected forms of global connectivity. ‘The signature of the author,’ writes Dudley Andrew, ‘is a mark on the surface of the text signalling its source [and] . . . embeds . . . a . . . fourth

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dimension, the temporal process that brought the text into being.’62 Interestingly, in contradistinction to the prioritization of his name in the DVD version of the film, Makibefo in its theatrical manifestation subordinates Abela to the business of the film’s making: the director is only mentioned after the expression of gratitude, and it is the collaborative experience that takes precedence. Even when, during the end credits, the identity of the auteur is revealed, a subsequent announcement once again makes clear that ‘process’ is deemed of greater importance than ‘signature’. The ‘zebu ox’, it is stated, ‘was sacrificed in our honour according to the customs of the Antandroy people and was distributed to the families involved in the making of Makibefo’. At once an apologia for the benefit of western audiences, the explanation also stresses mutual respect: the zebu, a symbol of wealth in Madagascan society, is put to a communal purpose, affirming the value of a culturally legitimated act of social inclusion. At least at first sight, a narrative stress upon comparable networks of collaboration would seem to be missing from Souli, if only because the central characters appear unable to agree as to the essential mode through which the story of Thiossane might be communicated. Fiercely protective of his mother’s ‘lineage’, Souli/Othello contemplates transcribing his precious burden, but then resists, concluding, ‘without an initiation into the oral tradition, how do you decipher the blanks between the words?’ By contrast, Carlos/Cassio is as passionately persuaded that ‘Thiossane’ exists in written form and searches for it at every opportunity. The difference in viewpoint betrays a larger cultural collision, yet the prospect of interaction is not dismissed; rather, it is conjured in the film’s melding of techno music and the traditional piped score and in seemingly innocuous scenes, as when Buba laughingly aids Carlos/Cassio in the erection of his tent: the episode establishes that efforts at exploitation can be superseded by gestures towards reciprocity. As the film demonstrates, however, Carlos/ Cassio is ultimately excluded from any suggestion of collaborative relations, for the denouement reveals that it is Abi/Emilia who comes to occupy the disciple role. Dying in Abi/Emilia’s arms, Souli/Othello is represented, like Harry Lime, as nodding to convey the tale. For her part, Abi/Emilia is discovered as shuddering at the point of what amounts to a psychic transmission of her inheritance. The sequence is instrumental in finally taking Carlos/Cassio out of the picture, and it is striking that, while he is again rummaging for a script, the story is being communicated just beyond him on the beach. But the privileging of Abi/Emilia is not without its difficulties. It is premised upon the suggestion of a reformation in character and it would seem to suggest that only Africa can speak

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for Africa: only women, the argument runs, might figure as oral guardians. Transmission, finally, must take place within a physical/magical realm, and other cultural and national actors are disallowed from playing a part. If the narrative end leaves questions unanswered, the music that accompanies the closing credits brings them into better resolution. Souli re-edited replaces the score earlier written by Deborah Mollison with a new theme – that Abela commissioned – composed by Ali Wague´ and David Aubaile: a male and female voice join in a traditional African song, and the tale that is told concerns Abi/Emilia’s travel and work abroad. Now, it is asserted, having given up on the West to protect her culture, she is on the point of another journey: ‘we who have immigrated’, the lyrics announce, ‘are ready to return to our homeland’. Immediately noticeable is that the conjunction of perspectives underwrites the idea of male–female collaboration (the voices analogize those of Abi/Emilia and Souli/Othello): vital, too, is the fact that the song comprises a performance of a narrative. In these additional imaginings, Abi/Emilia remains peripatetic: her status functions so as to recall and celebrate Souli/ Othello’s soul in passage, to assert a powerful equation between rest and mobility, and to declare the virtues of what Rosi Braidotti terms a ‘nomadic subjectivity’.63 The commerce enunciated here traverses a

Figure 4: Souli/Othello (Makena Diop) communes with Abi/Emilia (Fatou d’Diaye) in Souli (dir. Alexander Abela, 2004).

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number of levels: the director deploys a new imagined history for Madagascar and what it symbolizes; the point of origin defines but does not confine communication; a sense of independent purpose has been arrived at and a plural construction of possibility is afforded. afterlives Given his multiple associations, it is highly appropriate that the questions introduced by Makibefo and Souli are conducted around the body of Shakespeare. Both the idea of an ancient tale and the cultivation of ancestry are energized by being enfolded in a figure that, in the popular imagination, is indelibly tied to issues centred upon writing, lineage, symbolism and iconicity. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, of course, the Bard is also an exilic author and migrant. Interestingly, these more recent journeys undertaken by Shakespeare are also refracted in the films. The leather tome (a weathered edition of Shakespeare) from which the narrator reads in Makibefo, for instance, served as a chief property in occasional theatrical realizations of the filmic narrative. That is, the same film, stripped of the on-screen narrator, was presented in individual nation-states by an indigenous, ‘live’ storyteller.64 Each time a performance took place, the resident storyteller would add to the book his or her ‘translation’ of the text, creating another Bardic representation and an increasingly polyphonic corpus of material. At once, the procedure recalls the moment, during the shooting of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1997), when the director/filmmaker was presented, as Russell Jackson notes, with a ‘small red-bound copy of the play that successive actors have passed on to each other with the condition that the recipient should give it in turn to the finest Hamlet of the next generation’.65 Where Makibefo parts company with this tradition, however, is in its non-Anglophonic emphases: its Macbeth is not only a product of multiple cross-cultural readings, but also constitutes a still evolving, as opposed to fixed, ‘Shakespeare’. The likelihood of other Shakespeares emerging from a process of reorganization might also be inferred from the intertextual resonances with which Makibefo appears to play. In his garb, appearance and vernacular departures from his volume, the narrator brings to mind Caliban (Michael Clark) in Prospero’s Books (dir. Peter Greenaway, 1991): the apparent reference back to this earlier island-bound Shakespeare raises the prospect of further Bardic endeavours that, spanning classes and nations, press at, while expanding upon, existing representational boundaries.

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These must, however, be posited as readings that the wider interpretive community brings to the productions themselves. In interview, Abela confesses to a lack of awareness of more obvious counterparts to his own initiative, including Shakespeare on the Estate (dir. Penny Woolcock, 1994) and The Children’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (dir. Christine Edzard, 2001), works also distinguished by their efforts to bring Shakespeare to an untried cast. Instead, Abela’s achievement is closer in spirit to fieldwork instances of anthropologists rehearsing Shakespeare to the subjects of their studies and closer in execution to quasi-ethnographic cinematic versions of mythic and international stories, such as It’s All True (dir. Orson Welles, 1942), Medea (dir. Pier-Paolo Pasolini, 1969) and Tabu (dir. F. W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty, 1931).66 Thomas Healey reminds us that ‘anthropological inquiry into the meaning of cultures . . . has been especially influential on New Historicist thought’, and it may well be the case that the director’s approach to his materials – and his preoccupation with Madagascar as symptom and cipher – owe at least some of their inspiration to the critical orientation that Shakespearean commentators have detected in other disciplines.67 No anthropological enquiry, as this chapter has argued, takes place in isolation. Reflecting upon the afterlife of Makibefo, the director states: The deal was we would . . . come back to Madagascar on a regular basis . . . the second time we came back, we [brought] a lot of nets and hooks . . . we were supposed to bring back eight pirogues . . . [but] haven’t done [that] yet. I’ve brought [only] three . . . the idea was that if ever the film made money . . . a proportion would go back to [the] . . . fishermen.

Arresting here is the way in which Abela operates entirely in keeping with recommended fieldwork practices: essential, according to Timothy Asch, is that the ethnographic filmmaker should ‘make a royalty arrangement with the people . . . and see that they are’ properly compensated.68 Arguably less of an adventurer-colonialist than an ethnographer-auteur working to type, Abela respects and maintains the balance. And, although some of his methods may suggest otherwise – indeed, it is impossible to pursue certain kinds of filmmaking without being accused of cultural malfeasance – the director endeavours not to disrupt; here, the other dominant image of Madagascar in the popular imaginary comes to mind, that of a fragile ecosystem or, as it has been termed, ‘a self-contained reserve of unparalleled natural diversity’ and ‘priceless . . . treasures’.69 In the creation of Makibefo and Souli, and in reflections on their place in a larger corpus of representation, there is a pronounced ethical subtext.

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What is the likelihood that Abela’s plans will come to pass? The product of changing forces in the industry, Abela has not produced a full-length feature since Souli in 2004, although there have been notable documentaries and screenwriting credits.70 Makibefo and Souli, it seems, belonged with a moment of efflorescence – a phase of Shakespearean auteurism or a Francophone love affair with the Bard – that was dependent upon a conjunction of particular personal and economic factors.71 France, one might suggest, is no longer the home of auteur cinema, however much we still associate its films with those constructions; Abela returned to ‘origins’, but at a cost. Yet these must remain speculations only. More positively, the release of Makibefo on DVD points to another development, a Shakespearean rehabilitation. The fact that the DVD came out in 2008, nine years after the film’s release, hints at a new interest both in the films themselves and in the wider genre of world cinema: as the website claims, there is the genuine expectation of the broader circulation of ‘Shakespeare adaptations from beyond the conventional margins of mainstream cinema’.72 Abela’s ‘de´but’ could be generative of other kinds of experiment: other beginnings are in the offing. The possibility of further forms of exposure for world Shakespearean filmmaking also recalls structures of visibility, such as academic discourse, in which ethical positions can be advertised in the same moment as commercial potential might be signalled. As Dudley Andrew writes, the concept of the ‘auteur . . . thicken[s] a text with the past of its coming into being and with the future of our being with it’.73 At a time when vast swathes of Madagascar, already at risk from deforestation, are being bought up by countries such as South Korea for controversial modes of intensive agricultural production, films such as Makibefo and Souli not only stimulate awareness of the significances of Shakespeare’s multiple incarnations but also suggest that we, too, as critics and consumers, carry authorial responsibilities.74 N O T ES 1 ‘Makibefo’: A Film by Alexander Abela based on William Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’, DVD booklet (Berlin: Scoville Film, 2008), n.p. 2 See Kate Ince, ‘Introduction’, in Kate Ince, ed., Five Directors: Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon (Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 6; and Rosanna Maule, Beyond Auteurism: New Directions in Authorial Film Practices in France, Italy and Spain since the 1980s (Bristol and Chicago, IL: Intellect, 2008), p. 14. 3 Robert Stam, Film Theory: an Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 83, 85.

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4 See Bernard F. Dick, Anatomy of a Film, 3rd edn (New York: Saint Martin’s, 1998), pp. 164, 167, 172; Brian Michael Goss, Global Auteurs: Politics in the Films of Almodo´var, von Trier, and Winterbottom (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 42, 53. 5 One may cite here too the BBC2/BBC HD documentary, Madagascar, which, according to the British press, shows a country of ‘primeval calm and strangeness . . . [with] mythically weird landscapes’ (‘Pick of the Day: Madagascar’, Radio Times, 5–11 February 2011, 92). 6 ‘Makibefo’: An Alexander Abela Film based on William Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’, press booklet (London: Blue Eye Films, 2000), p. 4. 7 Keith Richards, ‘Export Mythology: Primitivism and Paternalism in Pasolini, Hopper and Herzog’, in Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, eds., Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (London and New York: Wallflower, 2006), p. 57. 8 Courtney Lehmann, Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 11. 9 Dudley Andrew, ‘The Unauthorized Auteur Today’, in Robert Stam and Toby Miller, eds., Film and Theory: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 22; Dick, Anatomy of a Film, p. 167. 10 Graham Roberts and Heather Wallis, Introducing Film (London: Edward Arnold, 2001), p. 129. 11 Andrew, ‘Unauthorized Auteur Today’, p. 26; Goss, Global Auteurs, p. 53; Roberts and Wallis, Introducing Film, p. 129. 12 Interviews between Alexander Abela and Mark Thornton Burnett, 15 August 2006 and 24 November 2007. Unless otherwise stated, all Abela quotations are taken from these interviews and appear in the text or notes. 13 Ramona Wray, ‘Shakespeare on Film in the New Millennium’, Shakespeare, 3.2 (2007), 279. 14 Laurent Creton and Anne Ja¨ckel, ‘A Certain Idea of the Film Industry’, in Michael Temple and Michael Wit, eds., The French Cinema Book (London: BFI, 2004), p. 209; Maule, Beyond Auteurism, pp. 14, 16, 17, 53, 54. Makibefo has been shown at the following festivals: Festival d’Amiens (France); Rencontres Internationales de Cine´ma a` Paris (France); Rencontres Cine´ma de Manosque (France); Festival Cine´ma d’Ale`s (France); Rencontre du Cine´ma Britannique d’Abbeville (France); Regard sur le Cine´ma d’Afrique du Sud (France); Festival de la Rochelle (France); Festival de Lama, Corse (Corsica); BFM International Film Festival (Great Britain); Inspired by Shakespeare Season, BFI Southbank (UK); Taormina Film Festival (Italy), Pesaro Film Festival (Italy), Vues d’Afrique, Montre´al (Canada); and Pan-African Film Festival (US). 15 Souli was shown at the following festivals: 21st International Festival du Film Francophone de Namur (France); Festival de Saint-Denis (France); and Montre´al World Film Festival: Cinema of Africa (Canada). 16 Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 16. Carlos/Cassio’s significance as an

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17 18 19

20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27

28 29

30 31

32

51

ethnographer who has travelled accords intertextually with the real-life actor’s status as a figure ‘in transit between languages and audiences’ whose ‘desirability’ is linked to ‘symbolic and social delocations’ (see Chris Perriam, ‘Eduardo Noriega’s Transnational Projections’, in Lu´cia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah, eds., Theorizing World Cinema [London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012], pp. 77, 79, 82). John Mack, Madagascar: Island of the Ancestors (London: British Museum Publications, 1986), p. 62. Ibid., p. 66. Macbeth, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 4.1.109. Unless otherwise stated, all further references appear in the text. Othello, in Norton Shakespeare, 1.1.88–9. Unless otherwise stated, all further references appear in the text. Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999), pp. 107, 108. Mack, Madagascar, p. 52. Aidan Southall, ‘Common Themes in Malagasy Culture’, in Conrad Phillip Kottack, Jean-Aime´ Rakotoarisoa, Aidan Southall and Pierre Ve´rin, eds., Madagascar: Society and History (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1986), p. 415. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: the Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 11. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p. 7. David Murphy and Patrick Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors (Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 7–8. Franc¸oise Pfaff, ‘The Uniqueness of Ousmane Sembe`ne’s Cinema’, in Samba Gadjigo, Ralph H. Faulkingham, Thomas Cassirer and Reinhard Sander, eds., Ousmane Sembe`ne: Dialogues with Critics and Writers (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), p. 15. See Murphy and Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema, p. 8. Mbye Cham, ‘Film and History in Africa: a Critical Survey of Current Trends and Tendencies’, in Franc¸oise Pfaff, ed., Focus on African Films (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 50. Ulrich Beck, The Brave New World of Work (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), p. 155. Maureen Covell, Madagascar: Politics, Economics and Society (London and New York: Pinter, 1987), p. 15; Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), p. 101. Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 18; Stephen Castles, ‘Migration’, in David Theo Goldberg and John Solomos, eds., A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 577.

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33 Dennis Kennedy, ‘Afterword: Shakespearean Orientalism’, in Dennis Kennedy, ed., Foreign Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 294; Anthony M. Messina and Gallya Lahav, ‘Concepts and Trends’, in Anthony M. Messina and Gallya Lahav, eds., The Migration Reader: Exploring Politics and Policies (London and Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), p. 10. 34 Mack, Madagascar, p. 39. 35 Sea´n McLoughlin, ‘Migration, Diaspora and Transnationalism: Transformations of Religion and Culture in a Globalizing Age’, in John R. Hinnels, ed., The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 534. 36 Roger Rouse, ‘Making Sense of Settlement: Class Transformation, Cultural Struggle, and Transnationalism Among Mexican Migrants in the United States’, in Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, eds., Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity and Nationalism Reconsidered (New York: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1992), p. 45. 37 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 217, 218. 38 ‘Makibefo’, press booklet, p. 4. 39 Kennedy, ‘Afterword’, p. 301. 40 Covell, Madagascar, p. 9. 41 Ibid., pp. 14, 16; Bill Freund, The Making of Contemporary Africa: the Development of African Society since 1800, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998), p. 62. 42 Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 64; Covell, Madagascar, pp. 17, 28; Freund, Making of Contemporary Africa, p. 179. 43 Robert Cabanes, ‘Madagascar and Mozambique: the Global–Local Dialectic’, Science, Technology and Society, 8.2 (2003), 346; ‘Madagascan coup attempt fails’, Guardian, 22 November 2010, 20; David Smith, ‘Political turmoil and “timber mafia” threaten island’s lemurs’, Guardian, 18 November 2009, p. 22. 44 Mack, Madagascar, p. 84. 45 Southall, ‘Common Themes’, p. 415; Paul Kennedy and Victor Roudometof, ‘Transnationalism in a Global Age’, in Paul Kennedy and Victor Roudometof, eds., Communities across Borders: New Immigrants and Transnational Cultures (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 7. 46 Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 227; Naoki Sakai, ‘Translation’, Theory, Culture and Society, 23.2–3 (2006), 72. 47 See Brenda Longfellow, ‘The Great Dance: Translating the Foreign in Ethnographic Film’, in Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour, eds., Subtitles: on the Foreignness of Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 342. 48 Andrew, ‘Unauthorized Auteur Today’, p. 26; Dirk Delabastita, ‘More Alternative Shakespeares’, in A. Luis Pujante and Ton Hoenselaars, eds.,

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50 51

52 53 54 55

56 57

58

59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66

67

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Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), p. 117. The DVD version of Makibefo caters to a viewer’s desire for transparency and knowledge by including in the accompanying booklet a translation into English of two of the film’s songs, ‘Olo ty tadidy’/‘We will remember a man’ and ‘Angalatsiky’/‘He stole from us’, suggesting different forms of visibility for the word and the contingent nature of the auteur’s influence. Amresh Sinha, ‘The Use and Abuse of Subtitles’, in Egoyan and Balfour, eds., Subtitles, p. 173. Robert Carr, ‘Crossing the First World/Third World Divides: Testimonial, Transnational Feminisms, and the Postmodern Condition’, in Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 156. Rustom Bharucha, The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization (London: Athlone, 2000), p. 53. Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), p. 75. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 213. See Freya Schiwy, ‘Film, Indigenous Video, and the Lettered City’s Visual Economy’, in Sara Castro-Klaren, ed., A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), p. 662. Richards, ‘Export Mythology’, p. 56. See Christine Bolus-Reichert, ‘Imaginary Geographies: the Colonial Subject in Contemporary French Cinema’, in Christina Degli-Espoti, ed., Postmodernism in the Cinema (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 1998), p. 167. See Kathleen Kuehnast, ‘Visual Imperialism and the Export of Prejudice: an Exploration of Ethnographic Film’, in Peter Crawford and David Turton, eds., Film as Ethnography (Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 184. ‘Makibefo’, press booklet, p. 5. Maule, Beyond Auteurism, p. 24. ‘Makibefo’, press booklet, p. 5. Andrew, ‘Unauthorized Auteur Today’, p. 25. Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: on Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), p. 60. Such a version of the film was shown with a Caribbean actor as the narrator at the Festival Off in Avignon and with a Czech actor in the role at the International Theatre Festival, Hrade Kra´love´. Kenneth Branagh, ‘Hamlet’ by William Shakespeare: Screenplay and Introduction (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), p. 211. See Laura Bohannon, ‘Shakespeare in the Bush’, Natural History, 75.8–9 (1966), 29–33; Robert Koehler, ‘Makibefo’, Variety, 18 February 2003; Annick Peigne´-Giuly, ‘Shakespeare sur mer’, Libe´ration, 17 October 2001. Thomas Healey, New Latitudes: Theory and English Renaissance Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), p. 63.

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68 Timothy Asch, ‘The Ethics of Ethnographic Film-making’, in Crawford and Turton, eds., Film as Ethnography, p. 202. 69 A. A. Gill, ‘Special Branch’, Sunday Times: Magazine, 11 November 2007, 29; Daniel Howden, ‘What is going on in Madagascar, and can the African island republic survive?’, Independent, 18 March 2009, 30. 70 Beyond Limits 3D (2009) is a documentary, directed by Abela, about freediving; Zarafa (dir. Re´mi Bezanc¸on and Jean-Christophe Lei, 2012), on which Abela shares a screenwriting credit, is an animated feature centred on a boy from the Sudan who assists a lost giraffe in its homeward journey. Both works suggest a continuing interest in African and oceanic themes. 71 For related French films with Shakespearean dimensions, see Conte d’hiver/A Tale of Winter (dir. Eric Rohmer, 1992), which features an internal performance of The Winter’s Tale, L’Appartement (dir. Gilles Mimouni, 1995), in which a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream plays a significant role, and Le lait de la tendresse humaine (dir. Dominique Cabrera, 2001), which cites Macbeth at numerous points. Of Conte d’hiver Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe state: ‘the film works as fully as Shakespeare’s play within the Romance framework of accident, error, serendipity, miracle, and the need to awaken one’s faith that wrongs will be made right’ (New Wave Shakespeare on Screen [Cambridge: Polity, 2007], p. 38). 72 See ‘Makibefo’, www.scoville-film.com (accessed 7 November 2009). 73 Andrew, ‘Unauthorized Author Today’, p. 27. 74 See Billy Head, ‘Deal brings many jobs but at what price?’, Guardian, 22 November 2008, 30; Nick Mathiason, ‘UN acts to halt new scramble for Africa’s land’, Guardian, 3 November 2009, 26; Chris Smyth, ‘Red alert’, Times, 18 February 2010, 25.

chapter 2

Vishal Bhardwaj and Jayaraaj Rajasekharan Nair

Indian cinema, as far as the western imagination is concerned, is often seen as synonymous with Bollywood and its attendant registers of representation and expression. The association is generally pejorative. A form of ‘cultural . . . bricolage’, Bollywood is sometimes faulted for a seemingly random pillaging of various styles and conventions.1 Yet this is a view that owes more to an outmoded reification of originality than it does to the creativity of the medium: there is much of value in a filmic method that is so productively intertextual. More broadly, Shohini Chaudhuri’s remark that, ‘among South Asia’s film industries, India’s is by far the most prolific, generating over 900 films annually’, reminds us of the scope and density of filmmaking in the subcontinent.2 As the materialities of production and dissemination reveal, India is home to numerous regionally identified film centres – including Tollywood (Telegu Cinema) and Mollywood (Malayalam Cinema) – which interact with each other at several levels.3 Both the volume of films released and the number of sites of production function in India as preconditions for singular brands of auteurism. Discourses on Indian film have generally espoused the idea that the auteur stands as a breed apart from crass commercialism. As Alberto Elena notes, on the one hand, there is the ‘industrial colossus’ – the ‘giant dream factory’ of popular Hindi cinema – while, on the other, there are ‘certain hard-working trailblazers on [the] margins, trying desperately to survive’.4 Other commentators have outlined theories of interdependency: for example, Vijay Mishra argues that the auteur, in the ‘Bombay definition’, must of necessity already be established as a ‘star’ and be integrated as an essential component in the system’s commercial logic.5 Such constructions point up a conflicted scenario: the filmmaker with ambitions to carve out an independent niche is either intricately caught up in institutional networks or must avoid them studiously. But in the conceptualization of the Indian ‘director as author . . . mediating the multiple 55

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interplay between the forces of the medium and the audience’ a viable third position emerges.6 According to Heidi Pauwels, there is justification for regarding the auteur as occupying an enabling role – juggling different ‘pressures’, engaging with ‘living traditions’ and articulating ‘personal’ convictions.7 Two regionally marked cinema practitioners – Vishal Bhardwaj and Jayaraaj Rajasekharan Nair – invite consideration as directors who have consistently been drawn to Shakespeare (and to the challenges of locally revivifying his work) and who, in the establishment of production companies that bear their own names, have demonstrated a capability for negotiating interrelated artistic and commercial imperatives. As such, Bhardwaj and Jayaraaj present key test cases for how the auteur might operate according to Indian paradigms at the same time as they invite reflection on the place of the Bard as he is defined by different clusters of filmmaking within the same nation-state. Working in the capacities of composer, scriptwriter and director, Bhardwaj approaches the film medium by way of an involved control over sound and image. These dimensions of the filmmaker are abundantly in evidence in the Hindi- and Urdu-language Maqbool (2004), ‘Based on William Shakespeare’s Macbeth’, and the Hindi-language Omkara (2006), which is advertised as ‘a Vishal Bhardwaj adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello’. Both enjoyed global exposure via film festivals, with the favourable reception that greeted the earlier Maqbool, a film packaged as combining arthouse and popular elements, arguably preparing the way for Omkara, which was more lavishly budgeted and aggressively publicized.8 Crucially, Bhardwaj, who is based in Mumbai yet hails from Uttar Pradesh, elects to privilege both city and state. Hence, Maqbool takes Mumbai as its central location and as one of its subjects, while Omkara consistently prioritizes Uttar Pradesh settings and images. By contrast, Jayaraaj is at pains to foreground the state of Kerala and the appearances of its heritage. As the director explains, ‘Shakespearean characters . . . surpass time and space. In recreating these characters, a traditional backdrop should be used. That is why the films are made in terms of Kerala’s own traditions and culture’.9 Unlike Bhardwaj’s Maqbool and Omkara, however, Jayaraaj’s Malayalam-language films, Kaliyattam (1997) – ‘an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello’ – and Kannaki (2002) – ‘an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra’ – circulated in less globally visible ways. Neither Kaliyattam nor Kannaki is readily available in commercial DVD format outside India, which points to a less Eurocentric and more indigenously rooted conceptualization of the filmic product. While Kaliyattam was cut for

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international showings, the film simultaneously played in India with its full complement of songs, suggesting adjudication between the needs of various viewing constituencies.10 Kannaki was not internationally distributed nor did it receive widespread exposure: either regionalism outweighed the desire for recognition or processes of selectivity determined the nature of the film’s dispersal. This chapter argues that, as auteur, Bhardwaj can be seen as following a route that leads from the local to the global in his Shakespearean trajectory: Omkara, and not the earlier Maqbool, was the work that most assuredly announced the director’s arrival on the world stage. In contradistinction, I suggest, Jayaraaj, as auteur, commences his Shakespearean journey with some international ambition, only to elect to confine his second cinematic venture with the Bard to less wide-ranging modalities of exposure. This is not to suggest, however, that Bhardwaj has capitulated to Bollywood or that Jayaraaj is in thrall to an apologetic internationalism.11 Rather, these filmmakers embrace individual styles, involve themselves in more wide-ranging conversations and typify a finessed sense of a relation to their chosen places of narrative exposition. In so doing, Jayaraaj and Bhardwaj answer to auteur constructions: their films repeat concepts and structures, possess a unique ‘signature’ and put on display consistently realized ‘thematic motifs’.12 Dominant preoccupations, such as the politics of conflict (whether this is communicated via the classic use of the cockfight in Kannaki or the tried and trusted mobilization of Mumbai’s underworld in Maqbool), are scored across their respective statements. Comparable points of social interest emerge, too, in the attention given in Kaliyattam to teyyam performance and in the extrapolation in Omkara of the part of the bahu bali or political enforcer. In all four films, music and ceremonial – always carefully traced to the discrete forms of the region – consort with each other in evocations of mood and as motors for the plot: rituals interrupt the flow of the action in the same moment as they bring into focus the characters’ compulsions and anxieties. Metaphors of Shakespearean equivalence are eagerly pursued, with representations of the family functioning as a means through which the changing cultural environment of India can be given voice. Here, Bhardwaj and Jayaraaj devote a significant proportion of screen time to women’s attempts to redress imbalances. Hence, Indu/Emilia (Konkona Sen Sharma) in Omkara and Kannaki/Cleopatra (Nandita Das) in Kannaki are typologically similar in their vengeful predilections and in their confrontation with powers inimical to self-expression. Such a figuration, as will be seen, refracts the historical situation of women in India

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and larger issues of identity, autonomy and the gendering of male and female communities. Inside regionally separate readings of Shakespeare, then, Bhardwaj and Jayaraaj develop interpretations that are not so much different as complementary. In recent studies of Indian cinema, Richard Burt argues that Shakespeare functions as ‘a type of currency without any particular meaning, location, [or] traceable source of value’; this is a ‘ruined’ Bard, it is suggested, who is ‘diminished, fragmentary, [and] even forgettable’.13 This tendency – to downplay Indian cinema’s engagements with Shakespeare – has the effect of collapsing questions of reception and place as well as the continuing resonances of the Bard in adaptations that self-consciously acknowledge their indebtedness. Looking first at Bhardwaj, then at Jayaraaj and finally at their areas of intersection (including a mutual interest in Othello), this chapter spotlights the diverse geographies of Indian filmmaking in order to demonstrate that Shakespeare may still be traced and located, enlarged and remembered, through being imaginatively recast. The range of translation idioms deployed, as well as the ways in which each filmmaker finds a means of mediating his shaping contexts, suggests overlapping, but individually imprinted, visions are vitally constituent parts of the film industry of contemporary India. For the critic interested in the relations between Indian film and Shakespeare, dynamically interconnected forms of auteurism are significant forces to recognize. vishal bhardwaj In Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool, Mumbai surrogates for Scotland, with the Indian metropolis functioning as a kingdom in miniature; because the action centres upon the activities of the criminal underworld, the implication is that the central players – Abbaji/Duncan (Pankaj Kapur) and his henchman, Maqbool/Macbeth (Irfan Khan) – operate as urban rulers or, at least, as local manifestations of royalty. The idea is reinforced by one of the film’s most creative developments: Nimmi/Lady Macbeth (Tabu) is discovered as Abbaji/Duncan’s mistress and consort. Royal associations are extended when Abbaji/Duncan is described as the ‘Messiah of the minorities’: the title both establishes the Mumbai mobster as a type of quasi-divine leader and indicates the ways in which a process of ‘Islamification’ features as the chief means through which the Shakespearean play is mediated. Throughout his pursuit of filmic conceits, Bhardwaj shows himself as both sensitive to his Shakespearean sources and delighting in the adaptation process.

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Hence, in the same way that Shakespeare’s Othello is discovered as the most important component in Venice’s victory over the Turks, so Bhardwaj’s Omkara is seen as vital to a local political election success. Physical strength is what immediately characterizes Omkara/Othello (Ajay Devgan), as is reflected in the associations of his bahu bali title (which translates as ‘arm’ and ‘force’). Wearing a poncho-like black cloak, Omkara/Othello is immediately connected with popular bandit stereotypes. A sense of distance and even alterity is encouraged, with the unprecedented use of a demotic Khariboli (a Hindi dialect) and the Uttar Pradesh locations (Bhardwaj, in his own words, aimed at ‘a kind of lawless, Wild West setting’) bolstering the impression of an imaginative universe in which official institutions have a limited purchase.14 The equivalent of Othello’s Duke of Venice is Bhaisaab (Naseeruddin Shah), the leader of the Brahmin Youth Party, and the fact that he runs his operations from jail is instrumental in reinforcing informing contexts of criminality and instability. Omkara fleshes out and visualizes the protagonist’s mercenary profession. Exemplary is the sequence in which Omkara/Othello joins with his ‘lieutenant’, Langda/Iago (Saif Ali Khan), to dispatch a rival politician. Typically, however, while a violently executed murder frames the episode, filmic attention focuses on Omkara/ Othello’s desire to clarify the question of Dolly/Desdemona’s (Kareena Kapoor) supposed infidelity. Framed by the protagonist’s psychic fervour, the rising crescendo of the music registers not so much the grisly business of the assassination as the suspense surrounding the imminence of Langda/Iago’s disclosure. Political turbulence throws into relief the film’s circulation of unchanging hierarchies and prejudices. Most objectionable about Omkara/ Othello’s abduction of Dolly/Desdemona, according to the lawyer/ Brabantio (Kamal Tiwari), is that the former is a ‘damned half-caste’, the offspring of a ‘bloody slave girl’. Despite Bhardwaj’s assertion that, in Omkara, ‘we’re focusing on the jealousy more than racism . . . It’s there, but not in the foreground’, the question of caste continually resurfaces, reflecting a more general responsiveness to India’s systems of classification.15 As Rustom Bharucha remarks, ‘the debate on caste as race is beginning to enter . . . [Indian] political discourse’, particularly in the wake of the acknowledgement of ‘untouchables’ and dalits as groups eligible to receive compensation for discrimination in the public sectors.16 In representing the central act of transgression, Bhardwaj, with the assistance of his cinematographic team, plays on a light and dark visual dichotomy. Hence, Indu/Emilia, greeting Dolly/Desdemona, likens her

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Figure 5: Omkara/Othello (Ajay Devgan) shares an intimate moment with Dolly/ Desdemona (Kareena Kapoor) in Omkara (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2006).

to ‘milk in a pot of coal . . . a sandal shining in the darkest night [and]. . . a magic flute in the hands of the Dark Lord’. At once, these comparisons have the effect of foregrounding the caste differences between Omkara/ Othello and Dolly/Desdemona. At the same time, they work towards underscoring the social reverberations of Omkara/Othello’s behaviour: the details of the ‘milk’, ‘sandal’ and ‘flute’ bring Indian epics to mind and, in particular, the seductions of Krishna, the ‘Dark Lord’, cowherd and warrior divine.17 A summoning of the myths of India throws into relief the adaptation of the Shakespearean play: constructions of racial divisions are read through other classic stories in such a way as to point up the film’s contemporary sensitivities. To these interpenetrations must be added visual and verbal approximations of Shakespearean scenes and appellations. When Abbaji/Duncan visits Maqbool/Macbeth, he is greeted by the sight of his gangland accomplice attending to huge vats of welcoming biriyani on an upper terrace. At once, of course, the episode instances the opening of Macbeth and posits a connection between Maqbool’s cookery and the witches’ cauldrons; however, because this takes place at the moment when the filmic protagonist contemplates his master’s demise, the related suggestion is that the spectacle of hospitality is part of a duplicitous

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performance. In both Maqbool and Omkara, dissemination of meaning is linked to nomenclature. The histories encoded in Abbaji/Duncan’s secondary name – Jahangir Khan – lend what Anthony R. Guneratne has described as the ‘feudal milieu’ of Maqbool an additional specificity.18 For Jahangir was one of the rulers of the Mughal empire, governing between 1605 and 1627, in a period made infamous by the attempts of his sons to secure his overthrow: Bhardwaj works both to instantiate other stories of resistance and to conjure a temporal equivalent in India for the English Renaissance.19 Similarly, in Omkara, Langda/Iago’s name connotes a limping gait and ideas of disability (the ‘monstrous’ terminologies of Othello are hinted at), while Kesu/Cassio’s (Vivek Oberoi) predilection for speaking in English earns him the Hindi/Urdu moniker ‘firangi’, a term that signals both a ‘foreigner’ and the process of becoming ‘foreign’. Put into circulation is the associated notion of a potential for corruption or a receptivity to adulterating forces; Kesu/Cassio’s trajectory, it is implied, may also be Omkara/Othello’s own. Suggestions in Omkara of non-native presences alert us to a recurrent auteurial manoeuvre: the strategic use of Hollywood codes and conventions. One obvious example presents itself. Abbaji/Duncan in Maqbool and Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) in The Godfather (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) resemble each other in both manner and situation. In particular, the ‘movement’ of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) from ‘simple filial duty towards the . . . killer of foe and family’ encapsulates a crisis of loyalty, and it is just such a ‘movement’ that Maqbool takes as its point of departure.20 A further gangster film example cited by Bhardwaj extends the idea. As Vincent Vega (John Travolta) in Pulp Fiction (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 1994) is tempted to sleep with Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), his boss’s wife, so does Maqbool/Macbeth desire Abbaji/ Duncan’s mistress, Nimmi/Lady Macbeth. This represents a major reworking of the Shakespearean source, eroticizing, as it does, the betrayal of trust and introducing a destructive desire into the nexus of allegiance. In Bhardwaj’s envisioning, the murder both establishes Nimmi/Lady Macbeth as more openly manipulative (she is represented as bidding for Maqbool/Macbeth’s attentions) and romanticizes the hero’s fateful undertaking. What this amounts to is more than a simple exercise in intertextuality. Rather, Maqbool, in demonstrating, as Philipp Hinz states, an ‘engagement with its own medium’, fashions from its Shakespearean affiliations a confrontation with the Indian cinema industry itself.21 At the start, for example, the two police inspectors in the underworld’s employ, Pandit (Om Puri) and Purohit (Naseeruddin Shah), draw

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kundali (horoscopes) on a car windscreen: the lines traced evoke a filmic frame, while the misted glass hints at a camera’s lens, suggesting the shaping role of directorial figures. Gesturing to an historical association with the Mumbai underworld, the episode imagines the film industry as a form of power, an empire within an empire that dominates individual lives and fortunes. It is in part because she is denied a film role, and supplanted in her affections by another Bollywood heroine, for example, that Nimmi/Lady Macbeth elects to turn against – and plot the downfall of – Abbaji/Duncan, her patron-lover. Performative despair, domestic dissent and Shakespearean aspiration come together in the representation of the tensions that give rise to the murder, and in such a way as to show Bhardwaj crafting Maqbool as a purposefully hybridized, and cinematically cross-fertilizing, Shakespearean appropriation. The playing out of Nimmi/Lady Macbeth’s rejection is of a piece with the ways in which, in both films, offers of favour and expressions of resentment are seen as intricately co-dependent. Already bristling at the emasculating charge that he is a ‘wimp’, Maqbool/Macbeth is envisaged as particularly troubled by the news that Abbaji/Duncan, who has no male heirs, is likely to pass on his empire to Guddu/Fleance (Ajay Gehi), his future son-in-law. Omkara plays a variation on this state of affairs. In a puja (religious initiation), Omkara/Othello is appointed to a place in the ‘local assembly’, while Kesu/Cassio is selected to fill his vacated role. The grant of power is registered in a highly stylized manner; Sanskrit verses are intoned, while the circulation of consecrated items and scenes of anointing (a tilak or dot is placed on the foreheads of the participants) bolster a sense of formality, spirituality and orderliness. Yet the fact that Langda/Iago, smarting at having been passed over, stages a private pastiche ceremony immediately afterwards throws these meanings into a perverse light. The smashing of a mirror allows Langda/Iago to cover himself in blood rather than the statutory red kumkum powder and symbolizes a personal investiture that expresses bitterness and a clear sense of motive. Constructions of generational upset in Maqbool and Omkara confirm the extent to which the internal logic of the Indian family is vital to reflections upon self-worth, agency and the social order. For Dolly/ Desdemona in Omkara, for example, the fact that she has been abandoned by her father following her elopement is a source of continuing distress. ‘Who have I besides you, anyway?’ she says to Omkara/Othello, her question illuminating the ways in which the absence of a culturally sanctioned network locks her in a position of vulnerability. Family in

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Maqbool appears both as a unit of subjective allegiance and as the system through which underworld practices of illegality are perpetuated. Thus, because Abbaji/Duncan functions as paterfamilias, the foundling Maqbool is ‘bound’ to him at multiple levels. To contemplate Abbaji/ Duncan’s removal is a psychically entangled affair, and it is when Maqbool/Macbeth, following his assumption of gang leadership, is discovered as being ill at ease in familial terms – unequal to the task of functioning as ‘father’ – that the empire begins to crumble. Matching the film’s emphasis on the paternal is its corresponding attention to the maternal. Although Maqbool’s house is characterized as ‘safe as a . . . womb’, the mockery of a bodyguard, who has been goaded into drinking whiskey (‘go and have some milk’), and a glimpse of the blood emanating from a sacrificed goat suggest a less secure purchase for the mother’s stereotypical role: nurturing metaphors are displaced by ideas of intoxication and death, and the association between ‘human kindness’ and milk is subordinated to the elevation of Nimmi/Lady Macbeth’s scheming aspirations.22 Familial failure, indeed, is the common denominator linking Maqbool/Macbeth and Nimmi/Lady Macbeth’s respective declines. Once she has become pregnant (it is not clear if the father is Abbaji/Duncan or Maqbool/Macbeth), Nimmi/Lady Macbeth is branded ‘mother’, ‘whore’ and ‘witch’, the conjunction of detractions pointing up a perception of gendered derelictions, while the conviction, on the part of the one-time mistress, that her child is ‘wailing’ inside her implies not only a temporal rupture but also a condition of maternal crisis. The familial world of Maqbool, it is suggested, is ripe for renewal. Characteristic of Bhardwaj’s vision, however, is the suggestion that history, and an absorption in the past, do not yield to the prospect of alteration so easily. On separate occasions, Nimmi/Lady Macbeth and Abbaji/Duncan are represented as looking over photograph albums: the dominant mode of nostalgia here is in sharp distinction to the elaboration elsewhere of Mumbai’s rapidly developing urban landscape. Omkara makes manifest its relation to what is anterior in the purposefully focused reification of the appearance of the cummerbund, the ‘family heirloom’ that substitutes for the play’s handkerchief. Made up of filigree, the cummerbund introduces considerations of fragility and entrapment; emblazoned with hearts, it betokens romantic love; and worn around the waist, it signifies the relation between sexuality and morality. These latter meanings hold sway because, in an early scene, Dolly/Desdemona gifts to Omkara/Othello a piece of jewellery, an act which stimulates in the protagonist anxieties about the ownership of objects and the dangers

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of exchange. Further suspicions fall on Dolly/Desdemona when she puts her mobile on ‘silent’ – ironically, she wishes to learn from Kesu/Cassio the Stevie Wonder song ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’ so as the better to entertain Omkara/Othello. Forms of modern technology and older artefacts constitute the currency through which Maqbool and Omkara hint at the characters’ divorce from their surroundings and themselves. What is old, in both films, is imagined as being in tension with what is new, and in such a way as to illuminate both internal conflicts and wider cultural determinants. The interlude involving Dolly/Desdemona and Kesu/Cassio brings to mind the partnership shared between Bhardwaj (who composed Omkara’s music) and fellow filmmaker and Shakespearean interpreter, Gulzar, who penned the lyrics.23 As Paul Watson states, the auteur is defined by the ‘particular creative, expressive and artistic activities of the personnel’ with whom he or she collaborates.24 As is typical of Indian film, song and dance numbers demonstrate the ways in which the score performs an ‘extra narrative role’.25 The ‘Beedi’ number, for example, discovers Billo/ Bianca (Bipasha Basu) singing before an unruly audience of the need to ‘share somebody’s quilt, [to] borrow heat from the next fellow’s oven’. Drawing upon vernacular and older lyrical formulations, the song conjures Othello’s preoccupation with a performance, ‘’twixt [the] sheets’, of ‘office’ and hints at ideas of dangerous domestic interchange.26 Metaphors centred on fire (‘Light . . . your fags with the heat of my bosom’) reinforce these associations at the same time as they mock contemporary regulations in India that forbid smoking in cinemas and public places: the whole teases at what is permissible and impermissible. The lines are a potent illustration of music facilitating an intensification of ‘emotions’ and affording the ‘possibility of jouissance’; in addition, the on-stage participation mirrors off-stage relations.27 Thus, the business accompanying the music (Billo/Bianca tears off her veil) throws into relief the more modest conduct of Dolly/Desdemona, who, in a simultaneously unfolding inset, is discovered as withdrawing behind some curtains to don the fatal cummerbund: constructions of dressing and divestiture, mediated through Indian familial traditions, stress the constricted position of the woman who is looked at and modes of pleasure that have specifically gendered complexions. The parallel between the world of the song and the surrounding action is drawn even more forcefully when Omkara/ Othello’s coitus is interrupted by the audience’s riot: Bhardwaj pushes at the boundaries of the figurative in a scene of merged and confused sexual passions. For all their apparent ‘indirectness’ and ‘digression’, as Lalitha

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Gopalan observes, the ‘interruptions’ of song and dance numbers in Indian film, then, are still integral to ‘the plot’.28 Song and dance simultaneously work in a discordant fashion. As in Omkara, Bhardwaj in Maqbool is split and distributed as auteur (he shares a screenwriting credit), yet is advertised as taking sole responsibility for ‘original music’, which implies a particularly shaping role. Here, Maqbool/Macbeth and Nimmi/Lady Macbeth’s relationship is represented against the backdrop of Islamic ceremonial to the extent that the surface emphases of the narrative, and its underlying directions, collide. An early sequence centres on a visit to a dargah (the shrine of a sufi or saint) and gains energy from its manipulation of the Bollywood convention of the pilgrimage. Bhardwaj’s recreation of the dargah – qawwals (singers) clap to the qawwali (song) and address the godhead – is designed to play up the traditional features of a mystical route to divine union. For, as David Waines states, adherents of sufi asceticism seek ‘direct access to . . . the eternal’ and the achievement of an ultimately ‘ecstatic state’.29 Yet the song – ‘O worship of my eyes . . . beautiful beloved . . . How glorious to have love tear your soul apart’ – functions not so much as the instrument through which the ‘superhuman power’ of the saint can be embraced, as a revelation of the developing intimacy of the central couple. In this sense, Islam is compromised, with the spiritual–sexual friction in the lyrics illuminating what is at stake.30 The prospect of a dangerous liaison is reinforced when Nimmi/Lady Macbeth deliberately steps on a nail to attract her would-be lover’s attention. Penetration is taken up in the subsequent business of Maqbool/Macbeth’s search for, and relocation of, Nimmi/Lady Macbeth’s missing earring: both episodes pave the way for the consummation. The whole is executed via a merging of registers: there is a climax here, but not that of sufi enlightenment, while the notion that the dargah constitutes a liminal space between earthly and heavenly categories is granted forceful realization. And, throughout, both the escalating pace of the music and the tenor of its expressions act as guides to alternative interpretive scenarios. The ways in which song and dance numbers in Omkara and Maqbool articulate present concerns as well as future possibilities are in keeping with a more general attention in the films to acts of prophetic interpretation. In characters’ attempts at prognosis, a response to that perennial Shakespearean preoccupation with the workings of fortune becomes richly apparent. Illustrations of dharma or ‘deep patterns in the nature of things’, the oft-repeated pronouncements of the police inspectors in Maqbool bear out the ways in which, in Macbeth, the witches’

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constructions of what is to come embody strange truths.31 ‘The balance of power is critical’, states Pandit, with Purohit adding, as illustration, ‘Fire has to fear water’. Such a conception of the operation of the elements is graphically manifested when Devsare (Murli Sharma), the Chief of Police, is transferred to work in Customs and is thus enabled to foil his nemeses’ plan for a maritime drug deal. The coming of the ‘sea’ to Maqbool/ Macbeth’s ‘house’, in the inspectors’ formulation, enacts the movement of Dunsinane in Macbeth, while the circulation of predictions that, in retrospect, turn out to possess a perverse logic establishes the forces of law, like the play’s witches, as arch-exponents of double-dealing. Via such translations, Bhardwaj reanimates the Shakespearean supernatural and, because the inspectors appear as both commentators and participants, ensures that the action and what it signifies are part of an intricately co-involved arrangement. If Maqbool spotlights the tricksy aspects of fortune, Omkara favours a grammar of inauspiciousness. Already, in the opening scene, at the aborted wedding to Rajju/Roderigo (Deepak Dobriyal), the letter D in the emblazoned name of ‘Dolly’ over a gateway has fallen to the ground, a grim pointer to her perceived moral lapse. Later, in a byaha haath (purification ritual), Dolly/Desdemona is discovered as preparing for union by being covered in uptan (turmeric paste); as the ceremony unfolds, however, a swooping hawk drops a cobra into a pot of milk.32 This is an occurrence of dark foreboding, since attempts at cleansing give way to a symbolic sullying, poison replaces purity (the cow and the snake are rich in such associations in Indian mythology) and the promise of a new life stage is thrown into stark relief by signs of mortality.33 Similarly, at the Hindu wedding itself, a sense of imminent disaster is constantly to the fore. The fact that there has been no prior betrothal, and the absence of Dolly/Desdemona’s family, casts a pall over the proceedings, at least in terms of an observance of the various necessary elements. Because of the tenor of earlier events, the throwing of rice by the assembled guests, an indication of communal support, appears an empty gesture, while the appearance of Omkara/Othello wearing the customary sihra-bandi or garland of flowers designed to repel ‘evil . . . looks’ reminds us that he has been unable to shake off Langda/Iago’s malign suggestions.34 Finally, as the couple enter their home, there is a shot of Dolly/Desdemona imprinting the marks of her hands on the wall: familiarity with Othello makes clear that such indexes of identity are soon to be extinguished and that, for all its assurances of prosperity, the wedding finale of Omkara is a doomed undertaking. In part the nihilistic undertow is related to

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Bhardwaj’s typical prioritization of Langda/Iago as a key directorial entity. From the start, as when he parts bushes so as to look to camera, Langda/ Iago has been envisaged as enjoying a choric authority: nowhere is this more apparent than during the nuptial celebrations, for the sequence commences with a shot of the back of his head and concludes with a frontal image of him advancing through a pair of doors. The implication is that Langda/Iago is the deity that presides over all, watching and dictating. His presence infuses the business of union, and he occupies the centre of the frame, suggesting that the marriage that has taken place is not so much between Omkara/Othello and Dolly/Desdemona as between Omkara/Othello and his corrupting associate. jayaraaj rajasekharan nair Like Bhardwaj, Jayaraaj is an auteur invested in the politics and potential of place who reinvents Shakespeare according to a template of regional traditions. Kaliyattam (1997), for example, takes its cue and title from the dance form of northern Kerala, teyyam, or, as it is sometimes known, theyyatam.35 As T. V. Chandran explains, ‘The generic term teyyam is a corrupt form of daivam or god, and so teyyam is the dance (attam) of god (teyyam)’.36 Various stages are strictly observed, including invocation, recitation, dance and the bestowal of blessings, in a ritual whose aesthetic effect is enlivened by drumming, music and elaborate costume. Crucially, the teyyam performer impersonates one or other of the Hindu deities, the idea being that the actor-protagonist becomes the godhead and discharges vital social functions. Teyyam performances themselves are linked to the Hindu festive/religious calendar and are directed towards the creation of a sacred ‘“other reality”’.37 According to Sita K. Nambiar, during the performance ‘the human medium is empowered to comment on as well as criticize . . . distortions or inequalities’; that is, teyyam’s importance resides in its potential to articulate a sense of protest and to challenge representatives of authority.38 In its preoccupation with inversion and theatre, historical occlusion and the expression of resentment, it is not difficult to grasp the pertinence of teyyam to a reconsideration of Othello. Kannaki (2002) shows Jayaraaj drawn to a second performative conceit. Punctuating the action at regular intervals are the cockfights staged between the central players, theatrical occasions which reference a passing metaphor in Antony and Cleopatra (as the Roman general states of Caesar, ‘His cocks do win the battle . . . his quails ever / Beat mine’).39 As Jayaraaj notes in interview, the cockfight is envisaged as evoking ‘an atmosphere of

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war . . . the tensions, thrills and competition’ and, certainly, in its mise en sce`ne and detailing of place, Kannaki is rife with combative connotation. The realization of Gounder/Pompey (Manoj K. Jayan), who is imagined as a landlord and as an interloper into Kerala (Kannaki is set on the Kerala–Tamil Nadu border), is shaped by long-established inter-state rivalries. ‘The compulsion of landlords to bring everything under their control is clearly visible’, states Jayaraaj, with an additional marker of Gounder/Pompey’s villainy revealing itself in his Tamil speech, superior attitude and militaristic adornments. Jayaraaj’s is a doubled method: the auteur approximates Shakespeare in order then to demonstrate a perception of Kerala’s individuality and integrity. As the appearance of Gounder/Pompey makes clear, Jayaraaj expends some effort in securing a particular ‘look’ for his films; indeed, in both Kannaki and Kaliyattam visual detailing is vital to the total effect. In Kannaki shots of Kerala’s picturesque backwaters, rivers, lakes, paddy fields and palm groves not only establish a scenic context for unfolding events; they also conjure Shakespeare’s Egypt – the Cydnus and the Nile – and, to adopt a formulation of Janet Adelman, the ‘watery foundation’ of Antony’s identity.40 Throughout Kannaki the Shakespearean precursor text is apprehended via costume signals. For instance, Manikyan (Lal), a ‘jockey’ or cockfighting expert, is announced as a type of Antony via a red shirt, beard, earrings and a swaggering manner; these function to distinguish the character from the rest of the cast and underscore a sense of his importance. By the same token, Kannaki, a folk healer or medicine woman, is associated with bangles, bracelets, revealing orange attire and long, loose hair, ‘geographically localized’ features which, following Francesca T. Royster, conjure Cleopatra’s ‘beauty’ and ‘glamour’.41 A white pallor, clean-shaven face and make-up, Indian signifiers of the eunuch, suggest a connection between Ravunni (Cochin Hanifa), the servant who inhabits Kannaki/Cleopatra’s all-female compound/shrine, and Mardian, the attendant in Antony and Cleopatra. Consistently mobilizing images that assist understanding, Jayaraaj, across the body of his Shakespearean work, operates as auteur: as Bernard F. Dick states, he pursues ‘stylistic traits that become his . . . signature’.42 The visual complexion of these ‘traits’ is also abundantly in evidence in Kaliyattam, not least in the reiterated motif of the fire. The focus at the start on a huge blaze suggests not only a funeral pyre but also the articulation of overriding passions. Because the flames are filmed as if dancing to the drumbeat of the music, we are alerted to the profession of Perumalayan/Othello (Suresh Gopi), who defines himself through his teyyam performances. As

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an index of energy and power, the colour red also figures in Kaliyattam in the silk blanket which Perumalayan/Othello gifts to Thamara/ Desdemona (Manju Warrier) as ‘treasure’ and ‘heirloom’. Immediately associated with the possibility of broken ‘relations’, the richly brocaded covering expands its meanings to encompass fertility (the childless Cheerma/Emilia [Bindu Panikkar] steals the property in the belief that it possesses magical reproductive powers), jealousy and mortality. Particularly towards the end, when this substitute for Shakespeare’s handkerchief is inserted into a nexus of other red hues – markings on clothes, the teyyam performers and a mist that engulfs Perumalayan/Othello have red as a point in common – the links binding the blanket and emotional crisis or collapse are unmistakable. To apprehend Jayaraaj’s adaptation of Shakespeare is to be indoctrinated into his distinctively imagistic technique and cinematographic predilections. Further illustrating Jayaraaj’s auteurial ‘signature’ is his interest in theatre as a cultural practice that both challenges social divisions and allows for moments of communal cohesion. Here, the origins of the teyyam performers are key factors, for the principal roles are taken by members of the lower castes who are supported, in turn, by higher caste constituencies.43 Notably, Perumalayan is imagined as an ‘upstart’ hailing from an inferior ‘sect’, and reinforcing the sense of a lower caste designation is the fact that he bears the physical scars of ‘smallpox’ – a visual marker hinting at Othello’s racial difference – and that his family was wiped out by the disease. Ania Loomba remarks that the protagonist is ‘divine as long as he is in costume’; however, the film makes the point that, such is the celebrity status of Perumalayan/Othello, he is able to woo off stage and impress with reflections on ‘the mystery and miracle’ of his craft and his ‘adventures’.44 As Jayaraaj notes, ‘If Desdemona loves stories of Othello in battle, Thamara loves Perumalayan for his teyyam portrayals’. Moreover, the prefix, ‘peru’, in Perumalayan/Othello’s name, means ‘great’ in Malayalam (only esteemed practitioners of teyyam are granted such a title), demonstrating the ways in which his profession parallels rather than runs counter to his local ascendancy.45 The idea is developed in the song sequence in which Perumalayan/Othello and Thamara/ Desdemona consummate their love: the mutual decorating with the sacred teyyam colours suggests a theatrical form of foreplay, the attractions of the world of the performer and the excitement involved in blurring the demarcations between real and imagined environments. As the scene unfolds, the accompanying song emphasizes the symbolic significance of this trading in properties, instancing ‘turmeric’ and

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‘vermilion’, while, at the same time, recalling what is involved in the marriage of a woman from a ‘palace’ with an ‘untouchable’ man: the issue is introduced briefly (‘Like a wild jasmine blossom, why have you descended to this garden of flowers?’) and quickly subsumed in the celebratory mood. For, as Perumalayan/Othello and Thamara/Desdemona embrace, the mise en sce`ne intercuts a corresponding moment of union, which shows teyyam performers and village elders joining hands to dance around a fire. This, it is suggested, is a belated wedding, and these are the revels of its guests. More generally in the films, Jayaraaj conjures Shakespeare dialogically; that is, Antony and Cleopatra and Othello are merged with, and mediated through, other stories and mythologies. In Kaliyattam, this procedure reveals itself in an identification of the titanic conflicts that underpin the performative action. Teyyam is the expression of Perumalayan/ Othello’s dominion; it is also the conduit through which his weaknesses are graphically communicated. In his first manifestation (kolam) as a deity, Perumalayan/Othello, sporting a straw breastplate, blackened eyes and magnificent mudiye¯ttu or headgear, enacts Visnumurti, the drama of Visnu, the ‘Supreme God’, and his victory over Hiranyakasipu, an aspiring demon: the spectacle of him throwing himself ritualistically on a pile of embers speaks loudly of his omnipotence and unassailable kudos.46 As a version of the central battle of Shakespeare’s play, the implication is that this filmic Othello keeps the Iago character triumphantly at bay. On the second occasion of impersonation, which comes hard upon Paniyan/ Iago’s (Lal) unhinging of Perumalayan/Othello, the protagonist plays Kundora Chamundi or the ‘Terrible Mother’. Here, bloody lips, floral and lunar decorations, and pointed breasts indicate the legendary account of the vengeful goddess, Kali, who, taking on sakti (divine energy), kills the evil spirit, Darika.47 Arguably, it is as much Perumalayan/Othello’s vulnerabilities that are on display here as his power. His speaking for women who are otherwise silenced is affirmative, but it simultaneously suggests a changefulness and possible instability. In this sense, Jayaraaj finds a locally theatrical equivalent for the exposure of the Shakespearean hero’s insecure foundations. As Kaliyattam develops, interpolated teyyam manifestations elucidate both the strategy of adaptation and the course of Perumalayan/Othello’s psychic journey. In an assessment of the auteur, T. Muraleedharan writes that ‘the broad parameters of Shakespearean tragedy appear to function . . . as a frame encasing and inviting international interest’.48 Attending to the films suggests, rather, that Jayaraaj’s efforts are directed at showcasing what

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emerges when a singular non-Indian literary figure and indigenous histories are pushed into productive proximity. As the director states, reflecting on the Kadhaprasangam, a storytelling art of Kerala that recasts classical and popular literature, including Shakespeare: ‘I encountered Othello in my childhood through this art form, [developing] a passion for the powerful characters and stories . . . which culminated in the making of Kaliyattam’. Crucially, Kannaki draws attention to the project of cultural convergence. Hence, in Antony and Cleopatra the Roman general’s gift to his Egyptian consort of an ‘orient pearl’ (1.5.40) is rendered in Kannaki as a ‘bracelet’ that the departing Manikan/Antony bids Ravunni/Mardian take back, ‘with loving words’, to his mistress. The alteration illuminates Jayaraaj’s indebtedness to the Tamil epic Shilappadikaram (The Ankle Bracelet), which relates how the beautiful Kannaki suffers when her husband, Koˆvalan, consorts with a temple dancer. Reconciled with his wife, Koˆvalan is unjustly accused of stealing the Queen’s anklet and is executed; in response, Kannaki tears off her breast in a fury that engulfs the palace in flames.49 A series of allusions to Shilappadikaram (The Ankle Bracelet) shows Jayaraaj characteristically layering his filmic narrative, seizing upon points of intersection and highlighting events that possess a comparable logic so as to allow Shakespeare to speak in native idioms. An ecstatic sequence at the Kodungallur Temple, which was founded in Kannaki’s memory, clarifies the method. Both Manikyan/Antony and Kannaki/Cleopatra are represented as participating at a Bharani festival in a vain attempt to forget the other, with the mise en sce`ne concentrating on actions directed towards release. Chants, shaking bodies, waving sabres and speeded up camera work suggest excitement and danger even as they also reflect sublimated sexual energies. Overlaying the action is a song that rehearses Shilappadikaram (The Ankle Bracelet), thus making it clear that this is a reading of Shakespeare that sees his plays, too, as enjoying a classic status and enshrining similarly transferable applications. Rajinder Kumar Dudrah writes that ‘song . . . numbers’ in Indian film trace a ‘route back to the . . . discourses . . . from which . . . art forms stem, so that stars become identified with mythic figures’.50 A further consequence of characters being so identified is that a sense of ‘interiority’ is afforded.51 Certainly, this is the effect of the final song of Kannaki, for, as the lyrics sound (‘I will wait for you . . . If we could be born again, we would meet by the Sarayu river . . . the Yamuna river . . . I yearn for your return . . . Let’s merge as Ardhanarisvara’), we are offered the sight of Kannaki/Cleopatra in solitary reflection. The impressionistic instancing

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of a number of epic episodes and locations, both from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, aids the production of a subjective viewpoint and affirms the melancholic note introduced by the score. Various traditions are enmeshed, the suggestion being that Shakespeare is an author who sits easily alongside Indian representations and forms. In particular, the possibility of union (the divine Ardhanarisvara is half male and half female) is offset by a montage that features Kannaki/Cleopatra, dressed in her ‘wedding saree’, traversing empty fields, adorning herself and looking over keepsakes. Myths and stories cross and combine in the film to create an impression of Kannaki/Cleopatra as a woman whose experiences are perennial and whose life trajectory exhibits a tragic inevitability. In so doing, they reinforce an autobiographical position consistent with the directorial emphasis on allowing Shakespearean characters to express themselves. At least in part, the isolation of Kannaki/Cleopatra in Kannaki, it is suggested, is a product of cultures of masculinity. Clifford Geertz notes in his celebrated commentary on the Balinese cockfight that ‘at stake [are] esteem, honour, dignity, [and] respect’.52 A comparable schema informs Kannaki, particularly in the scenes where Choman/Caesar (Siddique) exclaims, ‘You flung my bleeding mongoose . . . cock at me, spat at me in front of these villagers’, or where Gounder/Pompey goads, ‘Sing lullabies to your mongoose-feather and feed him with milk’. Although the central struggle pits Gounder/Pompey against Choman/Caesar, with Manikyan/Antony as the latter’s aide, ideas of perceived offence, aspersion, infantilization and betrayal make the larger impression. It is entirely appropriate, then, that the first song of the film centres upon relations between men: the movements of the all-male dancers, and the suggestions of camaraderie in the agricultural activities represented, define a world characterized by the exclusion of women and by forms of playful masculine combat. As Coppe´lia Kahn states, Antony and Cleopatra reveals ‘a pervasive . . . pattern of homosociality: men playing with, and against, each other’.53 To illustrate the ‘stylistic traits’ of Jayaraaj as auteur is to recognize his predilection for separating out forms of activity along stereotypically gendered lines, for understanding Shakespeare according to a dynamic that places men and women in straitjacketed cultural categories. Such ‘traits’ are ‘stylized’ as well as ‘stylistic’. As the choreography of the opening of Kannaki makes clear, Jayaraaj frequently relies on filmic sequences whose ritualistic properties operate so as to cast light on a character’s predicament. In Kaliyattam, Perumalayan/Othello’s descent

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into jealousy and madness is communicated via highly wrought insets that indicate his point of view. The first of these shows Perumalayan/ Othello demanding of Paniyan/Iago, ‘What is the meaning of all this?’, then to be greeted with the noise of thunder and the sight of cattle stampeding, apt expressions of his dislocated state. Pathetic fallacy is complemented by the sudden appearance of a running figure, dressed in a coconut frond skirt and bearing a trident, who sports a mask showing protruding teeth, bulging eyes, and a mocking tongue. This is the Pottan Daivam, sometimes known as the ‘idiot’ or ‘loafer’, a teyyam deity associated with aggression, scurrilous laughter and a questioning of ‘inequality’.54 Perumalayan/Othello, it seems, is possessed by alternative divinities which threaten his ascendancy, for the Pottan Daivam commemorates the story of a ‘low caste watchman’, and his appearance suggests a manifestation of inferior social energy assuming power over a higher force.55 When, in a subsequent shot, an audience is granted a glimpse of the Pottan Daivam throwing himself off a cliff to his death, a loss of profession and suicide are implied, with the action functioning as a type of rite that pre-empts Perumalayan/Othello’s own end. The idea of an abandonment of vocation receives a more forceful statement in a final formalized encounter. ‘Listen, you kolams and teyyams, adieu’, exclaims an impassioned Perumalayan/Othello, who invokes the gods from a hillside, ‘I am separating from you all’. His prayers are answered by an assembled throng of magnificently adorned deities, who appear only in order to turn their backs on the distraught supplicant: the implication is that the spiritual world is no longer available and that Perumalayan/Othello must seek succour elsewhere. Instead, in this version of the play’s farewell to the ‘Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war’ (3.3.359), the protagonist is met by Paniyan/Iago, his persecutor. A low-angle shot emphasizes how Paniyan/Iago’s shadow falls on Perumalayan/Othello and points up the ways in which, as Patrick Hogan states, the ‘shadows’ of ‘untouchables’ in India ‘are considered polluting’.56 The stylization of the moment is instrumental in reinforcing a paradoxical scenario: a form of caste contamination is alluded to at the same time as Paniyan/Iago is imagined as replacement godhead. Here, as elsewhere, Jayaraaj places a ritualistic emphasis on a scene of humiliation and reversal. Emerging from such sequences in Kaliyattam and Kannaki is an acute sense of the importance of status. A pertinent example is to be found in Kaliyattam, which takes, as one of its central premises, a situation delineated in Othello: that of the ‘servant who does not believe that his master

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Figure 6: Paniyan/Iago (Lal) triumphs over a distraught Perumalayan/Othello (Suresh Gopi) in Kaliyattam (dir. Jayaraaj Rajasekharan Nair, 1997).

has a right to be a master’.57 As a teyyam ‘clown’ or, in his own words, ‘scarecrow’ (the cast-off metaphor is suggestive), Paniyan/ Iago inhabits a lower order of theatrical impersonation. The mask in which he is seen at the start is anonymous and blank, while frustration and diminution are implied in his later outburst that Perumalayan/Othello ‘deprived me of my dues . . . Am I not as good as any man?’ In Kannaki, Jayaraaj extends this auteurial preoccupation, using the cockfight to bring into the open a wider range of status sensitivities. ‘Don’t I deserve a career as well?’ a hurt Manikyan/Antony asks, having taken on board Kannaki/Cleopatra’s questioning of his position as ‘jockey’: ‘Why should [you] slave for others?’ is her demand. The sentiment finds a parallel in the delineation of Manikyan/Antony’s own assistant, Muthu/Enobarbus, who wonders, ‘What do I get by being a sidekick?’ This doubling of situations and requirements develops Kaliyattam’s engagement with the condition of servant via a construction of the Egypt–Rome relation that stresses lost opportunities, social perception and aggrieved personalities. Typically leisurely and roving camera work on the part of Jayaraaj is key to the imagining of Egypt (which, in Kannaki, becomes Chemmanampathy) as an ‘other’ space, with bells, sweet scents and soft lights

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testifying to (as one onlooker has it) ‘luxurious’ temptations. The embodiment of this alternative existence is Kannaki/Cleopatra herself. ‘A witch . . . the virgin who poisons . . . the evil nymph who puts men into trances’; these appellations illuminate the embitterment of Gounder/ Pompey and Choman/Caesar, her rejected suitors. At the same time as he anatomizes competitions between men, so Jayaraaj explores the predicament in India of the single woman, the power of male speech to shape how she is regarded, and the ease with which rumour is established as truth. Faced with detractions, Kannaki/Cleopatra is represented as agitating for a form of social reintegration that would dramatically improve her status. ‘I am rearing fighting cocks’, she informs Manikyan/Antony, adding, ‘Just once, I would like to win.’ Like Cleopatra, who possesses an army that rarely fights, Kannaki aspires to emancipation from men through men and functions to mediate the director’s particular approach to familial questions. Jayaraaj, in a nod to Enobarbus’s famous encomium, describes Kannaki/Cleopatra as a variegated concoction (‘destitute . . . revengeful . . . powerful . . . loving . . . beautiful’) and, given her circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that she is represented as a devotee of Kali, the mother goddess associated with black colours, death and consumption. Of interest are the mythic figure’s Dravidian/ethnic allegiances (recalling Cleopatra’s ‘black’ [1.5.28] and ‘tawny’ [1.1.6] appearance) and forceful gender reversals (iconographic traditions show Kali standing upon Shiva, her male consort).58 Destructive tendencies are stressed through long takes in which the camera pans over an image of Kali that Kannaki/Cleopatra has chalked on the shrine floor: the pictured accessories (the sword, trident, severed head and skull-cup), and the tongue and tusks, denote the goddess’s connections with anger and warfare and reinforce a sense of the heroine modelling herself on the example of her divine counterpart.59 Yet Kali simultaneously possesses more benign characteristics – she triumphs over evil and embodies possibilities of salvation, as when she rescues an infant found on the battlefield.60 A comparably doubled view of Kannaki announces itself in the ways in which she is discovered as curing children of snake bites and ministering in a healing capacity: here, of course, Cleopatra springs to mind, not least the climactic death scene in which she refers to the asp as ‘baby’ (5.2.300) and herself as ‘nurse’ (5.2.301). At those points where Kannaki is addressed as ‘mother’, and is imagined as productively combining a number of qualities and functions, she transcends the limiting effects of a sexual economy which judges only in terms of a demonic register. Exploring

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options for women’s behaviour, and unpacking the ways in which they are configured, Jayaraaj acknowledges the oppositions and imbalances that constitute Indian modernity. It is characteristic of Jayaraaj that he consistently returns to the sexual–social equation. A requirement of teyyam artists is the observation, during preparations for a performance, of sexual abstinence; Kaliyattam indexes these vratas (austerities), and the physical isolation of the artist in the kavu (shrine), but in such a way as to point to an unbridgeable gulf.61 ‘Austerity’ becomes the convenient excuse that Perumalayan/Othello cites as he begins the process of detaching himself from what he believes to be a source of defilement. As a result, Perumalayan/Othello and Thamara/Desdemona are increasingly filmed individually (Jayaraaj’s camera resists positioning them in the same frame), suggesting an irresolvable impasse. One of Jayaraaj’s major innovations in Kaliyattam is to build upon the brief of his source and establish Uduppelamma – a mother figure and a teyyam performer – as a commentator on the protagonist’s vexed condition. Living with Perumalayan/Othello as a practitioner of the art form they both profess, she counsels Thamara/Desdemona to tolerate her husband’s wayward behaviour, stating, ‘a performer’s heart must be pure always . . . [the] sacred fire . . . must feel cold when he steps on it. Heat will increase if the mind is neglected’. In these observations, the elderly woman appears as the instrument through which the meanings of teyyam are elucidated. Hers are mystic insights that, drawing upon physiological traditions, place the protagonist, and his interests, at the imaginative centre. Throughout, Uduppelamma is treated with reverence. Her advice is honoured, and at an early stage she is realized as enacting a parental role: ‘I don’t have a mother’, states Thamara/ Desdemona, continuing, ‘Treat me as your daughter.’ In this regard, Jayaraaj follows the generic imprint of Indian film in which the filmic mother, as Vijay Mishra notes, ‘remains steadfast, the ultimate beacon’.62 Inside such a construction, according to K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, ‘the mother is clearly invested with the spiritual qualities of self-sacrifice, devotion and religiosity’.63 Whether they objectively pronounce on sexual economies or are interpellated within them, mothers (fictional and mythological) in Jayaraaj’s Shakespeare films play a centralizing role. In scenes of women looking to mothers, ‘traits’ of the director’s ‘signature’, one encounters moments of testing and exploration whose force derives, in part, from cinematic precedent.

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auteurs compared Although there would seem to be no direct imitation, the final scenes of Kaliyattam and Omkara both foreground readings of psychic disorder and theatrical performance while making an imaginative virtue of the work of Bardic reinvention. For these auteurs, domestic interiors are akin to stages on which a fatal drama is acted out. Thus, Kaliyattam’s Perumalayan/ Othello, preparing for his final ritual, murders Thamara/Desdemona with a comparable ritualistic passion in an honour killing. Noting that the protagonist wears only ‘part of his make-up’, Poonam Trivedi suggests we see him as ‘unhinged by the dualities and divisions of his being’.64 One might take the point further, I think, by attending to the specific role that Perumalayan/Othello elects to play: the detailing of the entwined cobras on his chest, the reddened countenance and the motif of tails around the eyes point to the Kandanar Kelan festival and indicate that the deity, Shiva, is to manifest himself. Associated with the linga or ‘phallic emblem’, Shiva is also linked to bodily control: as Alain Danie´lou states, ‘dormant . . . sexual power’ supports ‘attempts to conquer . . . higher worlds’.65 These mythic intertexts animate the sequence: tortured facial expressions, flailing hands and a frantic score comprised of drums and nadaswaram (oboe) register the ecstatic content of the action, while the stress on physicality points to the tragic distance of Perumalayan/Othello from any sense of divine elevation. In contrast, Bhardwaj renders the comparable episode in Omkara as essentially silent: only a few notes of a distorted score can be heard, the effect of which is to concentrate attention on the visceral shock of the suffocating of Dolly/Desdemona and the contribution of other acoustic elements. The creak of the swaying hammock, in particular, suggests the rhythms of love-making, heightening, and grotesquely counterpointing, the murderous business. That this is similarly a mode of performance is emphasized via Omkara/Othello’s injunction to Dolly/Desdemona, ‘Stop your play-acting now’, a statement that gains in intensity from capitalizing on a recollection of the film’s points of theatrical origin. Kannaki’s ending also builds upon the theatrical qualities of domestic space in the ways in which separated structures signify fractured relations. Hence, because the ‘temple of the snake cult’ to which Kannaki/Cleopatra withdraws is represented as set apart, surrounded by a verdant expanse, a sense is afforded of an increased distance between gendered worlds. The idea is repeated in the scene where Manikyan/Antony, thinking that Kannaki/Cleopatra is dead, retires to her compound/shrine, inserting a

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blade into his cockerel’s feet and goading the bird to cut his throat. In that he is slaughtered with the instrument of his own discipline, the cockfight, and the male rivalries that it symbolically expresses, comes full circle. (In an extension to the motif, Kannaki/Cleopatra is shown dying from the bite of the cobra she had earlier acquired.) As the camera pans outwards, we see that the floor picture of the goddess, Kali, has been smudged beyond recognition, obliterated in the conflict. If this is a composition that suggests the efforts of one community to blot out another, however, it is also one that commemorates the endeavour to contemplate alternatives, for the closing image, countering the effect of earlier suggestions, is of Manikyan/Antony and Kannaki/Cleopatra locked in each other’s arms, reconciled in death: theirs is an identical space, gulfs have been bridged, their relation has a common habitus. As spectators, we see these events both through the point of view of Ravunni/Mardian and through carefully placed mediating structures, such as bars and lattice-work: the implication is that the central couple belong to a sublime category and that their story can only ever be imperfectly appreciated. Doors and gates are similarly communicative images at the close of Omkara. Omkara/Othello’s act (once the truth of his deception has been revealed) of shutting the door on Langda/Iago not only allows the protagonist a choric prominence for the first time (he is granted, from the play, the ‘Let it be hid’ [5.2.375] injunction to conceal Desdemona’s body): it also means that, metaphorically, the curtains are closed on the scene that the ‘lieutenant’ has endeavoured to dominate. It is striking that both Bhardwaj and Jayaraaj elect to bypass the silences of Othello, privileging the moral punishments meted out to their versions of Iago and thereby establishing their respective protagonists as importantly proactive. Kaliyattam takes furthest the suggestion that the Othello figure enacts revenge. Playing out a version of a mythological narrative, Perumalayan/Othello attacks Paniyan/Iago, leaving him ‘a lump of flesh without hands and legs’, and stands in triumph over him: the shot reverses the visual composition of before and suggests a re-establishment of deific credentials. This, as the film urges us to recognize, is part of a dance of death consonant with Shiva’s violent tendencies and association with rhythms that ‘destroy the world’.66 Hence, in full regalia as the bejewelled and resplendent god, Perumalayan/ Othello completes the teyyam by announcing his own end, throwing himself into the sacred fire in a defining act of self-conflagration. Man and deity merge in a denouement of annihilating harmony. The idea of a hero no longer defending his own life is common to both directors. At the end of Maqbool, the protagonist is discovered as

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abandoning his passport, which might allow him transit and escape, and dropping his gun, a kind of suicide. As Maqbool/Macbeth leaves the hospital building in which the son of Nimmi/Lady Macbeth has just been born, he is shot by his rival, Boti/Macduff (Ankur Vikal), and falls to the ground. Swirling camera work makes for disorientation and suggests that the underworld life, and its codes of behaviour, have been cast adrift. As Poonam Trivedi argues, the moment signals Maqbool/Macbeth’s ‘anagnorisis’, his ‘self-realization of the futility of a life of bloodshed’.67 A diegesis composed of the protagonist’s face, and accompanying sounds of crying children and cacophonous birdsong, recalls the film’s indebtedness to Shakespeare even as it stresses the passing of a criminal order and the expulsion of Maqbool/Macbeth from a world he no longer desires nor understands. Urgently highlighted in Maqbool is the adoption of Nimmi/ Lady Macbeth’s child by Sameera/Malcolm (Masumeh Makhija) and Guddu/Fleance, an act that establishes the daughter of Abbaji/Duncan as sister-mother and removes the protagonist as father from the picture: insisted upon is a transformative moment which involves the creation of a fresh familial unit. A strategically pointed privileging of spaces and buildings reinforces the film’s concluding perspective. An aerial shot from the top of the Asian Heart and Research Centre, which substitutes for the hospital, suggests, via a survey of the surrounding landscape, not only the all-embracing power of Mumbai’s modern and state-of-the-art healthcare institution but also an inclusive vision, the ambitions and vitality of twenty-first-century India, and the ethical possibilities of a global capitalism. Carolyn Jess-Cooke notes that Maqbool finds its logic in ‘pluralistic . . . configurations of . . . identity’ and, as such, the film positions itself against the ‘racialization of difference’ that has marked riotous outbursts in India of Hindu–Muslim hostility.68 For, as the attention to clothes and styles over the course of Maqbool makes clear, Sameera/Malcolm is represented as a Muslim while Guddu/Fleance is a Hindu: theirs is a cross-faith union, one that, like Bollywood itself, moves beyond religious boundaries and speaks to the prospect of an energizing diversity.69 In this version of Macbeth, at least, the future resides with a progress away from restricting beliefs, with mutuality, with interchange. Writing about Kaliyattam, Ania Loomba notes that ‘the question of caste difference vanishes’.70 Yet, as Thamara/Desdemona’s murder demonstrates, Perumalayan/Othello’s partial occupation of his role draws attention to a performative gap that illuminates the ‘untouchable’ self, with caste being not so much absorbed as made appallingly visible. Caste is dominant, too, in the scene devoted to the transmission of the

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Figure 7: Sameera/Malcolm (Masumeh Makhija) greets her father, Abbaji/Duncan (Pankaj Kapur), at her wedding celebrations in Maqbool (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2004).

protagonist’s power. Having lost his place because of drunkenness, Kantham/Cassio (Biju Menon) is reinstated: ‘Pardon me’, states Perumalayan/Othello, adding, ‘Hereafter my status and titles shall be yours’. Customarily, teyyam artists are established as such via systems of familial inheritance or methods of appointment presided over by higher caste landlords.71 Kaliyattam, however, consistent with the broader resonances of its dominant conceit, discovers Perumalayan/Othello eschewing these conventions: he goes against the internal organization of his craft by electing his own descendant, which suggests a construction of caste that goes beyond kin, an assertion of primacy that inheres only partly in theatrical manifestations, and a moment of transformation that acknowledges, rather than subordinates, ‘socio-political moorings’.72 Omkara is similarly imagined. For Nandi Bhatia, Bhardwaj’s ‘refusal to place race at the heart of his adaptation . . . is to bring attention to other kinds of urgencies that mark the contemporary postcolonial milieu in India’, which include ‘problems and crime related to caste warfare’.73 Nowhere is this better seen than in the film’s coda involving Indu/Emilia as a force for change. It is a radical addition to Shakespeare’s play, not

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least because the work of heroic reinvention and separation that commences with Omkara/Othello is taken up by another agency. Three times Indu/Emilia is represented in the act of opening or closing doors, which suggests that she is envisioned as the ultimate arbiter of entrances and exits. At the start, Dolly/Desdemona had felt as if she were ‘trapped in a well’, and there is a deadly irony in the fact that Landga/Iago suffers precisely such a fate. Making up for the passivity of her mistress, and taking on the mantle of the abused woman, Indu/Emilia tips her husband into the communal well in a striking illustration of the ultimate execution of just deserts. In Indian film, female revenge tends to be generically related to ideas of sexual violation. There is more than a hint, in the denouement of Omkara, of the vigilante investments of Shekhar Kapur’s film, Bandit Queen (1994), which provoked controversy in its reworking of the biography of the ‘dacoit, Phoolan Devi, [the] child bride to an outlaw’, who, having been raped, notoriously avenged herself on her attackers.74 Crucially, Bandit Queen was set in, and drew upon the locations of, Uttar Pradesh; Omkara is enriched via the intertextual connection and suggests in its final stages a kind of victory in the expression of lawlessness. More significantly, the decisive impact of Bandit Queen can be traced to its indictment of the ways in which Mallah subcastes are dictated to and exploited by the upper Thakur caste: the reminders and remainders of this dynamic in Omkara lend it, too, contemporary powers of social critique. In this way, Bhardwaj interrogates prevailing constructions of gender to highlight the existence of related systems of repression and exclusion in India and to squeeze from the Shakespearean source a vitally resonant narrative continuation. We access the auteur, writes Brian Michael Goss, by ‘positioning the director in his or her timeframe, place and means of production’.75 A politics of location in Kaliyattam, Kannaki, Maqbool and Omkara unites Bhardwaj and Jayaraaj: these are directors who, although belonging to discrete traditions, are still drawn to the virtues and valences of their own regions, finding in their places of origin and identification a rationale for, and metaphors that illuminate, the work of Shakespearean adaptation. Thus, where Jayaraaj is concerned, Othello translated enables a renewed appreciation of Kerala – its ambitions to be self-sufficient, to maintain cultural continuities, and to make an impression when Malayalam, compared to Hindi, is a minority language. A similar reading might be pursued of the role of Uttar Pradesh in Omkara, in which the operations of outlying rural areas are seen to be dependent upon an urban-based politics. Working in such capacities, Bhardwaj and Jayaraaj

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offer visions that are overlapping and discrete, visions that show what is possible as individual exponents of a Shakespearean cinema. Occupying positions of mediation, they sculpt from plays similar and dissimilar narratives of striking purchase and pertinence and, in so doing, showcase the enabling effects of their bridging of institutional interrelations. In the context of a cluster of films that bear witness to regionally situated energies and aspirations, we see the category of auteur being extended and nuanced through figurations of India as it was, is and might be, and via an experience of the imaginative transposition of Shakespearean authority. NOTES 1 Kaushik Bhaumik, ‘Lost in Translation: a Few Vagaries of the Alphabet Game Played Between Bombay Cinema and Hollywood’, in Paul Cooke, ed., World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 202. 2 Shohini Chaudhuri, Contemporary World Cinema: Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 137. 3 See Shanti Kumar, ‘Hollywood, Bollywood, Tollywood: Redefining the Global in Indian Cinema’, in Anandam P. Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar, eds., Global Bollywood (New York University Press, 2008), p. 95. 4 Alberto Elena, ‘Cinematographies of India: Tradition and Renovation’, in Juan Guardiola Roman, ed., India: Auteur Films, Independent Documentaries (1899–2008) (Madrid: La Casa Encendida, 2009), p. 65. 5 Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 122. 6 Heidi Pauwels, ‘Who is Afraid of Mı¯ra¯baı¯? Gulzar’s Antidote for Mı¯ra¯’s Poison’, in Diana Dimitrova, ed., Religion in Literature and Film in South Asia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), p. 47. 7 Ibid., p. 47. 8 Randeep Ramesh, ‘A matter of caste as Bollywood embraces the Bard’, Guardian, 29 July 2006, 28. Maqbool was shown at the Berlin Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, among others; Omkara was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, the Cairo International Film Festival and elsewhere. 9 Interview between Jayaraaj Rajasekharan Nair and Mark Thornton Burnett, 22 February 2010. Unless otherwise stated, all Jayaraaj quotations are from this interview and appear in the text or notes. 10 The film was shown, for example, at the Berlin Film Festival and the Thessaloniki Film Festival. For additional instances of Indian Shakespeare films that occupy different positions on a global–local axis, see Nanjundi Kalyana (dir. M. S. Rajashekar, 1989), a Kannada-language adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew that travelled in only a limited way outside India, and Dil Bole Hadippa! (dir. Anurag Singh, 2009), a Hindi-language adaptation of

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12 13

14 15 16

17

18 19 20

21 22

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Twelfth Night indebted to She’s the Man (dir. Andy Fickman, 2006), which is well known among diasporic audiences. For alternative views, which stress Jayaraaj’s indulgence of European stereotypes about India, see Ania Loomba, ‘Shakespeare and the Possibilities of Postcolonial Performance’, in Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen, eds., A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 130–1; T. Muraleedharan, ‘Shakespearing the Orient: Western Gaze and the Technology of Otherness in Jayaraj Films’, Deep Focus (March 2002), 31–8. See Brian Michael Goss, Global Auteurs: Politics in the Films of Almodo´var, von Trier, and Winterbottom (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 42. Richard Burt, ‘All that Remains of Shakespeare in Indian Film’, in Dennis Kennedy and Li Lan Yong, eds., Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 76–7, and ‘Shakespeare and Asia in Postdiasporic Cinemas: Spin-offs and Citations of the Plays from Bollywood to Hollywood’, in Richard Burt and Lynda Boose, eds., Shakespeare, the Movie, II: Popularizing the Plays on film, TV, video, and DVD (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 269. Stephen Alter, Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief: Inside the World of Indian Moviemaking (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 41. Ibid., p. 51. Rustom Bharucha, ‘Foreign Asia/Foreign Shakespeare: Dissenting Notes on a New Asian Interculturality, Postcoloniality, and Recolonization’, Theatre Journal, 56.1 (2004), 17; Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 270. Alain Danie´lou, The Myths and Gods of India: the Classic Work on Hindu Polytheism (Rochester, NY: Inner Traditions International, 1991), pp. 176–7. Lalita Pandit Hogan notes that the film’s ‘mythic allusion to . . . the great warrior . . . cannot be missed by a vast majority of Indian viewers’ (‘The Sacred and the Profane in Omkara: Vishal Bhardwaj’s Hindi Adaptation of Othello’, Image & Narrative, 11.2 [2010], 51). Anthony R. Guneratne, Shakespeare, Film Studies, and the Visual Cultures of Modernity (New York: Palgrave, 2008), p. 71. David Waines, An Introduction to Islam, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 190. Nick Browne, ‘Fearful A-Symmetries: Violence as History in the Godfather Films’, in Nick Browne, ed., Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Godfather’ Trilogy (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 3. Philipp Hinz, ‘Shakespeare’s Dirty Business: Reading Signs and Controlling Looks in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool ’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 145 (2009), 170. Macbeth, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 1.5.15. Unless otherwise stated, all further references appear in the text. Gulzar directed Angoor (1981), an Indian film adaptation of The Comedy of Errors.

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24 Paul Watson, ‘Approaches to Cinematic Authorship’, in Jill Nelmes, ed., Introduction to Film Studies, 4th edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 107. 25 Rajinder Kumar Dudrah, Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies (London: Sage, 2006), p. 48. 26 Othello, in Norton Shakespeare, 1.3.369–70. Unless otherwise stated, all further references appear in the text. On the song’s intertextuality, see Hogan, ‘Sacred and Profane’, 50. 27 See K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, Popular Indian Cinema, 2nd edn (Stoke-on-Trent and Sterling: Trentham Books, 2004), p. 102; and Sangita Gopal and Biswarup Sen, ‘Inside and Out: Song and Dance in Bollywood Cinema’, in Rajinder Dudrah and Jigna Desai, eds., The Bollywood Reader (Maidenhead and New York: Open University Press/ McGraw-Hill, 2008), p. 147. 28 Lalitha Gopalan, Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI, 2002), pp. 18, 19, 28. 29 Waines, Introduction to Islam, pp. 137, 140. 30 See Peter Gottschalk, ‘Indian Muslim Tradition’, in Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby, eds., Religions of South Asia: an Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 231. 31 See Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby, ‘Introduction’, in Mittal and Thursby, eds., Religions of South Asia, p. 7. 32 See Danie´lou, Myths and Gods of India, pp. 377–8; and Ramesh Chander Dogra and Urmila Dogra, Hindu and Sikh Wedding Ceremonies (New Delhi: Star Publications, 2000), p. 36. 33 See A. L. Basham, The Wonder that was India, 3rd edn (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988), p. 319; and Danie´lou, Myths and Gods of India, pp. 87, 316. 34 See Dogra and Dogra, Hindu and Sikh Wedding Ceremonies, p. 37. 35 See J. J. Pallath, Theyyam: an Analytical Study of the Folk Culture: Wisdom and Personality (New Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 1995), p. 59. 36 T. V. Chandran, Ritual as Ideology: Text and Context in Teyyam (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 2006), p. 19. 37 Wayne Ashley and Regina Holloman, ‘Teyyam’, in Farley P. Richmond, Darius L. Swann and Philip B. Zarrilli, eds., Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), p. 131. 38 Sita K. Nambiar, The Ritual Art of Teyyam and Bhu¯ta¯ra¯dhane (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 1996), p. iii. 39 Antony and Cleopatra, in Norton Shakespeare, 2.3.34–6. Unless otherwise stated, all further references appear in the text. 40 Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, ‘Hamlet’ to ‘The Tempest’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 189. 41 Francesca T. Royster, Becoming Cleopatra: the Shifting Image of an Icon (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 97–8.

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42 Bernard F. Dick, Anatomy of a Film, 3rd edn (New York: St Martin’s, 1998), p. 164. 43 See Chandran, Ritual as Ideology, p. 4; Nambiar, Ritual Art, p. 13; and Pallath, Theyyam, p. 61. 44 Loomba, ‘Shakespeare and the Possibilities’, p. 130. 45 Nambiar, Ritual Art, p. 16. 46 See Chandran, Ritual as Ideology, plates 10, 45; Danie´lou, Myths and Gods of India, pp. 168–9; and Nambiar, Ritual Art, p. 104, plate 32. 47 See Sarah Caldwell, Oh Terrifying Mother: Sexuality, Violence and Worship of the Goddess Kali (Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 19–21; Chandran, Ritual as Ideology, p. 27, plate 22; Diana Dimitrova, ‘Religion and Gender in Bollywood Film’, in Dimitrova, ed., Religion in Literature and Film in South Asia, p. 77; and Nambiar, Ritual Art, p. 77. 48 Muraleedharan, ‘Shakespearing the Orient’, 34. 49 See Prince Ilangoˆ Adigal, Shilappadikaram (The Ankle Bracelet), trans. Alain Danie´lou (New York: New Directions, 2009). 50 Dudrah, Bollywood, p. 48. 51 Gopal and Sen, ‘Inside and Out’, p. 150. 52 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 433. 53 Coppe´lia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 114. 54 Chandran, Ritual as Ideology, p. 6; Dennis Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 212; Pallath, Theyyam, p. 99. 55 Nambiar, Ritual Art, p. 34. 56 Patrick Colm Hogan, Understanding Indian Movies: Culture, Cognition, and Cinematic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), p. 23. 57 Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 109. 58 See Caldwell, Oh Terrifying Mother, pp. 21–2. 59 See Basham, Wonder that was India, p. 312; and Danie´lou, Myths and Gods of India, pp. 271–4. 60 See Danie´lou, Myths and Gods of India, pp. 273–4. 61 See Ashley and Holloman, ‘Teyyam’, p. 133; and Nambiar, Ritual Art, pp. 14, 31. 62 Vijay Mishra, ‘Towards a Theoretical Critique of Bombay Cinema’, in Dudrah and Desai, eds., The Bollywood Reader, p. 38. 63 Gokulsing and Dissanayake, Popular Indian Cinema, p. 44. 64 Poonam Trivedi, ‘“Filmi” Shakespeare’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 35.2 (2007), 152. 65 Basham, Wonder that was India, p. 308; Danie´lou, Myths and Gods of India, p. 217. 66 See Basham, Wonder that was India, pp. 307–8. 67 Trivedi, ‘“Filmi”’, 156.

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68 Carolyn Jess-Cooke, ‘Screening the McShakespeare in Post-Millennial Shakespeare Cinema’, in Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray, eds., Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 178; Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, History, Culture and the Indian City (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 105 69 See Kishore Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere: the Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), p. 170. David Mason makes the elegant point that the ‘Hindu–Muslim’ dialectic of Maqbool substitutes for tensions between ‘Protestants and Catholics’ in Shakespeare’s England. See ‘Dharma and Violence in Maqbool ’, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, 4.2 (2009), 2, www.borrowers.uga.edu (accessed 17 June 2010). 70 Loomba, ‘Shakespeare’, p. 131. 71 See John Russell Brown, New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience and Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 161; and William Dalrymple, Nine Lives: in Search of the Sacred in Modern India (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), p. 36. 72 Muraleedharan, ‘Shakespearing the Orient’, 37. 73 Nandi Bhatia, ‘Different Othello(s) and Contentious Spectators: Changing Responses in India’, Gramma, 15 (2007), 171. 74 See Lalitha Gopalan, ‘Indian Cinema’, in Jill Nelmes, ed., Introduction to Film Studies, 4th edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 355–6. 75 Goss, Global Auteurs, p. 7.

part ii

Regional configurations

chapter 3

Shakespeare, cinema, Latin America

The last decade has seen the beginnings of a critical body of work devoted to the place of Shakespeare in Latin America, with the publication of two anthologies in English significantly opening up the field.1 This work, part of the broader move to explain Shakespeare through the lens of postcolonial studies, has pursued an historical recovery of performances, prose works, verse parodies and so on, successfully establishing the basis of a new archive.2 Film, however, makes only an occasional appearance in these studies, in part due to a preference for translation as an interpretive medium, with the effect that the various complexions of the local cinema industries are passed over. In this chapter, building on emerging discussions, I place in dialogue three Latin American Shakespeare films – Sangrador (dir. Leonardo Henrı´quez, 2000), a Venezuelan adaptation of Macbeth; As Alegres Comadres (dir. Leila Hipo´lito, 2003), a Brazilian adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor; and Huapango (dir. Iva´n Lipkies, 2004), a Mexican adaptation of Othello. I use the term ‘Latin American’ throughout to signal both a geographical configuration and an ideological construction that assists us in distinguishing moments of cross-fertilization in a diverse grouping of nation-states. In other words, engaging with the part played by national contexts in the production process, this chapter, while recognizing that any single descriptor is imperfect, argues for the significance of the representational practices of the individual nation-state inside larger arrangements. In As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador self-consciousness about narrative points of departure suggests Shakespeare as a recognizable body of material for present-day Brazilian, Mexican and Venezuelan audiences. Each film advertises a Shakespearean connection: ‘Versio´n libe´rrima de Macbeth de William Shakespeare’ is a bolded on-screen statement in Sangrador; As Alegres Comadres’s comparable identification declares the film ‘uma adaptac¸a˜o da obra de William Shakespeare – As Alegres Comadres de Windsor’; and ‘Inspirado en Othello de 89

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W. Shakespeare’ is displayed prominently in Huapango as an early announcement. Two points emerge here: one is that, in terms of their packaging, these films particularize themselves as ‘Shakespeare’ films, and the second is that they invoke, through a variety of terminologies, the processes of adaptation upon which they depend for their rationale. ‘Free version’, ‘adaptation’ and ‘inspired by’ imply contrasting encounters with Shakespeare at the same time as they suggest the nature of each film’s operations. Hence, Sangrador, a deeply regionalized updating, substantially cuts Macbeth while retaining many familiar linguistic formulations; Huapango takes a looser approach, adapting Othello via the conjuration of the play’s ideas, rhetoric and plot; and As Alegres Comadres reveals itself as a virtual word-for-word translation of The Merry Wives of Windsor. ‘Shakespeare’ as language fluctuates in Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador, matching their complementary modes of operation, yet filmic constructions of figurative Shakespearean expression remain integral. These films are evocative both in how they anatomize nation-states inside Latin America and in how they adapt Shakespeare according to a schema of individualized cultural and linguistic registers. The first section of this chapter argues that key to any aesthetic or political evaluation is a focus on multivarious locational and typological details. All three films stress time and setting as central interpretive modalities, with action and period specification – whether that be a romantic conjuration of nineteenth-century Brazil, a representation of contemporary Mexican heartlands, or a portrait of the Andean mountains of the Venezuelan past – coming together so as to invite responses that are mediated through a carefully localized mise en sce`ne. Emerging from this purposeful concentration on a series of town and country environments, I argue, are the ways in which the plays’ allusions to animals are transformed across all three films into indigenous realizations that highlight shifting praxes of power, sexuality and social status. A rich repository of meaning, and a vivid bridge between contemporary filmmakers and Renaissance England, is embodied in the use and variety of the natural world as a shared filmic resource. As one index of their local charge, for example, animals are tied, particularly in Sangrador, to prophetic lore and Catholic ritual, reinforcing the political valences of this discrete updating of the Shakespearean word. An attention to local and regional explanatory frameworks is an instrumental mechanism throughout this chapter, not least because As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador work carefully to highlight the symbolic weight placed on women as ciphers of national affiliation. As I will

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argue, this precipitates, in As Alegres Comadres, conflicting understandings of national identity which are bound up with a playful use of Brazilian folkloric figures, while in Huapango an engagement with the nation is conveyed through representations of cultural authenticity, specifically, regionally marked music and dance. This is not to suggest, however, that the films perform identical local manoeuvres, for Huapango, via women’s participation in dance, displays a critical edge in implying that projects centred upon cultural reclamation mask continuing and deep-seated difficulties. By deploying Shakespeare in such applications, As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador are able to expose the intricacy of the relationship between established institutions and the popular imaginary in various parts of the Latin America of modernity. The relevance of the films to the multiple elements of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American preoccupations is a constant, as is revealed in the extent to which As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador are able to confront the political and postcolonial determinants that lie behind any act of national self-expression. Sangrador is typical in that the film uses the status of Macbeth as a political tragedy to reflect upon militaristic authoritarianism in an explicitly Venezuelan guise. By contrast, As Alegres Comadres, constrained by the generic filmic imprint it follows, aspires to endorse an idealized and reassuring image of Brazil that simultaneously preserves existing divisions and celebrates racial diversity. In all three films, I suggest, ethnicity figures in a multilayered fashion – in images of imported black labour and its consequences and in evocations of colonial conquest, mestizaje and inheritance. Crucially, as in the carnivalesque utilization of blackface in As Alegres Comadres, the films test the limits of US-based studies of Shakespearean performance and invite interpretation according to more locally situated paradigms. In the work conducted thus far on Shakespeare and Latin America, the theoretical frameworks enlisted tend to be based on a concept of plurality. A ‘logic of multiplicity’ is the formulation proposed by Rick J. Santos to capture a sense of Shakespeare’s many applications in Latin America, with the Bard being seen as both indigenized – he is part of the ‘mestic¸o’s blood’, writes Aimara da Cunha Resende – and reflective of the ‘mixed’ constitution of the various parts that make up the whole.3 From these readings it is possible to identify a Shakespeare who is envisaged in rarefied terms and as a radical spokesperson at one and the same time. Commentators have shown the ways in which an attitude of ‘admiration’ and ‘reverence’ has marked the Bard a type of ‘patron saint’: his are ‘sacred

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texts’.4 Overlapping is a construction of Shakespeare’s plays as sites of ‘contestation’: the work has been subjected to ‘cannibalization’ and deployed as a ‘political weapon’ in the interests of assisting ‘covert . . . estrangement effects’ and even ‘revolt’.5 I argue here that the dynamic between revolutionizing and reifying does not offer an inclusive account of the films or answer to their total effects, while ‘multiplicity’ obscures areas of difference, fissures in ideologies that obtain in different parts of Latin America, and rifts in cultural practice. As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador are works different in kind and from each other. Part of the complexity is that film as genre is caught up in particular circuits of consumption and reproduction, and the film industries of Latin America in particular are marked by competing kinds of understanding and coexisting practices and tensions.6 Although there have been unprecedented developments over the past fifteen or so years, which have taken the form of government support, foreign investment and an expanding corpus of films in international terms, this has not obtained across all types of production.7 Hence, while the consensus, as Deborah Shaw states, is that the contemporary national cinemas of Latin America represent a ‘qualified success story’, which has involved a general flowering of films across a range of genres (from romance and melodrama to social commentary to heritage/conquest narrative), some nation-states, such as Venezuela, have lagged behind the filmic revivals of Brazil and Mexico, not least because of bottlenecks in exhibition/distribution and limited funding opportunities.8 Accordingly, the concluding parts of this chapter examine As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador in terms of their contexts of reception, contexts which affect in turn questions about meaning, marketing and perspective. Film, I argue, depends for its visibility or invisibility upon a complex of networked factors, including the operations of festival culture and commercial responses to local storylines. Via a recognition of Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador as discrete interventions, we might attend more precisely to their discontinuous responses to histories and situations (from exclusion to mediation to confrontation) that bring to mind the conditions of Latin American film production, processes of change and a sensitivity to the significances of Shakespeare on the global stage. setting, time, type Time and setting in the films are the immediate point of reference for spectator involvement. In As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador, these dimensions are communicated through the utilization of images and

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codes, generic elements that lend each film a unique appearance. For instance, As Alegres Comadres, which is set in the mid nineteenth century and is filmed in the town of Tiradentes in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, relies upon a palette of bright, primary colours, invests in widescreen shots of blue skies, and invokes numerous temporal referents (such as the Maria Fumac¸a steam train) so as to better declare its affiliations with a nostalgically infused vision of the national past. In this, director Leila Hipo´lito takes a bifold approach. The director’s prioritization of colour, setting and nostalgia is responsive to a recent ‘utopian curve’ in Brazilian cinema, which has revealed itself in a number of films preoccupied with historical continuities and ideas of paradise.9 But As Alegres Comadres also imitates the template of recent English heritage films, which, as Jerome de Groot notes, because of their representation of history as ‘homogeneous’, have been associated with a ‘conservative . . . middle-class agenda’.10 What distinguishes Hipo´lito’s approach is a careful merging of, and alternating between, nationally marked and European-inflected representational strategies. As Anglophone screen versions of the Bard make clear, of course, Shakespeare is par excellence a heritage author. An index of the connections As Alegres Comadres advertises shows itself in the debt to Much Ado About Nothing (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 1993). ‘I love Kenneth Branagh’s films,’ the director states, in open acknowledgement of a film which matches her own in its sunny disposition and style.11 The implication, in As Alegres Comadres, is that the nineteenth century betokens a kind of golden age: a comparison with the golden age of Elizabethan England is not too far away, and it is notable that Tiradentes, with its strikingly beautiful and well preserved neocolonial buildings, is listed as a world heritage site. The discovery of gold in Minas Gerais in the 1690s represented a significant moment in the development of Brazil’s material resources and global reputation.12 Hence, when Fausto/Falstaff (Guilherme Karan) states of Mrs Lima/Mistress Page (Zeze´ Polessa) in the film, ‘Like this state, she is full of gold and licence’, he is discovered as bearing witness to an historically resonant fantasy of self-improvement and instant riches: Minas Gerais, in this estimation, holds out the possibility of a dramatic transformation in personal fortunes. At the same time, this is a purposefully anachronistic projection: as the director notes, ‘we weren’t faithful to the real history’, her observation highlighting the ways in which As Alegres Comadres looks backward in time and offers impressionistic readings in the interests of generic allusion, narrative thrust and cinematic effect.

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Such representational priorities work to cover over a more diffuse political trajectory. At this nineteenth-century juncture Brazil was presided over by Dom Pedro II; independent of Portugal, the monarchical system was riven with political dissatisfactions. In 1788–89 Joaquim Jose´ da Silva Xavier conspired in Sa˜o Jose´ del Rey, Minas Gerais, to throw off Portuguese domination and to proclaim a republic. The plot was discovered, and Xavier, nicknamed Tiradentes or the ‘tooth-drawer’, was executed in 1792.13 Quickly, he became a martyr of the independent movement: Sa˜o Jose´ del Rey was renamed Tiradentes; a republican party was formed in 1871; and a ‘new paradigm of the individual and society’ came to inform ‘political practices’.14 By 1889 a military coup brought the empire to a close.15 In As Alegres Comadres the republican associations of Tiradentes are allowed to infiltrate the film only intermittently. Instead, an apparently unconditional approval of royal authority is allowed the characters, and a genuflection to constituted forces is prioritized. ‘The Imperial Council will hear of this’, threatens Judge Braga/Justice Shallow (Marcelo Escorei) in a formulation that both rephrases a comparable warning in The Merry Wives of Windsor – ‘The Council shall know this’ – and elevates a version of Elizabethan Whitehall into an abiding arbiter of conflict, an ultimate place of redress.16 ‘Not for all the Emperor’s riches’, an opinion proffered by Mr Lima/Master Page (Edwin Luisi), is the film’s equivalent for the play’s ‘I would not ha’ your distemper . . . for the wealth of Windsor Castle’ (3.3.182–3); notwithstanding its close approximation of the Shakespearean utterance, the expostulation functions, in context, as a powerful endorsement of class privileges, existing governmental systems and a status quo that is remarkable for being uncontested. In the same way that The Merry Wives of Windsor is directed towards dramatizing ‘an Englishness of everyday life’, as Wendy Wall writes, As Alegres Comadres is animated by concentrating upon the ‘Brazilianness’ of the imagined nineteenth-century nationstate.17 Fausto/Falstaff’s epistolary brag that he is as powerful as ‘Brazil’ and related allusions in the film to ‘my country’ typify, therefore, a narrative subscription to a construction of national strength, to unproblematic allegiances and to associated ideas of sovereign sentiment, bearing out recent Brazilian cinema’s re-evaluation of the nation through the lens of utopia.18 If heritage films, as Andrew Higson remarks, ‘function to maintain the values and interests of the most privileged social strata’, As Alegres Comradres performs a similar function in its semi-touristic visitation of a place and period that is as arresting for what it occludes as it is for what it makes visible.19

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Like As Alegres Comadres, Sangrador finds part of its rationale in a specific time and place: the date is 1900, and the setting is the rural landscape of Me´rida in the Venezuelan Andes. Unlike As Alegres Comadres, Sangrador deploys a stark black-and-white cinematography and a surrealist, rather than semi-realist, method. The decision is highly suggestive in translational terms, for shots of the cloud forests approximate the central protagonist’s ambition, while alternating images of dry and arid conditions or, as the film has it, the ‘treeless plain’, precisely connote the play’s ‘blasted heath’.20 Periodically raiding the sen˜ores del cafe´ or coffee barons, Dura´n/Duncan (Alfonso Rivas) is cast as a bandit in charge of a mountain village; Max/Macbeth (Daniel Alvarado) is his right-hand man. Vital here is the way in which the setting of the stronghold – complete with rope bridge and portcullis – establishes a dynamic relationship between the bandits and the Andes themselves. Glimpses of fortifications suggest not so much the actions of hostile others as the dangers posed by the natural domain; elaborating the play’s absorption in a world characterized by a tricky prophetic power, the film constructs an environment that, visualized as unwelcoming and strange, possesses a threatening life of its own. Accordingly, an opening sequence shows us the neighbouring forests scorched and ravaged by fire, suggesting the efforts of the community to keep nature at bay, to guard against the perils of its proximity. Figurative equations in Macbeth – the pathetic fallacy, in particular – are here rendered in graphically illustrative elaborations. Drawing upon melodramatic filmic conventions is Huapango, which is set in Tamaulipas, a state in the Huasteca region of northeastern Mexico. At an immediate level, Huapango rephrases Shakespearean power contests via a setting that underscores class divisions, social inequities and colonial influences: a classical-style fountain flanked by a church suggests a Spanish legacy, while the elegant house of Otilio/Othello (Alejandro Tommasi), with its Art Deco lights and dark wood interior, points to inherited wealth and the cultivation of European cultural traditions. It is a setting, in short, that brings vividly to mind the trappings of conquest and a troubled, postRenaissance history. Crucially, the town is presided over by the casa de cultura, a centre for the community which plays host to the numerous dance rehearsals that the film takes as its organizational principle. During these sequences the camera’s eye dwells insistently on the bold colours worn by the participants, suggesting regional affiliation as a form of theatre. Huapango locates militaristic signifiers in dance, the mastery of which will instantiate order. ‘Get in step!’ insists Maestra Ange´lica (Marı´a Elena Velasco), the teacher, who goes on to exclaim ‘We must be

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disciplined, people, even if we don’t get paid!’ These injunctions implicitly equate the ranked dancers with the martial discourse of Othello (the ‘Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war’) and cleverly translate the play’s battlefield musical references (the ‘shrill trump . . . spirit-stirring drum [and] . . . ear-piercing fife’).21 As the film portrays, huapango dance music is traditionally performed by a huasteco group comprising three instruments (a violin, a quinta or guitar and a jarana or a guitar-like instrument): these are played by a woman who does not sing and two male singers. Such a tripartite arrangement mimes the triangular rivalry between Otilio/Othello, Julia/Desdemona (Lisset) and Santiago/Iago (Manuel Landeta) and draws into even closer alignment the teasing out of the central relationship and the cultural practice from which the film takes its title. The huapango fandango dance itself, as Luis Covarrubias states, is marked by ‘vigorous heel and toe stampings . . . executed on a . . . wooden platform called huapango, which has holes bored in its sides to convert it into a sounding board’.22 Men and women dance as couples; the zapateos or movements are inspired by animals such as the caiman and the horse; and the whole represents an elaborate courtship ritual.23 By affirming dance as the film’s principal mode of action, Huapango thereby enacts in a metaphorical register the play’s dominant erotic entanglements. The noise that the huapango fandango generates also sensitizes us to a dominant thematic and to the aural economy – the suggestions of infidelity that Otilio/Othello hears, internalizes and disastrously acts upon – that brings about his downfall. Beyond the embodiments of dance, it is implied, is a sexual economy that will ultimately break free of its formal confines. An indication of the potential for a release of energy is hinted at in the fact of Otilio/Othello’s partial involvement. He dances only rarely. His sphere of influence lies beyond the casa de cultura; he plays no performative role in the local troupe’s competition victories. Huapango consorts with the play in imagining the protagonist as a type of outsider. The instance is suggestive of the ways in which As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador render the Shakespearean personality a familiar Latin American type. Typical is the way in which As Alegres Comadres discovers Mr Rocha/Master Ford (Emani Moraes), at least in Fausto/ Falstaff’s estimation, as a ‘cheap sugar dealer’ rather than a ‘salt-butter rogue’ (2.2.246), sugar being one of the most lucrative agricultural exports in nineteenth-century Brazil.24 Pursuing the project of local reinvention, Huapango imagines Otilio/Othello as a successful cattle rancher; empowered by the status that belongs with his role as employer,

Shakespeare, cinema, Latin America

Figure 8: Santiago/Iago (Manuel Landeta) and Julia/Desdemona (Lisset) join in dance, as depicted in the poster for Huapango (dir. Iva´n Lipkies, 2004).

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he rebukes the mayor/Brabantio (Alfredo Sevilla) for profligacy and acts with impunity to reverse political malfeasance. Hence, when the fate of the dance festival hangs in the balance because of the poor state of the roads, Otilio/Othello steps in to save the scheme. The ‘structural imbalance of state and social forces’ that Stephen D. Morris sees as historically associated with Mexico is here analogized in the image of the jefe or chief who intervenes in, so as the better to manage, his community’s cultural operations.25 Interestingly, in the place of an Othello which delineates a general whose ‘service’ inheres in a productive movement between the ‘state’ (5.2.348) and the Venetian senate, Huapango substitutes a landowner/farmer, who, standing at the intersection of community and state, also discharges intermediary functions. The modern gloss succinctly suggests the early modern construction. If Huapango seeks in its translations to render a local politics, As Alegres Comadres wants to illuminate pretence. Fausto/Falstaff is immediately realized as a faux soldier: boasting a carioca accent that connects him with Rio de Janeiro and the court, he is initially represented on a train stealing a military medal from a grieving widow (Maria Sa´). In this interpolated carnivalesque scene, the figuration derives its dramatic impact from the mobilization of the ‘confidence trickster’ stereotype, the appellation with which the character is introduced in the opening credits. As a malandro, or swaggering but harmless adventurer, Fausto/Falstaff relies upon a mastery of that popular Brazilian practice, the jeitinho – ‘a fast . . . way of accomplishing a goal by using . . . social or personal resources’.26 The medal theft is revealing in this respect, since it foregrounds a Fausto/ Falstaff who deploys charm as well as sleight of hand to promote the self. It is entirely appropriate, then, that the film elects to visualize as well as describe the robbing by Fausto/Falstaff of Judge Braga/Justice Shallow’s house: the doubled method of representation points up the pivotal role of the episode in the action as a whole. In a later scene that removes a Shakespearean ambiguity, Fausto/Falstaff is glimpsed looking covetously at the rings on the fingers of the merry wives, which suggests that his motivations are less sexual than they are monetary. For Fausto/Falstaff, then, Tiradentes holds out the prospect of a material change unavailable to him in the Rio de Janeiro society from whence he came. Here, the film gestures towards the ‘economic crisis’ of modern Brazil – the country has been described as a ‘dystopia of burgeoning . . . poverty’ – and colours its recasting with a specifically Latin American topicality.27 The economic is more directly invoked in Sangrador in the alternately violent and romanticized discovery of Max/Macbeth as a bandit who

Figure 9: Max/Macbeth (Daniel Alvarado) is appalled by his crime in Sangrador (dir. Leonardo Henrı´quez, 2000).

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contests the forces of wealth and elitism. Royalty is less important in this interpretation than the realities of dispossession, with a potent early montage displaying the spoils (furniture, paintings, statuary and a gramophone) of the bandits’ looting policy. This is, of course, booty with a distinctive social edge. An anatomization of power that brings colonial narratives of emancipation and oppression to the fore, Sangrador deploys a typology of Venezuelan folk heroism (the protagonist might be seen as a demotic and brigandish version of Simo´n Bolı´var, known in Venezuela as ‘El Libertador’); in so doing, it broaches questions about the distribution of property and privilege and the role of class in conflicts of interest. bestial manifestations/religious transformations In all of the settings and time periods instanced is a common concentration on the natural world. As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador are adaptations with complementary relations to Shakespearean language, and nowhere is this evidenced more strikingly than in the films’ utilization of a bestial discourse. Shakespearean themes suggest themselves in a filmic grammar of animals and animality that finds visual equivalents for textual details. In Huapango, for example, Otilio/Othello’s local influence is seen at the wedding celebrations where, in a consummate display of horsemanship, he sweeps Julia/Desdemona on to the back of the animal to the delight of the assembled spectators. Building upon the allusion to the ‘Sagittary’ (1.3.115) or centaur in Othello, the episode furnishes from a dramatic detail a scene of sublime social cohesion, casting in a romantic light the play’s cynical construction of the ‘beast with two backs’ (1.1.118). To a conjunction of man and beast, however, dangers are attached. In a subsequent impromptu rodeo, a drunken Otilio/Othello is persuaded to ride a bull, only to fall and injure himself, suggesting the brevity of the protagonist’s centralizing authority. Because the corresponding scene in Othello at this point is the drunken ‘rout’ (2.3.193) in which references to ‘Turks’ (2.3.153) and ‘Ottomites’ (2.3.154) abound, the implication in Huapango is that Otilio/Othello, through the bull, has become other or, at least, like the animal, is prone to anger and wildness. The film’s narrative foregrounding of animals thus serves as a potent means of realizing the fragile sense of self that underlies an apparently invincible exterior. If, moreover, the spectacle of the rodeo makes of Otilio/Othello a type of bull, then this echoes the play’s delineation of fantasies of physical transformation – ‘I have a pain upon my forehead here’

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Figure 10: Mrs Lima/Mistress Page (Zeze´ Polessa) and Mrs Rocha/Mistress Ford (Elisa Lucinda) prove a difficult pair to outwit in As Alegres Comadres (dir. Leila Hipo´lito, 2003).

(3.3.288), states the protagonist, in anticipation of cuckold’s horns – and its more general concern with the blurring of human and animal registers. The threat of cuckoldry recurs in As Alegres Comadres, too, as when a telling head shot juxtaposes the face of Mr Rocha/Master Ford and a pair of antlers on a tavern wall, suggesting the character’s mental projection of humiliation. It is in the sequence devoted to the attempted discovery of Fausto/Falstaff that this preoccupation is most emphatically rendered. Here, the use of a split screen divides attention between, in the foreground, the efforts of Mrs Lima/Mistress Page and Mrs Rocha/Mistress Ford (Elisa Lucinda) to conceal the malandro and, in the background, the frenzied attempts of Mr Rocha/Master Ford to flush him out. The search, it is suggested, thematizes what Mr Rocha/Master Ford wants to find – the evidences of his own sexual indignity. An imagined context of infidelity grants to the household objects that are thrown about imputed values of honour and morality, while the appearance of hens and cockerels, comic manifestations of the contents of the play’s ‘chambers . . . coffers [and] . . . presses’ (3.3.177–8), points up in a farcical key the complexion of Mr Rocha/Master Ford’s cuckolding illusions. A more extended treatment of animals as ciphers for psychic states is developed in Sangrador: the governing dialectic here is of power and

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weakness, submission and domination. Camera angles in an opening montage that features eagles, and bird cries approximating human screams, encourage us to see Max/Macbeth as a persecuted personality, suggesting a defining vulnerability: he is similarly identified via a shot of a scorpion scuttling across a rock in search of prey. Lines such as ‘O, full of scorpions is my mind’ (3.2.37) in the play are rendered in the film in images that discover Max/Macbeth as haunted by fears of becoming the next victim in a rapacious food chain. That Max/Macbeth is demonically targeted is implied in a later scene in which the witches are seen cradling various animals, including a snake: the beast’s associations with satanic temptation are self-evident, while the serpentine image brings to mind an archetypal narrative of exploiter and exploited. At the close, the representation of Max/Macbeth’s death – strapped down, he is skewered through the neck – is placed alongside a coda in which the two halves of the witches’ processional cart eventually vanish into the centre of the screen: as well as highlighting the film’s absorption in processes of trickery, dissimulation and equivocation, this mirroring sequence confirms the protagonist’s status as an abusive figure who is in turn abused and highlights the animalistic endpoint of that mutually constitutive preying process. Animal-centred imperatives in Sangrador are realized at several levels. Playing upon the porter’s preoccupation with ‘desire’ (2.3.27) and ‘performance’ (2.3.28) in Macbeth, an interpolated episode in the film shows the farmhand/porter (Gerardo Luongo) buggering a donkey. Coming, as it does, immediately prior to the discovery of the murder of Dura´n/ Duncan in the film, this graphic reflection upon entrances and exits points up the ways in which codes of difference have been grotesquely transgressed. At the same time, as director Leonardo Henrı´quez admits, the scene plays upon that ‘Shakespearean premise of mixing tragedy with comic elements’, with the combination of sex, animals, body parts and the unexpected operating as a farcical invocation both of the infamous surrealist images of filmmakers such as Luis Bun˜uel and Salvador Dali and of Bardic bawdy.28 Surrealism, which, in film, suggests itself in such formal effects as a blurring of ‘life and dream’, an ‘irrational storyline’ and the use of ‘hallucinogenic visions’, inflects Sangrador at several points and contributes to a thematic upon which the film also concentrates, which is the interplay between popular superstition and institutionalized religion.29 ‘What is going on?’ the farmhand/porter asks Macedonio/Macduff (Jose´ Sa´nchez), pausing to reflect upon the state of society in a question made all the more desperate by the simultaneous visual detailing of the

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character’s searching of a pig’s guts. Powerfully illustrated – and surrealistically coloured – is an effort of prediction or prognosis. In the same way that the witches foretell the future, so too does the farmhand/ porter investigate an animal’s interior so as to make sense of what is to come. The superstitious orientation of the scene finds an echo in Huapango at the moment where Santiago/Iago, angered at having been romantically passed over, pours salt on a doll of Julia/Desdemona and casts a package of mementoes into a river: as well as suggesting an effort to bewitch or besmirch, the ritualistic practice has the effect of associating him with an unorthodox or semi-underground practice opposed to established Catholicism. This distraught Santiago/Iago, moreover, is elaborately realized, with Huapango dwelling in some detail on the objects taken up (a photograph and a ring) and the activities accompanying their eventual rejection (a kiss and a spell): the implication is that the Huasteca region harbours counter-narratives, and alternative strategies of explanation, that threaten to explode the community’s seeming social harmonies. As the films progress so a superstitious/religious dialectic assumes bodily dimensions. One instance from Sangrador – a shot of a rock that bleeds – demonstrates the ways in which Catholic rituals, centring upon blood, wine and the body of Christ, are vital to the film’s effect. Mist, eerie choral music and whispered pronouncements come together to suggest a phantasmagoric scenario: the wounding of inanimate objects; a perverse miracle that none can explain; a sacramental transformation which results in no earthly improvement. Writing on the Venezuelan Andes, Mark Dinneen observes that ‘Catholicism has its deepest roots in this region, and it has marked many of the traditions and popular arts’, going on to note that the ‘veneration of the saints is crucial . . . for they have the power to grant favours to the worshipper’.30 Sangrador immerses itself in these blended or mestizaje traditions as part of its representation of the Muier de Max/Lady Macbeth’s (Karina Go´mez) religiosity and, in so doing, demonstrates not so much a divorce between superstition and religion as their intricate co-involvement.31 Dominating a shrine dedicated to the Archangel Michael in Sangrador is an icon of the commander of the heavenly army crushing the devil beneath his feet: because this version of Lady Macbeth sleeps alongside the holy construction, a connection between woman and saint is afforded, the suggestion being that the Muier de Max/Lady Macbeth is motivated by a desire similarly to act with martial courage.

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Yet, as the film makes clear, this is also an inverted application. In her fancy, at least, the Muier de Max/Lady Macbeth tramples upon and enslaves not so much evil as goodness; in addition, as subsequent scenes reveal, the character’s identifications are inseparable from a politically strategic use of Marianismo – the female cultivation in Latin America of the virtues of humility, sacrifice and patience.32 Marianismo involves, as one commentator writes, ‘submissiveness towards men’ and ‘the conviction that men are like children who need to be humoured’.33 In Sangrador, however, a cultivation of divinity is the means whereby the protagonist is cajoled and dominated, visually rendered in the scene in which Max/ Macbeth prays at the shrine (‘help me to stop this madness’, he implores), only for his wife to interpose herself physically between the supplicant and the represented godhead. Of interest is the way in which the icon of Saint Michael in triumph functions to analogize the Muier de Max/Lady Macbeth’s winning over of her husband: in the same way that the female protagonist identifies with the saint as part of an implied gendered transformation, so the male protagonist is robbed – made stereotypically womanly – through an appeal that costs him his conventional masculine traits. The shrine in Sangrador is not only a stage for the projection of ambitions; it also represents the battleground upon which gendered conflicts are played out. Further establishing the Andean provenance of the representation of the Muier de Max/Lady Macbeth are the calla lilies that cover the shrine: because they adorn cemeteries in the region, they come to refract in Sangrador the deathly effects of the female protagonist’s aspirations, granting a symbolic transmutation to a dramatic orientation. In the central parts of the film the gap separating the central players reveals itself as a divide between piety and blasphemy. Acting upon the witches’ promise that he can ‘summon the wrath of God’, a scythe-wielding Max/Macbeth throws the Communion bread and wine around the church: spliced in with the murder of the wife and children of Macedonio/Macduff, the scene draws an equation between tyranny and sacrilege and suggests that, having failed in his bid to secure divine succour, the protagonist now operates at a purposefully opposite extreme. In a climate of social upheaval and uncertainty, some parts of Venezuela have recently witnessed a turn to a mystical cult that worships the spirits of dead gangsters as saviours, with supernatural protection being sought for a crime wave that the government appears unable to control.34 Such a translation of popular religion not only illuminates some of the challenges facing local authorities; it also demonstrates the extent to which, in Sangrador, manifestations of the spiritual

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speak to the political. For, as a subsequent scene reveals, the height of Max/ Macbeth’s irreligion is arguably his self-satisfied announcement, ‘Imbeciles, I am immortal, I am a saint!’ The line exerts a powerful fascination at the narrative level – Max/Macbeth is constructed as not so much opposing as assuming the place of the Archangel Michael – and beyond, demonstrating, as it does, the amorphousness of the boundaries between crime and sanctification in Venezuela and the constantly shifting ground occupied by spiritual signifiers. Where Max/Macbeth blasphemes, the Muier de Max/Lady Macbeth is represented as endeavouring to atone, as when she leads a group of whitegarbed girls to a Confirmation festival: the children function as signs of a will to venerate rather than be venerated, to recover via pious work a semblance of self. Pietistic exercises are realized, most fully, in the extended treatment of the hand-washing fixation. ‘My hands are stained, smell the . . . blood, it sickens me’, states the Muier de Max/Lady Macbeth, the idea being that to return to cleanliness is to claim kinship with purity and some of the associated meanings – such as innocence – embodied in the calla lilies. Only with the ‘urine of virgins’, according to the Muier de Max/Lady Macbeth, can this transformation be effected; accordingly, Sangrador dwells in detail upon flower-festooned scenes of ablution, as the now confirmed girls relieve themselves on demand for their distraught mistress. Less of a reworked superstitious belief than, in the director’s words, a ‘morbid allegory’, this filmic version of the ‘perfumes of Arabia’ (5.1.42–3) operates metaphorically: it holds out, for the Muier de Max/Lady Macbeth, the possibility of regaining a previous status, even a pre-sexual state, and of finding in the intact female body a route to redemption. Yet such a deepening – and increasingly crazed – religiosity is ultimately self-defeating. For, in a concluding tableau, the Muier de Max/Lady Macbeth is glimpsed hanging by her neck from the rope of the bell tower: because she is attired in a cassock, whose shape resembles a calla lily, the final connection afforded is with the flower as a signifier of mortality. Sangrador thus makes visible the character’s suicide, and its means, making both significant parts of the narrative: the film points up the startling violence, and scenic bleakness, underpinning the fate of another vulnerable body. At the same time, as the witches’ lilyfestooned processional cart – a hearse that arrives to transport the dead to their place of rest – looms into view, we are reminded that any victory is of a demonic kind: the Muier de Max/Lady Macbeth is here linked to her husband’s tormentors, with the suggestion being that she, too, has been one of their playthings.

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Arguably, the fate of the Muier de Max/Lady Macbeth brings into focus locally mediated diagrammatic conceptions. Nikki Craske notes that women in Latin America have historically been separated into ‘good women . . . or whores’ in a formulation that helps to illuminate the films’ representation of restricted ideological frameworks.35 Certainly, Julia/ Desdemona in Huapango is subjected to either idealizing or damning treatments on the parts of men, but her own behaviour is characterized by a compulsion to move past these polarities. The cultivation of expertise in the Mexican ballet folklo´rico, Susanna Rostas argues, can reflect for women a ‘search for personal fulfilment’ and enact ‘external and internal empowerment’.36 For much of the film, Julia/Desdemona is discovered dancing: dance, for her, is equated with work, and its pursuit allows her both a space outside marriage (participating in competition is chosen in preference to the honeymoon) and kudos in the community. Similarly, in As Alegres Comadres, female director Leila Hipo´lito finds in Ana Lima/ Anne Page (Talita Castro) a cipher for a variety of independent behaviours, which suggests that the character functions ultimately as a test case for the possibilities of non-conformity. In a series of interpolations, for instance, the film showcases either Ana Lima/Anne Page’s acceptance of Franco/Fenton’s (Daniel Del Sarto) favours or her love-making with him, the latter scenes, in particular, demonstrating her self-determination and resistance to parentally chosen suitors. These episodes take place externally (on the street, in a forest, at the train station) rather than internally: they fuse local signifiers of mobility and escape with the ways in which, as Julianne Pidduck notes, the transgression of the domestic ‘threshold’ by ‘the apparently passive woman’ in British heritage film connotes ‘a desiring female gaze’.37 And, when we bear in mind that Ana Lima/Anne Page ultimately outwits her parents, it becomes clear that, in contradistinction to the unsuccessful Fausto/Falstaff, she has successfully used a jeitinho or subterfuge to achieve her ends. Crucially, in both As Alegres Comadres and Huapango visuals inflect acts of individual female will with national associations. In As Alegres Comadres the appearance of Ana Lima/Anne Page in blue in the masque, flanked by characters in yellow and green, situates her as a metaphor for national unity: yellow, green and blue are the Brazilian flag’s dominant colours.38 ‘Woman’ thus stands, in Natividad Gutie´rrez Chong’s words, as a ‘marker with which to construct archetypal images of national’ affiliation.39 Insets prior to the masque showing Ana Lima/Anne Page trying on green and

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yellow costumes bolster the point: national colours are implicated in the enactment of her own destiny. Because, in the masque itself, Ana Lima/ Anne Page occupies the centre of the frame, the suggestion is that the Brazil of modernity is synonymous with the assertion of an emancipated spirit: the character’s avoidance of dependency declares a national energy and focus. National considerations are articulated in Huapango via the film’s reification of varieties of Mexican ‘authenticity’. Otilio/Othello is represented as standing opposed to Americanization, insisting on Huasteca foods for the dance competition rather than ‘pizza’ and ‘hamburgers’, while the blouse with a floral design (a version of the play’s handkerchief) registers as a ‘present’ that is ‘hand-embroidered’ rather than factorymade: its significance resides in its individually worked uniqueness. Otilio/Othello’s defence of traditional cuisine, and the artesanı´a or older skills conjured in the blouse, point to Mexicanidad or Mexicanness – a conception of heritage that historians have traced to the 1910–17 revolution.40 Crucially, the ballet folklo´rico plays a significant role here; as Paul Allatson explains, ‘traditional . . . dances’ belong with ‘cultural initiatives sponsored by the Mexican government in its ongoing construction of a national project anchored in regional and indigenous cultural traditions’.41 Huapango demonstrates the extent to which a participation in popular culture and a political drive towards the improvement of basic standards of living are part of a symbiotic relationship. If, for instance, the Tamaulipas troupe that Otilio/Othello supports wins the ‘National Festival of Huapango’, a ‘water recycling plant’ for the region will be gifted by the central authorities. The new is anticipated in the pursuit of the old, with Otilio/Othello working in tandem with a nationally approved manifesto for change. Mexican nationalism in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has evolved in the wake of a massive land-grabbing exercise – ‘the US seizure of more than half of [its] national territory’ – and the result is that Mexico ‘has had to [endure] . . . a psychological as well as a political burden’.42 As Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith explain, ‘a deep-seated distrust and hostility’ towards America characterizes the Mexican imaginary in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that the US represents a key point of reference for the development of an autonomous nation-state.43 In this way, the neo-colonial narrative of Mexican–American relations has both exacerbated a feeling of political and economic marginality in the local culture and has proved the spur to attempts to secure an identity defined in indigenous terms.44 Huapango’s elevation of what is deemed authentically Mexican springs from these

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contexts and demonstrates the ways in which Shakespeare is used to pass critical comment. In a striking illustration of the transmigration of texts, the Bard becomes a lever with which to push an anti-imperialist agenda. What is deemed European and unchanging stands as a bastion against continuing waves of non-European territorial expansionism whose ramifications in Mexico are still powerfully in evidence. Beyond the representation of Julia/Desdemona, arguably, stands another woman defined through similar sets of associations. Huapango was the brainchild of Marı´a Elena Velasco, who, in the film, plays Maestra Ange´lica, the dance teacher (she shares a screenplay credit alongside her son, Iva´n Lipkies, the director). More specifically, as the director acknowledges, Huapango was supported by the contributions of the mother and financed, in part, via the ‘family film company’.45 Dubbed ‘La India Marı´a’ (Maria the Indian), Velasco, a long-established comedienne, has made a public and political point of playing indigenous types, wearing traditional dress and speaking in indigenous Mexican languages – her intertextual presence, which is signalled via a role that recalls earlier performances, endorses the importance of the local inside the national. At the same time, the resonances precipitated by her participation in the film make clear that dance and music traditions cannot be taken for granted, may be threatened and must be anxiously defended. As in Othello, in which the protagonist’s mother exerts an uncanny influence comprised of prophetic lore and native inheritance, Huapango is shaped by considerations of maternal investment and creates a space for a female voice to speak from outside its parameters. ‘Culture’, it is implied, can be prized and preserved – ‘conserved’ (3.4.73), to use the term in Othello – in the same way as the precious Shakespearean handkerchief. To capitulate to ‘new fancies’ (3.4.61), or, as the film understands them, external influences, is to enact a form of cultural betrayal. Yet this subscription to indigenous values is also nuanced, in part because the flawed Otilio/Othello proves unequal to his cultural task. Sandra Logan describes Iago as ‘emblematic of . . . a motor of capitalist production . . . a tenet of the condition of modernity’, and such a construction also animates the Santiago of Huapango, who is concerned not with dance as heritage but as a route to preferment and who shows his disrespect for the local when he entertains prostitutes at the casa de cultura.46 Whereas Otilio/Othello focuses on a notion of the people, Santiago/Iago thinks only of the individual, with the latter’s self-regard exposing weaknesses in the former’s communally rooted philosophy. Given that ‘woman’ is linked to a national imaginary, it is doubly galling

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for Otilio/Othello that his marriage is unconsummated. Extending hints in the play, the film places at the centre Otilio/Othello’s vexed exclamations that he has enjoyed ‘no dancing, no honeymoon, absolutely nothing!’ For this filmic Othello, it is a narrative essential that the ‘fruits are to ensue’ (2.3.9). If machismo, which, as Marit Melhuus writes, is used in Latin America ‘synonymously with masculinity’ and ‘implies, above all, the ability to penetrate’, then Otilio/Othello is characterized in the film by a failure to demonstrate his manhood.47 His frustration is exacerbated by the fact that he is, following his rodeo accident, bed-bound: cultural and physical disempowerment are enfolded in the image of a plaster-cast leg and crutch, which signify a parody phallus. Unable to function as husband, and debarred from the all-important dance, Otilio/Othello is robbed of his capacity fully to discharge cultural and communal responsibilities. The predicament is reinforced at a musical level, with the songs performed externalizing internal displacements or anxieties. Hence, during a dance rehearsal one trio claims ‘one hundred and fifty pesos someone has offered me to cheat on your husband . . . ask your sister’, while a second counters with ‘the lady, she’s so good . . . she’s worth the pay . . . I should think you’re gay . . . You know my sister, I know your mum!’ Clearly, the scene is conceived of as a mock competition, as two constructions of a relationship vie for due acknowledgement. In this, the film’s musical interpolation enacts in a public register both the exchange between Desdemona and Emilia in Othello – the attendant notes that ‘the world’s . . . a great price for a small vice’ (4.2.67–8) – and the banter between Desdemona and Iago in which the latter gives free rein to ‘profane and liberal’ (2.1.165) detractions that amount to slander. Playing a variation upon the Shakespearean preoccupation with money and sexuality, prostitution and the economy, the ‘flyting match’ in Huapango articulates in performative guise some of the dichotomies of gendered interpretation that animate the film, with choric figures enacting prevailing Mexican stereotypes that bring into conflicted circulation issues of kin, morality, imputed inadequacy and role reversal. A centrally directed sponsorship of music and dance, as it is represented in Huapango, moreover, conceals an inimical state of affairs. Mexico, writes Yvette Lopez, has ‘one of the highest rates’ for ‘domestic violence . . . in the world’; in some communities, gender stereotypes reinforce abusive kinds of behaviour, a situation that has only recently been officially addressed.48 Notably, as discussion of the problem reveals, ‘alcohol . . . is a well-established risk factor for . . . domestic violence at . . .

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individual . . . levels’.49 Huapango sees as mutually informing acts of male drinking and the expression of mysogynist beliefs, as when Otilio/ Othello, who is glimpsed cradling a bottle of tequila, threatens to send Julia/Desdemona ‘back to the dung so that you can revel in it like the pig that you are’. The idea is crystallized at the moment of Julia/Desdemona’s death, with the protagonist acting upon a traditional macho belief that, as one commentator notes, men might ‘kill with impunity adulterous wives’.50 Here, in rapid-fire editorial alternating between contrasting scenarios, a drunken Otilio/Othello strangles Julia/Desdemona while the final dance competition approaches its climax. Such a juxtaposition underscores a sense of interlocked fortunes, which an audience is invited aurally to apprehend: Julia/Desdemona’s rain of blows directed at Otilio/ Othello’s chest constitutes a rhythmically punctuated beat identical to the stamping sound of the dancing feet. While one cultural practice is being enacted, it is suggested, another is being ignored; or, to put it another way, Huapango places on display the gulf that separates political vision and material reality, pointing up the consequences for women of a government policy that misdirects its attention and skews its readings of what is valued. Ultimately, then, Huapango expresses a qualified view of the reification of the ballet folklo´rico, and implicitly counters the credo of the extra-textual mother, not least because a final shot lingers lovingly on the floral detailing of the character’s colourful national costume. Powerfully registered is an idea of youth cut off in its prime – Julia/Desdemona has been robbed of the opportunity to advance a Mexican cause – and of locally rooted processes disallowed from fully expressing themselves. Camera angles that dwell upon the horizontal position of her form establish Julia/Desdemona, in death, as a cultural casualty, an identification that sudden illumination – electricity is restored following a power cut – serves only to reinforce. The denouement of Huapango, with its suggestions of community breakdown and a divorce of interests, contrasts markedly with the unique form of carnival that concludes As Alegres Comadres. Fausto/Falstaff exclaims that he is haunted not by ‘fairies’ (5.5.117) but by ‘monsters’: the allusion is to Brazilian carnival in which ‘ghosts, death’s heads, devils and other apparitions’ prominently feature.51 Hence, it is entirely apposite that Padre Arnaldo/Sir Hugh Evans (Milton Gonc¸alves) should be disguised as a werewolf or lobisomen, a type which signifies both the prospect of transformation (the governing idea, of course, is that Fausto/Falstaff will be remade after having been humiliated) and a manifestation of the supernatural in Brazilian festive culture.52 Above all, as a mestizaje or

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hybridized event, this carnival is indebted to African influences and antecedents, as is suggested in the mask with horns worn by Dr Caius/Dr Caius (Chico Diaz), the inclusion of straw figures and a high priestess or ialorixa´ (played by Ana Lima/Anne Page), and the deployment of details taken from umbanda and candomble´, syncretic cults of possession which worship orixa´ or non-human forces.53 The effect is both to foreground Ana Lima/ Anne Page’s role and to endow the proceedings with a spiritual complexion. Inflecting the film’s local version of Shakespeare’s festive world, then, is a rich panoply of images and associations that both testify to Brazil’s colonial history and celebrate its ongoing postcolonial incarnations. In this connection, it is telling that the film removes Herne the Hunter and installs instead Saci, a one-legged black boy with a pipe who, in Brazilian folklore, is celebrated as a Puck-like prankster. At once, the referencing of this figure serves narrative functions: because children play no part in the film, Saci stands in for the energy of youth, and because he is a trickster, the implication is that Fausto/Falstaff, the malandro, has been defeated at his own game. Yet Saci is also important as a festive component particular to and expressive of the nation-state: as Roberto DaMatta states, carnival is an ‘essence’ that enables Brazilians to ‘sense and feel . . . their specific continuity as a distinct social and political entity’.54 Certainly, the carnival is a joyous collective occasion, one in keeping with the final welcoming of Fausto/Falstaff and with the orientation of a film keenly interested in the representation of plurality. In appearance, the sequences show bodies intermingling, forms dancing in circles, characters becoming indistinguishable, and fiery cartwheels blending into each other: national colours form part of a creative jumble, a constantly changing mixture. As the modern carnival of Rio de Janeiro makes clear, such an envisioning of merriment is also sexually accommodating. The ‘gay balls’ and ‘transvestite parades’ that accompany this annual phenomenon find an echo in As Alegres Comadres when it emerges that, in the generation of confusions, Silva/Slender (Rafael Primo) has accidentally been married to Roberto/Robert (Marcelo Melo), a manservant.55 The mise en sce`ne reveals the delight of both: the gesture is an expansive one that embraces multiple perspectives, including class. As is the case with Ana Lima/Anne Page’s spirit, Silva/Slender’s wake-up to his own sexuality is incorporated inside the convivial mood, with general hilarity, a jaunty flute score, knowing smiles and a shrug of the shoulders testifying to a vision of accord. In this way, As Alegres Comadres demonstrates how carnival, as Robert Stam states, constitutes an expression for Brazilian culture of a ‘profoundly democratic and egalitarian impulse’.56

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Whereas As Alegres Comadres pushes towards closure, Sangrador elects to stress a continuing course of events. ‘This is over, and now what, sisters?’ asks Hecate (Glenda Mendoza), her question making explicit a blurred boundary between a conclusion and a commencement. The alternating between two states of being emphasizes the unsatisfactory nature of the play’s ending: thus, the agreement that Macedonio/Macduff and Damia´n/Malcolm (Leonardo Villalobos) enter into with the coffee barons is represented as no more than pragmatic. As one disaffected onlooker states, ‘they say that they would leave us alone for a while if we join forces to kill the monster’. This is neither a reformist moment nor a smooth coming together of interests: the alliance is forged between different social forces; the causes underpinning banditry remain unaddressed; and uncertainties and imbalances persist. Given that Hecate is dressed here in military garb – she is a type of generalissima or even demagogue – the implication is that the story we have witnessed, and the one that is about to commence, takes its cue from local histories of despotism and popular images of military government. The use of optical illusion, coupled with the shot of the richly caparisoned horses, suggests, too, the theatrical complexion of the political, even the dissimulating character of constituted authority. In this sense, a Venezuelan Macbeth – in which, according to the director, ‘finding contemporary allegories is very easy’ – could be seen as carrying a particular cultural force. Hugo Cha´vez, a former tank commander, came to power in 1998, basing his appeal to the populace on his opposition to entrenched oligarchal forces, to austerity policies, to social deprivation and poverty, and to the lack of proper political representation for the underclass.57 With time, any populist conception of the president has been diluted: for a majority, Cha´vez now appears a species of ‘monster’ or ‘dictator’ who has ignored human rights in the interests of perpetuating his regime.58 Sangrador is a responsive film in these respects, with Max/ Macbeth’s subscription to tyranny indicated not least through dress. A hero of the people, sporting trinkets and a poncho, Max/Macbeth is visually discovered as succumbing to despotism in his subsequent transformation into a smart-suited governor, who has traded in his rudimentary musket for an ornamental sword. The embrace of a new role is also hinted at in the scene where the protagonist sits upon a sumptuously upholstered armchair, implicitly styling himself king rather than chief. Crucially, the insignia decorating this approximation of a throne are

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stamped with local significances: pointed detailing resembling flames implies that Max/Macbeth’s tyrannical trajectory has a damnable endpoint, while a lion’s head brings to mind the heraldic emblem of Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, and hints at an appropriation if not misuse of civic symbols. In this way, familiar Venezuelan iconographies suffuse the Shakespearean ending with reflections upon contemporary politics, the appearances of power and the persistence of the past in present configurations. A further dimension of the Cha´vez government – the president’s celebration of his Indian and African roots and alignment with the causes of indigenous peoples – reminds us of the extent to which issues of ethnicity and race are key elements of political discussion in some parts of Latin America.59 Either implicitly or explicitly, As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador mediate their local agendas through an absorption in the racial and colonial inheritances of their respective nation-states. As Alegres Comadres addresses the theme not so much visually as verbally; thus, while the reference to the ‘Ethiopian’ (2.3.24) is cut, the black/white casting of the wives points up an idea of racial balance and an idealized conception of intermarriage between dominant and subdominant groupings. As Alegres Comadres places an utopian cast on the racial material underside of its nineteenth-century surroundings. For, as historians have noted, marriages between white and black were the exception rather than the rule in the period – in a highly stratified society, the institution of slavery consigned the imported African population to poverty and marginality.60 Although some regions of Brazil, such as Minas Gerais, were noted for their numbers of freed slaves, slavery persisted as the national labour mechanism: it was only with the so-called Golden Law or Lei A´urea of 1888 that the institution was abandoned entirely.61 Race as an index of history is abundantly evident in nomenclature and cinematography. If only intertextually, to adopt a formulation of Eric Griffin, Huapango brings to mind, through Santiago’s name, the ‘patron saint of Spain . . . Saint James, Slayer of Moors’ and, hence, an historical trajectory of colonial conflict in Europe and elsewhere.62 Not least because his image emblazoned Herna´n Corte´s’s standards during the sixteenth-century conquest of Mexico, Saint James is tied to arguments about the operations and institutions of imperial power.63 More suggestively, perhaps, Huapango defines social position according to a visual grammar of skin tone: lower-ranked characters are darker in complexion, while Otilio/Othello himself is the palest of the cast. During overlapping periods of colonization across the subcontinent, as Santiago

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Castro-Go´mez observes, ‘the imaginary of whiteness was a sign of social status’ and a distinguishing marker of nobility.64 In a similar fashion, Otilio/Othello’s ascendancy operates in direct relation to hierarchies of shade and appearance, which are themselves socially and historically encoded, bringing into play, as they do, traces of Spanish influence, Mexican nationalism and the contested meanings precipitated by these conjunctions. By contrast, As Alegres Comadres’s local instantiation of race is inseparable from its dominant generic signatures. Tiradentes churches, on which the mise en sce`ne pauses for aesthetic effect, were constructed with black labour, and an opening image of a slave turning away from an overseer to secrete a gold nugget in his mouth suggests both an act of racial resistance and a correlation between the prosperity of the town and the systems of work upon which economic progress depends. It is with the representation of the disguising of Fausto/Falstaff that As Alegres Comadres asserts its racial engagements most forcefully. In this sequence, Fausto/Falstaff is made up to resemble a ‘black mother’, a traditional figure from Brazilian folklore, and passed off by Mrs Lima/ Mistress Page as ‘my servant’s aunt from Africa’. Although ‘slave’ is not specified at the level of language (‘servant’ replaces ‘maid’ [4.2.148]), the institution of slavery is clearly conjured. Accompanying musical chants and drums place the action within an African-derived field of allusions, and a delayed entrance makes all the more spectacular the appearance of the disguised malandro when he finally graces the scene. Because the camera’s pan begins at Fausto/Falstaff’s feet and moves slowly upwards, the moment of clarification – that Fausto/Falstaff has indeed been racially altered – is realized as a pointed theatrical revelation. It is difficult to know how to judge the episode at the level of reception: unsettling for American and European audiences, Falstaff’s transformation may be envisaged as farcical in a Brazilian environment. Certainly, the generic underpinning of the scene – comedy – is a vital component of the intended effect. In the remainder of the episode, Mr Rocha/Master Ford abuses the ‘old African’: interpolated exclamations such as ‘Black or not, she deserves a beating!’ and marked references to ‘fetishes’ make clear that the filmic ‘Aunt of Brentford’ (4.2.148) is objected to because she brings together witchcraft, female power and blackness in an unacceptable combination. The climax – Mr Rocha/Master Ford whips Fausto/Falstaff out of the household – establishes the centrality of issues of ownership and racial difference in a graphic realization of violence. Linda Williams writes that a ‘primitive folk authenticity such as . . . minstrelsy’ demonstrates ‘a desire to . . . eradicate the particularism of . . .

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the black’s history’.65 On the one hand, the ‘blacking up’ sequence in As Alegres Comadres would seem to enact a similar impulse: it mimes the claims and practices of white ascendancy in Brazil, a state of affairs that has consigned a black majority to a minority status. On the other hand, because of its local nuances, the scene is not necessarily open to a reading that invokes the minstrelsy tradition, which is associated more with US rather than Latin American histories of popular entertainment. Arguably, this radical change to the play’s disguising – one of the film’s most striking departures – is to be understood on its own terms and within the contexts that the film itself makes available. The theatrical use of blackface, as Virginia Mason Vaughan reminds us, takes on different significances according to culture, location and time; as she states, ‘the . . . power of the actor’s blackened face . . . stems from the codes that circulate within society . . . during a particular . . . moment’.66 As various performance histories attest, blackface across several nation-states in Latin America was associated with touring Portuguese and Spanish entertainments, with local adaptations of minstrel shows, with carnival-linked appropriations by elite white constituencies of African music and dance, and with rivalry between racially defined urban groupings, resulting in impersonations within impersonations. To don blackface was also to enter into a debate about the origins of national identity, to bring into play a concept of mestizaje as an oppositional force and to draw attention to a spectrum of meanings, not all of which formed part of a coherent assemblage.67 Clearly, the scene of Fausto/Falstaff’s blacking up is primarily a shaming ritual that exposes underlying racial ideologies and functions to endorse a construction of the social order, yet it is also one that eludes easy interpretations and identifications. If it is the case, then, that As Alegres Comadres shows how race operates according to inconsistent registers, it might be suggested that the film simultaneously invites less contradictory readings of itself and aspires to the notion of a working society in which differences are passed over. Courtney Lehmann, writing of the black Don John’s (Denzel Washington) failure to participate in the communal celebrations that conclude Much Ado About Nothing (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 1993), points up a ‘rift’ that troubles the film’s ‘ideological quilting’.68 Her argument anticipates Ayanna Thompson’s thesis that ‘colourblind casting’ demonstrates continuing ‘problems of performance and race’; the practice, she notes, ‘deconstructs the notion of its own belief in blindness’.69 Yet no such disturbance would seem to be detectable in As Alegres Comadres’s equivalent movement, which suggests that ‘colorblind casting’ does not have a

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universal application and, in certain circumstances, may function in a less self-cancelling fashion. The use of stereotype in As Alegres Comadres does not signify in its local contexts in precisely comparable ways. In the final scene of As Alegres Comadres, a wide-angle crane shot suggestive of omniscient benediction shows the central players processing around ‘Frog Lake’ en masse: the idea is that Fausto/Falstaff is now seen as an honorary citizen of Tiradentes and that he has been accommodated within the bourgeois order he previously endeavoured to exploit. The sequence is supported by camera movements that allow for all of the participants to be viewed within the same filmic frame: masks are taken off to reveal identities and ancestries, and singled out is a range of constituencies, which includes the black Padre Arnaldo/Sir Hugh Evans and Saci, now discovered as Gomes/Simple (Luciano Vidigal), Silva/ Slender’s servant. Crucially, leading the procession and bringing up the rear are Harlequin figures, whose motley costumes announce the film’s affirmation of admixture. And, as the camera shifts outwards to reveal the length of the column and its encompassing of conviviality, it is implied that this forms part of a more general forward movement. Of course, it is a fanciful moment, one that papers over contemporary contrarieties. As Robert Stam states, commenting upon Brazil’s current conceptualization of a ‘racial democracy’, discrimination and oppression continue. The ‘founding fable . . . that declares Brazil . . . Indian, African, and European’, he writes, ‘obscures present-day inequalities’.70 Yet, for As Alegres Comadres, the point is that interaction is to be embraced as an overriding possibility: matching earlier travel shots of the steam train is this naturalized evocation of progress towards some better collocation of social and cultural arrangements. reception, transmission, value Shakespeare is variously ingested and incorporated in As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador as a measure of status, as a representational challenge and as a medium through which to unsettle dominant values. These traits of ‘cannibalization’, however, are neither consistent across the films nor are they uniformly associated with a stance of dissidence: As Alegres Comadres, for instance, is the exception to the rule that an indigenization of Shakespeare amounts to a radically political act. Similarly, the contrasting directions of Huapango and Sangrador – one is interested in finessing its own cultural project, while the other is centred upon suggesting that the trajectories of tyranny are always

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contemporary – remind us of the difficulties of attempting to approximate the operations of a discrete assembly of Shakespearean adaptations with regional points of contact. Rather than looking to find homogeneity of response, it is helpful, instead, to pinpoint slippages, inconstancy and individuality. Such a theoretical approach has the benefit of seeing cannibalization and reverence merging and separating, disagreeing and disappearing in an evolving flow of ideas that takes us backwards to the manifold elements of Latin America and forwards to Shakespeare’s continuingly evolving extraterritorial manifestations. In interview, in responses to the question ‘Why Shakespeare?’ the directors of As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador offer various answers. For Leila Hipo´lito, Shakespeare is able to operate so productively in the filmic medium because he is a ‘classic author with a wide audience’. Leonardo Henrı´quez expresses a like-minded sentiment when he writes that ‘Shakespeare’s works have overcome the flow of time . . . he is an unlimited resource for the cinema . . . to be translated into every language and to be applied to all cultures’. He is joined by Iva´n Lipkies in his explanation that ‘it is impossible to produce a . . . tragic story about love, jealousy and deception without crashing head-on into the best story ever written on these themes – Othello’. Clear signs of a reverential construction of Shakespeare are detectable. But there is also acknowledgement given to textual transference and a continuum of imaginative recreation. The Bard, according to these formulations, is not fixed as an historical constant: in operating as a standard of comparison, Shakespeare becomes the stimulus for creativity and experiment on a worldwide basis. In this context, it is perhaps no accident that all three films express awareness both of traditions of adaptation and their own adaptive strategies. As Alegres Comadres recalls its connection via an opening and closing song (‘Amor’) that rehearses the plot of the famous Shakespearean comedy on which the film is based. Because the song is ‘Cabo Verde’ music, moreover, which represents a meshing of African, Brazilian and European elements, the implication is that the Shakespearean story of The Merry Wives of Windsor bridges if not integrates a number of different origins, cultural histories and memories. Similarly, as the booty is being examined at the start of Sangrador so the camera focuses on the farmhand/ porter listening to a snatch of opera on the gramophone. A recording of ‘Vieni t’affretta’ from Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth, the aria in which Lady Macbeth reflects on her husband, constitutes another – intertextual – rendering of temptation, even before the more direct attempt to persuade Max/Macbeth to evil has been initiated. At this point Sangrador

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contemplates the processes of making a Shakespeare film in a nonAnglophone register and, because it is a Maria Callas recording that is instanced, gestures to the European legacies (Greece and Italy) that shape its production possibility. Making a claim for itself, the film declares its own quality and credentials and invites us to value its contribution in the same terms as Callas’s international reputation. Sangrador, too, it is implied, is capable of imitating the prima donna’s success story. The question of value takes on denser resonances in the light of the limited success achieved by As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador. Notably, and possibly related to their identification with Shakespeare, As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador do not sit easily with such popular, larger-scale and well-attested examples of the nouvelle vague of Latin American cinema, such as Amores Perros (dir. Alejandro Gonzales In˜a´rritu, 2000), Cidade de Deus (dir. Fernando Meirelles and Ka´tia Lund, 2002) and Y tu mama´ tambie´n (dir. Alfonso Cuaro´n, 2001). By contrast, As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador enjoyed uneven exhibition runs in their own countries and various degrees of appreciation on the festival circuit.71 As a site where ‘cultural value’ may be translated into ‘economic value’, the festival resembles a ‘flow’ or ‘network’ that can facilitate exposure or consign to oblivion.72 It is revealing here that As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador have appeared, in particular, at exclusively Latin American film festivals.73 There is arguably a correlation between the films’ conduits of exposure and their introduction of scenes that challenge European or US/British styles of explanation: relevant in this connection are the use of ‘blackface’ in As Alegres Comadres; the sequence in which a package of mementoes is discarded in Huapango; and the episode with the donkey in Sangrador. Institutional contexts establish parameters of interpretation and suggest exploratory boundaries: the films are ultimately to be read, their international framing suggests, according to a logic that can be said to possess definitively Latin American characteristics. To advertise a film via a Shakespearean affiliation is not for it to be guaranteed a global prominence. Similarly, interchange and commerce do not themselves bring canonical legitimacy or citational prominence: of the three films discussed here, only one is available in DVD format outside the subcontinent. In the relatively small audiences that they attracted, and in their status as films that did not attract significant amounts of co-funding, As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador compare in their destinies less favourably with the more internationally envisaged, supported and directed film products of other contemporary filmmakers. Luisela Alvaray notes that the degree of

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attention accorded Latin American cinema often hinges on the extent to which an individual film maintains a balance between ‘cultural specificity’ and ‘universal values’ or, as she glosses these formulations, the ‘local and the global’, and it is arguably because As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador tip the equilibrium in some sense that they have not been critically appreciated beyond their own places of origin.74 In the afterlives of these films we see allegorized the conditions of their own making: As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador bear witness to a Latin American film industry’s underlying realities – a combination of strides in financing and an increase in production but, where Shakespeare is concerned, structural imbalances, funding difficulties, distribution problems and domination by global neighbours.75 Mapping Shakespeare on to geographical and cultural coordinates that refuse easy categorizations, As Alegres Comadres, Huapango and Sangrador take the texts in fresh directions and prompt reflection on the ways in which the Bard on film is customarily understood and identified. N O T ES 1 See, for example, Bernice W. Kliman and Rick J. Santos, eds., Latin American Shakespeares (Madison, WI and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005); and Aimara da Cunha Resende, ed., Foreign Accents: Brazilian Readings of Shakespeare (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002). For Portuguese and/or Spanish studies of Shakespeare in Latin American, see Alfredo Michel Modenessi, ‘Latin America’, in Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells, eds., The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 251–2; and Margarida Gandara Rauen, ‘Brazil’, in Dobson and Wells, eds., Oxford Companion, p. 54. 2 For Shakespeare and postcolonial studies, see Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds., Women, ‘Race’, and Writing in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); and Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, eds., Post-Colonial Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). 3 Aimara da Cunha Resende, ‘Introduction: Brazilian Appropriations of Shakespeare’, in Resende, ed., Foreign Accents, p. 39; Rick J. Santos, ‘Mestizo Shakespeares: a Study of Cultural Exchange’, in Kliman and Santos, eds., Latin American Shakespeares, p. 11. 4 Thaı¨s Flores Nogueira Diniz, ‘Shakespeare Parodied: Romeo and Juliet’, in Kliman and Santos, eds., Latin American Shakespeares, p. 263; Alfredo Michel Modenessi, ‘Meaning by Shakespeare South of the Border’, in Sonia Massai, ed., World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 105; Alfredo Michel Modenessi,

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7 8

9 10 11

12

13 14

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Regional configurations ‘Of Shadows and Stones: Revering and Translating “The Word” Shakespeare in Mexico’, Shakespeare Survey, 54 (2001), 153; Barbara Heliodora C. De M. F. De Almeida, ‘Shakespeare in Brazil’, Shakespeare Survey, 20 (1967), 121. Modenessi, ‘Meaning by Shakespeare’, p. 105; Santos, ‘Mestizo Shakespeares’, p. 12; Modenessi, ‘Of Shadows’, 157; Resende, ‘Introduction’, p. 18. See Luisela Alvaray, ‘National, Regional, and Global: New Waves of Latin American Cinema’, Cinema Journal, 47.3 (2008), 48; Alberto Elena and Marina Dı´az Lo´pez, ‘Introduction’, in Alberto Elena and Marina Dı´az Lo´pez, eds., The Cinema of Latin America (London and New York: Wallflower, 2003), p. 10; Walter Salles, ‘Preface’, in Elena and Lo´pez, eds., Cinema of Latin America, p. xiv; Deborah Shaw, ‘Latin American Cinema Today: a Qualified Success Story’, in Deborah Shaw, ed., Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Breaking into the Global Market (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), p. 3. Alvaray, ‘National, Regional, and Global’, 49, 51, 55; Shaw, ‘Latin American Cinema Today’, pp. 1, 2. Alvaray, ‘National, Regional, and Global’, 49; Mark Dinneen, Culture and Customs of Venezuela (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood, 2001), pp. 87, 106; Shaw, ‘Latin American Cinema Today’, pp. 1–10. Surveying the year 2006, Martha Escalona Zerpa notes that ‘the market share of Venezuelan movies is only 1%, making a local movie industry almost unsustainable’ (‘Venezuela’, in Daniel Rosenthal, ed., International Film Guide 2006, 43rd edn [London, Los Angeles and Cannes: Button, 2006], p. 303). See Lu´cia Nagib, Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007), pp. xx, 4. Jerome de Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 212. Interviews between Leila Hipo´lito and Mark Thornton Burnett, 5 May 2009 and 31 January 2012. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Leila Hipo´lito are from these interviews and appear in the text or notes. Darlene J. Sadlier, Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), p. 92; Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, 6th edn (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 25. Thomas E. Skidmore, Brazil: Five Centuries of Change (Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 32–3. Richard Graham, ‘Free African Brazilians and the State in Slavery Times’, in Michael Hanchard, ed., Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 33; Sadlier, Brazil Imagined, pp. 129, 149. See Russell G. Hamilton, ‘European Transplants, Amerindian in-laws, African Settlers, Brazilian Creoles: a Unique Colonial and Postcolonial Condition in Latin America’, in Mabel Moran˜a, Enrique Dussel and Carlos A. Ja´uregui, eds., Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 115; Alfred P. Montero, Brazilian Politics: Reforming a Democratic State in a Changing

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17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29 30 31

32 33 34 35

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World (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), p. 12; Skidmore, Brazil, p. 43; and Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, pp. 143, 147. The Merry Wives of Windsor, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 1.1.99. Unless otherwise stated, all further references appear in the text. Wendy Wall, ‘Why Does Puck Sweep?: Fairylore, Merry Wives, and Social Struggle’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 52.1 (2001), 105. See Nagib, Brazil on Screen, p. 4. Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980 (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 46. Macbeth, in Norton Shakespeare, 1.3.75. Unless otherwise stated, all further references appear in the text. Othello, in Norton Shakespeare, 3.3.359, 3.3.356–7. Unless otherwise stated, all further references appear in the text. Luis Covarrubias, Regional Dances of Mexico (Mexico City: Eugenio Fischgrund, 1979), p. 29. Ibid., p. 34. Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, p. 147. Stephen D. Morris, Corruption and Politics in Contemporary Mexico (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), p. 42. Lı´via Neves de H. Barbosa, ‘The Brazilian Jeitinho: an Exercise in National Identity’, in David J. Hess and Roberto A. DaMatta, eds., The Brazilian Puzzle: Culture on the Borderlands of the Western World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 36. Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, pp. 178, 179; Sadlier, Brazil, p. 280. Interview between Leonardo Henrı´quez and Mark Thornton Burnett, 19 May 2009. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Leonardo Henrı´quez are from this interview and appear in the text or notes. Elliott H. King, Dalı´, Surrealism and Cinema (Harpenden: Kamera, 2007), pp. 17, 19, 147, 171. Dinneen, Culture and Customs, pp. 15, 29. In a discussion of mestizaje, Peter Bakewell notes ‘the intermingling of religion that in the Andes . . . has drawn Christian saints and ancient native deities together into single cults’ (A History of Latin America, 2nd edn [Oxford: Blackwell, 2004], p. 548). Paul Allatson defines mestizaje in terms of its ‘connotations of cultural admixture’ (Key Terms in Latino/a Cultural and Literary Studies [Oxford: Blackwell, 2007], p. 158). Tessa Cubitt, Latin American Society, 2nd edn (Harlow: Longman, 1995), p. 111. Nikki Craske, Women and Politics in Latin America (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), p. 12. Unreported World: Venezuela, Cult of the Thugs, Channel 4, 21 November 2008. Craske, Women and Politics, p. 12.

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36 Susanna Rostas, ‘The Production of Gendered Imagery: the Concheros of Mexico’, in Marit Melhuus and Kristi Anne Stølen, eds., Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas: Contesting the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery (London and New York: Verso, 1996), pp. 209, 210. 37 Julianne Pidduck, Contemporary Costume Film (London: BFI, 2004), p. 26. 38 See Sadlier, Brazil, p. 130. 39 Natividad Gutie´rrez Chong, ‘Women and Nationalisms’, in Natividad Gutie´rrez Chong, ed., Women, Ethnicity and Nationalisms in Latin America (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 12. 40 Roderic Ai Camp, Politics in Mexico (Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 49. 41 Allatson, Key Terms, p. 28. 42 Camp, Politics in Mexico, p. 50; John Charles Chasteen, Born in Blood and Fire: a Concise History of Latin America, 2nd edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 147. 43 Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, p. 258. 44 On Latin America and neo-colonialism, see Mabel Moran˜a, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Ja´uregui, ‘Colonialism and its Replicants’, in Moran˜a, Dussel, and Ja´uregui, eds., Coloniality at Large, p. 10; J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: an Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 192–3. 45 Interview between Iva´n Lipkies and Mark Thornton Burnett, 19 and 21 April 2009. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Iva´n Lipkies are from this interview and appear in the text or notes. 46 Sandra Logan, ‘Domestic Disturbance and the Disordered State in Shakespeare’s Othello’, Textual Practice, 18.3 (2004), 371. 47 Marit Melhuus, ‘Power, Value and the Ambiguous Meanings of Gender’, in Melhuus and Stølen, eds., Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas, p. 240. 48 Yvette Lopez, ‘Sleeping with the Enemy: Mexico and Domestic Violence, Out for a Rude Awakening or Rising in Time?’, Women’s Rights Law Reporter, 25.1 (2003), 1–6. Mercedes Olivera writes that ‘feminicides . . . have become a pathology that has spread throughout Mexico . . . The fact that the perpetrators are so rarely punished and that the number and viciousness of crimes against women continue to increase reveals the government’s political incapacity to deal with this kind of crime’ (‘Violencia Feminicida: Violence against Women and Mexico’s Structural Crisis’, in Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano, eds., Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Ame´ricas [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010], p. 49). 49 Mayra Buvinı´c, Andrew R. Morrison and Michael Shifter, ‘Violence in the Americas: a Framework for Action’, in Andrew R. Morrison and Marı´a Loreto Biehl, eds., Too Close to Home: Domestic Violence in the Americas (Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank, 1999), p. 25. 50 Craske, Women and Politics, p. 11. 51 Roberto DaMatta, Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes: an Interpretation of the Brazilian Dilemma, trans. John Drury (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), p. 41.

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52 Sadlier, Brazil, p. 159. Additional folkloric figures – familiar from Brazilian children’s stories – impersonated in the masque include ‘curupira’ (a boy with green teeth, fiery hair and backward-pointing feet who safeguards the forests), ‘boitata´’ (a flaming serpent or will-o’-the-wisp) and the ‘mula sem cabec¸a’, a woman’s ghost in the shape of a headless mule. Together, they suggest that Fausto/Falstaff is taken back to the bogey-like creatures of a childhood imagination. 53 Michael Hanchard, ‘Introduction’, in Hanchard, ed., Racial Politics, p. 4; Robert Stam, Tropical Multiculturalism: a Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 209, 224. 54 DaMatta, Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes, p. 15. 55 On this note, it is interesting that Fausto/Falstaff, shortly before the masque, labels himself a ‘veado’ (male deer). The term, which surrogates for the play’s ‘Windsor stag’ (5.5.11), is a slang term for a gay man, and this is picked up in the English-language subtitle, ‘bambi’, another Brazilian colloquial term suggestive of homosexuality. 56 Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 130. 57 Rory Carroll, ‘The long slide’, Guardian: Weekend, 17 May 2008, 32–41; Rory Carroll, ‘Hurricane still swirling as old price fall casts cloud on anniversary’, Guardian, 2 February 2009, 22–3; Dinneen, Culture and Customs, pp. 9–10; Joe Foweraker, Todd Landman and Neil Harvey, Governing Latin America (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), p. 19. 58 Carroll, ‘Long slide’, 35, 41; Carroll, ‘Hurricane’, 22; Foweraker, Landman and Harvey, Governing Latin America, p. 19; Bart Jones, ¡Hugo!: The Hugo Cha´vez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution (London: Bodley Head, 2008), pp. 9–10; Edwin Williamson, The Penguin History of Latin America (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2009), p. 597; Gregory Wilpert, Changing Venezuela by Taking Power: the History and Policies of the Cha´vez Government (London and New York: Verso, 2007), pp. 20, 23–6. 59 Jones, ¡Hugo!, pp. 27–8, 61, 102. 60 Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, p. 26; Nathan W. Warren, Racial Revolutions: Antiracism and Indian Resurgence in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 60. 61 Allatson, Key Terms, p. 212; Graham, ‘Free African Brazilians’, p. 31; Skidmore, Brazil, pp. 68, 70; Stam, Tropical Multiculturalism, pp. 30, 311. 62 Eric Griffin, ‘Un-Sainting James: or, Othello and the “Spanish Spirits” of Shakespeare’s Globe’, Representations, 62 (spring 1998), 68. 63 Ame´rico Castro, The Spaniards: an Introduction to their History, trans. Willard F. King and Selma Margaretten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 420–70. 64 Santiago Castro-Go´mez, ‘(Post)Coloniality for Dummies: Latin American Perspectives on Modernity, Coloniality, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge’, in Moran˜a, Dussel, and Ja´uregui, eds., Coloniality at Large, p. 282. See also Williamson, Penguin History of Latin America, p. 135.

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65 Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 138, 154. 66 Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 130. 67 John Charles Chasteen, ‘Blackface Kings, Blackface Carnival, and Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Tango’, in William H. Beezley and Linda A. Curcio-Nagy, eds., Latin American Popular Culture: an Introduction (Lanham: Scholarly Resources, 2004), pp. 49–52; Jill Lane, Blackface Cuba, 1840–1895 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), pp. 2–3. 68 Courtney Lehmann, ‘Much Ado About Nothing? Shakespeare, Branagh, and the “National-Popular” in the Age of Multinational Capital’, Textual Practice, 12.1 (1998), 2, 10. 69 Ayanna Thompson, ‘Practicing a Theory/Theorizing a Practice: an Introduction to Shakespearean Colorblind Casting’, in Ayanna Thompson, ed., Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 9, 11. 70 Stam, Tropical Multiculturalism, p. 49. 71 In addition, As Alegres Comadres was taken via educational programmes to poorer areas of Brazil lacking commercial cinemas and shown ‘for free’; Sangrador was exhibited in ‘experimental theatres’. As Alegres Comadres appeared at the Brazilian Film Festival (Miami), the International Film Festival (Hong Kong), the Latin American Film Festival (Cardiff) and the Women’s Film Festival (Barcelona), while Huapango was seen at the Malaysian Film Festival (Kuala Lumpur), the Mexican Film Week (Budapest) and the Multicultural Film Festival (Canberra). Outside Venezuela, Sangrador premiered at festivals in Argentina, Canada (the Latin American Film Festival), India, Italy, Japan, Korea and the US. 72 See Marijke de Valck, Film Festivals: from European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam University Press, 2007), pp. 18, 36, 106. 73 See note 71 above. 74 Alvaray, ‘National, Regional, and Global’, 62. For a complementary discussion, see Marvin D’Lugo, ‘Authorship, Globalization, and the New Identity of Latin American Cinema’, in Anthony R. Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., Rethinking Third Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 112, 113, 122. 75 See Michael Chanan, ‘Latin American Cinema: from Underdevelopment to Postmodernism’, in Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, eds., Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (London and New York: Wallflower, 2006), p. 47.

chapter 4

Shakespeare, cinema, Asia

In contrast to many of the Shakespeare films discussed in this book, The Banquet (dir. Xiaogang Feng, 2006), a Chinese adaptation of Hamlet, enjoyed global release, distribution and visibility. Accessibility was facilitated in large part through a kinship with recent blockbuster martial arts movies – such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (dir. Ang Lee, 2000) – that, drawing upon chivalric and operatic motifs, remodel eastern heroism for audiences around the world.1 The Banquet declares its generic affiliations via the evocation of a bloody moment in Chinese history: an onscreen announcement informs us that the action is set in ‘China, 907 bc . . . the period [of] . . . the “Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms” . . . an era plagued by widespread turmoil . . . and a bitter struggle for power within the imperial family’.2 Lush cinematography reinforces the film’s epic dimensions, as in the sumptuous opening where the extravagantly attired Empress Wan/Gertrude (Ziyi Zhang) is filmed from behind processing towards the throne: the sequence recalls a similar back-view image of the protagonist in Hamlet (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 2007) and positions The Banquet as a continuation of this earlier production in ambition and scale. Framing devices, then, consort with filmic content to establish for The Banquet recognizable interpretive parameters, concomitant box office and DVD sales and more than customary scholarly interest.3 This chapter builds upon the work already being undertaken on The Banquet by exploring in greater detail the film’s simultaneous application of localized styles of representation and reworking of the Shakespearean source of inspiration. It does so, however, not so much by pursuing moments of contact between The Banquet and its western equivalents as by situating the film in relation to a series of Asian Shakespeare-inspired works. Inside this chapter’s grouping, The Banquet has as a close colleague the equally ambitious but less well-known film, Prince of the Himalayas (dir. Sherwood Hu, 2006), an adaptation of Hamlet set in Tibet.4 This 125

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film, which, like The Banquet, gestures to Shakespeare’s play via a thematic rendering of snowy landscapes and makes a virtue out of locating itself in an ancient time period, is the work of the US-trained Chinese director and screenwriter Sherwood Hu and the Tibetan screenwriters Trashidawa and Chenaktshang Dorje Tsering (Jangbu), who also shares a directing credit. Prince of the Himalayas, as a collaborative, jointly authored and multiply produced venture, can thus be seen to represent a specific species of transnationalism. Both The Banquet and Prince of the Himalayas reconfigure the Shakespearean family so as to highlight culture-specific questions about female agency. In The Banquet, Empress Wan/Gertrude is involved in a love affair with her stepson, Wu Luan/ Hamlet (Daniel Wu), despite her power-brokering marriage to Emperor Li/Claudius (You Ge): the authority she wields stems from her combined roles as stepmother and ruler.5 Comparably desiring is Queen Nanm/ Gertrude (Zomskyid) in Prince of the Himalayas: she conducts an extramarital relationship with her brother-in-law, latterly King Kulo-ngam/ Claudius (Dobrgyal), as an escape from a loveless marriage to the tyrannical King Tsanpo/Old Hamlet (Lobzangchopel). When she marries King Kulo-ngam/Claudius after her husband’s death, this is merely the continuation of a long-standing affair.6 These films, then, consort with each other in situating the Gertrude figure at the centre and, in so doing, construct female sexuality as the lynchpin or underlying spur to the narrative. Comparing The Banquet and Prince of the Himalayas prompts us to think about the place of Hamlet in Asian film culture more generally, but extending the generic range facilitates a broader reading of how the larger Shakespearean corpus signifies. Alexander C. Y. Huang argues that the ‘first decade of the new millennium was for Asian cinematic Shakespeares as the 1990s had been for Anglophone Shakespeare on film’.7 Certainly, the period has produced a constellation of films that, in their temporally proximate preoccupations, invite critical attention.8 Hence, I also examine in this chapter the satirical comedy, Chicken Rice War (dir. Chee Kong Cheah, 2000), and the darker, dystopian production, Gedebe (dir. Nam Ron, 2002). Backed by the Singapore Film Commission, Chicken Rice War unfolds in downtown Singapore and reinvents Romeo and Juliet as a feud between the Chan and Wong families, who run adjacent and competing chicken rice stalls.9 Gedebe, a Malaysian adaptation of Julius Caesar, is an independent, low-budget work that eschews the conventions of mainstream Malaysian cinema and is distinctive for interrogating a variety of authority forms. In discussing side-by-side films produced

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within China, Malaysia and Singapore, I am following the lead of film critics who maintain, as does Shohini Chaudhuri, that the ‘Asian territories’, although ‘highly distinctive and different from each other in numerous respects’, invite comparative analysis in that they share ‘many centuries-old cultural traditions: Confucian ethics . . . Buddhism, supernatural beliefs [and] classical theatre’.10 In particular, I want to argue here that a comparative approach assists us in understanding the unfolding significance of this period of Asian cinema for Shakespeare studies and allows for a properly contextualized appreciation of the films’ manifold creative elements. Creative experiments with the ‘original’ in The Banquet and Prince of the Himalayas are typical of Asian cinematic Shakespeares as a whole. For example, Chicken Rice War is invigorated by mixing and matching Shakespearean language and MTV-style musical insets, the effect of which is to emphasize plural perspectives on events. Because it features two Romeo and Juliet storylines – one centred on the feud, the other centred on a college production of the play in which members of both families participate – a mirroring of Shakespearean and Shakespearean-related components is generated. Music as motor to the action – the underground punk rock scene of Kuala Lumpur – informs Gedebe, too, a film whose own imaginative refiguring of Shakespeare is demonstrated in the ways in which Julius Caesar’s tussle of minds is transformed into a football match with a paper cup and Roman consuls are discovered as petty criminals. Less of a statesman than a hoodlum, Caesar (Hariry Abd Jalil), for instance, is robbed of gravitas when he is glimpsed urinating upon himself in a telephone booth. In this way, Gedebe, although never released on DVD and rarely commented upon, has established for itself a cult reputation as a Shakespearean appropriation that is revealing precisely because of its inventively debunking orientation.11 At a structural level, this chapter argues, Shakespeare is essential both to the internal organization of The Banquet, Prince of the Himalayas, Chicken Rice War and Gedebe and to their final effects. The films pursue core questions posed by the plays, utilizing the Bard as a strategy of legitimation (Asian film industries are paradoxically bolstered by their imbrication in western history) and referencing Shakespeare’s works as indices of an ongoing debate between tradition and change. A Shakespearean presence is felt not so much through citation (although this is a recurring feature) but via revision: Prince of the Himalayas, for instance, becomes a tragedy of forgiveness rather than revenge. The Banquet, Prince of the Himalayas, Chicken Rice War and Gedebe place on display their lineage,

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dwelling repeatedly upon theatre and film as genres enjoying a powerful utility. Shakespeare in this application is the instrument with which ‘Asia’, broadly conceived and explained, reflects upon itself at a key stage of its recent global emergence. Commentators have linked the modernization of ‘Asian territories’ and ‘converging patterns of rapid and drastic societal development’.12 Crucially, self-consciousness in the films assumes local complexions that both answer to the transposition imperative and express divergent political responses to the contemporary. Thus, Gedebe finds in the urban scene manifestations of an autocratic government and a corrupt police force; Chicken Rice War details Singaporean mores and languages in response to the growing hegemony of western media forms; and Prince of the Himalayas deploys shots of landscape that raise, in a compelling yet elusive fashion, issues of Tibetan identity construction. Gravitating towards each other in their preoccupations, The Banquet, Prince of the Himalayas, Chicken Rice War and Gedebe address, albeit in contrasting ways and via distinctive representational registers, the encounter between, on the one hand, the nation-state and modernity and, on the other hand, modernity and older sets of values (including those centred upon the family and the individual). In this connection, localization takes on a gendered complexity, for women in the films are figured as variously striving for independent subjectivity, functioning as political agents and agitating to preserve narrative memory. Embracing the shifting status of gender in Asia, the films contemplate, through women, male-defined systems of control. Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Banquet, in which the representation of Empress Wan/Gertrude points up oscillating masculine and feminine polarities of power. As a group, The Banquet, Prince of the Himalayas, Chicken Rice War and Gedebe demonstrate the means whereby the inherited cultural capital of Shakespeare is enlisted in an interrogation of new Asian realities and, conversely, the extent to which adaptation can vitally reshape a play’s emotional and generic contours. shakespearean connections Immediately characterizing the approach to Shakespeare is a connection with the Bard that frames the films’ conceptions of themselves. Expressions of a Shakespearean kinship, in this sense, are part and parcel of how The Banquet, Prince of the Himalayas, Chicken Rice War and Gedebe are structured and distinguished. Typical is The Banquet; here, Hamlet and the adaptation of the play across time are repeatedly hinted at in the

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highlighting of particular questions or of images and readings that have gained widespread critical currency. Whenever Qing Nu/Ophelia (Xun Zhou) appears, the sound of running water is heard: this diegetic signature is picked up in the song associated with her about the boat girl and stamps the character (who dies via poisoning rather than drowning) with the memory of her counterpart’s means of death in Shakespeare’s ‘original’. The play – in particular, the protagonist’s role as ‘soldier’ and ‘scholar’ in Ophelia’s estimation – returns more forcefully in the representation of a Wu Luan/Hamlet who is a practitioner of martial arts and a student of music and calligraphy (here, as elsewhere, The Banquet implicitly elects to privilege the textual traces of a female character’s perspective).13 At the same time, The Banquet prioritizes the play’s Oedipal dimension: because Wu Luan/Hamlet is figured as having lost not only his father but also his former lover (Empress Wan/Gertrude), an obvious rationale is offered for his melancholy and subsequent reification of paternal bereavement. ‘Who’ or ‘what inhabits the armour of the dead Hamlet? Or, to put it another way’, asks Susan Zimmerman, ‘what does the impregnable-looking casing hide?’14 The Banquet exploits this ambiguity by figuring the Ghost as a chainmailed carapace that is empathetically occupied. In the scene where Wu Luan/Hamlet investigates his father’s armour, a point-of-view shot from inside the casing’s eyeholes suggests a still sentient presence, while an accompanying glimpse of blood trickling from the sockets points up the idea of harm or injury. As in the play, this Ghost is offended: something is not yet satisfactorily settled. Later, Wu Luan/Hamlet grasps at a handkerchief that falls from the air: on it is illustrated a dark figure puffing poison into a victim’s ear with a quill. Because the sound of background breathing is heard in this sequence, too, the suggestion is that the Ghost’s inhaling and exhaling motions have blurred with the murderer’s blowing: father and uncle are briefly Oedipally synonymous. Or, looked at slightly differently, the sequence exposes the moment when the emperor expires and the usurper assumes his living privileges. These episodes are largely wordless, yet they have the virtue of communicating in a powerfully economic way the richness of the text and a powerful history of Shakespearean interpretation and debate. If incriminating questions are asked of Old Hamlet’s death in Hamlet, similar reservations are introduced in relation to Caesar’s death in Julius Caesar. Gedebe declares its Shakespearean affiliations with the tag line ‘Who killed Caesar?’, basing this interrogative stance on the qualifications and ironies thrown up by Mark Antony in the play and promising a

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return to the central plot line. Indeed, the issue of the identity of the murderer or murderers becomes one of the motivating energies of the film: in this sense, Julius Caesar, in the same way that Hamlet haunts The Banquet, resurfaces in Gedebe as a narrative whose mystery is still to be deciphered. The idea is developed in the representation in the film of characters – Brutus (Zul Huzaimy Marzuki) and Cassius (Along Md Ezendy) – whose ability to act independently is in doubt: there are constant hints of other pressures and manipulation by external institutions and forces. Within this arrangement, versions of the Shakespearean utterance are privileged, as when the screen freezes on an ‘Ides of March’ textual announcement. The prioritization given to the citation both invites audiences to explore the film inside Shakespearean parameters and to recognize that it is those parts of the play most concerned with fate – with attempting to determine and unravel the shapes of futurity – that warrant attention. As in Julius Caesar, in which a scene of holiday misrule inaugurates the action, Gedebe commences riotously (a violent altercation between punks and skinheads). Recalling the play, too, are scenes at the concert hall (a version of the capitol), Brutus’s fear that ‘the guys [won’t] . . . be all right with me’ (a gesture towards the fickle crowd) and the ways in which the two protagonists fall out with each other (the ‘wrangle’).15 These reminders of the precursor text are embedded in a mode of organization that combines exchanges between Cassius and Brutus, between Cassius and an anonymous interrogator, and between Brutus and the Chief of Police (Hairul Anuar Harum): the effect of frequent interruptions, flashbacks and repetitions means that narrative points of reference are destabilized, that different claims compete with each other and that no single voice is allowed to dominate. Forms of heteroglossia in Gedebe take their cue from Julius Ceasar, in which rival interpretations of key events are an informing principle: the play’s alternation of opinions becomes the film’s structural raison d’eˆtre. Like The Banquet, Prince of the Himalayas, in its adaptation of Hamlet, is sensitive to ambiguity, fashioning clarity from inconsistency. To Odsaluyang/Ophelia (Sonamdolgar) Lhamoklodan/Hamlet announces at the start, ‘From this day, you shall be my only beloved’, in a sequence that not only streamlines the play’s amatory intricacies but also puts romance at the forefront. In other ways, however, Prince of the Himalayas builds upon ambiguities already present in Hamlet: its procedure here is to pursue rather than bypass narrative tensions and difficulties. For example, Prince of the Himalayas separates out the Ghost/King Tsanpo’s (Lobzangchopel) revelation – ‘O denizens of heaven, do not let me die wizened of a broken

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heart! . . . I was poisoned . . . Take revenge’ – into multiple units spread over the course of the film, the effect of which is to forestall explanation and to keep an audience in a state of heightened expectancy. In a film which self-consciously plays upon ideas of delay, this drip-feed of information means that the precise circumstances surrounding the death of King Tsanpo (the ‘Spirit of Heaven’ makes available a poisonous lapdog to be used against the enraged husband when he launches a murderous campaign against the lovers) are revealed only via a slowly retrospective movement. The most dramatic use of partial discourse is the gradual revelation that Lhamoklodan/Hamlet is the product of the relationship between Kulo-ngam/Claudius and Queen Nanm/Gertrude, a plot twist that helps to explain the protagonist’s tense relation to filial duty. Further compounding the representation of the Ghost is its shadowy, uncertain status. Hamlet’s declaration that ‘The spirit that I have seen / May be the devil’ (2.2.575–6) is crucial to Prince of the Himalayas’ elaboration of the supernatural. The feathered costume of the Ghost betokens its alliance with the vultures that announce its arrivals and departures, suggesting a preying attitude and deaths in the offing. Shakespeare’s ‘ghosts’, writes Stephen Greenblatt, ‘are figures who exist in and as theatre’: such a type is the spirit of King Tsanpo in Prince of the Himalayas, not least because of an appearance that brings to mind the elaborate attire of the players.16 Itself realized as a species of actor, the Ghost is inseparable from questions about deceit, performance and the reliability of the word, with its multiple comings back suggesting a structural teasing out or extension of considerations the play resists resolving. Where Prince of the Himalayas multiplies, The Banquet divides, playing to expectations about Hamlet by splitting characters. In that she is his former lover, Empress Wan/Gertrude might also stand in for Ophelia, while Qing Nu/Ophelia can be equated with Horatio because she explains to Wu Luan/Hamlet the circumstances behind his father’s death. Individual characters are broken in two as well. Hence, Polonius is suggested in Minister Yin Taichang ( Jingwu Ma), who is realized as compassionate, and in the Chamberlain (Zhonghe Zhou), who appears as self-serving: a Shakespearean type is made apprehensible in the dual highlighting of dominant components. Joel Fineman’s work on fratricide and cuckoldry has established the importance to Hamlet of ‘doubling’ structures and mirrored arrangements.17 The Banquet takes up these bifurcated perspectives by distributing across the action a number of similarly shaped scenarios, the effect of which is to elaborate points of contact between the characters and to point up the nature of a court world in which

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individual players continually confront reflections of themselves. More strikingly, The Banquet doubles the play’s set pieces: there are, for example, two closet scenes (Empress Wan/Gertrude entertains, respectively, Wu Luan/Hamlet and Emperor Li/Claudius), which function to suggest both the pervasiveness of Oedipal relations and to position the female protagonist at the centre of a triangulated familial conflict. Structural reorganization of the play here serves to illuminate one of the film’s dramatic shifts in focus. Publicity accompanying Chicken Rice War maintains that the film is a ‘classic parody of Romeo and Juliet’, a purposefully contradictory formulation which alerts us to the ways in which images of the text of the play feature in the film as structuring agents.18 In a discussion of the play, Courtney Lehmann remarks that Romeo, to attain ‘self-authorship’, operates ‘“by the book”’.19 Taking this notion to heart, Fenson Wong (Pierre Png) is represented as learning the book of the play by rote so as to gain the part of Romeo and win the sophisticated Audrey Chan/Juliet (May Yee Lum). Shakespeare here functions as a passport to sexual autonomy and social preferment. Chicken Rice War is organized around efforts aimed at textual mastery, with the mise en sce`ne repeatedly lingering over a copy of Romeo and Juliet in such a way as to point up the play’s talismanic qualities. Because remembering lines and speaking them with passion are seen as Shakespearean attributes, an additional suggestion is that Fenson/Romeo finds in his performative facility (and, by implication, his knowledge of the western literary tradition) a species of cultural elevation. Enacting Shakespeare enables him to lose his stutter and highlights how the Bard is envisaged as aiding personal development. Such a construction brings to mind the extent to which, in the Singaporean educational system, ‘European civilization’, as Carl A. Trocki notes, has historically been presented as ‘the global standard of progressive modernity’: to be conversant with that ‘civilization’ is to be in tune with the governmental recommendations of the nation-state and with its economic directives.20 For Fenson, then, mimicry secures promotion, and imitation is indissoluble from the cultivation of identity. The text of Romeo and Juliet structures Chicken Rice War in visual terms; it also functions as a material reminder of one of the film’s ideological investments. Chicken Rice War is additionally structurally indebted to Romeo and Juliet in that production rehearsals of the play punctuate the action at regular intervals. These sequences discover Fenson/Romeo and Audrey/ Juliet obsessively returning to the scene of the first kiss: the choice is

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Figure 11: Poster for Chicken Rice War (dir. Chee Kong Cheah, 2000).

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significant, since the language animating this moment (‘devotion’, ‘pilgrims’, ‘saints’ and ‘shrine’) hints at the larger institutional arrangements that inform and dictate behaviour.21 In Fenson/Romeo and Audrey/ Juliet’s case, these suggest themselves not as religious practices but as familial injunctions that inhibit communication and contact; hence, it is also revealing that the lovers elect to rehearse the ‘balcony scene’ in which an underlying preoccupation is the pointlessness of a struggle based on nomenclature. Such selective recurrences of the play hint not only at the multiple levels at which Romeo and Juliet operates in the film, but also at the extent to which the lovers have been affected by the irreconcilable differences of the parental generation. Although Chicken Rice War implicitly suggests that an absorption in Shakespeare is a conduit to modernity, it simultaneously acknowledges that such a movement is dependent upon the correct conjunction of knowledge, information and access as prerequisites. Audrey/Juliet may ask ‘What’s in a name?’ (2.1.85), but the applicability of her question to a real-life situation is not generally recognized. The performance fails to shift entrenched rivalries: the Chans and the Wongs in the audience fall to blows soon after it has started, indicating both an element of involvement in the dramatic action and a reassertion of the ‘ancient grudge’ (Prologue, 3). The question asked of the lead performers by one family member, ‘Hey, aren’t they supposed to speak in English?’, at one and the same time points up different degrees of cultural awareness and demolishes the illusion that Shakespeare constitutes a universal language. theatre, representation, language To confess to structural Shakespearean debts, The Banquet, Prince of the Himalayas, Chicken Rice War and Gedebe suggest, is also to be selfconscious about the processes through which the Bard is adapted for twentieth- and twenty-first-century cinema audiences. In underscoring theatre and film as key narrative components, three of the works under examination here point up an awareness of their conditions of production and multiple shaping influences. The Banquet is revealing in these respects: the opening takes place in an outdoor theatre in the ‘southern heartlands’, which is described as being ‘under the protection of the Crown Prince’. The correlation with the King’s Men and early modern royal patronage posits performance in The Banquet as a kind of descendant of Shakespearean playing practices. In its circular shape the film’s theatre resembles the Globe: from the start, then, The Banquet imagines

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itself as a reconstruction of Shakespeare that is for the world. Inside his retreat, Wu Luan/Hamlet, seeking ‘solace in the art of music and dance’, acts out through mime impressions of sufferings and disappointments, suggesting theatre as recuperative and physicality as a way of coming to terms with romantic rejection. The multiple uses of playing are further instanced when the outdoor theatre serves simultaneously as a space for martial arts and a highly theatricalized form of combat. Later, we see Empress Wan/Gertrude ascending a dais to view her late husband’s armour (costume is a political spectacle) and taking a bath in another circular enclosure (the eroticized body is placed on display). The theatrical is also figured in The Banquet in the ways in which the film conjures various permutations of The Mousetrap: in a rehearsal for the performance (in which Wu Luan’s parrying of the swords of his attackers refracts Hamlet’s verbal dexterity); in the performance itself; and in the lengthy banquet scene, where Qing Nu/Ophelia sings the ‘Song of Yue’ and, unwittingly drinking the poisoned wine intended for Emperor Li/ Claudius, dies before she has completed her performance. Throughout, via her love of embroidery and handiwork, Qing Nu/Ophelia has been tied to Wu Luan/Hamlet and his theatrical preoccupations. It is telling, then, that the protagonist reveals himself at this point, stripping off his mask – and his ‘antic disposition’ (1.5.173) – to cradle his dying lover: in another gesture to Shakespeare’s play, a celebratory banquet becomes an impromptu funeral. A powerful distinction is drawn between the unwavering commitment of a lover and a context of court treachery: throughout, The Banquet suggests an intense evocation of drama as reparation and of the ways in which theatre and politics are intimately intertwined. Where The Banquet is metatheatrical, Chicken Rice War is metafilmic. Emerging from its self-conscious equation between life and art is the film’s equally insistent emphasis on the forms of modern media. Typical is the way in which Chicken Rice War, as Li Lan Yong notes, quotes William Shakespeare’s Romeo þ Juliet (dir. Baz Luhrmann, 1996) to ‘comic effect’.22 Certainly, the global impact of that screen statement is suggested in Chicken Rice War’s rapid-fire editorial technique, predilection for cameo roles (the pop star, Tanya Chua, appears as ‘herself’), use of music to determine narrative pace, and moments of direct comparison (as when the lovers’ eyes meet over a chicken stall display rather than through a tropical fish tank). With his flamboyant manner and pigtailed appearance, Mr Pillay (Edmund L. Smith), the director of the ‘experimental’ production of Romeo and Juliet, might also stand as a fictional realization of Baz

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Figure 12: Wu Luan/Hamlet (Daniel Wu) strikes a soulful pose in The Banquet (dir. Xiaogang Feng, 2006).

Luhrmann. But it is equally important, I think, to recognize both Chicken Rice War’s anticipations of, and references to, the Shakespeare in the ‘high school’ film genre, such as Ten Things I Hate About You (dir. Gil Junger, 1999) and Get Over It (dir. Tommy O’Haver, 2003), and its connections with restaurant or fast-food parodies of Romeo and Juliet, such as Love Is All There Is (dir. Joseph Bologna and Rene´e Taylor, 1996), Kebab Connection (dir. Anno Saul, 2004), Pizza My Heart (dir. Andy Wolk, 2005) and West Bank Story (dir. Ari Sandel, 2005). Chicken Rice War is multiply intertextual: it participates in larger trajectories of adaptations of the Bard and it finds in an international mix of ‘Shakespeares’ an internal rationale. The result is that Shakespeare is both reified and reduced in a paradoxical procedure that self-consciously pushes him into proximity with his offshoots and commemorates the continuing relevancies of his theatrical manifestations. Nowhere is this better seen than in the rewriting of the prologue – ‘In fair Ang Mo Kio, where we lay our scene . . . A pair of star-crossed lovers choose their chicken rice’ – which indicates that the tragic generic imprint of the ‘original’ exists in mutual relation to its comically satirical equivalent and that the classical Shakespearean language can consort with, and

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be vitalized by, its Singaporean manifestations. Because the prologue is delivered by a television presenter (Paul Tan) with a cut-glass British accent, an air of decorum is maintained. Hence, when a production assistant interrupts the delivery to demand, ‘What are you saying? . . .. When I told you not to speak in Singlish, I didn’t ask you to sound like Shakespeare. Do it again!’, a deflating note is struck: Shakespeare, English and Singlish are placed together in a mix that, in context, both indicates a crucial reliance on pastiche and announces the procedure of the film as a whole. The intersection of a standardized Shakespeare and an appropriated Shakespeare is signalled by the ways in which, in the envisioning of the prologue, static shooting styles are combined with jumpy, choppy camera work. Yet, as Li Lan Yong argues, in its constructions of ‘Singaporean identity’, Chicken Rice War is ‘ambivalent’.23 In particular, it is in the film’s subtitles that an implied hierarchy of value begins to emerge. Because, as one critic notes, the film’s subtitles ‘straighten out’ and make ‘normative’ a range of linguistic registers, tacit approval is granted to notions of propriety and global linguistic accessibility.24 Translation, first, is intermittent (the operatic sections are left as they are), which points to the operation of a discriminating sensibility. Moreover, while ‘Singlish’ (a Singaporean form of English) and Cantonese are rendered simultaneously in English and Mandarin subtitles, terms of abuse are either omitted or cleaned up, suggesting both the pressures of censorship and the commodification of an idealized consumer. See Kam Tan and Jeremy Fernando observe that ‘Singlish’ has been ‘vilified as the tongue of the uneducated and uncultured . . . [because] it bears the irrevocable mark of . . . ingenuity and industry’, and, in its transformative textual apparatus, at least, Chicken Rice War aligns itself with this history.25 If Chicken Rice War is self-conscious, then this is due in no small part to an engagement with linguistic hybridity that is as striking for its inclusion as for its inconsistency. The issue of linguistic plurality is taken up and overtly politicized in Gedebe. Cassius is represented as eschewing the official Bahasa Malaysia and preferring the Kelantanese dialect. His questions in the interrogation room – ‘What, not allowed to speak with a slang? I have to speak in standard Malay?’ – suggest the homogenizing tendencies of state operations. If Kuala Lumpur is represented as estranging, it is in part because Cassius is envisaged as a linguistic stranger within it. Privileging a dialect means that Gedebe confronts directly the Malaysian government directive that films should deploy the national language: even in the title, a Kelantanese term for ‘bad ass’, is this tussle with officialdom reflected.26

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Gedebe’s linguistic referents, therefore, are finally revealed as an implied criticism of a film industry in which multilingualism is disallowed. Extrapolating Julius Caesar’s discussion of constituted authority, Gedebe offers an alternative to an indigenous cinematic tradition that is socially and linguistically circumscribed and proclaims the significance of difference. Taking Gedebe’s interests in a different direction, Chicken Rice War dramatizes the ways in which, in a multiethnic state that recognizes English, Malay, Mandarin Chinese and Tamil as official languages, various forms of representation co-mingle and cross-fertilize. At the Hungry Ghost Festival, for instance, with which the film concludes, two modalities of expression (Cantonese opera and western-style pop music) are set against each other as forms of entertainment, with neither occupying a dominant role. The possibility of a narrative logic that accommodates more than one field of reference is raised again in the extent to which Chicken Rice War situates at centre stage several choric positions, from Fenson/Romeo’s in-performance reprimand to the feuding families that they honour a ‘civil moment’ to the Fat Lady’s (Zalina Abdul Hamid) predilection for operatically telling the story. Typical here is the way in which Chicken Rice War, at the close, shows the city hawker authorities attempting to separate the rival chicken rice stalls: there are no ‘stars’ or ‘fate’ here, merely the minor manifestations of municipal policy. The owner of a drinks stall, the Fat Lady is distinctive for offering a female perspective on events; at the same time, as a Malay woman, she invites attention as a player who is able to move, like the lovers, between different cultural polarities. It is here, I think, that the particular contexts of Asian nation-states emerging into visibility become pertinent. As Andrew Simpson notes of Singapore, the ‘government is . . . committed to the preservation of . . . official Asian languages for the sake of . . . social stability’. Such a commitment, though, he adds, ‘highlights [a] dilemma . . . The development of national identity . . . has to contend with the two opposing forces of apparently necessary diversity paired against the desire for overarching unity’.27 Chicken Rice War and Gedebe play out these conflicts and contradictions: they privilege the particular while at the same time sidelining its more vernacular incarnations; they simultaneously admit of multiculturalism and aspire to regularization; and they reinvent Shakespeare even as they want to keep his guardianship of cultural value intact. To be linguistically self-conscious, both films suggest, is to be politically sensitive, with Chicken Rice War and Gedebe

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finding in the intersection of Shakespeare and Asian languages vexed histories and debates about national ambitions and priorities. stories, spirits, politics Emerging from an encounter with Shakespeare defined in self-conscious terms is a concentration on the local. The Banquet, Prince of the Himalayas and Gedebe have as their common denominator an immersion in local belief systems and practices that is vital to each film’s Shakespearean enterprise. For example, Empress Wan/Gertrude’s reflections on her training with the ‘sword of the Yue maiden’ in The Banquet make sense inside a culture historically associated with education and mentorship. The evocation of Empress Wan/Gertrude’s studenthood connects her to Wu Luan/Hamlet, particularly in the opening, where he, too, is discovered as schooling himself. The stillness of his body in these sequences, coupled with the care with which he performs individual gestures, bespeaks a conjunction of body, mind and spirit: as Sheng-mei Ma states, in Asian chivalric stories, ‘the protagonist’s arduous apprenticeship and later combat is predicated upon a philosophy of stringent self-discipline’.28 Skilfulness in music and dance prepares the way for the discovery of Wu Luan/Hamlet’s proficiency in calligraphy. Because this form of writing was thought to define masculine strength, Wu Luan/Hamlet is thus envisaged as particularly empowered. Brush strokes in calligraphy imitated parts of the bamboo plant, and following hard upon orange-filtered battle scenes comes the introduction of Wu Luan/Hamlet in a swaying bamboo grove: the juxtaposition analogizes the ways in which families can be pushed by politics and fortunes fluctuate in times of war. Flexibility, probity and righteousness, qualities which bamboo is said to incarnate, are also, of course, the distinguishing markers of a Wu Luan/Hamlet who, dressed in white and consummately executing expertise in martial arts, outwits his dark armoured opponents and acrobatically avoids injury: body and plant are imagined as one. The Banquet commences, to adopt a formulation of Gary G. Xu, with a ‘poetic sense’ of ‘yiying . . . the harmony between the human mind and . . . surrounding nature’.29 Yet such a balance is immediately upset in the spectacle of the armed assassins sent against Wu Luan/ Hamlet by a conspiratorial uncle: here, the Confucian virtues of loyalty and camaraderie (zhong and yi), which were commonly tied to the bamboo, are conspicuous by their absence.30 A conjuration of the local visualizes a Shakespearean preoccupation; at the same time, such a procedure is key to establishing the moral polarities of the particular filmic universe.

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At an immediate level, Prince of the Himalayas is also locally characterized in placing a dramatic emphasis on concerns of loyalty and allegiance. ‘Why bury my royal father the morning before my return?’ is Lhamoklodan/Hamlet’s leading question, and it is one that both points up his attachment to filial obligations and emphasizes the rationalization of a missing ritual. These principles are played out in the following scene in which the distraught prince is seen conducting his own funeral service on the battlements while the coronation of the new king unfolds below. A shot of the lofty and precipitous stronghold walls conveys the dangers and grandeur of Lhamoklodan/Hamlet’s undertaking and recalls the ways in which The Banquet, too, imagines its central players as dictated to by the looming architecture of their physical surroundings. Indeed, both films, whether through the impact of elaborate make-up or the focus on precious objects, situate personal interaction in a locally visual vocabulary. In Prince of the Himalayas, intricately layered costumes comprised of leathers, snow leopard hides and wolf furs suggest a court weighed down with a legacy of burdens, while interwoven images of turbulent rivers approximate a disturbed psychic state. Wide-angle pans of the ‘Holy Mountains of Lianbao Yeze’ elaborate the idea and indicate human actions dwarfed by larger processes and unbridgeable emotional distances.31 The Himalayas, of course, specify an area rather than a nation. In this connection, it is striking that the original title for the film, King of Tibet, was not approved by the Chinese film authorities and that a new title was necessitated.32 Presumably, ‘Tibet’ was deemed to connote a separate entity and ‘King’ was seen to suggest a majority royal rule; by contrast, the ‘Himalayas’ as a designator points to extraordinary natural phenomena and to a vaguer set of regional meanings. Commenting upon Chinese–Tibetan relations, Dibyesh Anand summarizes a current situation of deadlock and a delicate, volatile state of affairs.33 In this light, the fact that Tibet is nowhere referred to in the dialogue of Prince of the Himalayas is arresting; no less significant, and possibly politically expedient, is the way in which the film favours an older historical moment when Tibet was not so much a unified nation as a looser collection of principalities.34 ‘Jiabo’, the nation-state presided over by Kulo-ngam/Claudius in the film, is an invention, while any notion that it will be aggressively taken over by the Princess of the Subi nation, Ajisuji/Fortinbras (Luo Sang De Ji), is sidelined into depoliticized, non-incendiary territory: Ajisuji/Fortinbras is represented as courageous and ‘graceful’. In contradistinction to Asian Shakespeare films that push at a local aesthetic, Prince

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of the Himalayas is notable for distancing itself from some of the locale’s more specific applications. As the prominence given to the mountains and a banner-festooned stupa mound indicates, however, what is visual in Prince of the Himalayas is all too often spiritually communicative. Glimpses of monks, yaks and rotating drums, and shots of flags and trumpets, summon a vital sense of Tibetan traditions or, at least, reference a Tibetan cultural imaginary. Hence, when in a vast snowy expanse, Lhamoklodan/Hamlet notes, ‘This place is a prison . . . with countless . . . cells and dungeons: I live in the worst of all’, vexed discussions of occupation are inevitably invoked, demonstrating the ways in which Prince of the Himalayas, often through no more than a tweaking of the Shakespearean, pushes at the barriers of history and ideology. In addition, despite the director’s claim that Prince of the Himalayas is set in a pre-Buddhist period when Bo¨n, the indigenous shamanistic religion, prevailed, it is difficult to resist seeing in the film either Buddhist elements or sublimations of Buddhist belief.35 A rejection of worldliness, for instance, informs the dream in which Lhamoklodan/ Hamlet is represented riding naked on a horse. For this Hamlet, ‘trappings and . . . suits’ (1.2.86) are an unnecessary and irrelevant inconvenience. This is also a Hamlet overwhelmingly defined by a condition of interiority. The moment at which Lhamoklodan/Hamlet meditates in the snow and ice, only to become frozen himself, both embroiders the play’s discovery of a protagonist whose cold disposition is inseparable from his melancholy and stresses a search for inner accord.36 How the individual might be characterized increases in urgency as a consideration in Prince of the Himalayas, as is testified to in a struggle to name Kulo-ngam/Claudius (‘uncle’, ‘stepfather’ and ‘Majesty’ slide against each other in the protagonist’s speech) that culminates in the film’s close realization of the ‘To be, or not to be’ (3.1.58) soliloquy. ‘Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? . . . Who would choose a weary life and perish in the struggle?’ Lhamoklodan/Hamlet demands, his questions reflecting the recent revelation of his birth father and suggesting a critical impasse in his sense of himself. Crucially, the film ponders these concerns of identity construction and paternity by contemplating the choice to be made between armed struggle and passive resistance. Once again, in the introduction of these concerns, landscape is an actor, the calm surface of the lake that Lhamoklodan/Hamlet contemplates reflecting his quest for spiritual serenity. Such landscapes – often, like the lakes and rivers, circular or winding in appearance – evoke, within a Buddhist schema of interpretation, the

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Figure 13: Lhamoklodan/Hamlet (Purba Rgyal) ponders his future in Prince of the Himalayas (dir. Sherwood Hu, 2006).

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operations of karma, the notion that, as Sogyal Rinpoche observes, ‘whatever we do . . . will have a corresponding effect’.37 Certainly, in the film, there are frequent circular movements and returns, as when Lhamoklodan/Hamlet rushes back to court on horseback or when Kulo-ngam/Claudius, in a series of confessions, is figured endeavouring to make up for past misdeeds; with these latter scenes, in particular, the structuring convention is that a negative karma might be replaced by one of a more positive orientation.38 Circularity even characterizes the moment at which Lhamoklodan/Hamlet finds out who he is: electing to ‘quit Jiabo in all haste’, he ‘comes back’ and is, in fact, represented as never leaving the country. Inspired by Ajisuji/Fortinbras and her march against the Persians (‘Thousands of us will perish . . . To penetrate the snow-covered mountains and reach the trade routes . . . is worth the sacrifice’, she states), Lhamoklodan/Hamlet is stimulated to reconsider his priorities: ‘how I have shamed myself’, he states, adding, ‘I flee abroad and have abandoned my quest for justice.’ Prince of the Himalayas draws upon memories of the Chinese invasion of 1950, and the Dalai Lama’s flight into exile of 1959, by elaborating Lhamoklodan/Hamlet as committed to an heroic return. This is a Hamlet who will honour his mission, who is not of a ‘truant disposition’ (1.2.168). At the same time, the prospect of what is involved in such a return is reflected upon by the Wolf-Woman (Dechendolma) when she announces, ‘With a new king, a river of blood will flow.’ Prince of the Himalayas reifies integrity and loyalty, yet not without an attendant acknowledgement of the political ramifications of the articulation of such ideals and principles. Death, indeed, is continually foregrounded in Prince of the Himalayas, not least in the elaborate ceremonials with which Lhamoklodan/Hamlet’s expiry is surrounded. ‘If my death reminds people about love and hate then I shall have no regrets’, he announces at the close. Arresting is the way in which an individual life is seen as paradigmatic: for Lhamoklodan/Hamlet, his existence represents an example, an educative resource, and in coming to this realization he is imagined as waking up to his own significance, as ascending to a kind of enlightenment. That this is envisaged as an acquisition of knowledge with a collective application is registered in the phrase ‘remind people’, which introduces the prospect of a common salvation.39 Current directives from the Tibetan government-in-exile ‘renounce political independence’ and, instead, ‘advocate for Tibet’s self-determination within China’: a spirit of co-operation and compromise is becoming visible.40 ‘Most Tibetans’, Patrick French writes, would

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now admit the futility of ‘open revolt’ as a way out of the deadlock.41 Steven J. Venturino notes that, because of the ‘strategic ambiguities of Tibetan signification’ the ‘magical realist’ stories of Trashidawa, who shares a screenwriting credit for Prince of the Himalayas, may be read as politically dissident.42 This, I think, is a reading that reveals more about our own projections than it does about the content of the texts themselves. Prince of the Himalayas does not operate according to these local ‘ambiguities’, much as we might wish it to; rather, it mediates its shaping realities carefully, recalls with circumspection abiding Tibetan cultural values, and looks to Shakespeare for an accommodating sensibility. Gedebe is more directive in its mediation of the political. In part, Cassius is imagined as troubled because of the soullessness of the city he inhabits. Crucially, in this exposure of the underside of Asian modernity, much of the action takes place in an underground public toilet. Hard glass surfaces, empty shopping malls, echoing stairwells, half-completed buildings and interchangeable underpasses conjure Kuala Lumpur as a developing if unfeeling conurbation, as oppressive in its anonymity. Indices of western capitalism (such as the hamburger) are continually to the forefront of Gedebe’s landscape, but, interestingly, such signifiers of an imported modernity are invariably inverted or ironized. For example, the punk and skinhead characters sport swastikas and wear ‘Redskin’ badges, suggesting anti-fascist leanings and a stance angled against extreme forms of institutionalized power. In this sense, as Kevin C. Dunn argues, the film embeds in its mise en sce`ne the ways in which punk ‘offers the possibility for counter-hegemonic expression . . . for a critical opposition to the status quo’.43 Scenes of non-conformity in Gedebe are animated by the particularity of their generational implications. Typical is the moment at which Brutus contemplates himself, saying, ‘I saw my face in the mirror, pale . . . I washed it again’: recalling the concern with mirrors in Julius Caesar, the scene equates the character with a youth that is disturbed and preoccupied. Writing on Malaysia, M. Sylvia Fernandez notes that ‘the effects of poverty, rising unemployment, rapid and unplanned urbanization, exposure to lifestyles and values contradictory to traditional values and behavioural norms, and family breakdown create a conducive environment for the emergence of juvenile delinquency and criminal behaviour’.44 Gedebe directs its action towards alienated types, towards politically subordinated players with limited means of self-expression. Thus, even though Cassius is figured as reifying notions of inclusion and membership – his love for his ‘clan’ is a version of the play’s

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veneration of ‘Rome’ (1.2.152) – he is still driven to declare that ‘we are shouting and screaming all alone, but nobody is responding’. Nowhere is this sense of a disaffected condition better illustrated than in the scene in which Cassius, in his room, unwinds: as his voiceover approximates the play’s ‘Well, Brutus, thou art noble’ (1.2.302) soliloquy, the camera pauses on pornography in plastic folders, on a copy of the Kama Sutra and on a paperback novel. Interventions in radical ideology are made immediately apparent: the plastic folders point to a culture of censorship, while the novel – Faizal Tehrani’s 2000 fiction, Cinta Hari-Hari Rusuhan, about the Malaysian student riots of the 1960s and abuses in human rights – suggests identification with opposition groups and with protests against governmental injustice.45 These, the film suggests, are the local resources of a dissident mindset. In its unveiling of an alternative Malaysia, Gedebe pits against each other the relative positions of autocracy and democracy. In a version of the incitement scene in Julius Caesar, Cassius states that ‘You can’t give authority to [Caesar]’, continuing, ‘I am not convinced that he can be a leader’. The populist democratic ideal is summoned only to be dismissed; as Cassius states, ‘There’s no such thing as freedom . . . we are servants. Liberty? Dark, confined, empty.’ The exigencies of the situation, from Cassius’s perspective, are underscored in his use of the term ‘coolie’: the subtitles render this as ‘servant’, which masks the associations of indentured slavery and racial subordination introduced in the original dialogue. Cassius is represented as exercised because of a treatment that denies him an economic voice and that plays upon his minority status. Gedebe does not directly reference political scandal, but there is undoubtedly a point of comparison between the film’s elaboration of authoritarian styles of government and the corruption accusations involving Anwar Ibrahim, deputy prime minister of Malaysia from 1993 to 1998 and a critic of the then prime minister.46 The popular protests that followed in the wake of Ibrahim’s arrest in 1999 highlighted abuses of democracy and issues of powerlessness, and chime with Gedebe’s representation of a gangster subculture in which larger structures of advancement are based on dissimulation and self-interest. In keeping with its position outside the mainstream, the film reserves its most strident detractions for police and governmental corruption. In a wry reworking of captives being ‘led in triumph / Thorough the streets of Rome’ (5.1.108–9), the action culminates in the press conference of the Chief of Police, who catalogues the fates of the various players: Caesar and Brutus have been killed, while Cassius is in prison awaiting trial. Striking

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in the Chief of Police’s speech is a dismissive attitude towards issues of construction and interpretation. ‘Where did you hear these rumours?’ he asks, continuing, ‘This must be the foreign media, making up stories that the police is involved in the slayings. Don’t listen . . . I cannot give any further comment . . . come and see me . . . the police’. Combining assertions and denials, this peroration of officialdom imitates the rhetorical style of Mark Antony’s address to the crowd in Julius Caesar and highlights the ways in which providence has taken on an institutional complexion. In so doing, it demonstrates the extent to which a range of bodies – the legislature, the health care system and the media – is complicit in the approval of falsehood. For, as the epilogue reveals, there is an alternative narrative reality: Brutus, having turned police informer, has survived and will be given a new identity, leaving Cassius to be framed for Caesar’s murder. Within the film’s construction of his career trajectory, Brutus moves from a dark public toilet to a bright, airy apartment, the latter his reward for betraying his gangster compatriots. Yet, as the camera pans over Brutus’s anxious inspection of his environment, it is also suggested that he has traded one kind of dependency for another and that his new alliance does not easily equate with ‘liberty’. Power in Gedebe, it is finally implied, may never be sustained from below and invariably takes the form of continuing control from above. gendered identities Notably, Gedebe conceives of the operation of authority via the concentration on an all-male world. ‘Republicanism’ in the early modern period, remarks Andrew Hadfield, ‘was invariably cast as a masculine phenomenon’; pursuing this claim in Julius Caesar, Barbara Parker makes the point more forcefully, stating that Shakespeare’s play ‘is unique . . . in its sodomitical thrust’.47 Although real-life political figures are not specifically conjured up in Gedebe, the film, in that it features no women, does suggest for politics an informing homosocial context. Moreover, scenes in which Caesar touches Brutus, and Cassius’s remark that fellow gangsters are correspondingly ‘keen to live under Caesar’s crotch [and] . . . fondle his balls’, would seem to hint at an intimate connection between same-sex relations and the acquisition of favour. By removing women from the Shakespearean adaptation, Gedebe places its emphasis on the exercise of rule as an exclusively male preserve. The same cannot be said for Chicken Rice War and The Banquet, which highlight roles of daughters and lovers in such a way as to reflect upon

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considerations of gendered independence and the place of women inside changing national arrangements. Towards the end of Chicken Rice War Audrey/Juliet turns to camera to announce, ‘Funny how violent delights have joyful ends’: her rewrite of Friar Laurence’s moralizing shows a woman taking over not only the position of male institutions but also the voice of established religion. In contradistinction to a Singaporean government ideology that sponsors virtues of community and selfsacrifice, Audrey declares the importance of a personal agenda and the value of a feminist-inspired individualism.48 This Juliet is singled out, as when a freeze-frame introduces her character: in contrast to the other players, who are given a Chinese horoscope sign at this moment, Audrey has none (the fact that she ‘digs Shakespeare’ is the only marker). This suggests that Audrey/Juliet’s interpretive paradigm is situated elsewhere – her models are not of local extraction. If the Chinese Fenson/Romeo is embraced, this is only because his interests are unique and can be marshalled to suit Audrey/Juliet’s anti-nationalistic perspective. Talking with Fenson/Romeo at the end, Audrey reflects, ‘All my close friends are either Caucasians or Eurasians . . . I never thought I’d meet a Chinese boy who shares [my] . . . ideas . . . about romance and Shakespeare’. Implicit here is an endorsement of the arts (which are implicitly associated with Britishness) and a condemnation of the sciences (which are linked to Asia). Christopher Berry and Mary Farquhar argue that ‘double mimicry’ defines ‘Singapore’s lineage and its survival tactic in the transnational capitalist order of appropriating whatever works’. This mimicry, they conclude, ‘becomes a process of hybrid identity construction’.49 Chicken Rice War casts Audrey/Juliet in this mould in that she is represented as referencing a spectrum of cultures and histories in the endeavour to make independent choices and to secure a measure of enfranchisement as a desiring female subject. In The Banquet we see a more extended development of the foregrounding of a female character: remodelled as a villainous Claudius, Empress Wan/Gertrude is discovered as a proactive and scheming aspirant in a Hamlet that places her, and not her male counterparts, at centre stage. Contests for privilege are at work in the scene where Empress Wan/Gertrude and Emperor Li/Claudius play, half-threateningly, halferotically, with each other’s ties and titles: relational terms are bandied in tit-for-tat fashion, while the mutual insistence on the ‘correct’ forms of ‘address’ being employed (‘Your Majesty’ and ‘Empress’) suggests a jockeying for advantage. At the same time, as the accompanying dialogue reveals, union with Emperor Li/Claudius is the price Empress Wan/

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Figure 14: Empress Wan/Gertrude (Ziyi Zhang) plots her next move in The Banquet (dir. Xiaogang Feng, 2006).

Gertrude must pay to secure her own needs and requirements. ‘Will brother-in-law let the prince go free?’ she asks, her question highlighting not only Wu Luan/Hamlet’s imprisonment but also her own: to effect release, Empress Wan/Gertrude barters in sexual favour. On a later occasion, Empress Wan/Gertrude reflects on the ‘power of nomination’ as this is manifested in her titular trajectory: ‘Little Wan . . . Empress . . . Her Majesty, the Emperor’, she intones, tracing an historical journey from child to adult, from dependent to independent, from female to male.50 Simultaneously stated is an identification with the Chinese phoenix or fenghuang, a mythical creature embodying an empress’s powers and abilities. ‘I shall rise’, exclaims Empress Wan/Gertrude in a promise that, bringing the heroine of Elizabeth (dir. Shekhar Kapur, 1998) to mind, is as arresting for its glorification of singleness as it is for its exclusion of the male Chinese dragon with which the female phoenix was conventionally allied. If The Banquet finally addresses women’s roles through a mediation of the public sphere, then Prince of the Himalayas performs its corresponding manoeuvre by initially focusing on the private realm. For, having chosen to be unfaithful and to keep a secret, Queen Nanm/Gertrude is, for much

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of the film, imagined as constricted in her mobility. Only in the concluding sequences where Queen Nanm/Gertrude joins forces with the WolfWoman to tell Lhamoklodan/Hamlet of his origins is she given a more responsive prominence. Alexander Leggatt writes of Hamlet that the Ghost possesses a ‘fissured’ and ‘dislocated identity’.51 Prince of the Himalayas addresses this argument directly by splitting the Ghost in two: one half is represented by the ominous spirit of King Tsanpo while the other half is represented by the figure of the Wolf-Woman, who mediates the supernatural world. Frequently appearing together, the Ghost and the Wolf-Woman – ‘figures’ that, in the words of the screenwriter, Chenaktshang Dorje Tsering (Jangbu), ‘arise from the contradictory psychology of the Prince’s ego’ – compete to offer a ‘truthful’ rendering of Lhamoklodan/Hamlet’s fraught history.52 The alternative relation offered Lhamoklodan/Hamlet by the Wolf-Woman – ‘I shall break the silence and tell . . . of what happened between two brothers of royal blood . . . the sins of past generations will not cause you to seek revenge in the present’ – strips away male-defined dissimulation, installs female-determined clarity and allows for attendant issues of identity and responsibility to be confronted. In this regard, the Wolf-Woman tells the story that Queen Nanm/Gertrude is mostly prevented from disclosing and, in so doing, points up a contrasting model of speaking female action. (Played as a warrior woman, Ajisuji/ Fortinbras also serves to highlight Queen Nanm/Gertrude’s removal from the world, functioning as a foil to her more retiring royal counterpart.) As at the end of Chicken Rice War, in which Audrey/Juliet is represented as surviving, moving forwards and eschewing the death that characterizes her Shakespearean equivalent (all of which is testimony to her integrity), so Prince of the Himalayas, at its end, declares gendered continuity, envisioning women as the narrative’s guardians and interpreters. A metaphorical mother, the Wolf-Woman forges a connection with a biological mother, Queen Nanm/Gertrude, in a union of power that confirms the female hold on the action’s imperatives. The Banquet offers a more dispassionate picture of the quest for female emancipation. Stabbed by an anonymous assassin as snow falls, Empress Wan/Gertrude fails in her political endeavour, the cold of the snow symbolically blanketing and changing the heated temperature of her ‘desire’. White covers red (the spirit of Wu Luan/Hamlet returns) and effaces Empress Wan/Gertrude’s ‘flame’ of ambition. As petty human actions cede place to larger natural processes, the assembled maidservants quickly depart, suggesting both a clue to the identity of the killer and a sorority of women taking revenge. Molly Hand writes of The Banquet:

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‘chaos and death, darkness and despair, there is little hope for renewal or rebirth’.53 Yet the closing montage is not as definitive as this assessment allows. As the knife blade is seen being dropped into a mossy pool, a glimpse is afforded of koi carp swimming together beneath. Beyond the ‘unweeded garden’ (1.2.135) of the court, it is implied, and past the knotty entanglement of mystery and motive, the beautiful and the rare are still discernible. Linked in Chinese mythology to love and friendship, and associated with a state of bliss, the koi carp index an as yet unrealized world of harmonious interaction that belies surface appearances. In these intimations of mortality, then, affirmative future projections are briefly entertained. A more forceful expression of the idea is found in Prince of the Himalayas, not least in the representation of the prospect of reincarnation that underlies the scene of Odsaluyang/Ophelia’s demise. Although taking place in water, this core episode from Shakespeare’s play is accompanied in the film by the delivery of Lhamoklodan and Odsaluyang’s son, which implies not so much suicide as death in childbirth: the heroine does not, it seems, elect to dispatch herself. The fact that a new life comes into being at the precise moment when another existence is extinguished is graphically underscored by a mise en sce`ne that places mother and infant side by side in the river (with a subsequent tracking shot tracing the journey of the child downstream). In contradistinction to Hamlet, in which, as Linda Charnes states, the ‘individual bloodline’ is erased, in which ‘existence’ is cancelled ‘in both the literary and symbolic realms’, Prince of the Himalayas stresses renewal and futurity.54 To cite the screenwriter Chenaktshang Dorje Tsering (Jangbu), in interview on this theme, ‘I could not accept the metaphor of a movie about Tibet with an ending in which all the main characters die.’ Hamlet, then, or a version of him, lives on: the Shakespearean-inspired character is granted another manifestation. The identity of the princely babe is immediately recognized by the Wolf-Woman in a sequence which undergirds the notion of the preservation of the royal lineage by mobilizing Buddhist practices of the acknowledgement of the reincarnation of religious leaders. As the dying Lhamoklodan/Hamlet is introduced to his son, the precious child is cradled by the Wolf-Woman and Ajisuji/Fortinbras and hailed as the ‘King of Jiabo’. It is a distinctive moment of generational, gender and national fusion that both makes up for the dysfunctional family of before and allows for reconciliation. The coming together of the Jiabo and Subi nations is also a celebration of the birth of a new dynastic partnership and of a child who will rule in minority: Lhamoklodan/Hamlet’s question,

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Figure 15: A pregnant Odsaluyang/Ophelia (Sonamdolgar) commences her descent into madness during a snowstorm in Prince of the Himalayas (dir. Sherwood Hu, 2006).

‘Who am I?’, is finally answered in his offspring’s future development. Like his lama forebears, the ‘King of Jiabo’ will be protected until he reaches maturity, an arrangement to which the closing chants of monks reciting scriptures lend approval. Because assured of what lies beyond, Lhamoklodan/Hamlet is realized as ready to embrace his own destiny, and confidence in succession means that he can finally lay the spirit of King Tsanpo to rest. Rejecting the Ghost’s claims, Lhamoklodan/Hamlet refuses to ‘raise his sword’ against his biological father and, hence, turns his back on a paternal–filial relation expressed as a reverence for authority. Instead, an inflexible and male-defined doctrine of violence is replaced by an open and female-shaped pacific philosophy: as the Wolf-Woman asserts in the closing montage, ‘Love, all-embracing love’ is what is ultimately important. In this final conjunction of the political and the spiritual, Prince of the Himalayas implicitly gestures to a pantheon of female Buddha figures of compassion in its realization of a protagonist for whom the ‘readiness’ is indeed ‘all’ (5.2.160).55

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In contrast to Chris Berry’s argument that, in the classic martial arts film, ‘territorial nation-state nationalisms’ are passively reproduced, The Banquet, Prince of the Himalayas, Chicken Rice War and Gedebe mediate the national in more diffuse or metaphorical ways. In particular, representations of the family precipitate reflections upon issues of fealty and history, while the attention given to relations between fathers and sons, and between substitute fathers and substitute sons (as in Prince of the Himalayas), reminds audiences of the ways in which the past persists into the present and of the forms taken by constitutional authority during periods of imperial development. The films are further distinguished by addressing, through various means, how particular situations have come into being, the causes that lie behind a peculiar feud or conflict, the sets of circumstances that have resulted in the emergence of discrete identity positions. Often, as we have seen, this engagement with the subject assumes a gendered complexion; at other times, a postcolonial dimension is apparent. In the cases of Gedebe and Chicken Rice War, for instance, films that trace their genesis to Malaysia and Singapore, which were formerly British colonies, the representation of the shaping of the individual is indissoluble from memories of earlier cultural systems and from empire-determined systems of governance. As a film originating in China, which, as Alexander C. Y. Huang notes, has ‘an estranged, ambiguous relationship to the post-colonial’, The Banquet might appear as an instance to the contrary, yet, even here, we find that imagining the ancient is central to the film’s canvassing of contemporary questions of belonging and action. In this sense, all four films ventilate anxieties about their respective legacies and are acutely sensitive to the changing face of Asia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How best the relation between tradition and change might be articulated is a shared area of concern. In a film such as Prince of the Himalayas, for example, the concluding coming together of national and cultural configurations refracts a similar deployment of possible solutions for the Chinese–Tibetan situation. Like The Banquet, Chicken Rice War and Gedebe, Prince of the Himalayas is politically freighted, although the precise complexion of each film’s engagements on this score differs according to praxes of production, circulation and distribution, and matters of generic affiliation: these are not uniform or homogenous works in their ideological investments. Yet politics persists: Gedebe expresses its sense of a world beholden to politics in discovering individuals who elect,

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ultimately, to cast their lot with the dominant majority. Elsewhere in the films, political pressures make themselves visible in evocations of imprisonment that look to local geographies as a context (Prince of the Himalayas): here, as we have seen, the local, in the same moment as it facilitates transposition, can be perceived as carrying a dangerous charge. This is not to suggest that any one of these films subscribes to a kind of philosophical fatalism. Hence, if Prince of the Himalayas, as publicity informs us, was precipitated by director Sherwood Hu’s guilt over his failure to attend his father’s funeral, the film goes on to exorcise a guilty political conscience (the legacy of the Chinese takeover of Tibet) by reinstating what have through recent history been occluded perspectives.56 The protagonist’s name, Lhamoklodan, apparently originated with a senior lama, which gives to the Shakespearean filmic enterprise as a whole the force of holy backing; in addition, via its spiritual frame, Prince of the Himalayas implicitly aims at, if not aspires to, a condition of mutual toleration and the acceptance of plurality.57 As Sherwood Hu states, referencing Tibet as instructive, ‘The world will certainly be peaceful if different religions can co-exist in the same way elsewhere.’58 What plurality is for Prince of the Himalayas diversity is, in differing ways, to Gedebe and Chicken Rice War. If some parts of Asia, indeed, are now characterized by a move towards recognizing multiple points of reference, then this collocation of films follows suit: The Banquet, which, in discovering the self-immolation of a system and the impossibility of authority being concentrated in one figure, implicitly argues for a need for a more various and representative order. In its reading of Hamlet, moreover, The Banquet similarly recognizes that power can inhere in more than one location – the martial arts, the disciplines of art and music, the natural world. Their utilizations of various local registers are, of course, underpinned by Shakespeare; that is, The Banquet, Prince of the Himalayas, Chicken Rice War and Gedebe show how the Bard is the medium or conduit through which the political discussions, gendered disputes, cultural vexations and social imperatives of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Asia might best be conveyed and communicated. In a film such as Prince of the Himalayas, the local resonances of Buddhism, which, as commentators have noted, has been associated in Tibet with anti-Chinese protests, are revitalized by their connections with a Shakespearean-inspired evocation of mutuality. The force of Shakespeare is what is recognized here, and, indeed, in all four films the power of the Bard in performance (from plays within plays to college productions) is a recurring interest. Shakespeare, as the films conceive him, is a palimpsest for revision, a repository of

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meaning that facilitates the processes through which the new Asia also reassesses itself. And if these are films that draw attention to themselves as artefacts (The Banquet, in particular, is a theatrical object lesson in reconstruction) and reflect upon how Shakespeare has been relayed and transposed, either through modern media or through writing and script, then this is because self-consciousness is a symptom of the encounter with modernity. The director of The Banquet, Xiaogang Feng, recalls early in the imaginative process being shown a ‘Chinese movie version’ Hamlet script that sent him straight back to the play. ‘When I had finished reading,’ he states, ‘I realized I wasn’t interested in directing a pure translation. I wanted there to be creativity . . . we pushed the script far away from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.’ The Banquet is singled out for its distance from the precursor text, for the replacement of Shakespeare by another author or auteur, and for the injection of a transformative impetus.59 Asian Shakespeare films, and Asia as a global force, emerge into visibility simultaneously. The process of analogizing their relation to Shakespeare, a western cultural phenomenon, becomes the means through which Prince of the Himalayas, Chicken Rice War, Gedebe and The Banquet ultimately contemplate the tensions and the energies, the initiatives and the instabilities, that constitute their own possibility. NOTES 1 One might also mention here Hero (dir. Yimou Zhang, 2002) and House of Flying Daggers (dir. Yimou Zhang, 2004). Like these ‘Chinese’ wuxia (swordplay) and kung fu (fist-fighting) movies, to which The Banquet is allied in terms of cast and crew, the film belongs to an international brand. See Chris Berry, ‘Cinema: from Foreign Import to Global Brand’, in Kam Louie, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 219, 316; Christopher Berry and Mary Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 53, 72; Felicia Chan, ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Cultural Migrancy and Translatability’, in Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes (London: BFI, 2003), p. 316; and Sheng-mei Ma, East–West Montage: Reflections on Asian Bodies in Diaspora (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), p. 61. 2 On the ‘Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms’, see John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: a New History, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 87; and John Keay, China: a History (London: Harper Press, 2008), p. 292. 3 The DVD launch was widely publicized: I noticed the production on sale at my local supermarket, an index of its mass-market appeal. At the same time,

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the film was shown at the 2008 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, an event that helped to approve its credentials as an adaptation of Hamlet. Although Prince of the Himalayas, like The Banquet, premiered at international film festivals (including the Adelaide Film Festival, the AFI Los Angeles Film Festival and the Hawaii International Film Festival) and was shown at a meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America (2011), the film has had a particularly chequered distribution history. This was somewhat compensated for by a highly successful theatrical run in 2011–12 at the Rubin Museum of Art, New York, which excited extensive plaudits. Casting is a further aspect of the international brand status of The Banquet, for, as Anne Ciecko notes, Daniel Wu (Wu Luan/Hamlet) is an ‘Americanborn Hong Kong’ star whose ‘globalized’, ‘westernized’ and ‘cosmopolitanized’ image as a ‘metrosexual pin-up’ has been ‘exploited in numerous advertising campaigns, fashion spreads and even a fashion design collection’ (‘Contemporary Meta-Chinese Film Stardom and Transnational Transmedia Celebrity’, in Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., The Chinese Cinema Book [London: BFI, 2011], pp. 186, 187, 190). In this sense, the film brings to mind John Updike’s novel, Gertrude and Claudius (2000), which, as Marianne Novy notes, ‘imagines Old Hamlet as tiresomely moralistic and Gertrude’s liaison with Claudius as a movement for liberation allied with the development of courtly love’ (‘Shakespeare and the Novel’, in Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete and Ramona Wray, eds., The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts [Edinburgh University Press, 2011], p. 62). Alexander C. Y. Huang, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 12. In China from the 1990s onwards, economic reform and the growth of the media industries allowed a revitalized film industry to become a global competitor, with a combination of domestic enterprise and foreign investment leading to increased commercial gains and the exploration of new diasporic markets. See Michael Curtin, Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: the Globalization of Chinese Film and TV (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 3; William Darrell Davis and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, East Asian Screen Industries (London: BFI, 2008), p. 13; and Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), p. 293, and Cinema, Space, and Polyvocality in a Globalizing China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010), pp. 16–17. Other instances of the Asian cinematic fascination with Shakespeare include: Trouble Couples (dir. Eric Tsang, 1987), a Hong Kong adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew; Just Heroes (dir. John Woo, 1987), a Hong Kong thriller which cites King Lear at several points; and The Frivolous Wife (dir. Won-kuk Lim, 2008), a Korean adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew. After having won the Volkswagen Discovery Award at the Toronto Film Festival in 2001, Chicken Rice War was briefly distributed in DVD format.

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10 Shohini Chaudhuri, Contemporary World Cinema: Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, South Asia (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 93. 11 Originally destined, in the producer’s words, for ‘our immediate independent film circle in Kuala Lumpur’, Gedebe was directed not so much towards local multiplexes as private showings, multimedia exhibitions and international exposure (interview between Rosihan Zain [Dhojee] and Mark Thornton Burnett, 8 May 2009). In contrast to the purposefully rough-feel appearance of Gedebe is the glossier Malaysian Shakespeare film Jarum Halus (dir. Mark Tan, 2008), an adaptation of Othello in English and Bahasa Malaysia (a standard form of the Malay language) in which Daniel/Othello (Christien New), because Chinese, is signalled as ‘other’. ‘Within Malay dominated circles’, states the director, ‘being Chinese is almost akin to being black. Obviously, I am glossing over a very complicated issue, but to avoid the opportunity to suggest racial parallels would have been a disservice to the story’ (interview between Mark Tan and Mark Thornton Burnett, 24 September 2011). On Malaysian independent cinema, see Khoo Gaik Cheng, ‘Contesting Diasporic Subjectivity: James Lee, Malaysian Independent Filmmaker’, Asian Cinema, 15.1 (2004), 171, 174; William Van der Helde, ‘Malaysia: Melodramatic Drive, Rural Discord, Urban Heartaches’, in Anne Tereska Ciecko, ed., Contemporary Asian Cinema: Popular Culture in a Global Frame (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), pp. 84–5. 12 Chaudhuri, Contemporary World Cinema, p. 93. 13 Hamlet, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 3.1.150. Unless otherwise stated, all further references appear in the text. 14 Susan Zimmerman, ‘Killing the Dead: The Ghost of Hamlet’s Desire’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 140 (2004), 87. 15 Julius Caesar, in Norton Shakespeare, 4.2.45. Unless otherwise stated, all further references appear in the text. 16 Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 195. 17 Joel Fineman, ‘Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare’s Doubles’, in Murray M. Schwartz and Coppe´lia Khan, eds., Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 70–109. 18 See ‘Chicken Rice War’, www.mediacorpraintree.com (accessed 21 July 2009). 19 Courtney Lehmann, Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 32, 34. 20 Carl A. Trocki, Singapore: Wealth, Power and the Culture of Control (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 62; Andrew Simpson, ‘Singapore’, in Andrew Simpson, ed., Language and National Identity in Asia (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 377. 21 Romeo and Juliet, in Norton Shakespeare, 1.5.91, 92, 95, 96. Unless otherwise stated, all further references appear in the text.

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22 Li Lan Yong, ‘Romeos and Juliets, Local/Global’, in Krystyna Kujawin´ska Courtney and R. S. White, eds., Shakespeare’s Local Habitations (Ło´dz´ University Press, 2007), p. 143. 23 Ibid., p. 142. 24 Ibid., p. 150. 25 See Kam Tan and Jeremy Fernando, ‘Singapore’, in Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie, eds., The Cinema of Small Nations (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 131, 136. 26 See Cheng, ‘Contesting Diasporic Subjectivity’, 170; Asmah Haji Omar, ‘Malaysia and Brunei’, in Simpson, ed., Language and National Identity in Asia, p. 348. 27 Simpson, ‘Singapore’, p. 386. 28 Ma, East–West Montage, p. 66. 29 Gary G. Xu, Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), p. 40. 30 Ma, East–West Montage, pp. 66, 42, 65, 67. 31 ‘Prince of the Himalayas’: a Sherwood Hu Film, publicity book (Los Angeles and Shanghai: Hus Entertainment/CineHyte Films, 2006), p. 86. 32 Ibid., p. 11. 33 ‘The Chinese state marshalls arguments buttressing its historical claim of sovereignty over Tibet . . . Tibetan exiles and their supporters make counterclaims and assert that Tibet was . . . independent’ (Dibyesh Anand, Geopolitical Exotica: Tibet in Western Imagination [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007], p. 66). 34 Donald Lopez notes geographical differences between an ‘ethnic Tibet’, a ‘cultural Tibet’ and a ‘political Tibet’. See ‘Foreword’, in Anne-Marie Blondeau and Katia Buffetrille, eds., Authenticating Tibet: Answers to China’s ‘100 Questions’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. xix. 35 ‘Prince of the Himalayas’, p. 36; John Powers, Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, 2nd edn (Ithaca, NY and Boulder, CO: Snow Lion, 2007), pp. 137, 497, 498. 36 See Daryl W. Palmer, ‘Hamlet’s Northern Lineage: Masculinity, Climate and the Mechanician in Early Modern Britain’, Renaissance Drama, 35 (2006), 16–18. 37 Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (London: Rider, 2008), p. 96. 38 See Tulku Thondup, Peaceful Death, Joyful Rebirth: a Tibetan Buddhist Guidebook (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2005), p. 28. 39 ‘The Bodhisattva ideal’, writes Sangharakshita, ‘is . . . of the Enlightenment not just for one’s own sake but for the benefit of all’ (Tibetan Buddhism: an Introduction [Birmingham: Windhorse, 1999], p. 48). 40 Steven J. Venturino, ‘Signifying on China: African-American Literary Theory and Tibetan Discourse’, in Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy and Steven G. Yao, eds., Sinographies: Writing China (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 280. Ugyen Trinley Dorje, tipped to be the successor

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Regional configurations to the Dalai Lama, has stated of the Chinese, ‘We should learn their language . . . and compete with them. That is how you become equal’. See Jeremy Page, ‘The hip-hop lama ready to lead the Tibetan struggle’, Times, 12 March 2009, 39. Patrick French, ‘The view from the top of the world’, G2, 10 March 2009, 16. Venturino, ‘Signifying on China’, p. 294. Kevin C. Dunn, ‘Never mind the bollocks: the punkrock politics of global communication’, Review of International Studies, 34 (2008), 193, 197. M. Sylvia Fernandez, ‘Malaysia’, in Maureen P. Duffy and Scott Edward Gilling, eds., Teen Gangs: a Global View (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood, 2004), p. 137. On these disturbances, which originated in racial tensions, and the subsequent state of emergency, see Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of Malaysia, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 297–300; Omar, ‘Malaysia and Brunei’, p. 351. In 1999 Ibrahim was ousted from power and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for corruption; in 2000 he was sentenced to nine years on charges of sodomy. See Andaya and Andaya, History of Malaysia, p. 329; Cheng, ‘Contesting Diasporic Subjectivity’, 177. Coincidentally, Ibrahim found Shakespeare, during a period of solitary confinement, ‘my most intimate companion and chief source of comfort’ (see his ‘Between Tyranny and Freedom: a Brief Voyage with the Bard’, in Richard Fotheringham, Christa Jansohn and R. S. White, eds., Shakespeare’s World/World Shakespeares [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008], p. 23). Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 174; Barbara L. Parker, ‘The Whore of Babylon and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar’, Studies in English Literature, 35.2 (1995), 264. See Simpson, ‘Singapore’, p. 386. Berry and Farquhar, China on Screen, p. 221. See Rebecca Chapman, ‘Spectator Violence and Queenly Desire in The Banquet ’, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, 4.2 (2009), 3, www.borrowers.uga.edu (accessed 17 June 2010). Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Violation and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 55, 81. Interview between Chenaktshang Dorje Tsering (Jangbu) and Mark Thornton Burnett, 23 October 2009. Unless otherwise stated, all Jangbu quotations are taken from this interview and appear in the text or notes. Molly Hand, review of Ye Yan/The Banquet (dir. Xiaogang Feng), Shakespeare, 4.4 (2008), 433. Linda Charnes, Hamlet’s Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 9. See Rinpoche, Tibetan Book, pp. 67, 191; Sangharakshita, Tibetan Buddhism, p. 191. The idea of ‘compassion’ accords with Chenaktshang Dorje Tsering (Jangbu)’s emphasis in the film on ‘mercy’, which, he notes, was translated

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from Tibetan into Mandarin and English as ‘the Western concept of “universal love”’. See ‘Prince of the Himalayas: Director Sherwood Hu’, www.princeofthehimalayas.com/articles/article3.htm (accessed 16 June 2009); ‘Prince of the Himalayas’, p. 8. ‘Prince of the Himalayas’, p. 93. Commenting on how the suggested name was elaborated, Chenaktshang Dorje Tsering (Jangbu) notes: ‘“Lhamo” in Tibetan signifies a female deity protector of Buddhism . . . I quietly inserted a “k” in the name, making it into Lhamok. “Mok” means “helmet”, which, in classical Tibetan, refers to someone who has a valiant and virtuous disposition. “Lodan” means to possess wisdom. When you put the two together, you have something like “to be both resourceful and brave”’. Ibid., p. 36. See ‘The Banquet: About the Production’, www.metrodomereleasing.com/ films/banquet (accessed 12 May 2009).

part iii

Plays

chapter 5

Macbeth

When criticism instances a non-Anglophone Shakespeare film, it tends to be Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 adaptation of Macbeth. Typically, the aesthetic verve and ambition of Kurosawa’s achievement is identified in Throne of Blood ’s use of Japanese Noh theatre and a mise en sce`ne (embracing fog or clashing horizontals and verticals) that privileges the disordered state of the Macbethian protagonist.1 Also singled out is the film’s imaginative recasting of the words of the play. Thus, the combined rain and sunshine conditions of the Cobweb forest are highlighted as approximating the play’s reference to ‘So foul and fair a day’; similarly, interest alights on the interconnected horse sequences that render visible the description, in Macbeth, of horses that have ‘broke their stalls [and] flung out, / Contending ’gainst obedience’.2 Working through Shakespeare, Kurosawa is further lauded for his engagement with political considerations, as mediated via scenes of feudal warfare and the film’s corresponding subscription to the jidai-geki or period genre. For Anthony Dawson, Kurosawa finds in Shakespeare’s ‘vision of impermanence’ an evocation of ‘the terrible devastation of World War II’, while, in Erin Suzuki’s estimation, the material realities of a ‘post-war, post-occupation Japan’ feeds into Throne of Blood ’s ‘portrayal of a weakened society open to infection by the forces of chaos and change’.3 In the critical tradition that has prioritized Throne of Blood, it is the film’s successful fusion of the aesthetic, the textual and the political that has cemented its place as one of the most significant of Shakespeare on screen statements. Although Throne of Blood ’s individual merits have been acknowledged, the extent to which its vision of Macbeth has been echoed in the work of other filmmakers has continued to be underestimated. Macbeth has long appealed to auteurs of an independent, distinctive mould, both before and after Kurosawa’s canonical realization, with adaptations ranging from Brazil, Finland, India, Russia and elsewhere.4 And, as I argue here, it is according to a schema of the aesthetic, the textual and the political that 163

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this play, in particular, is perennially reinvented. This chapter not only points up the regularity with which Macbeth is a point of departure for rewriting; it also suggests the extent to which Shakespeare’s political allegory yields relevancies that apply to specific cultural, national and geographical groupings. Earlier parts of this book have spotlighted the key contributions made by a localized imaginary in such Macbeth adaptations as Makibefo (dir. Alexander Abela, 1999), Sangrador (dir. Leonardo Henrı´quez, 2000) and Maqbool (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2004). This chapter analyzes three further examples. The first is Yellamma (dir. Mohan Koda, 1999), which situates Macbeth inside an historicized representation of southern Indian insurrection; the second is Someone is Sleeping in My Pain (dir. Michael Roes, 2001), which reveals how an attempt to film Macbeth in Yemen becomes itself a Macbeth-like narrative; and the third is Macbeth (dir. Bo Landin and Alex Scherpf, 2004), which uses the snow and ice landscape of the Arctic Circle to conjure the play in terms of wintry remoteness. The varying locations are complemented, I will argue, by all three films’ aesthetic choices, as manifested in widescreen shots of the undulating luxuriant hillsides of Andhra Pradesh, in evocative images of brutally characterized deserts and mountains, and in sweeping pans that, spotlighting the aurora borealis, represent nature as spectacle. Individual shooting styles testify to the ways in which Macbeth is apprehended in world cinema as a work that invites a set of unique visual responses. While Yellamma, Someone is Sleeping in My Pain and Macbeth may be illuminatingly placed in juxtaposition with Throne of Blood as works whose significance resides in their mediation of Shakespearean language, these are simultaneously films that stick closely to dramatic dialogue, retain the essence of many rhetorical formulations and privilege what is at stake in acts of translation. A film such as Someone is Sleeping in My Pain, for example, discovers the problematics attached to particular translation acts and, in so doing, bears out Willis Barnstone’s argument that ‘translation is . . . another creation’ that testifies to ‘virtual autonomy, art, and originality’.5 Yellamma, Someone is Sleeping in My Pain and Macbeth also approach the Shakespearean word in such a way as to play up the literary qualities of individual nations and cultures; as Andre´ Lefevere and Susan Bassnett note, ‘Translation . . . becomes the means by which a . . . nation . . . shows that its language is capable of rendering what is rendered in more prestigious languages’.6 Because it is a play that revolves around tyranny and absolutism, and because it ventilates these themes through a specifically Jamesian project centred upon the union of

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nations, Macbeth speaks volubly to filmmakers and artists invested in challenging forms of cultural and linguistic hegemony. From very different parts of the world, Macbeth is reworked to pose questions about the integrity of the individual nation-state, the place of particular constituencies and the role of Shakespeare in promoting the promulgation of endangered traditions. For all four of the filmmakers discussed in this chapter, Shakespeare’s word, as filtered or imitated, affords opportunities for self-affirmation and adjudication between centres and peripheries. A further common denominator is the way in which the films foreground transformative political forces; Macbeth is explicitly concerned with questions about indigenous culture while Yellamma and Someone is Sleeping in My Pain preoccupy themselves, respectively, with regionally fraught power relations and an imperial encounter that operates along an East–West global axis. Political freight shows itself in Yellamma’s reflections on monarchical structures and colonial systems of rule, in Someone is Sleeping in My Pain’s invocation of a critical impasse in relations between the US and the Middle East, and in Macbeth’s concentration on assimilationist practices that have undermined linguistic and territorial rights and claims. Alongside such considerations, at least one of the Macbeth examples explores not so much the imposition of Shakespeare on a nonAnglophone imaginary as that imaginary’s appropriation of the Bard. Crucially, a film such as Someone is Sleeping in My Pain goes beyond the kinds of ‘distortion’ that, as Keith Richards notes, may be generated by the use of ‘an ethnographic template’, establishing, instead, the political valences of acts of writing back.7 Macbeth, the play, constitutes a treasure house of meanings for the filmmaker, suggesting that Kurosawa is not alone in his recognition of its transferable potential. Rather, as the temporal proximity, and geographical representativeness, of Yellamma, Someone is Sleeping in My Pain and Macbeth indicate, Shakespeare’s drama communicates urgently to ambitious and locally committed cinema practitioners across the globe. prophecy and power Described in publicity as ‘Based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth’, Yellamma translates Shakespearean English into Telangana, a dialect of Telegu, the third most common language spoken in India and the official language of Andhra Pradesh, where the film was made.8 Rustom Bharucha notes that ‘new hierarchies among Indian languages’ are primarily established through ‘the global media and the market’ and, in this context, it is

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notable that, although Tollywood produces nowhere near the numbers of films credited to the Bollywood machine, it does generate over one hundred movies each year.9 Filmmakers belonging to the Tollywood industry have, historically, seized upon a range of discrete identifiers, including local identity politics and representations of minority populations, and have relied upon realist representations of feudalism, deploying southern India, as Ashish Rajadhyaksha notes, as ‘a narrational “other” to the radical metropolitan imagination’.10 Yellamma is an expressive instance here, for the action takes place in the rural Karimnagar and Warangal areas, with the film more generally making a virtue of a region-encoded interplay between sound and look. As director Mohan Koda states, the aim was to privilege a ‘language that is extremely expressive’ at the same time as a ‘rocky landscape’, the ‘richness of the culture’ and the ‘robust colours of the people’.11 Central to the director’s vision of Macbeth is a period setting and event – the Indian Rebellion, sometimes known as the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’, of 1857–9. During these years, unrest occurred throughout India but had a specific manifestation in southern parts where Rohilla chieftains agitated in the city of Hyderabad for an armed uprising. An unsuccessful attack was launched on the English agent’s residence, and a crucial element in the rebellion’s local failure was the support given by the fifth Nizam, the ruler of the state of Hyderabad, to British forces.12 Yellamma mimes this triangular chain of command, imagining the ‘disloyal traitor, / The Thane of Cawdor’ (1.2.52–3) as one such Rohilla chieftain, and Pratap/Macbeth (Nasser) as an initially loyal soldier keen to maintain the provincial balance of power in the interests of his imperial overlords. The unquestioning extent of Pratap’s allegiance is suggested in the bloody zeal with which he impales the Rohilla chieftain on his sword in an episode that graphically visualizes Ross’s report of Macbeth’s actions (1.2.48–58). In addition, Yellamma complicates and extends the structures of authority inside which Macbeth plots and launches his coup d’e´tat. Although elevated to subedar or commander of the army, Pratap/Macbeth is still in the employ of Bhoopal/Duncan, the King of Rudraram, a local monarch beholden to the Nizam of the state of Hyderabad, a ruler owing duty in turn to the British Crown. Thus, when Pratap/Macbeth, resplendent in chains and breastplate, announces that he aspires to ‘imprint my name in history for ever’ – ‘My fame should be spread all over the world’, he insists – his ambition is imagined as far-reaching in its implications.13 Pratap/Macbeth emerges both as a force that cannot be contained within existing arrangements and as a manifestation of a context-specific state of

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unrest. And, in electing to foreground an event that was linked, in the contemporary English imaginary, to ‘horror’, ‘demonic possession’ and ‘psychological trauma’, the director draws upon a moment in Indian history that was itself interpreted as a Macbeth-like narrative of epic proportions.14 Undergirding the film’s epic dimensions is the figuration of Yellamma (Revathy) herself. A holy woman who presides over a rocky shrine in a lush wilderness, Yellamma operates as a medium for the goddess Kali and her pronouncements – ‘in days to come, men and women, rich and poor, will fight . . . there will be . . . bloodshed’, she warns – show her status as a legitimate spokesperson for her community. The scene in which this singular version of Shakespeare’s three witches first appears is saturated with colour and grandeur: horses gallop magnificently across fertile swards, hands gesticulate solemnly as prophecies are elaborated, and inquisitive reaction shots suggest histories in the making. Festooned in green and purple, and arrayed with the jewellery that signifies her abilities, Yellamma wields considerable influence. Locals consult her for guidance; Mahadevi/Lady Macbeth (Sonali Kulnarni) cites her as a source of ultimate authority; and Yellamma herself is portrayed as vitally in touch with histories past and present. ‘I see the ghosts of darkness on their way . . . Men whose fates I have just sealed’, she expounds, rather in the manner of the witches who ‘Show’ (4.1.123) Macbeth apparitions or ‘shadows’ (4.1.127) of kings who were and yet might be. In this sense, the priestess is simultaneously an expression of the bhakti or devotional love movement which, as, Rachel Dwyer comments, ‘brought about significant changes in gender hierarchies with its acceptance of women’ as devotees.15 Thus it is that Pratap/Macbeth is seen to depend with a particular desperation upon Yellamma, pleading with her for illumination (‘Only . . . you have all the answers’, he exclaims) because excluded from her unique communion with the divine. Even as the film privileges Yellamma as a prophetic entity, a domesticated manifestation of the supernatural that is not so much strange as familiar, so does it also play up her vulnerability as a woman, her situation as a fallen type. In the Indian epics, Yellamma is a faithful wife who, married to an ascetic, is excited by witnessing a god’s sexual tryst; as a result, she is punished with deformity, cast out and killed, only to return as a goddess possessed of an even greater splendour and virtue.16 Symbol of victimhood in the Hindu pantheon, Yellamma attracted a cult following and, in the pre-independence period, so-called devadasis (generally women of a lower caste) ‘married’ or dedicated themselves to the

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goddess, attained privileged positions as dancers and singers in courts and temples, and were associated with good fortune.17 Post-independence a different picture obtains: devadasis in southern India are exploited as sex workers, the sacrality of their profession having been compromised, highlighting the plight of women caught in a cycle of poverty and injustice.18 Yellamma enfolds Shakespeare’s witches inside these multilayered traditions. Throughout, the priestess is discovered in terms of an unwanted possession and a questioning relation with the heavens, as her frequent exclamations attest: ‘Why do you use me as [a] vehicle of destruction . . . why do you make me suffer?’ she asks. The dual construction of Yellamma is suggested in the contrasting nature of her two appearances. On the first occasion the priestess prophesies during the day, the establishing wide-angle shots of the verdant expanse of the mountains connoting abundance and possibility. On the second occasion she forewarns Pratap/Macbeth of his future at night, cold blues and swirling fogs emphasizing a radical change in the protagonist’s circumstances. A close-up on Yellamma’s eyes, darting, frightened and spotlighted in the dark, indicates a pained sensibility and, as she disappears magically from view, one is reminded not only of the witches (‘what seemed corporal / Melted as breath into the wind’ [1.3.79–80]) but also of the devadasis whose condition has, until recently, been largely invisible. Agent and conduit, Yellamma is a character riven by contrarieties and a conceptual category that expresses the doubleness at the heart of Shakespeare’s play. More obviously in the film, Yellamma is distinctive as a foil to Mahadevi/Lady Macbeth: where the former struggles against her powers, the latter wishes to gain in kudos and dominion. Joanna Levin argues that, in Shakespeare’s play, Lady Macbeth is continually associated with ‘the unruly, unsatisfied Mother’; there is ‘continuity’, she adds, ‘between the monstrously maternal and the demonic’.19 Invoked as the ‘great mother’ by the priestess, Kali, in her negative manifestation, bearing tusks and garlanded with skulls, she could be said to have a similarly demonic aspect.20 Compositions reveal the goddess in the form of an effigy in the shrine, complete with a bindi or tilak to signify energy, and in decorative motifs, such as the trident, Kali’s typical weapon, which cover the interior and exterior walls of Pratap/Macbeth’s fort. With both locales, it is implied, the maternal is a point of reference. Mothers, or substitute mothers, also appear as characters, as in the figure of the maidservant-nurse, Sauramma, who, installed after the death of Mahadevi/Lady Macbeth’s own mother,

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is confused for Yellamma at one point, suggesting the interchangeable nature of maternal types. For his part, as he steels himself to murder Bhoopal/Duncan, Pratap/Macbeth sings to himself his mother’s lullaby. This musical interlude, in which the memory of the parent functions to mediate the ‘fatal vision’ (2.1.36) of the dagger, operates as a subliminal source of justification (‘O dear moon, come [to]. . . my . . . child . . . gently . . . for he will be crowned king in the morning’) and as an echo of that precious commodity in Macbeth, sleep (or the lack of it). Indeed, the various mothers of Yellamma register a sense of lack in the protagonists’ lives. Mothers intimate the primacy of the familial unit and also the fact that Pratap/Macbeth’s crime is an offence against blood relations. Allusions in Macbeth to ‘kindness’ (1.5.15) and ‘kinsman’ (1.4.58, 1.7.13), with their associations of kin or family, are extrapolated in Yellamma. For Mahadevi/Lady Macbeth is sister to the wife of Bhoopal/Duncan, which stresses the ties that bind family and politics and lends a particularly horrific complexion to Mahadevi/Lady Macbeth’s crime. It is an issue of consanguinity, rather than fealty, which underpins and animates the narrative, and in such a way that women’s roles are expanded and female pairings assume prominent positions. As Mahadevi/Lady Macbeth reflects, chafing at her status as underling, or consort-in-waiting, ‘I am Mahadevi not Maharani’. Offsetting Pratap/Macbeth’s part as agent, Yellamma identifies sibling rivalry as a spur to action, the idea being that the protagonist’s rebellion against his king has its origins in his wife’s personal dissatisfactions. Trust in Yellamma, cutting across interrelated systems for the maintenance of rule, is doubly abused. Macbeth crystallizes the amoral will of Lady Macbeth in the image of the ‘smiling . . . babe’ (1.7.55, 56) denied milk and life; as variation, Yellamma establishes the equivalent dimensions of Mahadevi in repeated suggestions of narcissism. When she is first introduced, she is being adorned with toe rings, objects that point up a pride in her marital status and an accumulative material instinct.21 Vanity is underscored in the key filmic property of the mirror in which Mahadevi/Lady Macbeth repeatedly admires herself. It is this property, rather than the elaborately carved bedstead and the box of family heirlooms she also covets, that announces her absorption in the ‘I’, and it is a rich visual irony that, as her madness progresses, she turns to her reflection less. (Instead, it is Pratap/Macbeth who is drawn to inspect himself, his use of the mirror stressing the realization of his psychic disintegration.) It is in the banquet scene – played here as a coronation episode – that Mahadevi/Lady Macbeth’s

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madness first announces itself. In a sequence marked by great formality – a stately procession, serried ranks of officials, the high-pitched wail of victorious woodwind and the insistently rhythmical proclamation of Pratap/Macbeth’s ‘New honours’ (1.3.143) – Mahadevi/Lady Macbeth is visibly traumatized. As the puja or ritual unfolds, the cleansing kumkum paste that she uses to anoint the feet of Pratap/Macbeth turns into a coagulated bloody mess, and the basin is dropped. Central to the film’s remodelling of Macbeth’s banquet scene, and its concomitant theme of ‘admired disorder’ (3.4.109), is the ghostly appearance of a further maternal figure. During the ceremony, Bhoopal/Duncan’s wife enters on an upper gallery, only to shake her head disbelievingly and to convey in her glance a wealth of suspicions and accusations; hers is a punitive intervention that confirms sibling rivalry as a primary motor. With this pairing, in particular, Yellamma plays up women’s dysfunctional relations as a nexus of recrimination and guilt. At a deeper level, the coronation scene establishes a link between Mahadevi/Lady Macbeth’s failed cleansing rite and subsequent hand-washing fixation.22 Indeed, the preoccupation with her bloodied hands becomes, in Yellamma, the defining motif of Mahadevi/ Lady Macbeth’s decline. She is represented as worrying about the ‘smell’ and the ‘stain’, galling for a newly installed queen dependent on appearances. And, in a telling mythological parallel, Mahadevi/Lady Macbeth compares herself to a ‘wretched leper’, deploying a register of caste exclusion that summons the fate of Yellamma in the epics, plagued, as she was, with boils and sores as stigmatic indices of her supposed crime.23 The endpoint of Mahadevi/Lady Macbeth’s narcissism is that she becomes a type of outcast, and this is conveyed in the dimly illuminated interiors that she frequents and in the scene where she gives her bangles to and frees her maidservant-nurse, abandoning worldly attachments. The maidservant-nurse’s liberated status draws attention to Mahadevi/Lady Macbeth’s constricted circumstances, suggesting both a translation of the rejection of the maternal function in Shakespeare’s play and the completion of a cycle. For Mahadevi/Lady Macbeth is ultimately trapped by her deeds, myth and film narrative combining to make of the fallen woman a distinctive archetype. The equation between Mahadevi/Lady Macbeth and blood is typical of the ways in which Yellamma instances colour to reinforce meaning, mood and tone. Orange filters are technical devices whose use in several nighttime sequences assists in suggesting mediation and even hallucination. Alternatively, white filters, also reserved for nocturnal set pieces, point up an impression of spectrality. Light, more generally, seems to emanate,

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thanks to careful backlighting, from the flowing costumes, the idea being, as in Macbeth where ‘robes’ (1.3.107) are either ill-fitting or ‘borrowed’ (1.3.107), that the surface image is inherently unreliable. All is consistent with the film’s otherworldly luminosity and aesthetic versatility. Overall aesthetic effects are enhanced aurally, as in the repeated deployment of birdsong – jubilant trills or gloomy caws – that, harking back to Macbeth, finesses in another key the interplay between good and evil omen. Establishing thematic rhythms, and following the emotional contours of the narrative, birdsong operates as a kind of meta-commentary, and this is also evidenced in Yellamma’s score. In the immediate aftermath of Mahadevi/Lady Macbeth’s death, a song is heard, its lyrics stressing the illusory qualities of material achievement: ‘O imprudent king . . . like a dewdrop on a lotus leaf is your life . . . Impermanence is its very nature . . . nothingness’. At once, of course, the song rephrases the nihilistic existential tenor of Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ (5.5.18) soliloquy, finding in an evanescent natural phenomenon an apt correlative for the ‘brief’ (5.5.22) life on the stage of Shakespeare’s ‘poor player’ (5.5.23). Unlike the mythic Yellamma, reborn after her fall, Mahadevi/Lady Macbeth, it is implied, will not return: the funeral pyre that Pratap/Macbeth lights in a revision of the practice of sati is a conflagration of finality, and the accompanying flashbacks to a previous existence point up an unalterable fate. In that it echoes the priestess Yellamma’s earlier warning that ‘No king can remain a king forever’, the song also takes on the properties of quasi-spiritual instruction, sounding at a critical moment a note of divine reprimand. Her pronouncements, long after Yellamma has left the action, assert themselves still. Throne of Blood is distinctive in the ways in which it goes against the prospect of historical providentialism. As Stephen M. Buhler observes, Kurosawa purposefully ‘withholds any victory speech . . . he frustrates hope on the audience’s part that a new order can or should be established.’24 Yellamma resists such a reorientation and is arguably more invested in restoring, and thereby approving, the systems that Pratap/ Macbeth’s period of rule has endangered. The immediate descendent of the Bhoopal/Duncan royal line, Arjun/Malcolm, is represented as an unfit candidate to assume power; appearing only with his mother, and injured in the wars, he is effeminized through his cowardice in battle and subsequently dies of his wounds. Crucially, Arjun/Malcolm’s removal from the action is not the prompt for an overturning of the principle of dynastic succession. For Maheshwar/Macduff, acting on the instructions of Hyderabad’s ‘rulers’, agrees to bring down Pratap/Macbeth, to install

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Yughandhar/Fleance and to act as ‘regent’. In this development, ideals of family are once again highlighted – Maheshwar/Macduff is brother to Roddam/Banquo, while Roddam/Banquo himself is Bhoopal/Duncan’s son-in-law. All the major players are bound by lineaments of kith and kin, making this Macbeth a family drama of some intricacy. With no wife and children of his own, Maheshwar/Macduff is seen as compelled to act out of a sense of ‘revenge’ and ‘justice’ (his motivation is to right a family wrong). And, in the place of the discounted Arjun/Malcolm, the film substitutes a martially proficient, and morally sound, fraternal bond. Its strength, and the prowess that the brothers manifest, are attested to in the similarity between Maheshwar/Macduff and Roddam/Banquo: barechested, skilled in swordplay and luxuriantly bouffanted, they are envisaged as the masculinized defenders of the state. As the camera’s focus falls on the bloodied face of Pratap/Macbeth in the final scene, echoing Macbeth’s on-stage property of the ‘curse`d head . . . Of this dead butcher’ (5.11.21, 35), Maheshwar/Macduff intones, ‘No life in this world is immortal . . . This is a fitting end’. The recurrence of the priestess Yellamma’s philosophy of impermanence, a key feature of Hindu and Buddhist thought, stresses again the centrality of her role at the same time as it broadens the scope and resonance of her counsel.25 Implicitly, too, in the salvation of the internal dynamic of the Rudraram monarchy, other kinds of structures are ratified, including the balance of power that obtains between the state of Hyderabad and British colonial rule. In this sense, Yellamma concerns itself with, as Wimal Dissanayake states, ‘the positive function of evil insisted on by traditional Hindu mythology’, valued, as it was, as ‘a force necessary for the maintenance of the social order’.26 Yet, as this discussion has argued, these general principles are granted a specific application in Yellamma – in the translation of the Shakespearean word into Telegu dialect, in felicitous aesthetic decisions, in a preoccupation with minority utterances, and in vividly rendered cultural practices that illuminate the situation of the state of Hyderabad, or modern-day Andhra Pradesh, in relation to other arrangements. Using the conceit of the Indian Rebellion as its point of departure, Yellamma animates Macbeth anew as a play that supports a regionally inspired representational agenda. heat and dust Yellamma enfolds into its adaptation of Macbeth suggestions of regional tension; at the opposite end of the extreme, in Someone is Sleeping in My Pain, internal division and internecine strife are the pretexts for a radical

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transformation of Shakespeare’s play. Billed in its secondary title as An East–West ‘Macbeth’, Someone is Sleeping in My Pain, by relocating Shakespeare’s Scotland to modern-day Yemen, recalls an encounter centuries earlier. On 31 March 1608, off the island of Socotra (now part of Yemen) in the Gulf of Aden, Captain William Keeling of the East India Company had staged on his ship, the Red Dragon, a production of Hamlet, which, in the words of his journal, ‘I permit to keep my people from idleness and unlawful games, or sleep.’27 Between these two expressions of Shakespeare lies an unstable political history. Formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, an outpost of the British Empire and a monarchy, this divided nation-state was united in 1994, leading to full-scale civil war, with the result that state power was weakened and tribal groups, led by shaykhs or chieftains, continued to exercise considerable local autonomy.28 For Michael Roes, the German anthropologist, academic, novelist and director of Someone is Sleeping in My Pain, it was precisely the country’s ‘rough, archaic’ conditions that reminded him of Shakespeare’s play; as he states in interview, ‘contemporary Yemen and the Scottish Middle Ages did not seem so very different’.29 Specific shooting locations included the opening scene in New York and extended sequences filmed at the fortified citadel of Kawkaban and the village of al-Dhafeer, the movement between geographically removed situations prioritizing the premise of a meeting of East and West. To the key preoccupations of Macbeth – honour (‘He hath honoured me of late’ [1.7.32] states the protagonist of Duncan) and revenge (‘Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge’ [4.3.215], Malcolm enjoins) – Someone is Sleeping in My Pain gives a reanimating impetus. For, as Paul Dresch notes, ‘honour’ or ‘sharaf ’ among Yemeni tribesmen ‘has associations with . . . distinctness and distinction . . . and the term can often be translated “nobility”’; not surprisingly, he adds, ‘sharaf ’ may be damaged by ‘ayb’ or ‘disgrace’, leading to group or ‘tribe’ acts of ‘vengeance’.30 Of course, in Macbeth, the play, ‘honour’ is often inseparable from a penchant for violence (‘with his brandished steel . . . he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chaps’ [1.2.17, 22] states the Captain, reflecting on Macbeth’s exertions on the battlefield), and, in several shots of Yemeni tribesmen sporting in their belts a janbiyyah (curved dagger) and brandishing Kalashnikov rifles, a like context of a socially encoded brute force is suggested. This, as several commentators on Yemen note, is a society marked by its armed citizenry.31 Or, to adopt the formulation of Michael Roes, ‘The whole setting seemed to us already Shakespearean if not Macbeth-like.’

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Someone is Sleeping in My Pain tells the fictional story of an unnamed American film director (played by Andrea´ Smith) who travels from New York to Yemen to make an adaptation of Macbeth. Andrea´ Smith, a renowned dancer, is the only professional actor in the cast, the rest being amateur performers, mainly Yemeni tribal warriors. Two Macbeth narratives coexist within the frame, then; the first concerns the film director’s overweening ambition to stage Shakespeare’s play in seemingly inhospitable terrain (making him a type of Macbeth in his own right), and the second centres on the ‘actual’ production which emerges. As a result, the film inhabits a number of genres, among which is the documentary, while the process of its creation is reflected in the extent to which extemporization is reinforced as an interpretive strategy. In this connection, visual coding is a significant clue. Colour photography signifies the film director’s efforts; black and white discovers the Shakespearean counterpart. Hence, in blackand-white sequences where tribesmen participate in a traditional circular dance, with daggers drawn and drums playing in the background, we are sensitized to the translation of Macbeth and to its apposite accommodation with the Yemeni world. But a smooth unfolding of the production is often impeded, not least because of the film director’s unfamiliarity with Yemen; his alterity – and naivety – are recurring themes. His lack of connection is indicated in several chapter titles, such as ‘The Innocence’, and his cultural difference is suggested in his responses to animals. When, for example, the film director looks askance at the live chickens killed, cut up and packaged in a butcher’s shop, the implication is that he fails to understand a specific ritual of slaughter (dhabiha) which makes the animal fit – permitted and sanctified – to eat (halal).32 Similarly, stressed in a related scene in which the film director visits a zoo are his appalled reactions. The shocked registration at the caged conditions of the baboons and hyenas points up how he is out of tune with his habitus.33 These are among the symptoms of estrangement that must be confronted, it is implied, if the Macbeth project is to bear fruit. Because the film director is black, his enterprise brings into play a further dimension of this Macbeth genre, which is a concern with ‘unique racial, ethnic, and cultural identities’.34 ‘Otherness’ migrates between director and subject; the ownership of the directorial gaze is finessed; and the issue of cultural domination is opened up to scrutiny. Someone is Sleeping in My Pain might well, therefore, be likened to those Macbeth productions that Ayanna Thompson, in a discussion of the play’s performance history in the US, has labelled ‘weyward’ or ‘wayward’ – ‘weird, fated, fateful, perverse, intractable, wilful, erratic, unlicensed, fugitive, troublesome’.35

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Tellingly exposed in Someone is Sleeping in My Pain are the material difficulties of filming Macbeth in an Islamic country. The ‘original’ lead, Yahya Hamood Mohsin al-Dhafeeri, fell ill early in the shoot and was replaced by his ‘double’, Abdullah Nasser Muhammed al-Hamdani, only to recover and take over the role for the final scenes. Unforeseen felicities arising from the doubled role led to the decision to cast two further Macbeths, the idea being that different manifestations of the protagonist refract the various stages of the character’s trajectory. More broadly, the putting into circulation of more than one Macbeth both conjures a Shakespearean notion of the unstable self and engages a localized sense that acts of impersonation are potentially acts of deceit. For, as commentators note, certain kinds of acting are forbidden (haram) in Muslim tradition, particularly if they involve the representation of immorality, and thus the profession has been tied to dishonour and even blasphemy.36 More pressing challenges were thrown up by context. For example, ‘The Innocence’ sequence – shot in the Iman Palace at Kohlan – was put in disarray when a dog was unwittingly filmed on a musallah or prayer rug, leading to a guard’s conviction, then relayed to the local mosque, that an animal had been singled out as an object of worship. As a consequence, the cast were asked to move on; in the words of the film’s fictional director, ‘We are no longer welcome.’ Sabry Hafez’s warning against the ‘lazy assumption that Islam is hostile to images’ notwithstanding, at issue here would seem to have been anxieties about the role of the camera and an act of representation.37 Indeed, it is against the background of an increasingly beleaguered production of Macbeth in Yemen that the title makes sense. Elliptically allusive, the key terms connote the ‘pain’ of the film director and the ‘sleep’ or rest he is denied. Throughout these developments, Macbeth the play is kept to the fore. First, the division of Someone is Sleeping in My Pain into named parts, such as ‘The Battle’ and ‘The Illusion’, suggests a concept of action that accords with the play’s theatrical rhythms. More obviously, ravishing shots of swathes of sand, holy desert wells and the soaring, chequered edifices of the capital, Sana’a, are at the heart of a thrilling aesthetic translation of Macbeth’s material world – the ‘blasted heath’ (1.3.75), the ‘cauldron’ (4.1.4) or ‘charme`d pot’ (4.1.9), and architectural ‘mansionry’ (1.6.5) are all shadowed in the cinematography, underscoring the poetic power of the Yemeni milieu. Certainly, the film yields a cornucopia of remarkable images – villages rise precipitously from the escarpment; dust clouds bathe the rugged aridity of empty spaces; stone and rubble combine to create strange, rocky formations; and cratered, serpentine passes

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rise dizzily through the mountains – that allegorize Shakespeare’s Scotland as an unrelenting but inspiring landscape. In fact, the issue of translation is directly addressed. An early scene shows the film director identifying in English the highlights of Macbeth to potential cast members, his transmission of information depending on the services of an Arabic interpreter (Ahmed Hizam al-Dulaee). Interestingly, Shakespeare is never specified; instead, as the film director explains, the narrative he will adapt is a generic one that trades in universals: ‘We are here to tell a very ancient story . . . a ghost story’. The effect of the privileging of his voice is to place him in a position of choric authority. By the same token, his supernatural slant on Macbeth makes of the drama an oral fable that, divorced from authorial and national point of origin, is distinctive by virtue of its immersion in history. Translation becomes an area of difficulty in the rehearsal scenes. Here, with the help of the interpreter, the film director phonetically teaches his cast Macbeth, and it is clear that the actors have no understanding of the English words. Shakespeare, no more than a foreign language, is learned by rote. These are moments of implied breakdown in communication in which two cultures fail to converge. Yet, as the action progresses, Shakespeare transmutes, with the play being indigenized in part through the landscape’s rough magic. At the point where the boys cast as witches rename themselves ‘djinns’, there being no equivalent term for Shakespeare’s ‘wierd sisters’ (1.5.7) in Arabic, the film director is himself taught to modify his approach. ‘This is too much English,’ he states, reflecting on the inappropriateness of the phonetic method. The epiphanic episode mimes, in fact, a more general filmic movement in which English occupies an increasingly minor role and eventually cedes place to Arabic, suggesting a degree of native resistance. ‘Is translation,’ asks Michael Cronin, ‘the residual curse and continuing cause of ethnic fragmentation through its signalling of difference or is translation the way back to the industrious community of origin, all collaborating together on the ambitious project of human betterment, transcending the given for the hope of something more?’38 Someone is Sleeping in My Pain captures the opposites enshrined in this question, showing how early modern Shakespearean English and contemporary Arabic adaptation struggle to coexist. Aided by subtitles that capture the hesitations and repetitions involved in the work of translation, and by a score which mixes American pop and Arabic folk music (a combination described by Michael Roes as ‘another signifying expression of the film’s hybrid character’), Someone is Sleeping in My Pain discovers Macbeth – and its languages – as continually shifting and

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evolving. To stay alive, it is implied, Macbeth must reformulate itself, responding in kind to the exigencies demanded of its Middle Eastern cultural emplacement. For the film director, a second epiphany comes with the realization that he must take on the role of Lady Macbeth. ‘We have one other problem . . . why can’t we ask about Lady Macbeth?’ he demands. The impossibility of recruiting a Yemeni actress is generally indicated in chapter titles such as ‘The Lady’, and in a more covert glimpse of a woman in a burka ascending a stairwell at night whose retirement into domestic space signals a critical absence. As the interpreter unequivocally states, ‘It is custom . . . nobody wants his mother or his wife to act’. Blocked in his unthinking search for the authentic article, the director dances off his frustration in a haman or public bath; the sublimated homoeroticism of the episode both plays up the abandonment of one identity and the embrace of another and hints at a cleansing, a removal of the ‘damned spot’ (5.1.30) of male gender. A subsequent montage shows the film director, dressed all in white, on a sunny Sana’a rooftop overlooking a vista of agricultural terraces; rehearsing Lady Macbeth’s opening lines, he concludes the ‘unsexing’ process in which purification and fresh beginnings are significant elements. This dramatic act of becoming also doubles the meanings embodied in the film’s title, ‘sleep’ being primarily associated with Lady Macbeth and her quest for resolution and respite. Of course, at one level, the scene rephrases the play’s concern with an all-male stage and the film’s preoccupation with Yemen as an all-male public sphere. At a deeper level, what happens to the film director is more in keeping with the type of ‘ritualistic practice’ which, as Pierre Bourdieu explains, ‘always aims to facilitate passages and/or to authorize encounters between opposed orders’.39 Only after this experience can the film director freely join hands with one of the Macbeth actors and engage in a reciprocal English–Arabic Shakespearean dialogue. (Because this is the so-called ‘letter scene’, an additional emphasis falls on the idea of a communicative exchange.) The idea of arriving at a common understanding is returned to in the sequence, towards the end, when Yemeni tribesmen agree to use their headcloths as burkas so as to impersonate women fetching water from a well in an approximation of the approach of ‘Great Birnam Wood’ (4.1.109). Such is the film director’s facility with improvisation at the level of gender that experimentation and change can be contemplated in the local mindset. Cultural differences begin to align themselves in Someone is Sleeping in My Pain via queer performative flexibilities. If these episodes imply a closing of the distance between the polarities of East and West, then the final images of the film – Macbeth washing and

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Figure 16: The film director (Andrea´ Smith), playing the role of Lady Macbeth, seizes the bloody dagger while Macbeth (Yahya Hamood Mohsin al-Dhafeeri) looks on suspiciously in Someone is Sleeping in My Pain (dir. Michael Roes, 2001).

anointing the body of his wife in intimacy, imitation and empathy – push further at that possibility. Where the play stresses the cynicism of the protagonist’s reaction to Lady Macbeth’s death (‘She should have died hereafter’ [5.5.16], he states), Someone is Sleeping in My Pain underscores a connective imperative born out of loss. This is most forcefully suggested at the point where Macbeth unwinds and removes his headcloth, draping it over his own body like a shroud, his gesture indicating a further responsiveness, on the part of the Yemeni actors, to what is at stake in the assumption of a female Shakespearean part. Furthermore, rituals of mourning prepare us for Lady Macbeth’s return. In a sequence filmed in an upper room of the Kawkaban citadel, Lady Macbeth awakes to deliver the ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ (5.5.18) soliloquy; suffused lighting and wandering violins suggest a dream, while the appropriation of Macbeth’s key philosophical reflection points to a coming together of the titular role and the film director’s alter ego. Both parts of the film – the directorial initiative and the play-within-a-film – join in generic fusion, suggesting a fifth Macbeth and a larger communion. Collaboration is highlighted in the resurrection of Lady Macbeth and in the film’s move to retain her presence and spirit. Rather than the expected return to New York, Someone is Sleeping in My Pain ends resolutely with the Yemeni Macbeth and his fate, as testified

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to in the camera’s lingering close-up on his face. ‘Villain’ (5.10.7) and ‘coward’ (5.10.23) are epithets addressed by Macduff to Macbeth in Arabic. The world of the play has become all-consuming: just as the film director as Lady Macbeth is unable to relinquish the narrative he has in part created, so is a western audience refused the restoration of familiar perspectives. In addition, and because no Malcolm appears, there is little sense of reconstruction or future projection; rather, the prioritization given to ‘“Hold, enough!”’ (5.10.34) as the last words suggests, at one and the same time, a state of suspension or stand-off and an as yet unrealized scenario. We are reminded, in the doubled quotation marks, of a story within a story and, hence, of the conceptual underpinning of Someone is Sleeping in My Pain – of how far the film has come in the pursuit of its Shakespearean agenda. Such an emphasis on a continuing state of violence hints at another narrative and at the fact that Middle East and US relations are among the film’s ghostly intertexts. Filming on the project commenced in Yemen in the wake of the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000, and ended in 2001, with the premiere taking place in December 2001, three months after 9/11.40 Someone is Sleeping in My Pain sits uneasily within this temporal trajectory; certainly, the opening sequence of the New Yorkbased film director looking at a map, the shot of his camouflage trousers and the camera’s pan over the airplane cockpit reveals political crisis, uncertainty and the growing role of jihadist movements to be constitutively embedded in the representational process. In contradistinction to the gung-ho patriotism of a film like Rules of Engagement (dir. William Friedkin, 2000), Someone is Sleeping in My Pain offers a subtler vision, disabusing expectations of Yemen as ‘other’ and positing, via the compromises of the film director, an equivalent contraction of American influence. In the contrast between, on the one hand, the professional actor and, on the other hand, the amateur Yemeni cast is encapsulated a recent history of national and cultural antagonisms, and it is here that the film director’s assumption of the Lady Macbeth part may be significant. As Gay Smith argues, the Lady Macbeth figure has traditionally been inseparable from that of the ‘First Lady’: Shakespeare’s female protagonist signalled the woman as ‘monster’ who entered ‘American politics’ so as to dominate the ‘White House’.41 The analogy gained in popularity, the critic notes, during periods of ‘anxiety about war’ and the ‘pressures’ placed on ‘the commander in chief’ by an ‘influential wife’.42 Because he is synonymous with Lady Macbeth, and assumes an initially forceful role, the film director comes to symbolize the dangers of the advisory

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function, particularly in their pedagogical manifestation, and more general kinds of intervention. Both Lady Macbeth’s perennial association with an incitement to violence, and the stereotype of a consort who aspires to advancement, have a charged place in Someone is Sleeping in My Pain, and in such a way that an additional facet of the film’s title comes into view: while the foreign policy it subscribes to causes pain, America sleeps. Conscious, possibly, of how, on the German stage, ‘a distinctly nationalistic appropriation of [Shakespeare] as a German author . . . [has been] transmuted . . . by . . . internationalism and postmodernism, [resulting in a] de-Teutonizing [of] the Bard’, ‘actual’ director, Michael Roes, has chosen purposefully to complicate, through the travels and travails of Macbeth, any notion of Shakespearean possession or ownership, espousing instead a questioning of imperialism.43 In so doing, he not only reveals the extent to which his production, in its ‘content and identificatory potentials’, to adopt Randall Halle’s discussion of ‘German film after Germany’, enacts ‘transnationalism’; he also reinforces a sense of tragic impasse, a political consequence of US involvement.44 Shakespeare, in this film’s conception, is the nexus of overlapping and competing interests, a place where realities and projections jostle and merge as telling dimensions of global disequilibrium. snow and ice Someone is Sleeping in My Pain is organized around the logic of desert locations and shimmering heat; by contrast, Macbeth exploits the thematic resonances of the snowy wastes and sub-zero temperatures of the Arctic Circle. For this film’s premise, the extremity of the play is matched by the extremity of harsh and unforgiving northerly climes. The film bears a dual directorial credit – Bo Landin and Alex Scherpf – which reflects the previous work in Scandinavia of these natural history and theatre directors. Both sets of interest intermingle in the mise en sce`ne. Exterior shots, derived from natural history programming, focus on snow as a moving entity, snow-encrusted conifers, animals such as the wolf and raven, and alternately pink, yellow and white skies, and display a kinetic verve thanks to wonderful aerial photography. Interiors are more theatrically oriented – the structures that stand in for Macbeth’s castle are none other than the Ice Globe Theatre and the Ice Hotel, located in Jukkasja¨rvi, two hundred kilometres north of the Arctic Circle in the Swedish municipality of Kiruna, on the banks of the River Torne. The film is based on a production of Macbeth staged in the Ice Globe Theatre (a temporary

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performance space that, during its short existence, played host to a number of dance dramas and operatic and Shakespearean productions), which lends the adaptation a global purchase, particularly in the light of the reproduction of the Bard’s ‘original’ playhouse across the world as a marker of prestige and ‘originality’.45 Considerable stress is placed in the film on the Ice Globe Theatre as a complex in which the lineaments of a familiar Tudor architecture can be discerned. Emphasis equally falls on interiors, accessible via fur-lined doors, whose cavernous stairwells, chilly colonnades and glittering chandeliers suggest a frozen version of an archetypally Gothic space. Exteriors and interiors are linked through ice. Macbeth, the film, is distinctive in that it uses only location shooting, with the result that a bedroom, a banqueting chamber and a battleground resemble each other in their cold and icy appearances. Thrones, furniture and walls are made of ice, suggesting not only a raw material but also a common condition. With this Macbeth, the state and shapes of a Nordic winter constitute a creative rationale. Further characterizing Macbeth is its deployment of one of the main Sa´mi languages.46 And, in translating Shakespeare into Sa´mi, noted for its hard consonants and staccato rhythms, Macbeth speaks for an indigenous agenda. Many lines from the play are rendered almost intact, the effect of which is to value Sa´mi as an authentic language with long-standing if not classical antecedents.47 The Sa´mi people live inside and across the national borders of Norway, Finland, Sweden and Russia in an area known as Sa´pmi (the Sa´mi homelands) and, in this sense, belong to an ‘imagined collective territory’ rather than to an identifiable nation-state.48 As Sari Pietika¨inen explains, the Sa´mi, historically, have been rebuffed in their claims for ancestral lands and have suffered a gradual whittling away of autonomy.49 To stage Macbeth against such a background is to underwrite the play’s preoccupation with forms of oppression and to emphasize in Shakespearean language a culturally pertinent cause. From the 1990s onwards, certain rights of the Sa´mi have achieved recognition – a panSa´mi movement has gained ground; distinctive symbols have been devised; and a parliament has been established.50 These are among the contexts that lend to Macbeth, the film, a politicized significance, with Shakespeare’s canonical words, in translation, modelling the predicament of Sa´mi as a minority tongue. When Ross (Beaska Niillas), for instance, refers to the ‘Norwegian banners’ that ‘flout the sky / And fan our people cold’ (1.2.49–50), it is not so much the nation-state itself that is condemned as the incipient dangers of national assimilation. The point is elaborated in Macbeth’s allusion, in the film, to the ‘rugged Laplandish

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Figure 17: Poster for Macbeth (dir. Bo Landin and Alex Scherpf, 2004).

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bear’, a change to the ‘Russian bear’ (3.4.99) simile of the play that affirms, through a term that has on occasion been used as an alternative to Sa´pmi or the Sa´mi homelands, the importance of the regional-cultural as a category of identification. Arguably because it is enduring, and can withstand the pressures of adaptation, Shakespeare’s language serves to draw attention to what is endangered and potentially transient. It is in part a political manoeuvre, then, that Macbeth should prioritize a keenly realized sense of Sa´mi heritage. The mise en sce`ne consistently evokes an older imaginary, as signalled by reindeer-drawn sledges, unkempt furs, a billow of smoke, the ring of a hammer on an anvil and the characters’ braided locks.51 The production summons mysticism and mythology, which have been associated with the Sa´mi, in the same moment as it anatomizes the concerns of modernity, and in such a way as to highlight indigenous creativity and resurgent cultural imperatives. Sound is similarly culturally resonant. For example, the opening sequence is marked by the use of a joik or yoik, a pentatonic chant that, traditionally accompanying Sa´mi shamanistic ceremonies, served to enact community well-being via the conjuration of the essence of a person or place.52 One of its functions is to summon into being the central protagonist and the Nordic geographies at the core of his reconfiguration. As Jessica Benko reminds us, the ‘Lutheran pastors who converted the Sa´mi forbade yoiking, calling it devil’s music’, and, in this connection, the distinctive throaty singing also works to evoke narratives of religious persecution and exclusion against which a Sa´mi reclamation project positions itself.53 If this genre of music looks forward to Macbeth, then it also looks back to the difficult passages of its historical survival. The film’s movement – from Scotland to the Arctic and from English to Sa´mi – might appear an extraordinary one. Directors Landin and Scherpf admit as much when they state, in interview, ‘we stretched the story a bit’. In fact, the deployment in Macbeth of Sa´mi signs and sounds is interpretively facilitative and allows for alternative complexions of the play to come into view. Because he is decorated with a cartridge belt and a garrotte made out of chains, Macbeth (Toivo Lukkari) is discovered as inhabiting a feudal–industrial interface; similarly, in that she wears a combination of elemental furs, a metallic breastplate and black crochetwork, Lady Macbeth (Anitta Suikkari) appears as an armoured warrior woman with a sexual and desiring underside. Both characters retain their costumes irrespective of situation, stressing the lack of separation between inside and outside locales. A significant narrative object is the crown of reindeer antlers. Seen first on Duncan’s (Per Henrik Bals) head and then

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suspended on a meat hook before Macbeth’s illegitimate investiture, this animal-identified orb connotes barbarity, kudos, wealth and royalty. As the crown’s troping of reindeer-as-power makes clear, this Macbeth adaptation understands the politics of the play in relation to natural symbols. Substituting for a lack in the various Sa´mi languages in which there is no clearly defined concept of war, divinity or money, reindeer become the overarching metaphor – their possession betokens authority and their thudding hooves approximate Shakespeare’s fighting hordes. As the directors state, ‘it was a real challenge to find the proper equivalents for terms which in Sa´mi are non-existent’. Particularly at the start, widescreen shots of reindeer moving en masse across the snowy hillsides alternate with close-ups of bloody swords, the switching between the two indicating instability, disorder and a contest for leadership.54 More generally, prevailing ice constitutes the film’s most eloquent expression of a Scotland – or the Sa´mi homelands – in a state of partial refrigeration. In the opening sequence (an accelerated montage of frost pattern formation), for example, the idea is of a world progressively icing over. And, at the point where the witches (Elisabeth H. Blind, Ebba Joks and Irene La¨nsman) manifest themselves inside a block of ice in an interior space, the additional implication is that the glaciated landscape is demonically inhabited. When he fantasizes about the means of despatch (‘Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?’ Macbeth asks [2.1.33–4]), ice takes on phantasmagoric properties: the protagonist detects multiple versions of the ‘fatal vision’ (2.1.36) within a set of ice sculptures. The requisite sense of distortion is developed here – Macbeth is haunted by a weapon that is as inaccessible as it is visible – but so, too, is the conceptual logic of the film (ice answers to topographical specifics as well as illustrative necessities). Wildlife associated with the region colour the prevailing conditions accordingly – a notably sinister instance is the scene in which Banquo (Nils Henrik Bulko) is pursued by murderers on a sledge pulled by ravenous, panting huskies. Not only does the sequence establish Banquo as animal quarry; it also evokes the Shakespearean notion that the murderers, ‘dogs’ and ‘demi-wolves’ (3.1.95, 96), occupy the lowliest rung of the ‘valued file’ (3.1.96). Aural effects are meaningful adjuncts in this suggestive process. For example, the hoot of an owl or the howl of a wolf – heard at defining moments in the protagonist’s downward trajectory – hint, in the directors’ words, at ‘threats to survival’, making a connection with the witches and the onset of moral darkness. Such animal sounds function somewhat in the manner of a photonegative and convey the presence of black deeds amidst the perpetual

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white. At the same time, a directive use of fades and dissolves ties the witches to the snow-covered trees, suggesting their proximity to the natural world and omnipresent influence. Indeed, it is with the witches that the blending of Shakespeare with an archetypal Sa´mi imaginary finds a peculiarly graphic realization. Early on, the witches are glimpsed retiring into a la´vut, a ‘cone-shaped tent’ used by the Sa´mi as a ‘portable shelter’; the structure points not only to a distinctive cultural marker but also to the theme of evanescence.55 Similarly, the witches’ skating movement gestures to a controlling hold over their icy environs, while the crane shots that announce their arrivals and departures conjure a mastery of flight. The witches and Lady Macbeth echo each other. A point of comparison is immediately established in the laughter that the ‘secret, black, and midnight hags’ (4.1.64) and the ‘fiendlike queen’ (5.11.35) share, an additional point of contact being the black crochet costume of the latter and the white crochet attire of the former; in the paralleling of weblike designs, narratives of entrapment reside. When Lady Macbeth shudders after having commenced her supernatural incantation – ‘Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here’ she exclaims (1.5.38–9) – two of the witches manifest themselves behind her: clearly, the injunction to unsexing generates an act of possession, the idea being that Macbeth’s ‘“dearest partner of greatness”’ (1.5.9– 10) is the newest recruit to Shakespeare’s infernal trinity. And, at the moment where Lady Macbeth demands that her ‘milk’ be taken for ‘gall’ (1.5.46), the witches are represented lapping up the imaginary substance. Lady Macbeth’s possession allows her in turn to possess, as when we see her seducing her husband in bed in an episode that crystallizes the completion of a demonic cycle. Her orgasmic embrace, combined with a persuasion that mixes loud hectoring with impassioned whispering, confirms her as rhetorician and sensualist, although it is with the latter impression that we are left, the camera dissolving to an ice sculpture of a woman’s naked form. Given the backdrop of a psychic-sexual takeover, Lady Macbeth’s suicide is sharply portrayed: she seems to exhale the forces that have dominated her. On a pile of ice blocks, she expels her possessors in a breathy act of unburdening that is also a defining death rattle. The ‘spot’ (5.1.30) of blood that appears on the ice at this climactic moment constitutes the physical cost of her exorcism, while the dark red and glaring white play of colours reinforces a sense of morally ambiguous extremities. Emerging from such set pieces – excessive, grandiloquent and histrionic – is a more general stress on performance acts. In keeping with

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the Ice Hotel’s reputation as a showpiece for high concept and designer art – work from all over the world is shown in the so-called ‘art suites’ – Macbeth continually foregrounds like expressions of theatrical display, from Lady Macbeth’s elaborate feather headdress to sumptuous banquets in which status is indicated in the size of the guest’s ice goblet. In particular, Lady Macbeth is a character who is quite at home in a consumerist world that is also an exhibition arena. Each year, for example, the hotel’s bedrooms play host to international themes, from bodies and movement to moons and animals, as they are revealed in elaborately sculpted ice artefacts.56 Yet, for Lady Macbeth, the work of performance proves her undoing; ‘playing the social role’ and maintaining, to adopt a formulation of Marvin Carlson, the ‘appropriate “front” (setting, costume, gestures, voice and appearance)’, is increasingly difficult, not least during the ‘great feast’ (3.1.12), which proves enervating and exhausting.57 Thereafter, Lady Macbeth is represented as abnegating responsibility for her public role. During the sleepwalking scene, she removes her magnificent coiffure, revealing it as a wig and herself as bald, cradling the hairpiece like a child. It is an unsettling moment that recalls the reference to the ‘babe that milks me’ (1.7.55), stresses Lady Macbeth’s own vulnerability and emphasizes the dismantlement of the performative self. Performance is more insistently enunciated via scenes taking place in the Ice Globe Theatre. Certainly, Macbeth avails itself fully of the resources of the playing space, notably through the camera’s focus on pillared entranceways, upper galleries and arched windows in which characters appear and disappear in ways that mimic the balance of power. Because of the prioritization given to the Ice Globe Theatre as a representational backdrop, Macbeth, on assuming sovereignty, becomes, if only in the filmic metanarrative, the owner of Shakespearean symbolic and economic capital, a participant in, to use Barbara Hodgdon’s phrase, the ‘Shakespeare trade’.58 And, lest we forget that the film is thematically informed by its circumstances, at the point where Birnam Wood moves against the protagonist (dense pine forests sweep across the snow-capped hills in militaristic formation), it is the Ice Globe Theatre that is seized – this is the most prized of possessions. The final battle between Macbeth and Macduff (Sven Henriksen), with ice swords, unfolds on the stage of the Ice Globe, making the conflict both a deciding performance and a battle for Shakespearean supremacy. Beyond the intertexts of the film stands the Ice Hotel as a seasonal phenomenon. Winter passes and the hotel melts, allowing for the construction, each year, of a new complex and the recreation of its gelid

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glamour. By implication, Macbeth’s period of rule is not a permanent condition; his power must be remade, like drama, and is only ever of the moment. Or, to elaborate the idea more pointedly, this Macbeth, enlivened by the contexts of its possibility, presses at, in order to elaborate as a guiding principle, Shakespeare’s ‘poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more’ (5.5.23–5). The transient presence of the player is refracted in the perishable grandeur of the Ice Hotel in a fashion that is itself Shakespearean for, in its concern with the passing of time, Macbeth, as imagined here, forms a bridge with related but wider reflections on change, that summer–winter dramatic confection, The Winter’s Tale, being the most obvious example. Ephemerality is also made visible in the film itself. Throughout, hints of a thaw – one shot places in the same frame a frost-bound castle and the flowing River Torne – confirm that there are alternatives to ice, that authority discandies, that material things resolve to their base liquid elements. Nature turns against Macbeth, indeed, at the point where it begins its melting process; significantly, the trees that make up Birnam Wood are ice-free, their green tops betokening the inexorability of another temporal order. More obviously, and reifying its symbolic function as an opposite, Macbeth foregrounds, towards the close, images of fire, as illustrated in the brazier around which Malcolm (Mikkel Gaup) and Macduff plot the tyrant’s overthrow and the candles that ring Lady Macbeth’s corpse, laid out for her husband’s lament in the Ice Hotel Church.59 But any secure sense of an affirmative takeover is dislodged by the ending’s coronation episode: here, Malcolm crowns himself king, looking insolently at his supporters, while Macduff appears displeased. Certainly, the latter’s aggressively enunciated ‘Hail, King of Scotland’ (5.11.25) hints at embitterment. Composition aids suggestion, with Macduff’s physical position behind Malcolm establishing the latter as a child-king and the former as a force agitating to take the reins of power. Notwithstanding the tyrant’s fall, the political landscape has not so much changed as revealed its cyclical constitution, as testified to in the shot of the snow-covered trees, and the sound of the witches’ laughter, with which we close. Sari Pietika¨inen writes that today’s ‘Sa´mi community’ is assisted by a ‘media’ apparatus that has brought into focus discussion about ‘political struggle’ and ‘indigenous rights’, and Macbeth might be seen as one instance of this process, showcasing the features of a discrete constituency through the means of a filmic representation.60 Pietika¨inen also notes that precisely the same Sa´mi community is ‘transnational, multilingual, pluricultural and partly diasporic’.61 Here, too, Macbeth is a pertinent example; moving

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from an English base to its discursive Sa´mi-language realization, the film explores how one culture may continue within another and how Shakespeare’s play affords meaningful transactions between seemingly unconnected representational registers. conclusions In contrast to the assured place of Throne of Blood in the western imagination, Yellamma, Someone is Sleeping in My Pain and Macbeth enjoy, at least at the time of writing, less secure critical positions. All three have been ill-served by the distribution process. Yellamma, in particular, has had an uneven exposure: the film was screened at the fourth International Film Festival, Mumbai, in 2001, and then at the Centre for the Arts, State University of New York at Buffalo, in 2003, but only received general release in India in 2011. Someone is Sleeping in My Pain received its premiere at the International Independent Film Festival, New York, in December 2001, and thereafter was limited to showings in German cine´mathe`ques and universities. Macbeth won the annual award at the European Minority Film Festival dedicated to celebrating stateless languages, but did not have a commercial release in the Nordic countries. At the level of reception, this constellation of Macbeth adaptations has not followed on from Kurosawa’s example, yet, as this chapter has argued, Yellamma, Someone is Sleeping in My Pain and Macbeth compare naturally to Throne of Blood, in their creative and fecund modes of translation, in their aesthetic confidence and style, and in their timely political sensitivity. The Macbeths of world cinema are multivalent, but they are always works that demand attention, response and commitment, and the various routes taken to the reanimation of the play in Yellamma, Someone is Sleeping in My Pain and Macbeth offer challenging, insightful and visionary cinematic experiences. More importantly, Yellamma, Someone is Sleeping in My Pain and Macbeth are indicative of the ways in which Macbeth – as text and play – appeals to a series of aspiring and experimental filmmakers and auteurs. Sharon Alker and Holly Faith note that Shakespeare’s Macbeth ‘emerged in a transformative moment in the establishment of a communal identity, containing and negotiating various contradictory positions related to the [English and Scottish political] Union’, and, in a variation on some of those ‘contradictory positions’, the Macbeths of world cinema are similarly multifaceted in their accommodation of diverse imperatives.62 At once, these are films that, in discrete ways, capture the mysticism and magic of

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Macbeth, either through the affective force of the landscape or via the grandeur afforded by the cinematography. Yellamma, Someone is Sleeping in My Pain and Macbeth bring to mind what Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover have described as ‘global art cinema’, film products distinguished by an ‘overt engagement of the aesthetic, unrestrained formalism, and a mode of narration that is pleasurable but loosened from classical structures and distanced from its representations’, and are characterized, to different degrees, by auteurial panache, seriousness of purpose and high production values consonant with the importance of the Shakespearean undertaking.63 These are not universalizing strategies; rather, as this chapter has argued, Yellamma, Someone is Sleeping in My Pain and Macbeth consistently embed Macbeth in local practices and discover, in so doing, how the production contexts that determine an individual act of filmmaking become themselves thematically resonant. Mediated in film, Macbeth illuminates some of the ways in which politics is exercised – in women’s interventions, family praxes, nation-state rivalries, debate between centres and peripheries and even the conceptual choices made by the individual directors. Yellamma, Someone is Sleeping in My Pain and Macbeth test the limits of international conversations and rewrite region-based histories, and they are able to perform in this capacity precisely because Macbeth, the play, proves elastic enough to stretch to reflection on issues of minority status, cultural affiliation and the colonial past. The language of Shakespeare’s Macbeth translates potently into other languages – some of them minority tongues – and demonstrates the ready facility with which the dramatist’s word serves as enabler. Thanks to such translations, and in the light of its English–Scottish interplay, Macbeth allows for locations of ‘otherness’ in the global imaginary to be held up to scrutiny. Notably, it is Macbeth’s exploration of the workings of tyranny and rebellion that permits it to communicate so eloquently. The play’s poetic rendition of unstable systems – coupled with its allegorization of monarchy – play out fully in non-Anglophone countries. In Indian and Middle Eastern contexts, for example, Shakespeare’s narrative of a political rise and fall proves particularly attractive and immediate, while in Scandinavia, as we have seen, the play meets the instincts of the indigene. Filmmakers see Macbeth as the most political of Shakespeare’s plays – the drama on which to cut directorial teeth and with which to make a salient intervention. Its energies, connecting with western and non-western sensibilities, fire practitioners with impassioned manifestos, and this is as true for Kurosawa as it is for Koda, Roes, Landin and Scherpf, names that may yet, through Macbeth, acquire greater currency.

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1 See, for example, Anthony Davies, Filming Shakespeare’s Plays: The Adaptations of Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Peter Brook, Akira Kurosawa (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 163; Robert Hapgood, ‘Kurosawa’s Shakespeare Films: Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well, and Ran’, in Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells, eds., Shakespeare and the Moving Image: the Plays on Film and Television (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 238–9; and Brian Parker, ‘Nature and Society in Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood ’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 66.3 (1997), 515–16. 2 Macbeth, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 1.3.36, 2.4.16–17. Unless otherwise stated, all further references appear in the text. See Roger Manvell, Shakespeare and the Film (London: J. M. Dent, 1971), p. 106; and Parker, ‘Nature and Society’, p. 515. 3 Anthony Dawson, ‘Reading Kurosawa Reading Shakespeare’, in Diana E. Henderson, ed., A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 170; Erin Suzuki, ‘Lost in Translation: Reconsidering Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood ’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 34.2 (2006), 94. 4 See the entries in Douglas Lanier, ‘Film Spin-offs and Citations’, in Richard Burt, ed., Shakespeares after Shakespeare: an Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture, 2 vols. (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood, 2007), vol. i, pp. 201, 204, 206, 208. Macbeth (dir. Pauli Pentii, 1987), made and produced in Finland, offers a parodic contrast to the Macbeth adaptations addressed in this chapter, centred, as it is, on a dour reading of a depressed Helsinki, on bathetic puns, on tenebrous interiors and on a purposefully incongruous use of the triumphal march from Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida as soundtrack. Closer to the tragic tenor of Shakespeare’s play is the Indian film Eklavya (dir. Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 2006), which recalls Macbeth in references to bloodied hands and scenes of dark scheming and madness. 5 Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 5, 261. 6 Andre´ Lefevere and Susan Bassnett, ‘Introduction: Proust’s Grandmother and the Thousand and One Nights: the “Cultural Turn” in Translation Studies’, in Susan Bassnett and Andre´ Lefevere, eds., Translation: History and Culture (London: Cassell, 1995), p. 8. 7 Keith Richards, ‘Export Mythology: Primitivism and Paternalism in Pasolini, Hopper and Herzog’, in Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, eds., Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (London and New York: Wallflower, 2006), p. 56. 8 ‘Yellamma’: A Film by Mohan Koda, press booklet (Hyderabad: Magic Lantern Communication, 1999), p. 1. 9 Rustom Bharucha, The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization (London: Athlone, 2000), p. 67; Lalitha Gopalan,

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11 12 13

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‘Indian Cinema’, in Jill Nelmes, ed., Introduction to Film Studies, 4th edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 336. On Tollywood, see pp. 55, 82. See Elavarthi Sathya Prakash and Sowmya Dehamma, ‘Introduction’, in Sowmya Dechamma and Elavarthi Sathya Prakash, eds., Cinemas of South India: Culture, Resistance, Ideology (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. xvi; Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: from Bollywood to the Emergence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), p. 358. Notably, Shakespeare has only rarely been adapted by Tollywood, which confirms the significance and value of Yellamma as a representational enterprise. An earlier example is Gunasundari Katha (dir. Kadiri Venkata Reddy, 1949), a Telegu film that owes much to King Lear, particularly in its early stages. See ‘Yellamma: The Treatment’, http://members.tripod.com/~adcom/ magiclantern/treatment.htm (accessed 10 April 2008). Narendra Luther, Hyderabad: a Biography (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 128, 139, 143–9. It is possible that Yellamma, in basing itself on Macbeth, also references the vicissitudes that characterized the rule of the Nizams, a period ‘full of intrigues, plots, double-dealings, and murders’ (ibid., p. 111). See Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: the Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 25, 33, 54. Rachel Dwyer, All You Want is Money, All You Need is Love: Sexuality and Romance in Modern India (London: Cassell, 2000), p. 36. William Dalrymple, Nine Lives: in Search of the Sacred in Modern India (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), pp. 58, 59; Alain Danie´lou, The Myths and Gods of India: the Classic Work of Hindu Polytheism (Rochester, NY: Inner Traditions International, 1991), p. 172. Dalrymple, Nine Lives, pp. 60, 70; Beeban Kidron, ‘The sex workers “married to God”’, Times: Families/Life, 24 January 2011, 12. Nash Colundalur, ‘A cursed community’, G2, 21 January 2011, 16–17; Kidron, ‘Sex workers’, 12. Devadasis in their modern instantiation bring into focus the cultural position of the dalit and the extent to which, as Rustom Bharucha notes, ‘the debate on caste as race is beginning to enter the political discourse of the Indian subcontinent’. See Rustom Bharucha, ‘Foreign Asia/ Foreign Shakespeare: Dissenting Notes on a New Asian Interculturality, Postcoloniality, and Recolonization’, Theatre Journal, 56.1 (2004), 17. Joanna Levin, ‘Lady Macbeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria’, English Literary History, 69.1 (2002), 41, 47. See the comparable depiction of a negative Kali in the Antony and Cleopatra adaptation, Kannaki (dir. Jayaraaj Rajasekharan Nair, 2002), discussed at p. 75. For toe-rings as a symbol of marriage, see Ramesh Chander Dogra and Urmila Dogra, Hindu and Sikh Wedding Ceremonies (New Delhi: Star Publications, 2000), p. 34. A similar complicating of a puja is developed in the Othello adaptation, Omkara (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2006); see p. 62.

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23 Dalrymple, Nine Lives, p. 59. 24 Stephen M. Buhler, Shakespeare in the Cinema: Ocular Proof (State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 170. 25 For the place of ‘universal impermanence’ in Buddhist and Hindu philosophy, see Richard King, Indian Philosophy: an Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought (Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 117. 26 Wimal Dissanayake, ‘The concept of evil and social order in Indian melodrama: an evolving dialectic’, in Wimal Dissanayake, ed., Melodrama and Asian Cinema (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 190, 203. 27 Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey, ‘Arabesque: Shakespeare and Globalization’, Essays and Studies, 59 (2006), 24–6; Gary Taylor, ‘Hamlet in Africa 1607’, in Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Singh, eds., Travel Knowledge: European ‘Discoveries’ in the Early Modern Period (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 230. The authenticity of the journal entry has recently been challenged; see Bernice W. Kliman, ‘At Sea about Hamlet at Sea: a Detective Story’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 62.2 (2011), 180–204. 28 See Tariq Ali, ‘Unhappy Yemen’, London Review of Books, 25 March 2010, 31–3; Paul Dresch, A History of Modern Yemen (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 28–57; Ilan Pappe´, The Modern Middle East (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 32, 107–8; and Lisa Wedeen, Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 172, 213. 29 Interview between Michael Roes and Mark Thornton Burnett, 13 November 2011. Unless otherwise stated, all subsequent Roes quotations are from this interview and appear in the text or notes. 30 Paul Dresch, Tribes, Government, and History in Yemen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), pp. 39, 85. 31 See ibid., p. 38; and Wedeen, Peripheral Visions, p. 1. 32 See Andrew Rippin, Muslims: their Religious Beliefs and Practices, 3rd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 32. It is also possible to see the episode as a forewarning of the rise of Macbeth the ‘butcher’ (5.11.35). 33 Of course, the film director’s judgemental gaze is one that western viewers of Someone is Sleeping in My Pain also share – in this case, the ‘other’ seems not so much the animal as its unsympathetic owner. 34 Ayanna Thompson, ‘What is a “Weyward” Macbeth?’, in Scott L. Newstock and Ayanna Thompson, eds., Weyward ‘Macbeth’: Intersections of Race and Performance (New York: Palgrave, 2010), p. 6. 35 Thompson, ‘What is a “Weyward” Macbeth?’, p. 3. 36 See Rippin, Muslims, p. 30. 37 Sabry Hafez, ‘The Quest for/Obsession with the National in Arabic Cinema’, in Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen, eds., Theorising National Cinema (London: BFI, 2006), p. 228. 38 Michael Cronin, Translation and Globalization (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 59–60. 39 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 120.

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40 On the attack on the USS Cole, see Victoria Clark, Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 2, 146, 172. 41 Gay Smith, Lady Macbeth in America: from the Stage to the White House (New York: Palgrave, 2010), pp. 1, 13. 42 Ibid., p. 181. 43 Wilhelm Hortmann, Shakespeare on the German Stage: the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 475. 44 Randall Halle, German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), p. 6. 45 The original Macbeth production drew upon the cast and resources of the Beaivva´s Sa´mi Tea´hter, Kautokeino, Norway; for the film, this company joined the Swedish Sa´mi Tea´hter, Kiruna, Sweden (see Lars Magnus Jansson and Lars Petterson, Icehotel: Cuisine and Adventure in Jukkasja¨rvi [Stockholm: Arena, 2002], pp. 72, 74). Dennis Kennedy notes that ‘Shakespeare performance’ is ‘deeply enmeshed with cultural tourism’ and, indeed, the proximity of the Ice Globe and the Ice Hotel bespeaks the investment of both in the tourist business (The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity [Cambridge University Press, 2009], p. 102). As part of that initiative, while the Ice Hotel deals in contemporary art, the Ice Globe Theatre promotes the art of history via a purposefully postmodern simulacrum. As Catherine Silverstone notes, reflecting on ‘Shakespeare’s Globe’ in London, the theatre, so reconstructed, ‘highlights Shakespeare’s status as yet another infinitely consumable product in the global marketplace of cultural tourism which trades in nostalgia for the past’ (‘Shakespeare Live: Reproducing Shakespeare at the “New” Globe’, Textual Practice, 19.1 [2005], 47). 46 There are currently nine living Sa´mi languages, and they divide into several groups and subgroups. Macbeth uses Northern Sa´mi (which, for purposes of economy, is hereafter referred to in the text as ‘Sa´mi’ or ‘the Sa´mi language’). 47 As the directors state, ‘It is important to have the great classics available in the Sa´mi language’ (interviews between Bo Landin, Alex Scherpf and Mark Thornton Burnett, 12 November 2011 and 31 January 2012). Unless otherwise stated, all subsequent Landin and Scherpf quotations are from these interviews and appear in the text or notes. 48 See Lia Markelin and Charles Husband, ‘The Sa´mi Media, State Broadcasting and Transnational Indigeneity’, in Olga G. Bailey, Myria Georgiou and Ramaswani Harindranath, eds., Transnational Lives and the Media: Reimagining Diaspora (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 123. 49 Jansson and Petterson, Icehotel, p. 108; Sari Pietika¨inen, ‘“To Breathe Two Airs”: Empowering Indigenous Sa´mi Media’, in Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart, eds., Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 198. 50 Markelin and Husband, ‘Sa´mi Media’, p. 117; Pietika¨inen, ‘“To Breathe Two Airs”’, p. 199. 51 As commentators have noted, in the Sa´mi-speaking communities of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, all-terrain vehicles have replaced

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52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63

Plays sledges and livelihoods dependent on reindeer herding have given way to factory work and tourism. See Jessica Benko, ‘The People who Walk with Reindeer: Sa´mi’, National Geographic, 220.5 (2011), 66; Neil Kent, A Concise History of Sweden (Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 268–9, 246, 256. See Kent, Sweden, p. 19; ‘Sa´mi Culture: Music Articles’, www.utexas.edu/ courses/sami/diehtu/giella/music.htm (accessed 17 December 2011). Benko, ‘People who Walk’, 68. ‘In the opening battle’, state the directors, ‘Macbeth, fighting an “army” of reindeer, claims a place as ruler’. Benko, ‘People who Walk’, 78. See Anders Porter, Icehotel: Art & Design Catalogue (Va¨stra Fro¨lunda: S. G. Zetterqvist, 2007), pp. 12, 14, 18, 22, 24, 28, 36, 46, 58. Marvin Carlson, Performance: a Critical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 41. Barbara Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. xi. Notably, because the Ice Hotel Church – described in publicity as a ‘divine conception filled with reverence and communion’ ( Jansson and Petterson, Icehotel, p. 45) – is the location for Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ (5.5.18) soliloquy, the film hints at the protagonist’s reformative potential. Pietika¨inen, ‘“To Breathe Two Airs”’, p. 201. Ibid., p. 197. Sharon Alker and Holly Faith, ‘Macbeth, the Jacobean Scot, and the Politics of the Union’, Studies in English Literature, 47.2 (2007), 381. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, ‘Introduction: the Impurity of Art Cinema’, in Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, eds., Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 6.

chapter 6

Romeo and Juliet

In the Mandarin-language film, A Time to Love (dir. Jianqi Huo, 2005), two young lovers, separated because of an ‘ancient grudge’ between their families, find in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet a mirror for their own lives.1 ‘The play . . . waited for us for several hundred years’, states Hou Jia/Romeo (Yi Lu), his voiceover personifying Shakespeare’s text to establish its intimate connections with a Chinese couple at a considerable cultural and ideological distance from Renaissance England. Centuries drop away as Romeo and Juliet patiently reveals its relevancies for the generation pincered between the end of the Cultural Revolution and the present. For cinema critic Rey Chow, a thematic treatment of the ‘passing of time’ is key to the ‘sentimentalism’ enabling some recent Chinese films, and consorts with notes of ‘melancholy’ and ‘entrapment’ and the representation of ‘oppressive and unbearable’ domestic spaces.2 Via muted filters suggestive of wasted lives, and punctuated by the emotional beats of seasonal change, A Time to Love enfolds the familial discord of Romeo and Juliet inside staged refusals to participate in family occasions (signifying Qu Ran/Juliet’s [Wei Zhao] continuing rebellion) and scenes of friction between Hou Jia/Romeo and his demanding wheelchair-bound mother (her condition encapsulating the stasis at the heart of the lovers’ relationship). Richard Burt suggests that A Time to Love ‘allegorizes’ the ‘love story’ of Romeo and Juliet ‘as a blocked mourning of political change’.3 Certainly, the film imagines romantic impasse inside the ‘new youth culture’ of China ‘dominated by modern transnational values and driven by consumerism’; the clash heightens a nostalgic style comprised of dreamy visuals and lyrical motifs.4 But importantly, A Time to Love is structured around a conjuration of a changed present and an engagement with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as a global commodity. The idea is reflected both in Hou Jia/Romeo’s bibliophilic enthusiasm (‘he collected over a dozen editions of Romeo and Juliet in different languages’, states Qu Ran/Juliet; ‘that was our link’) and the lovers’ passion for appropriation. 195

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As Hou Jia/Romeo notes, ‘We became . . . fans of . . . different interpretations of Romeo and Juliet . . . theatre, opera, stills . . . the protagonists . . . were ourselves’. Typical of the film’s discursive construction of Romeo and Juliet, this statement begins with the play, proceeds through a series of adaptive variants and ends with the personal. So it is that Romeo and Juliet shows its power to work across genres, nations, borders and periods, functioning simultaneously as an agent of connection and a mediating force. A Time to Love is emblematic of broader trajectories in world cinema in the extent to which it forges from a Shakespearean dramatic icon an individually rendered application, details the interplay between a romanticized predicament and changing national circumstances, and captures in its mise en sce`ne an impression of the play’s performance history. From the late 1980s onwards, this chapter argues, twenty-eight adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, with almost as many national or regional points of departure, stress the ease with which this work in particular inhabits a world cinema niche. These adaptations testify not only to the range of ways in which the play has been recast but also to acts of reimagining that are often strikingly contiguous. Crucially, a prioritization in film of similar sets of elements and casting arrangements shows how Romeo and Juliet is envisioned in relation to deterritorialization, urbanization, demographic shifts, generational conflict and local realignments of gender and race. Above all, Romeo and Juliet repeatedly forms a partnership with societies caught on the cusp of transition, arguably because the play itself is concerned with a coming of age. Indeed, Romeo and Juliet and their equivalents are perhaps at their most communicative as registrations of an uncertain landscape, including social breakdown and political violence, with all the attendant familial tensions. The play strikes a chord with cultural systems and nation-states characterized by an uneven relation to modernity and, seen within such a framework, its specifically early modern dimensions do not appear incongruous. Defining moments in Romeo and Juliet are smoothly accommodated within the particular storylines of world cinema where context means issues of individual will and community connection are invariably to the fore. The number of films that trade upon a forbidden love narrative is legion. However, it is those works that reference Shakespeare, or deploy a plotline derived from Romeo and Juliet, that are concentrated on in this chapter, since it is with this set of cinematic examples that the adaptation process and a negotiation with Shakespearean authority can be most clearly identified. Despite the impact on subsequent representation of a film such as Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo þ Juliet (1996),

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its template has not been subscribed to across the board. Hence, in the place of the faux Latin American imaginary and vague topography of Luhrmann’s garish cinema spectacle, Brazilian adaptations such as Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor/Mare´, Another Love Story (dir. Lu´cia Murat, 2008) and Era Uma Vez/Once Upon a Time (dir. Breno Silveira, 2008) strive for a greater regional veracity, particularly with regard to class, location, imagery and soundtrack. In keeping with their titles, these productions emphasize the significance of place and, in so doing, establish themselves as counters to if not critiques of earlier Shakespearean interpretations.5 Standing in for the process of many of the films discussed in this chapter is an opening sequence in Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor in which old posters are stripped away to reveal the film’s title: a rejection of stereotype is suggested, even a movement back to ‘source’. Adaptations of Romeo and Juliet are intertextually respectful and interrogative, suggesting that neither Hollywood, nor the English language, can be the default positions for the Montagues and Capulets of the contemporary world. Because Romeo and Juliet is archetypally conceived of as a play concerned with conflict, the first part of this chapter surveys varying constructions of a community divided while attempting to give a taste of the spread of filmic treatments. World cinema offers multiple contexts for families or groups at war, I argue, and the ‘ancient grudge’ is imagined as but one element of a contest-strewn scenario. Approaching Romeo and Juliet by way of conflict zones with timely applications, world cinema shows itself to possess an explanatory imperative: these are films with a diagnostic drive. The second section discusses world cinema’s preoccupation with key types (such as Friar Laurence and the nurse) and with salient motifs and scenes (such as the meeting, the balcony, elopement/exile and denouement), the contours of which underscore a mise en sce`ne in which class, ethnicity, family and diaspora are entangled. A highly self-aware rendering of situations of violence is in keeping with a further recurring characteristic – the extent to which Romeo and Juliet is filmically realized as a performed text or as a performance. Accordingly, the third section of the chapter argues that, in film, an internal performance of the play often combines with the main narrative to point up the talismanic qualities of an encounter with the Shakespearean text. Cinematic adaptations of Romeo and Juliet are distinctive in encouraging reflections on the construction of representation, as is revealed in their fascination with the book, performance and metatheatre. Such concerns feed into the fourth section’s consideration of the filmic treatment of resolution or, rather, the irresolution symptomatic of the ‘original’. In a move that goes against popular expectation, a number

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of adaptations spotlight not so much death as survival, suggesting that the lovers can transcend the destructive impetus of their environs. Local interests, one constellation of films suggests, are rejected as the all-consuming motors of tragic inevitability. Instead, such forces may be reworked and resisted. Finally, this chapter argues that the imaginary power of world cinema – its vitality, its pervasiveness and its preference for alternatives – is analogized in a new series of endings that overwrite Shakespeare and inscribe the virtues of a personal determinism. conflicted contexts In the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet, we hear how ‘Two households, both alike in dignity . . . From ancient grudge break into new mutiny’ (1, 3) and, across all world cinema adaptations of the play, it is the backdrop of conflict upon which the focus falls. Indeed, in the adaptive encounter, the ‘starcrossed lovers’ (6) are often demoted, seen as less significant than the conditions that draw them apart. Distinctive are the ways in which the feuding Capulet and Montague servants are discovered as belonging to rival gangs or social groups. In the filmic translation of Shakespeare’s Italian city, Verona is a community at war with itself. Hence, uGugu no Andile/Gugu and Andile (dir. Minky Schlesinger, 2008), a South African film notable for vertiginous camera work and documentary-style realism, relocates Romeo and Juliet to Thokoza, a township to the south of Johannesburg, and signals division in the recurring image of the fought-over bridge. Unfolding in the early 1990s, on the eve of, in historian Jonathan Farley’s words, ‘the final demise of apartheid and the advent of . . . universal suffrage’, uGugu no Andile juxtaposes the tensions of a critical moment in South Africa’s history with the mutual attraction of Gugu/Juliet (Lungelo Dhladhla) and Andile/ Romeo (Litha Booi), the dangerousness of which is indicated in the different languages (isiZulu and isiXhosa) they respectively speak.6 Similarly, Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor, which is set in the Mare´ favela of Rio de Janeiro, takes as its premise internecine strife. Adapting Romeo and Juliet for a music-based social parable, with a nod to West Side Story (dir. Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, 1961), the film discovers how the tribulations experienced by Jonata/Romeo (Vinicius D’Black) and Analı´dia/Juliet (Cristina Lago) are exacerbated by the drug trade wars involving their respective families. In the crowded alleyways and houses of the favela (brilliantly decorated but haunted by uncertainty) we find a particularly apposite transposition of Romeo and Juliet’s warring ‘households’ (Prologue, 1). As drug rivalries escalate, with ‘rage’ (Prologue, 10) assuming greater prominence, differences between

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Figure 18: The Capulets and the Montagues are represented as warring township factions in uGugu no Andile/Gugu and Andile (dir. Minky Schlesinger, 2008).

groups become more sharply defined. Glaring blue and red colours mark out separate domains, while terms of racial abuse, earlier unthinkable as categories of classification, infiltrate the dialogue: Jonata/Romeo is labelled ‘black’ and Analı´dia/Juliet a ‘whitey’. It is as a contrastive and neutral space, then, that the dance studio where the lovers meet comes to symbolize possibilities for cross-boundary romance. Continuing enmities have precipitated a racial conflict that runs counter to a national emphasis in Brazil on ideals of multiculturalism and democracy. Gang warfare takes on a nuanced role when it spirals outwards to precipitate clashes in and with a larger society. Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor suggests that, in any conflict situation, issues of class inevitably surface. In an emblematic scene, the lovers and their friends leave the Mare´ favela for a day by the sea only to find that the more privileged – and bourgeois – holidaymakers abandon the beach in disgust. The episode is the prompt for the film to showcase the rousing pop anthem, ‘Minha Alma’ (‘My Soul’), in which Jonata/Romeo, Analı´dia/Juliet and the company join in a musical arraignment of middle-class blindness; as the lyrics state, ‘the . . . condo is for your protection, but . . . maybe it’s

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Figure 19: Dance acts as an antidote to social tensions in Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor/ Mare´, Another Love Story (dir. Lu´cia Murat, 2008).

you in prison’. Particularly forceful are the ways in which dancers’ bodies, draped around the stationary cars or prostrated on the tarmac, connote vitalities ignored and a form of protest. And, because this interlude takes place on the Linha Vermelha Expressway, a major artery that bisects communities even as it assists transit, the scene facilitates an expressive confrontation with Brazil’s urban apartheid. Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor expands the Capulet–Montague feud to encompass social extremes; Amar Te Duele/Love Hurts (dir. Fernando Sarin˜ana, 2002), a Mexican adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, addresses that same dynamic by granting it a linguistic label. With this teen-targeted and MTV-indebted melodrama centred upon the landmark Centro Santa Fe shopping mall on the outskirts of Mexico City, the Romeo and Juliet characters, respectively Ulises (Luis Fernando Pen˜a) and Renata (Martha Higareda), are discovered as belonging to the discrete groups of the nacos (lower-class ‘white trash’) and the fresas (‘preppy’ offspring of a privileged bourgeoisie). Assisted by a mise en sce`ne suggestive of incompatible existences (the private school is contrasted with the market stall), Amar Te Duele identifies in the designer stores of the mall metaphors of branding that afflict Mexican social attitudes.

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Where Romeo and Juliet draws attention to groupings ‘both alike in dignity’ (Prologue, 1), some world cinema adaptations unsettle the trope so as to underscore a sense of hierarchy and inequity. Rio de Janeiro is again the setting and location for Era Uma Vez, although here it is the contrast between the favela of Cantagalo, which De´/Romeo (Thiago Martins) inhabits, and the rich beach-front district of Ipanema, in which Nina/Juliet (Vito´ria Frate) lives, that highlights opposition and difference. As in Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor, the overlapping relation between gangs, poverty and crime is implicated in the lovers’ ‘fate’ (3.1.114). This is demonstrated not least in the ways in which Era Uma Vez, via rapid-fire scenes of hyper-realized masculinity, represents drug trade antagonisms hovering at the edges of the action both as a form of ‘traffic’ (Prologue, 12) and a force of destiny. Yet, as publicity for the film makes clear (the poster depicts the lovers separated by a lightning bolt), it is the inexorable logic of a segregated city that ultimately inflects the tragic outcome. Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein note that ‘Brazil exhibits very high indices of inequality and poverty even by Latin American standards’, and it is such material realities that inform the film’s aesthetic framework.7 Throughout, shots of washing lines and telephone lines that cut across the frame operate to conjure continuing processes of exclusion, underscoring the sense of a world defined by binaries. Figurative suggestions are given a realist twist as images of bars and cordons come to dominate – factionalism is tacitly encouraged by local policing policies. Rome´o et Juliette (dir. Yves Desgagne´s, 2006), a French-language and Montreal-set adaptation, sounds an interesting variation on the theme of a conflict defined in terms of social disequilibrium. Here, Rome´o (Thomas Lalonde) is the son of a drugs lord, and Juliette/Juliet (Charlotte Aubin) is the daughter of the judge who presides over his trial. Gangs are still an index of a community’s discontent, but, in this instance, their function is as a force of opposition to the judiciary. In this film, parallels between the city’s crime wave and judicial-governmental corruption suggest a resistance to any neat partitioning of forces. By showing the punningly named Paul Ve´ronneau/Capulet (Pierre Curzi) and Rex Lamontagne/Montague (Gilles Renaud) patriarchs as similarly flawed, Rome´o et Juliette highlights the mutually constitutive nature of justice and criminality. Conflict is more obviously particularized when mediated through issues of immigration and race. The conceptually inventive Greek film, Kanenas/ Nobody (dir. Christos Nikoleris, 2010), converts the Capulets and the Montagues into displaced Albanian and Russian youth. Not only is their

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illegal street racing in downtown Athens an index of their contention; it also serves to underscore a pervasive condition of mobility. In several adaptations, the feud that prevents the lovers from coming together has its roots in, to adopt a formulation of Arjun Appadurai, the ‘ethnoscape . . . the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live’.8 With a film such as Rami og Julie (1988), which is set amongst the starkly lit and soulless concrete structures of Høje Taastrup, a satellite town near Copenhagen, Danish director Eric Klausen shows how the abusive treatment meted out by the parents to the lovers has its basis in anxieties about xenophobia and miscegenation entertained on both sides: Julie/Juliet is a young Danish woman, while Rami/Romeo is a Palestinian e´migre´, with their relationship, in the director’s words, testing ‘the limits of . . . tolerance’.9 In this sense, the prominence given in the film to Thors Ta˚rn or Thor’s Tower, Bjorn Nørgaard’s well-known but nationalistic civic sculpture, hints at a mythologized belief in unadulterated national origins and a reluctance to accommodate a plural demographic. In generic contrast, Sud Side Stori (dir. Roberta Torre, 2000), as its name suggests, is an Italian musical that advertises its reworking of Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story via an absurdist, kitchy and parodic realization of the Sicilian city, Palermo, and the balconied streets of the working-class Capo and Vucciria neighbourhoods. Exemplifying a shared antagonism, this film also juxtaposes comparable expressions of prejudice. On the one side, three Palermitan aunts vilify a group of recently arrived Nigerian sex workers as ‘cannibals’; on the other, three sex workers describe their counterparts as ‘monsters’. Comically invoking Renaissance terminologies of alterity, and using quick-fade dissolves to switch between similarly realized domestic interiors, Sud Side Stori points up the difficulty of integration between two kinds of south (Africa and Italy) and, hence, the intransigence of localized ideologies. Inside such unyielding parameters, the relationship between the Nigerian Romea/Juliet (Forstine Ehobor) and the Sicilian Toni/Romeo (Roberto Rondelli) appears ill-equipped to succeed. Romeo and Juliet adaptations are sensitive to, and find narrative capital in, the flows of diaspora; they also demonstrate how mobility between nations can accentuate rather than dislodge a ‘same’ and ‘other’ dialectic. In so doing, they draw attention to the ways in which types of ‘migration’ intersect – in individual lives, in Shakespearean relocations, and in the Romeo and Juliet cinematic imaginary. What characterizes these Romeo and Juliet world cinema examples, then, is a conviction that the ‘radical disjunctures’ and ‘non-isomorphic paths’ of

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Figure 20: Poster, designed for international distribution, for Kanenas/Nobody (dir. Christos Nikoleris, 2010).

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modernity, as they have been termed, have resulted in imperfectly aligned and acclimatized societies.10 Or, to put the point in another way, when the Romeo and Juliet characters are represented as afflicted by difficulty or doubt, underlying fault lines and contradictions, symptoms of larger changes, are invariably flagged as contributory ingredients. On occasion, it is not so much the social world as the protagonists themselves who illustrate these developments. For example, Kebab Connection (dir. Anno Saul, 2004) traces one of the complicating factors in the romance between the Turkish Ibo/Romeo (Denis Moschitto) and the German Titzi/Juliet (Nora Tschirner) to the fact that they inhabit a Hamburg in which multiculturalism and ethnic tension uneasily coexist. As a result, although they both audition for careers in the arts, he as a filmmaker and she as an actress (her rehearsal of the ‘strange love’ [3.2.15] soliloquy from Romeo and Juliet speaks to her situation), Ibo/Romeo and Titzi/ Juliet are frequently discovered as being at odds: they pursue asymmetric paths that indicate competing kinds of cultural affiliation and vacillating categories of the national. In other instances, it is earlier developments, as they impact upon the conflicted world of the lovers, which receive emphasis. Go! (dir. Yukisada Isao, 2001), which instances Romeo and Juliet at numerous points, is aided in its confrontation with mobility and racism by muted lighting and a fast-forward shooting style. Cinematography, narrative pace and chiaroscuro effects combine to stress the film’s concern with unstable and occluded constituencies. Nominally Japanese, the film, Kobayashi Kaori notes, centres on the plight of the zainichi, as represented in Sugihara/Romeo (Yoˆsuke Kubozuka), those individuals of Korean descent who can track their dispersion to Japan’s ‘occupation’ of Korea, ‘the period of colonization’.11 The situation in which Sugihara/Romeo finds himself – the fluctuations of his Korean identity between north and south register the contradictions of his residency in Japan – refracts an ongoing debate about ‘minority groups’, ‘citizenship’, ‘discrimination’ and ‘civil rights’.12 Thus it is that the school gate in the film, the basketball court and even Sakurai/Juliet (Kou Shibasaki) herself operate as ciphers of antipathy, reinforcing the concern of Go! with the legacies of the past. For this Romeo and Juliet, at least, it is precisely because the ‘grudge’ is ‘ancient’ that it possesses so specific and pertinent a present application. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the ‘ancient grudge’ in Romeo and Juliet is that it is without cause. The prologue acknowledges a feud but offers no explanation for its continuing existence. It is arresting in this connection that, across the range of Romeo and Juliet world cinema, there

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Figure 21: Ibo/Romeo (Denis Moschitto) and Titzi/Juliet (Nora Tschirner) experience the challenges of multiculturalism in Kebab Connection (dir. Anno Saul, 2004).

is a predilection for rooting – and thus hypothesizing – the infamous conflict in a carefully rendered set of circumstances. These are productions that make a virtue of and, indeed, owe their impetus to a lack in the Shakespearean source. Telling here are expansions to Romeo and Juliet in filmic treatments that otherwise bear a reductive relation to the theatrical point of departure. Often, the ‘grudge’ is positioned historically in such a way that the action that ensues might be illuminated. In the Bollywood production, 1942: A Love Story (dir. Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 1994), which is set in Kausani, a hill station in northern India, the romance of Nandu/ Romeo (Anil Kapoor) and Rajjo/Juliet (Manisha Koirala) unfolds alongside the genesis of Indian nationalism but is blighted because the lovers’ families represent different sides of a political equation. So plotted, 1942: A Love Story typifies a certain strain of Bollywood feature in which, as Wimal Dissanayake states, a ‘master narrative’ imposes ‘unity . . . over diverse competing languages, religions . . . and cultural practices’, reflecting the role of ‘cinema’, in particular, in the construction of an ‘imagined community’.13 The film invests throughout in an evocative use of Gustav Holst’s The Planets and relies on soft-focus cinematography, making it a striking exercise in nostalgia. Elsewhere, the moment of rupture that substitutes for the ‘grudge’ takes the form of a violent familial argument.

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A desire to avenge a familial wrong is a back story that reorients several Romeo and Juliet adaptations, filling the play’s void with precise histories of kith and kin.14 Contrasting methods – storyteller, flashback and prelude – testify to the range of ways in which past derelictions are understood, but a common denominator is the issue of personal aggrievement. Qayamat se Qayamat Tak (dir. Mansoor Khan, 1988), another Bollywood adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, is distinctive for furnishing a long prelude to the action proper. When Ratan, the feckless son of a local family, makes pregnant Madhumathi, the innocent daughter of a neighbour, he refuses to acknowledge his responsibilities and enters into an arranged marriage, prompting her suicide. At this point, her devastated brother carries her corpse into the wedding, shooting Ratan dead in retaliation. Crucially, via a highlighting of the ‘Singh’ family name, the episode does not mobilize markers of different social and cultural groupings; rather, as M. K. Raghavendra observes, Qayamat se Qayamat Tak interprets the ‘feud’ as taking place ‘between . . . individuals belonging to the same . . . Rajput (Kshatriya) caste’.15 As a result, the film makes for a particularly intense and even introspective reading of the central players. For critics such as Shohini Chaudhuri, a typical Bollywood production inculcates the virtues of the ‘Hindu joint family . . . where personal desires are subordinated for the good of the . . . collective’, and thus it is particularly striking that Raj/Romeo (Aamir Khan) and Rashmi/Juliet (Juhi Chawla) are imagined in terms of a questioning relation to such feudally indebted moral principles as ‘respect for elders’, ‘property’ and ‘prestige’.16 Yet, as the film also establishes, that interrogative attitude is itself nuanced; for much of Qayamat se Qayamat Tak, Raj/Romeo and Rashmi/Juliet are represented as struggling against the dictates of individual will, making this adaptation a revealing instance of the resilience of tradition in the face of newer pressures and expectations. Tradition is incarnated in the ways in which fathers – and to a lesser extent mothers – are allowed greater roles as forces of intervention and rationalization. The idea is illustrated in the Egyptian film, Hobak Nar/ Loving You is Hard (dir. Ihab Radhi, 2004), a partial reworking of William Shakespeare’s Romeo þ Juliet complete with video insets, ‘bullet time’ special effects, swishing zooms, expressive close-ups and an accelerated montage.17 Well into the film, a flashback reveals how an angry knifing during a card game precipitated a breakdown in relations between the Assas/Capulet and Zainaty/Montague families. It is this seminal episode, the film suggests, that moulds Assas/Capulet and Zainaty/Montague as particularly inflexible species of patriarch unable to brook expressions of

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filial independence. ‘My father doesn’t have the right to control my destiny,’ announces Karim/Romeo (Mostafa Kamer), only to be joined by Salma/Juliet (Nelly Karim): ‘I . . . have a heart and soul of my own,’ she exclaims. Such aphoristic sayings carry critical currency in a world in which all of the characters are defined through familial networks and in which the power structures of Alexandria, where the film is set, are visibly shored up through systems of kinship and inheritance. In the prioritization of types of father, Romeo and Juliet adaptations dovetail an account of the ‘ancient grudge’ with folkloric structures, as illustrated in the Burkinabe´ Shakespearean film, Julie et Rome´o (dir. Boubakar Diallo, 2011). Years previously, the theft of some eggs followed by an accidental killing put the families of the lovers, Julie (Aı¨da Wang) and Rome´o (Ge´rard Oue´draogo), at odds in such a way that, should further fraternization take place, ancestral retribution will ensue. The elder’s warning about the activation of a ‘curse on both families’ represents an indigenized teasing through of Mercutio’s parting shot, ‘A plague o’ both your houses’ (3.1.101), via a marshalling of African superstitions around infertility. More significantly, the warning points to the ways in which patriarchal authority inheres in the figure of the storyteller. With this adaptation, abbreviation and inversion are the watchwords: Shakespeare’s romantic hero is placed second in title order, with Julie first, the primary position suggesting both a gendered reorientation and the character’s intervention in the workings of time. As the director states, a ‘game of mirrors’ is involved: the ‘western view is of Romeo and Juliet, but, going south, everything is turned the other way around’.18 Similarly, as the film’s comically syncopated to-and-fro movement between scenes of rural village life and the vibrant capital, Ouagadougou, establishes, ‘tradition and modernity’, to adopt Eva Jørholt’s discussion of the cinema of Burkina Faso, are ‘not set up . . . as two irreconcilable poles of an abstract dichotomy’.19 Instead, embedded in the film’s happy outcome is an emphasis on the ‘ancient grudge’ as a misunderstanding, an incident whose effects can be overcome through persistence and communication. In this sense, Julie et Rome´o approves a strategy that underwrites consistency of social action, and the accommodation of the past in the present, as important principles. In world cinema, then, although gangs and groups are consistently elaborated as inimical to alternative models of belonging, there is also the suggestion that theirs is not an inviolable position. Filmmakers find in the ‘and’ of Romeo and Juliet ample opportunities for exploring relations between romantic subjects and cultural systems in changing times.

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Political and social commentary is assisted by, and made possible through, the updating and/or translation of types perennially associated with Shakespeare’s play, a process that brings into filmic visibility key episodes and properties. Immediately arresting are the means whereby the prologue is imagined. Electing to feature prologues of several kinds, adaptations work inside the framing conventions of the source text in their highlighting of a metacinematic device. Typical is the Danish arthouse feature, Rami og Julie, in which a laundrette manager addresses the off-screen audience: ‘the dark and the fair let old enmity flare up in newly awakened hatred . . . If you patiently lend your eyes and ears . . . our machines will wash your soul’. Via mediating allusions to ‘blood’ (Prologue, 4) in the ‘original’, the prologue invokes the kinds of stain and blemish associated with histories of ethnic conflict. In particular, the laundrette’s subsequent position as a focus for the action establishes a parallel between the process of the washing machines and the technologies of cinema, the idea being that the film represents a positive cleansing experience. By contrast, the prologue in Sud Side Stori – Saint Rosalia, the patron saint of Palermo, refers to the major’s attempt to introduce ‘a black saint, Saint Benedict the Moor’ – is not so obviously involved in narrative exposition. Her abnegation of responsibility for the ‘story’ – ‘I am going to let somebody down below tell the rest,’ she states – points to a reductive construction of a heavenly perspective, to a parodic undercurrent that the saint’s childish treble, and the throbbing, neon-lit assembly of portraits within which she appears, only serve to accentuate. Here, in the disconnected traces of a pop Catholicism (the detail of a cleaner dusting in desultory fashion further implies neglect), is crystallized the fate of the Shakespearean prologue. For Lu´cia Murat, director of Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor, the authority of the prologue is active, reflected in the ways in which the commentary of the ‘Nac¸a˜o Mare´’ group interrupts the proceedings at regular intervals. Crucially, the musical translation of the prologue – lyrics such as ‘Peace . . . was shattered by various factions’ – stresses the local reverberations of ‘war’. And, because ‘Nac¸a˜o Mare´’ originated in the Mare´ favela, the importance of place is underscored: intertextually, at least, this is a prologue with a stake in promoting community bonding and wellbeing. At the same time, the rap music performed by ‘Nac¸a˜o Mare´’ entails wider harmonies, with a Brazilian trio using an African-American style that brings into the equation Brazil’s own colonial legacies. As a counter to the prologue’s ‘ancient grudge’, and in the place of the ‘mutiny’ that

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is Romeo and Juliet, Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor aims to highlight productively multicultural street poetry possibilities. If prologues waver between involvement and disinvolvement, this tends to be offset in world cinema by the presence of characters that bring to a head overlapping reflections on cultural, sexual and national identities. A familiar casting decision turns Paris into a socially superior type, as in the Egyptian adaptation, Hobak Nar, where Wajih Fawal is presented not only as the wealthy playboy who will safeguard the Assas/Capulet family fortunes, but also as an international sophisticate who boasts of his knowledge of the French capital. By contrast, the homespun poetry, and Alexandria-based ways, of Karim/Romeo, it is implied, are infinitely preferable.20 Where the Paris equivalent incarnates conservatism, versions of Mercutio express an alternative lifestyle. In the South African film, uGugu no Andile, for example, Ras Bennie/Mercutio (Breeze Yoko) is set apart from destructive local loyalties: his Rastafarian dreadlocks and manner suggest the Caribbean, inner faith and music as his points of reference.21 Jonathan Goldberg, building on an established critical tradition, reads Shakespeare’s Mercutio in terms of ‘love . . . between men’, structures of male rivalry and ‘deformations of desire’.22 Of interest are the ways in which world cinema, in the wake of the representation in Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo þ Juliet of Mercutio’s (Harold Perrineau) performance in drag at the Capulet ball, has nuanced Romeo’s homoerotic companion. Rome´o et Juliette is typical in discovering Louki/Mercutio (David Michael) as a gay artist whose painting of a matronly woman wearing a ruff betokens an unresolved relation with a ‘mother’ that is expressed in Elizabethan-style iconography. At the same time, Louki/Mercutio’s frustrated attraction to Rome´o, which is sublimated in his suicidally offering himself to the homophobic E´tienne/Tybalt (Danny Gagne´), speaks to the problematics of the development of gay rights in a Quebecois environment.23 Louki/ Mercutio is a generic type; he is simultaneously a registration of recognizable Canadian civic struggles. As this instance makes clear, cinema allows for empathy through the invocation of prejudice, and the representation of the Tybalt figure is no exception to the rule. Rami og Julie is a case in point: here, the camera’s focus on the confederate flag that adorns the walls of Frank/Tybalt’s (Steen Birgir Jørgensen) room suggests both his unpalatable views and an outmoded form of Danish nationalism. The scene in which Frank/Tybalt attempts to rape Julie is also characteristic in eliding the racism of the Tybalt figure with masculine violence.24 In these and related reinterpretations, the Shakespearean personality

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moves beyond a strictly narrative function to point up what Arjun Appadurai identifies as ‘growing disjunctures’ in the ‘ideoscape’ of the ‘new global order’.25 Characters in Romeo and Juliet who assist rather than obstruct the lovers are rendered in world cinema adaptations as go-betweens with a careful attention to their social and cultural embedment. The nurse’s complementary manifestations as girl, teenage friend and elderly family confidante, for instance, are all congruent with a sense of date, place and space.26 Hobak Nar furnishes viewers with two nurses, the younger Rania and the older ’Out, each of whose speech is mediated through the proverbial. Doubling the nurse’s role in this fashion modifies and deepens the film’s absorption with female mobility and the traditional mores of Arabic culture. A parallel character development is also an interpretive strategy in uGugu no Andile, not least in the way in which Friar Laurence is reproduced in the black Bishop Mbengashe (Mac Mathunjwa) and the white Father John (Neil McCarthy): the fact that religious leaders are discovered as occupying both sides of South Africa’s racial divide hints at a broader filmic aspiration towards reconciliation. Transformed at the level of gender, Friar Laurence becomes Fernanda (Marisa Oth) in Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor, the teacher who religiously peddles dance as an antidote to life in the Rio de Janeiro favela (her ‘special good’ [2.2.18] is education), and Laurence ( Jeanne Moreau) in Rome´o et Juliette, the grandmother to the heroine whose restorative functions are shadowed in her voluntary work with the elderly and her ‘resurrection’ of a bonsai tree.27 Of course, Romeo and Juliet elaborates Friar Laurence as an ambiguous figure associated, via his ‘close cell’ (2.1.233), with underground regions and linked, through his ‘osier cage’ (2.2.7) of ‘plants [and] herbs’ (2.2.16), to liferestoring qualities. Julie et Rome´o provides us with a singular meditation on these contradictions. For, in the wake of her fiance´’s suicide (Rome´o, mistakenly thinking his beloved dead, kills himself), an inconsolable Julie is taken to the village of Wetenga to be comforted by her uncle, Matao/Friar Laurence (Souke´ Tiendre´be´ogo), a so-called ‘jujuman’. Complete with pipe and fly whip, Matao/Friar Laurence is seen both as a curative force (‘This . . . baobab bark . . . is . . . good medicine,’ he instructs) and as a ‘witch’ who controls the elements to transport objects in time and space. Jacques Derrida, in a discussion of Romeo and Juliet, notes the play’s preoccupation with ‘contretemps’, which is glossed as an ‘unfortunate mishap’ and as a state of ‘counter-time’ – being ‘out of time’.28 In its depiction of Julie going back in time, with her uncle’s assistance, to undo the tragic mishap of her lover’s death, Julie et Rome´o

Romeo and Juliet

Figure 22: Poster for Julie et Rome´o (dir. Boubakar Diallo, 2011).

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answers to this dual reading of ‘contretemps’: both a fatal narrative and a reversal of the conventional order are suggested in the title, and, more generally, the action concentrates on occupying the ‘counter-time’ of the past so as to rewrite and re-enter the present. Centrally connected with Julie’s passage is the shrine or ‘secret cave’ which, replete with fetishes, stands both as an Africanized version of Friar Laurence’s ‘cell’ and as the location of Matao’s ancestral power. Of all the constructions of Friar Laurence in world cinema, Matao represents the most creative engagement with the life and death properties of Shakespeare’s ‘ghostly sire’ (2.1.233). In the same way that Shakespearean characters are adjusted to suit the particular emphases of Romeo and Juliet adaptations, so, too, are archetypal scenes and motifs reconceived. At the level of structure, almost all of the examples considered here animate popular histories of appropriation so as to provide the required narrative momentum, emotional colouring and generic logic. For instance, adaptations understand as set pieces the first meeting (a lush score and slow motion are essential) and the party or Capulet ‘feast’ (1.3.82), which invariably takes place at an exclusive venue and serves as the occasion for a revelation of the all-important ‘name’. In Amar Te Duele, the eyes of Ulises/Romeo and Renata/Juliet first meet through the window of a store in the Centro Santa Fe shopping mall, the mottled effect of the glass connoting not only the distortions of their social world but also a gulf between inside and outside. And, if windows symbolize barriers here, other representations of the inauguration of the relationship favour such objects as a potted plant, a pillar and even a surfboard to make a comparable point. In other cases, particular moments are established as significant in that they prepare the way for experiences of consummation (or, in the case of the more chastely determined Qayamat se Qayamat Tak, a night in the forest together) and exile. Either the Romeo character is sent away or the Juliet equivalent, but common to both scenarios is the lovers becoming strangers to their homelands. Via narratives of displacement the prospect of a mythic return is allowed to circulate. Hence, if, in Era Uma Vez, it is ‘Europe’ to which Nina/Juliet is destined in a bid to secure her safety, in Rome´o et Juliette ‘France’ is imagined as serving the like purpose. Invoking a New World–Old World dichotomy (Brazil/Europe and Canada/France), these films, and others cast in the same mould, not only expose a patriarchal fantasy that the misguided heroine will be reclaimed by the ‘mother country’; they also figure the lovers in terms of a dispossessed demographic. Writing on the ‘specificity’ of ‘exile discourse’, Hamid Naficy notes that ‘There is a there there in exile’; world cinema envisages the lovers as emblematizing

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Figure 23: The young lovers, Rome´o (Thomas Lalonde) and Juliette (Charlotte Aubin), escape in Rome´o et Juliette (dir. Yves Desgagne´s, 2006).

in their movements the complexity and detail of individually rendered cultural-national environments.29 Over and above other properties, it is, not unsurprisingly, the balcony that features as the defining marker of a Romeo and Juliet adaptation. Often, the balcony appears no more than fleetingly, testimony to the paradigmatic qualities of the romance; in other instances, a balcony – or an upper window – is a means of conveying social and emotional distance or estrangement. Theme and context determine particular manifestations. Thus, in Sud Side Stori, the fact that the white Toni/Romeo occupies the balconic space in a seedy Palermo side street, and looks down at the black Romea/Juliet, crystallizes the film’s parodic manipulation of gender and performance expectations along the axes of race. Because it discovers Andile/Romeo reaching out to touch Gugu/Juliet through the bars of a window, thereby referencing South Africa’s system of apartheid, uGugu no Andile is similarly responsive to the balcony as a theatrical entity open to new inflections. As Marjorie Garber reminds us, the balcony is but one threshold Romeo must cross to gain Juliet, the other ‘physical barriers’ being the ‘walled garden’ and the ‘orchard’, and it is such a multiply enclosed sense of the heroine that a film such as Hobak Nar comically extrapolates.30 Here, Karim/Romeo, as befits his profession as an

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Alexandria ‘engineer’, uses a mobile crane to soar over the Assas/Capulet hedge and garden and access Salma/Juliet’s flowery balcony, the idea being that his mechanical know-how, and imaginative employment of the tools of the construction industry, are parts of his sexual allure. As a ‘metonymy for a forbidden world’, to use Celia R. Daileader’s term, the balcony is given its most extended reinterpretation in Water (dir. Deepa Mehta, 2005), a Canadian–Indian co-produced film that charts the development of a relationship between Kalyani/Juliet (Lisa Ray), a widow, and Narayan/Romeo (John Abraham), a passionate, Gandhi-inspired ideologue who has admired her on her suffocating ashram’s upper floor.31 The setting, the holy city of Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges, lends sacrality to the romance, while the period, the 1930s, informs the dialogue at every turn. ‘I don’t even know how to see her again,’ complains Narayam/Romeo, to which his friend, Rabindra (Vinay Pathak), replies: ‘Stand beneath her balcony, but don’t quote Romeo. People here don’t know Shakespeare.’ ‘You really are a brown Englishman’ is Narayam/ Romeo’s riposte. He refers, of course, to the Indian Education Act of 1835 whereby a privileged class would be trained, in Thomas Babington Macaulay’s phrase, to be ‘Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’.32 Water instances the balcony not only as an index of the social prohibitions that forbade contact between men and widows but also, via citation, as a reminder of generationally defined conflicts of interest. For Rabindra, there is only the condescending and misogynist view that western culture is beyond the reach of the masses; for Narayam/Romeo, by contrast, emancipation and Indian values are deemed important. Distinctive to Water is the way in which the balcony illuminates complementary situations of constriction, and concomitant desires for escape, at a critical juncture of national selfdefinition. The episode is symptomatic of the extent to which, in world cinema, Romeo and Juliet emerges into view via quotation. Patterns of quotation share a number of similarities. A consistent use of Juliet’s ‘What’s in a name?’ (2.1.85) address and its sentiments serves not only to bring the play to mind but also to point up a sense of the lovers’ intimacy, as when they are represented reading out versions of the speech as a duet and completing each other’s lines.33 As a signifier of identity, however, ‘name’ also carries in its train the potential for schism and rejection. The film, Go!, as part of its anatomization of the situation of the zainichi in Japan, opens with an on-screen quotation – ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet’ (2.1.85–6) – but replaces it

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Figure 24: Narayan/Romeo (John Abraham) and Kalyani/Juliet (Lisa Ray) relax by the banks of the Ganges in Water (dir. Deepa Mehta, 2005).

quickly with Sugihara/Romeo’s embittered voiceover: ‘Race, homeland, nation, unification . . . makes me sick,’ he states. The litany of terms, it is implied, constitutes Sugihara/Romeo’s translation of Juliet’s question from a vexed Korean–Japanese point of view. Given the film’s concern with the problematics of identity, issues of ‘name’ recur, as when Sugihara/Romeo refuses to divulge his full name (‘Who cares about names?’), only to discover, when he does reveal himself, that it is to a hostile reception: ‘Pop told me . . . Don’t go out with Koreans . . . blood of . . . Koreans . . . is dirty,’ Sakurai/Juliet protests. Mobilizing memories of ‘so¯shi kaimei’, the programme whereby ‘Koreans in Japan [were] . . . forced . . . to assume Japanese surnames’ to support a national drive towards ‘psychological control’, the exchange highlights spectres of patriarchal racism and the brute fact that, as in Romeo and Juliet, for all it may be discounted, nomenclature can function in insidiously adversarial ways.34 For example, to Julia/Juliet’s (Georgina Liossi) query in Kanenas, Goran/Romeo (Antinoos Albanis) replies that he is a ‘Nobody’, his identification self-consciously merging the difficulty of remaining Russian in Greece with the strategy used by Ulysses to avoid detection in The Odyssey. (Homer’s text, like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, is conjured up throughout.) Quotation, then, signals the possibilities and also the constraints at stake in membership of a community. The point is elaborated

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in Sud Side Stori: here, Romea/Juliet’s two quotations or, rather, misquotations from Romeo and Juliet – she is represented as muddling both ‘O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ (2.1.75) and ‘Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books’ (2.1.201) – are greeted with incomprehension, one of the other sex workers asking ‘What’s her problem?’ In Romea/Juliet’s relation to Shakespeare is encapsulated her situation as a migrant outsider. As they pass into cinematic parlance, lines assume meanings beyond themselves, commenting upon the specificities of the narrative situation but also adjusting themselves in response to global vicissitude. The word also resides in music, with musical numbers often constituting a means of approximating iambic pentameter.35 Bollywood conventions whereby realist action modulates into musical fantasy are enthusiastically taken up in world cinema adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, suggesting not only a generalized recognition of cinematic varieties of metatheatre but also a ready exchangeability between song lyric and Shakespearean source.36 A variation on the idea occurs in Sud Side Stori, in which frenetic but carefully distinguished musical themes bring to mind both ‘a lack of cultural homogeneity’, in Maurizio Calbi’s formulation, and Romeo and Juliet’s concern with ‘letters and . . . language’ (1.2.60) as indexes of dissension.37 As youth-driven genres, popular forms of music lend themselves with a particular appositeness to the complexions of teenage angst. If, as Bruce R. Smith suggests, Romeo and Juliet is par excellence ‘a tragedy of youth’, then this is refracted in a film such as Rome´o et Juliette, which contrasts the tongue-tied condition of the Montreal lovers with expressive songs about the first flush of love.38 Typical are such lyrics as ‘No one’s there to save you . . . Welcome to my life’, and ‘I came to say that I love you’, which canvass familiar tropes of inarticulacy, self-absorption and abandonment. In more classically characterized manifestations, music suggests an acknowledgement of other adaptations, of the fact that Romeo and Juliet is a play that has lent itself to musical reinvention of various forms. For Lu´cia Murat, director of Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor, a citing of the Prokofiev ballet version of Romeo and Juliet works not so much to indicate the play’s timeless appeal as the need for its social and cultural transformation; having watched a clip of the famous love scene, one of the studio’s dancers involved in a musical Shakespeare project announces, ‘My Juliet is brown, dances hiphop’. By implication, the anticipated rejection of the ballet also represents a demotic engagement with the Shakespearean word or, at least, with traditions of representation that have had an ostracizing effect. In the

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ambitions of the film’s favela resident we find a powerful registration of a desire to overcome barriers of language and class via the adaptive imagination of the indigene. modes of performance World cinema is notably drawn to acknowledging its adaptive processes, pinpointing narrative capital in interlinked expressions of metatheatre, whether this assumes the form of a foregrounding of the Shakespearean text, a performance or the unstable division between ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ worlds. A number of adaptations favour scenes in which a book functions as a talismanic index of a mutual mindset. In the Bollywood treatment of Romeo and Juliet, the lovers’ familiarity with libraries differentiates them from the lack of understanding and implied philistinism of elders who, in such a book-lined setting, quickly lose their bearings.39 Most often, the hallowed Shakespearean volume is conjured as an instrument of selfdefinition. In a film such as the Hamburg-based Kebab Connection, for instance, the ‘still dominant script embedded in textual auctoritas’, to use Courtney Lehmann’s formulation, declares its influence when Ibo/Romeo reads aloud to Titzi the ‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks’ (2.1.44) speech, the copy of the play that he wields suggesting the fetishization of the Renaissance book.40 Ibo/Romeo emerges as lover at the point where he chivalrously poeticizes himself and discovers in the material text applicable truths. A diametrically opposed view of the book is suggested by uGugu no Andile in which, as director Minky Schlesinger notes, ‘referencing Shakespeare was a conscious decision. The legacy of colonialism in South Africa is a major theme . . . and can be seen in . . . the fact that [the children] study Shakespeare’.41 In the classroom episode, when the teacher reads out the ‘pilgrims’ hands’ (1.5.96) exchange between Romeo and Juliet, Gugu/Juliet is unable to answer the question, ‘So what’s the scene really about?’ By the end of the film, however, in the immediate aftermath of the teacher’s delivery of Escalus’s ‘Some shall be pardoned, and some punishe`d’ (5.3.307) address, Gugu/Juliet is represented as having internalized the play’s relevancies. The close-up on a tear that blots her page suggests that Gugu/Juliet answers the question in relation to personal experience. This book-ended moment simultaneously highlights a power shift at a textual level, for the teacher’s position of dominance (signalled by her Arden edition of Romeo and Juliet) is unsettled by a shot of Gugu/Juliet transcribing key lines from the play into her exercise book and fingering the letters of Andile/Romeo’s name, which

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she has carved on her desk. Not only is the pre-eminence of one book challenged by another, but also an institutional form of writing gives way to an alternative script. Crucially, Gugu/Juliet appears here as a type of artist, appropriating Shakespeare according to her own agenda, to the extent that the book itself, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, fades from view, no longer the masterwork of canonical inviolability. That doubled movement – the authority that inheres in Romeo and Juliet is at one and the same time reified and dismantled – is symptomatic of the ways in which book and script come together. A further pattern discovers itself in scenes of rehearsal and/or performance. Inside a majority of world cinema adaptations, types of performance are consistently returned to, suggesting the co-dependency of forms of Shakespearean media and the conviction that the theatre is the venue with which the imaginative power of Romeo and Juliet is most immediately associated. Chicken Rice War, the Singaporean adaptation of Romeo and Juliet discussed earlier in this book, is but one example of the pull towards the theatrical.42 Similarly, 8 pa¨iva¨a¨ ensi-iltaan/8 Days to Premiere (dir. Perttu Leppa¨, 2008), a Helsinki-based drama, pivots around a stage. Vilma/Juliet (Laura Birn), having abandoned a previous Romeo and Juliet, is elaborated as possessing the talent but not the confidence to take on the part of Juliet in a new production. The central question, assisted by a throbbing soundtrack that stresses the heart-throb credentials of Lauri/Romeo (Mikko Leppilampi), is whether trauma – and Shakespearean ghosts – can be overcome through a performative leap of faith. As the director, Perttu Leppa¨, states, the film plays up ‘the idea of second chances’, with much of the action depending for its effect on the tensions accompanying the anticipated denouement.43 In a discussion of the ‘rehearsal in films of the early modern theatre’ trope, Anna Kamaralli notes that, ‘where art and self-discovery unite, artifice gives way to truth on stage’, the performers being ‘awakened to . . . emotional heights’.44 But Romeo and Julietinspired world cinema also questions the idea that Shakespearean performance is necessarily a psychically ameliorative force. Hence, in One Husband Too Many (dir. Anthony Chan, 1988), a Hong Kong marital comedy, the spousal leads, Hsin (Anthony Chan) and Park (Anita Mui), fall out when their cheap imitation of a Franco Zeffirelli-style Romeo and Juliet production is greeted with disdain. ‘Tight pants!’ and ‘It’s taboo!’ are among the objections raised to the tacky Capulet mausoleum conclusion, the objections reflecting both rural mockery of an urban scene and, as Adele Lee notes, ‘an ideological critique of Western culture’.45 At the point where local councillors enter to deal with the situation, a fight

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breaks out between the muscle-bound henchmen who have been hired to protect the actors and some similarly well-developed members of the audience, leading Hsin to declare ‘Now it’s Romeo and Juliet’. Given that the performance has to be abandoned, any notion that theatre promotes positive ‘self-discovery’ is debunked. Here, Romeo and Juliet functions as feud rather than romance, its conflicted identity refracting the condition of Hong Kong itself. ‘Caught between East and West, between China and Britain, a crown colony with a hybrid culture, and now once again part of China but under “one government, two systems”, Hong Kong presents a theoretical conundrum’, note Poshek Fu and David Desser, and it is precisely this sense of multiplicity that One Husband Too Many plays out, as the film juxtaposes deference and detraction and elaborates Romeo and Juliet as an in-between phenomenon that brings to mind the ambiguities of national and cultural attachments.46 Warai no daigaku/University of Laughs (dir. Mamori Hoshi, 2004) is a Japanese film that takes further the ways in which national concerns dictate the performance possibilities of Romeo and Juliet. Tokyo, the 1940s, the eve of war – the setting establishes the parameters for a struggle between Tsubaki (Goroˆ Inagaki), a playwright who wishes to stage an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, and Sakisaka (Koˆji Yakusho), the government censor. Throughout, as Richard Burt notes, ‘censorship as collaboration’ is spotlighted and, by the close, the opposed protagonists have found a meeting point.47 This is underscored not only in the transformation of Romeo and Juliet from a European ‘barbarian love story’ to a ‘Meiji melodrama’, a comedy entitled Julio and Romiet, but also in the ways in which the action flags long-established traditions of marrying Shakespeare to Japanese representational forms.48 Crucially, the censor’s office becomes the rehearsal space, with a concluding montage of stills from the performance itself suggesting that it secures a lasting place in the popular imaginary. In Warai no daigaku, Romeo and Juliet is accommodated to a specific state of affairs, and stressed is a type of pragmatic knowledge, a species of professional compromise in which the needs of one constituency are enfolded inside another. Discontinuities associated with performance as a medium will invariably be exacerbated in the light of place and context, it is suggested, and there are only ever locally mediated versions of ‘truth on stage’. If there is a constant to the performance-within-a-film trope, it is that the lines that separate rehearsing and living, acting and being, are never exact. Performances spill out beyond their place of making to foster a romantic connection (Nandu’s rehearsal of the part of Romeo in 1942: A Love Story allows Rajju/Juliet to recognize that ‘it wasn’t an act . . . it was

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your love for me’) or to disturb the boundaries erected between film and playhouse practice (in 8 pa¨iva¨a¨ ensi-iltaan, the characters’ gossip over the opening credits dissolves the conventional separation of titles and text in a fashion that anticipates Romeo and Juliet and its film functions).49 Of course, one could categorize all such variations on the blurred condition of the life–art dichotomy as postmodern incarnations of what Jean Baudrillard terms ‘hyperrealism . . . an aesthetic reality’, but this would be to neglect the ways in which Romeo and Juliet, in particular, has been conceived in world cinema as bringing into play questions about causality, accountability and involvement.50 The focused deployment of pseudodocumentary footage in uGugu no Andile, for example, not only lends this Romeo and Juliet an historical anchorage; it also invites an audience to discriminate, and to acknowledge their own part in creating, the various kinds of ‘truth’ which have been contested in the South African experience. By the same token, Sud Side Stori makes a point of integrating with its surrealist visuals interviews (‘No passport, no residence permit: that’s why I have to work on the streets,’ one sex worker complains) which work to complicate the differences between voyeuristic and economic types of exploitation. According to one account, the Nigerian sex workers recruited for parts in Sud Side Stori were ‘unwilling to invest themselves too wholeheartedly in the performance of their own “identities”’; there was an uncomfortable proximity between the fictional practices and their material underpinnings (mimesis created ambivalence), with friction developing between director and cast.51 For this film, at least, the attempt to expose prejudice via bodies that were themselves abusively encoded may not have been wholly successful. A more affirmative version of the life–art relation is provided by Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor, in which an imperative is to showcase a sense of the favelas independent of drugdominated mediatized spectacle. The pirouettes the dancers execute around the community’s gangs are, in this sense, envisaged as socially utile manoeuvres. Violence can be avoided, it is implied; there are significant sources of creativity. In the same way that the NGO-sponsored dancers in the film aspire to a kind of legitimacy, so has Brazil, in recent years, invested in a host of community-based projects aimed at transforming the lot of its occluded constituencies. Michael Dobson writes that amateur Shakespeare performance in English blends the need for ‘national self-assertion’ with a ‘civic tradition of self-improvement’.52 Something approximating to this effect is at work in the representation in Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor of Fernanda/Friar Laurence, the dance teacher who, even if her interests lie with adaptation, instances the Bard as a

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stimulus to action and an agent of cohesion. For many of the cast members, Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor was their first film experience, having come to it via the sorts of initiative that this Romeo and Juliet takes as its theme. And, arguably, it is through Shakespeare-imprinted cinema that other kinds of employment – and changes in perception – may be generated. Of course, it is easy to dismiss Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor as, to use Joa˜o Luiz Vieira’s formulation, ‘a new form of commodity . . . favela chic’.53 But, in that its Shakespearean associations work so broadly, neither this film, nor Era Uma Vez, to which it is closely connected, can be so transparently classified. At the start of Era Uma Vez, De´/Romeo’s opening voiceover, introducing the dominant motifs, runs: ‘I am part of [the] invisible crowd . . . no one notices us’. But, in the final sequence, De´/Romeo steps outside his role, much in the manner of any number of Shakespearean characters, to observe: ‘My name is Thiago Martins . . . I . . . live . . . in a slum . . . this could have been my story . . . I don’t know if there is . . . a way to make things better in this city . . . But if people looked carefully at each other, things could be different’. The autobiographical bracketing, and the plea for a more plural vision, complement consistently prioritized widescreen shots of Rio de Janeiro and intimate that the city is best appreciated from a range of perspectives. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the scene where De´/Romeo accompanies Nina/Juliet on to a shabby Cantagalo rooftop so as to show off his own ‘huge balcony with an ocean view’, extending his arms in a gesture of blessing reminiscent of Rio de Janeiro’s hilltop statue of ‘Christ the Redeemer’ (just visible in the uppermost part of the frame). De´/Romeo’s pose is striking in its inclusivity; it also suggests that Shakespearean reinvention may be redemptive. Transactions between the actor and Shakespeare are reinforced in De´/Romeo’s closing admission that he is a member of the No´s do Morro theatre group, a local organization that, via a variety of types of production, but especially Shakespeare, offers training opportunities for the underprivileged. Through its work, No´s do Morro has regenerated a number of Rio de Janeiro neighbourhoods and encouraged global conversations. For example, during the RSC Complete Works Festival, which took place in Stratford-upon-Avon between 2006 and 2007, No´s do Morro, speaking in Portuguese, joined forces with the English-speaking company, Gallery 37, in a production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, providing an experience of collaboration and interchange for performers and audience alike.54 Extratextual narratives forge networks of accord in situations otherwise hostile to cross-boundary interaction. Metatheatre, in this sense, becomes ratified for its reformative vitalities.

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Plays reformation and regeneration

Inside the conclusions of the films themselves, one tendency is for world cinema to subscribe to the tragic linear movement with which Romeo and Juliet is customarily associated, forgoing parental rapprochement and underlining the inexorability of tragic bloodshed. As the Bollywood adaptation, Qayamat se Qayamat Tak, reveals, the domestic idyll that Raj/Romeo and Rashmi/Juliet create for themselves in an abandoned Shiva temple is demolished at the point where hired killers enter the scene. The final shot, which dwells on the bodies of the lovers silhouetted against a portentously setting sun, points up the absence of any familial change of heart. Moreover, in view of the fact that no statue of Shiva appears in the temple sequences (there is simply a brief glimpse of his trident), the overriding sense is of divine agency overshadowed by the disastrous effects of human involvement. Such tonal evocations often share a premonitory connection with Shakespeare’s play (in which Juliet describes her ‘soul’ as ‘ill-divining’ [3.5.54]). In Sud Side Stori the suggestion of a tragedy to come is made not only through Toni/Romeo’s song about his mock suicide (‘I have a woeful . . . dream . . . Who knows if I’ll come back?’) but also via a soundtrack whose frantic rhythms accentuate the push towards a foreordained conclusion. Perhaps with the ‘holy palmers’ kiss’ (1.5.97) in mind, Qayamat se Qayamat Tak places the issue of the lovers’ destiny in a more traditional frame: a grandmother, reading Rashmi/Juliet’s palm, anticipates that her youth will be cut short, while Rashmi/Juliet herself, scrutinizing Raj/Romeo’s palm in a later episode, remarks that his ‘life line’ is ‘just like mine’. With this adaptation, the erotic play of hands in Romeo and Juliet combines with a folkloric subscription to prediction that hints at the incipient romance’s doomladen trajectory. And, in view of the attention in a number of adaptations to the role of chance in ‘violent ends’ (2.5.9) – letters are lost or false reports of death are allowed to circulate – it would seem that place and conceit are sometimes subordinated to fate, to a ‘consequence yet hanging in the stars’ (1.4.107). The classic significance of the denouement is often flagged via Shakespearean quotation. Hence, in Rome´o et Juliette, Laurence/Friar Laurence states in voiceover, ‘For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo’ (5.3.308–9). As the camera tracks her figure to the end of a jetty, we realize that the scenic emphasis is on private consolation rather than public reconstitution. Alone in her grief, Laurence/Friar Laurence is represented as refusing the role of mediator between the Lamontagne and

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Ve´ronneau factions: her Shakespearean imprimatur does not extend to healing work. Escalus’s address is introduced in a more directly visible fashion in Rami og Julie; here, a juxtaposed Danish–Arabic translation of the speech is superimposed on a backlit image of Julie/Juliet contemplating her lover’s demise. The columns of different national languages point up the impossibility of movement across cultural divides. In this film the Shakespearean word emblematizes – is a material sign of – a larger impasse. With certain world cinema examples, the way in which the concluding passage is reproduced illuminates particular praxes of power. That, at least, is the impression offered by Sud Side Stori, in which the division of Escalus’s reflections (5.3.304–9) between a journalist and a clairvoyant indicates an exclusively Italian ownership of Shakespeare: by contrast, the Nigerian sex workers feature only in accompanying images of exodus. Maurizio Calbi notes that the film’s coda, in which Saint Rosalia is fanned in heaven by ‘Saint Benedict the Moor’, displays a ‘disquieting contiguity with Orientalist fantasies’.55 Certainly, divine and earthly schemes complement each other in mutually reinforcing prejudicial expressions. Saint Benedict remains locked in a disempowered and voiceless role, while the qualifications introduced in Saint Rosalia’s voiceover (‘This doesn’t mean that we’re all the same, all the same’) stress continuing realities of discrimination. Against the weight of such pessimism, it is striking that many adaptations should elect either to alter the expected end or to find in it meaning and value. In a film such as A Time to Love the relaxation of enmities between the families emerges organically from the mellowing that accompanies the aging process. Although the lovers survive, it is with the knowledge of having grown old and having missed opportunities: the tragedy of A Time to Love is that lives have been left to stagnate. Coloured with mourning, the closing moment of togetherness – a montage of Hou Jia/Romeo and Qu Ran/Juliet posing for a wedding photograph – sounds the dominant notes of loss and regret. Less elegiac and more straightforwardly affirmative, a significant body of films – including Chicken Rice War – incorporates in the final frames either recuperative instincts or spectacles of mended communitas.56 Kebab Connection connects the professional success of Titzi/Juliet and Ibo/Romeo with the entente cordiale entered into by rival Turkish and Greek restaurants. A climactic scene, in which regionally identified foods are exchanged and savoured, signals the mutually constitutive relation between individual fortunes and cultural cross-pollination. Moving beyond immediate local contests is an imperative in the culminating sequence of Hobak Nar, too. In the wake of a

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reformative jail term for the erring fathers, Karim/Romeo and Salma/ Juliet are free to marry: the closing shot shows them leaving Alexandria in a speedboat, intimating an outward-looking mindset and a future separate from internal power struggles. A parallel scene occurs in Kanenas in which Goran/Romeo and Julia/Juliet escape from an opposition-riven Athens by, it is ironically implied, boarding a ferry for Italy, a new ‘homeland’. Cast in the same mould is Go! As its title and dynamic mise en sce`ne make clear, the film is concerned with going forwards to embrace a better society. Thus, when Mika Ko instances the failure of Go! ‘to counter the ideology of Japaneseness’, she rather misconstrues the film’s energy.57 At the end, Sugihara/Romeo and Sakurai/Juliet leap over the school gate in a shared confrontation with barriers. The simultaneous exclamation – ‘What am I? . . . I’m me!’ – discovers Sugihara/Romeo rejecting the zainichi label and claiming his own mode of selfhood. As Judith Butler states, ‘by being called a name, one is also given a certain possibility for . . . existence . . . the injurious address . . . may . . . produce an . . . enabling response’.58 Via the concluding detail of snow falling on Christmas Eve, Go! symbolically incorporates into its Japanese vision western paradigms of new beginnings. Emerging from an engagement with other points of view are forms of historical encounter and, notably, the implied reparation of colonial injustice.59 It is precisely because they allow for the bigger picture that rewritings of the ending of Romeo and Juliet in film discharge an ameliorative function. That is, discovering regeneration and purpose in the midst of acrimony and waste, adaptations shift the linear emphases of Shakespeare’s play and, in so doing, both take to task the ‘ancient grudge’ and make viable an alternative course of events. The standing ovation accorded the concluding production of Romeo and Juliet in 8 pa¨iva¨a¨ ensi-iltaan is exemplary: at once, Vilma/Juliet is empowered, through performance, to confront her guilty past and put triumph in the place of adversity. Nor is hers the only narrative of personal transformation as Shakespeare’s play generally reverberates. Theatrical ghosts are released from confinement, fathers are identified and acknowledged, siblings find acceptance and same-sex relationships come into the open; these developments, manifested as reanimations and epiphanies, show the ostensible Romeo and Juliet roles to be positively multivalent. As director Perttu Leppa¨ admits, ‘boundaries’ in 8 pa¨iva¨a¨ ensi-iltaan are ‘situated where we least imagine them to be’, with Shakespearean remaking becoming part of an all-encompassing exorcism. Although more guarded in outlook, the ending of uGugu no Andile might also be said to reflect on a changed state of affairs, in this case, the

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Figure 25: Lauri/Romeo (Mikko Leppilampi) and Vilma/Juliet (Laura Birn) savour the applause in 8 pa¨iva¨a¨ ensi-iltaan/8 Days to Premiere (dir. Perttu Leppa¨, 2008).

prospect, in the South Africa of the early 1990s, of a peaceful transition to democratic government. An audience is invited to adjudicate between the deaths of the lovers, mown down in the gangs’ crossfire, and the impassioned harangue of Bishop Mbengashe (‘You’re killing your own!’), the effect of which is momentarily to quell the violence. His recovery of Andile/Romeo’s incriminating photographs suggests, too, that the way is clear for accountability and exposure. Even if the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established shortly after the events portrayed in the film, was not wholly successful, it still, in Nigel Worden’s words, ‘offered the possibility of amnesty . . . in return for full and public testimony’.60 Cautiously but insistently, uGugu no Andile identifies in Shakespeare a call to productive political transformation. Invoking an even more distant period, Julie et Rome´o, the Burkinabe´ adaptation referred to earlier, is, by contrast, openly aspirational in its readjustments to dramatic denouement. For, having been transported back in time to avert the death of her fiance´, Julie arrives at the inception of the ‘ancient grudge’. Intervening so as to prevent the incident that catalyzes the family quarrel and Rome´o’s death, Julie is constructed not only as conflating gendered

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binaries (the villagers’ ‘Amazone’ designation is indicative) but also as assuming her uncle’s mantle: previously a type of apprentice, she now appears a fully-fledged ‘witch’. Abandoning her suspicion of ‘black magic’, Julie is realized as embracing significant traditions and, hence, a crucial part of her African heritage. As the director, Boubakar Diallo states, an imperative in Julie et Rome´o is ‘not forgetting one’s roots’. More generally, the film suggests that it is only through challenging the customary Shakespearean ending that a return to African particularity can be executed. Julie et Rome´o refuses to countenance Romeo and Juliet’s close and, in so doing, alters not only the play but also its back story, illuminating the vitality of African beliefs in the process. In the final scene, Julie, installed in the present, embraces Rome´o still in her native costume. Like the Shakespearean heroine who has not yet left her disguise behind, Julie is given the last word, her actions pointing up the ways in which rewriting enjoys a culturally restorative purchase. conclusions The breadth and depth of the global fascination with Romeo and Juliet confirm the play’s status as a mobile representational resource. Distinctively, world cinema interprets Shakespeare’s play by focusing, as this chapter has suggested, on particular regional pressure points and moments of historic transition. In this regard, Ulrich Beck’s notion that ‘globalization fragments’ (‘not only does it undermine the control of individual states . . . it may also lead to the destruction of local communities’, he argues) is particularly germane to the ways in which Romeo and Juliet has been seized upon as a narrative that addresses the shifting situation of national borders.61 At the same time, Beck continues, globalization ‘generates (compels) bonding’, and it is such a material tendency, and ideological possibility, that films would seem ultimately to approve.62 In world cinema, as we have seen, the problem of a new generation, which entertains alternative expectations to the parental generation, is highlighted by related demographic developments, which bring into play issues of immigration, class and displacement. Above all, it is as a text about cultural admixture that Romeo and Juliet is most appreciated. World cinema, responsive to the currency of a work that is accessible through particular expressions and images, offers readings that permit Shakespeare to continue positively to operate. To go back to the ‘ancient grudge’, with such a project in mind, is to bypass separatism in favour of dialogue and connectivity.

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One of the hallmarks of an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, it has been suggested, is an ‘inescapable sense of ill-fatedness’, yet it is against cultural accretions of inevitability that a significant number of interpretations of the play are positioned, with Shakespeare’s work being redrawn as a social parable of reversal, growth, accommodation and a new order.63 As Minky Schlesinger states, reflecting on the benefits of adapting Romeo and Juliet into film in South Africa, ‘Shakespeare . . . [is] material . . . which we are free to use for fresh purposes . . . [so as to embrace] the possibility of making a different kind of art’. Thus it is that Shakespeare’s play can be seen to be generating enriching representational ventures. Or, to cite Boubakar Diallo, director of Julie et Rome´o, reflecting on the need for less stereotypical perceptions of the subcontinent, ‘Romeo and Juliet has been the subject of numerous adaptations . . . Why has Africa been unwilling to invite herself to become part of that phenomenon?’ Now is surely the time, he announces, ‘to join our sensibilities with the chorus of the world in the cause of cultural diversity’. In spotlighting the effects of difference, an analysis of the multiplicity of adaptations of Shakespeare’s play argues for plural virtues. Continually mediated and performed, Romeo and Juliet is a dramatic creation that remains socially and culturally pertinent. Through its global instantiations, we are encouraged to see more creatively this canonized romance and to rethink the subjects, themes and geographies upon which we lavish so much critical attention. N O T ES 1 Romeo and Juliet, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), Prologue, 3. Unless otherwise stated, all further references appear in the text. 2 Rey Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 17, 19, 21, 22. 3 Richard Burt, ‘Alluding to Shakespeare in L’Appartement, The King is Alive, Wicker Park, A Time to Love, and University of Laughs: Digital Film, Asianization and the Transnational Film Remake’, Shakespeare Yearbook, 17 (2010), 67. 4 See John Gittings, The Changing Face of China: from Mao to Market (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 266. 5 Era Uma Vez suggests a placeless archetype but is, in fact, something of a trick: the film’s title ends in an ellipsis that invites us to ponder issues of location and application.

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6 Jonathan Farley, Southern Africa (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 85. 7 Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein, Brazil since 1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 210. 8 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 33. 9 Mette Hjort and Ib Bondebjerg, eds., The Danish Directors: Dialogues on a Contemporary National Cinema (Bristol: Intellect, 2001), p. 113. 10 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, pp. 37, 43. 11 Kobayashi Kaori, ‘New Intercultural Shakespeares in East Asia’, in Richard Fotheringham, Christa Jansohn and R. S. White, eds., Shakespeare’s World/ World Shakespeares (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), p. 251. 12 See Yoshio Sugimoto, An Introduction to Japanese Society, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 193–4. 13 Wimal Dissanayake, ‘Nationhood, History, and Cinema: Reflections on the Asian Scene’, in Wimal Dissanayake, ed., Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. xiii, xiv. The Bollywood film Josh (dir. Mansoor Khan, 2000) makes for an interesting comparison. An anti-colonial reworking of West Side Story set in Goa, the film shows that the ‘ancient grudge’ has its origins in the Portuguese governor’s decision to withhold his children’s inheritance. Josh constitutes a revealing instance of a filmmaker, Mansoor Khan, having directed Qayamat se Qayamat Tak twelve years previously, returning to Romeo and Juliet later in his career. 14 The relevant examples are Era Uma Vez, Hobak Nar and A Time to Love. 15 M. K. Raghavendra, Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 225. 16 Shohini Chaudhuri, Contemporary World Cinema: Europe, Middle East, East Asia, South Asia (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 141, 159. 17 The vitality of Shakespeare in Egyptian cinema is also attested to in Istakoza/ Lobsters (dir. Inas al-Degheidy, 1996), a coastal comedy romp ‘based’, according to the director, ‘on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew’ (see Andrew Hammond, Pop Culture and the Arab World! Media, Arts and Lifestyle [Santa Barbara: ABC Clio, 2005], p. 174). 18 Interview between Boubakar Diallo and Mark Thornton Burnett, 3 September 2011. Unless otherwise stated, all Diallo quotations are taken from this interview and appear in the text or notes. 19 Eva Jørholt, ‘Burkina Faso’, in Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie, eds., The Cinema of Small Nations (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 208. 20 See the equivalent Paris figures, Franc¸ois and Dudu, in Rome´o et Juliette and Era Uma Vez respectively. 21 The Korean film Go! associates Seong-il/Mercutio’s alternative perspective with his love of Shakespeare: ‘Read it,’ he urges, ‘it’s cool stuff.’ 22 Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Romeo and Juliet’s Open Rs’, in Jonathan Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 225, 230.

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23 See Ross Higgins, De la clandestinite´ a` l’affirmation: pour une histoire de la communaute´ gaie montre´alaise, trans. Alain Beauvais (Montreal: Comeau & Nadeau, 1999). 24 See the comparable representation in uGugu no Andile of Mandla/Tybalt, who remarks ominously that a ‘husband will fix’ Gugu/Juliet’s erring ways. 25 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, pp. 31, 37. 26 See, for example, the nurse figures in Amar Te Duele, Era Uma Vez, Water and uGugu no Andile. 27 The Brazilian comedy Didi, O Cupido Trapalha˜o/Didi, the Goofy Cupid (dir. Paulo Araga˜o and Alexandre Boury, 2003) centres on the trials and tribulations of Didi (Renato Araga˜o), an angel who, in order to retain his place in heaven, must engineer a romance between Romeu/Romeo (Daniel) and Julieta/Juliet (Jackeline Petkovic) without precipitating the tragic Shakespearean conclusion. The (accidental) skills he displays in the successful execution of his task earmark Didi as a type of Friar Laurence and a locus of adaptive energy. 28 Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 416, 419. 29 Hamid Naficy, ‘Framing Exile: from Homeland to Homepage’, in Hamid Naficy, ed., Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), p. 4. 30 Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (London and New York: Methuen, 1981), p. 165. 31 Celia R. Daileader, Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire and the Limits of the Visible (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 41. 32 Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Minute of 2 February 1835 on Indian Education’, in G. H. Young, ed., Macaulay: Prose and Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 729. 33 Pertinent examples are Hobak Nar and A Time to Love. 34 Sugimoto, Introduction to Japanese Society, p. 196. 35 In The Phantom Lover (dir. Ronnie Yu, 1995), a Hong Kong film that combines the plots of Romeo and Juliet and Gaston Leroux’s novel Le Fantoˆme de l’Ope´ra, the lyrical and musical prowess of the singer, Song Danping/Romeo (Leslie Cheung), grants him celebrity appeal. 36 Examples include Hobak Nar, Mare´, Nossa Histo´ria de Amor, 1942: A Love Story and Qayamat se Qayamat Tak. 37 Maurizio Calbi, ‘“This is my home, too”: Migration, Spectrality and Hospitality in Roberta Torre’s Sud Side Stori’, Shakespeare, 7.1 (2011), 28. 38 Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 79. 39 See, for example, the library episodes in 1942: A Love Story and Qayamat se Qayamat Tak. In Era Uma Vez, De´/Romeo and Nina/Juliet are represented as both possessing a copy of Zuenir Ventura’s 1994 volume, Cidade Partida, a classic journalistic study of Rio de Janeiro as a divided society. 40 Courtney Lehmann, Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 32.

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41 Interview between Minky Schlesinger and Mark Thornton Burnett, 9 August 2011. Unless otherwise stated, all Schlesinger quotations are taken from this interview and appear in the text or notes. Possibly Shakespeare is also referenced in the scene in which a group of white policemen raid the township, their blacked-up appearance suggesting outmoded conventions of Othello performance, the minstrelsy tradition and unpalatable histories dependent upon racial segregation. 42 Other world cinema examples in which a performance of Romeo and Juliet features significantly include Arven/The Inheritance (dir. Per Fly, 2004), Rendez-Vous (dir. Andre´ Te´chine´, 1985) and Ulysses’ Gaze (dir. Theo Angelopoulos, 1995). 43 Interview between Perttu Leppa¨ and Mark Thornton Burnett, 1 August 2011. Unless otherwise stated, all Leppa¨ quotations are taken from this interview and appear in the text or notes. 44 Anna Kamaralli, ‘Rehearsal in Films of the Early Modern Theatre: the Erotic Art of Making Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 29.1 (2011), 27, 29. 45 Adele Lee, ‘One Husband Too Many and the Problem of Postcolonial Hong Kong’, in Alexander C. Y. Huang and Charles S. Ross, eds., Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia and Cyberspace (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009), p. 199. 46 Poshek Fu and David Desser, ‘Introduction’, in Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 5. 47 Richard Burt, ‘Mobilizing Foreign Shakespeare in Media’, in Huang and Ross, eds., Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia and Cyberspace, p. 235. 48 See Akihoko Senda, ‘The rebirth of Shakespeare in Japan: from the 1960s to the 1990s’, in Takashi Sasayama, J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shrewring, eds., Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 30. 49 The Swedish film Wellka˚mm to Verona/Welcome to Verona (dir. Suzanne Osten, 2006) is a variation on the formula; the in-film performance of Romeo and Juliet is staged by the members of an old people’s home, thereby shifting the perennial focus of the play from youth to age. 50 Jean Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), pp. 144, 146. 51 Aine O’Healey, ‘Border Traffic: Reimagining the Voyage to Italy’, in Katarzyna Marciniak, Aniko´ Imre and Aine O’Healey, eds., Transnational Feminism in Film and Media (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 50. 52 Michael Dobson, Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: a Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 19, 66. 53 Joa˜o Luiz Vieira, ‘The Transnational Other: Street Kids in Contemporary ˇ urovicˇova´ and Kathleen Newman, eds., Brazilian Cinema’, in Natasˇa D World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 242–3. 54 Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘Shakespeare Exhibition and Festival Culture’, in Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete and Ramona Wray, eds., The

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55 56

57

58 59

60 61 62 63

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Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), p. 450. Calbi, ‘“This is my home, too”’, p. 30; Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 57. Exemplary here is the Indonesian adaptation of the play, Romeo Juliet (dir. Andibachtiar Yusuf, 2009), in which the Montague–Capulet rivalry is signalled via hostilities between the Persija (Jakarta) and Viking (Bandung) football teams. Two years after the death of Rangga/Romeo (Edo Borne) in a riot, Desi/Juliet (Sissy Prescilia) emerges with her toddler son, the product of their forbidden love. A coda to the film shows Desi/Juliet, amidst the bluecoloured Viking supporters, bearing aloft her child, who is dressed in orange Persija hues; her white top suggests neutrality, while the happy alignment of previously opposed groups in the same frame gestures to a greater tolerance. According to the director, the aim here was to accentuate the alteration to the play’s tragic imprint: ‘the child’s shirt is a symbol of remembering’, he states, ‘a sign that something may change in the war between conflicting sides’ (interview between Andibachtiar Yusuf and Mark Thornton Burnett, 9 March 2012). Mika Ko, ‘Mirroring Narcissism: Representation of zainichi in Yukisada Isao’s Go! ’, in Kevin Rockett and John Hill, eds., National Cinemas and World Cinema (Dublin: Four Courts, 2006), pp. 107, 110. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: a Politics of the Performative (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 2. Josh, the Bollywood adaptation set in Goa, rewrites both ‘real’ and fictional pasts in aligning the marriage of Rahul/Romeo (Chandrachur Singh) and Shirley/Juliet (Aishwarya Rai) with a righting of territorial wrongs. The decision of Max (Shah Rukh Khan) and his sister to become good citizens, having regained the lands that were due to them, encapsulates the film’s concern with the overthrow of Portuguese dominance. Nigel Worden, The Making of Modern South Africa: Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, 4th edn (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), p. 163. Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? (Cambridge: Polity, 2000) p. 50. Ibid., p. 49. Courtney Lehmann, Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’: the Relationship between Text and Film (London: A&C Black, 2010), p. 98.

Epilogue

In what follows, I reflect not so much on the ‘why’ of this project – that is addressed in the book itself – as the ‘how’. That is, how does an interested party acquaint himself or herself with non-Anglophone Shakespeare films that have slipped beneath the radar of mainstream critical attention? Richard Burt’s magisterial Shakespeares after Shakespeare: an Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture is a fine place to start for researchers, although it is not always as full in its provision of detail as one might like.1 This work has been superseded by the online database – an International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio – hosted by the British Universities Film and Video Council, which, as well as being user-friendly, is denser and more sustained in furnishing information.2 Then there are the other, more serendipitous, means – the word of mouth, the friendly tip-offs and the idle surfing of a search engine, which, in haphazard and unpredictable ways, can yield precious quarry. But how does one engineer a viewing of an individual filmic example once it has been identified? Online environments offer one possibility. A resource such as Global Shakespeares, hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is tremendously exciting in bringing before audiences extracts from theatrical performances of Shakespeare and, to a lesser extent, Shakespeare films from around the world.3 The concept of a library of Alexandria is suggested in the utopian ideal of a digital age that allows all Shakespeare films to be more readily obtainable. In this way, objections to a refiguring of the field, which take the form of instancing ‘availability’ or ‘obscurity’ as barriers to change, may be reduced in ubiquity as we enter a phase where such cultural-national and temporal markers have been absorbed within, and questioned by, the conversations of cyber space. Such connections as there are between Shakespeare scholars and technology at present, however, insist upon a rather more sombre picture. We have not yet arrived at a place of free exchange and instant cinematic gratification; rather, we need to acknowledge issues of inconsistency and 232

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difficulty and to be cognizant of the mechanics and processes that impact on a particular film’s fortunes. The filmography to Shakespeare and World Cinema includes some titles that are commercially available, but the fact remains that many of the examples discussed or referenced in this study cannot be located via conventional means. There are, of course, specific conditions shaping a film’s appearance or disappearance in global media, which in turn facilitates reflection on the complexion of local film industries and existing systems of mass-market distribution. As Elena Oumano notes, ‘the costs of marketing a film can outstrip its entire production budget, and distribution is increasingly challenging’.4 If a title fails to attract a distributor, its future is uncertain; certainly, for films made in older formats, there is a host of attendant preservation problems, since standard acetate or nitrate stock is volatile and combustible and laboratories are in the habit of clearing out unwanted items. Many films, Oumano goes on, ‘debut at . . . festivals . . . in hopes of garnering enough . . . attention . . . to win a television and DVD audience, even without a theatrical release’.5 Even if a title is granted DVD exposure, the situation is not necessarily more secure; as Eve-Marie Oesterlen writes, ‘new productions are released while others are withdrawn, distributors go out of business or their products change hands’.6 There are no guarantees that a film that is made will finally end up being a film that can be acquired. I sketch these contexts so as to underscore the ways in which Shakespeare and world cinema products are potentially perishable commodities. Dictated to by ‘corporate . . . criteria . . . [and] the vagaries of globalization’s multiple incarnations’, Shakespeare films can all too often stumble at the first hurdle and quickly disappear from view.7 Two illustrations may serve. An Athens Summer Night’s Dream (dir. Dimitri Athanitis, 1999) is a Greek film that relies upon the dual premise of a blurring between life and art (a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream brings tensions between the characters into the open) and an ironic repatriation of a Shakespearean setting. The jokey dialogue is symptomatic of a more general irreverence and, indeed, throughout this frothy comedy, as part of its delineation of a theatre company in crisis, the film probes farcically opposed constructions of Shakespeare’s cultural reputation.8 Much more politically oriented is the first large-scale screen incarnation of Shakespeare in te reo (the Maori language), The Maori Merchant of Venice (dir. Don Selwyn, 2002), which draws extensively on Auckland settings and the interplay between native and colonial histories and influences.9 The film invites, according to Catherine Silverstone, a clear link between Hairoka/Shylock’s (Waihoroi Shortland) desire to have his ‘bond’ respected and contemporary attempts

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in New Zealand to ‘investigate and redress land claims’ in the wake of breaches of earlier agreements between settlers and the indigenous Maori population.10 Despite the range of responses to Shakespeare they embody, neither An Athens Summer Night’s Dream nor The Maori Merchant of Venice during their runs made a significant mark, and they stand as instances of Shakespeare and world cinema titles that may fade from memory when a search for their whereabouts is frustrated. Failing to capture with its mockery of bardolatry the zeitgeist or the tastes of the moment, An Athens Summer Night’s Dream was not widely seen, while, because of ongoing discussions between the director and the distributors, plans to disseminate the film in other formats are currently in limbo.11 Although The Maori Merchant of Venice was screened to an enthusiastic audience at the 2003 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Victoria, BC, and at other festivals, and has subsequently been gratifyingly reflected upon in some critical literature, the film did not move much beyond a circumscribed cultural circle.12 A long-awaited DVD edition has failed to materialize. Whether this is due to the death of the director, Don Selwyn, in 2007, or the transfer of the rights, it has not been possible to ascertain. As well as those films which, for whatever reason, never make it to DVD, there are others that never appear at all, such as an adaptation of Coriolanus, made within the context of local Indian politics, referred to in a recent interview by the ‘new’ or ‘alternative cinema’ director, Shyam Benegal.13 The chimerical nature of Shakespeare and world cinema is one of its most pressing challenges and, in the issues of access thrown up by films such as An Athens Summer Night’s Dream and The Maori Merchant of Venice we find confirmed some of the conclusions advanced in this study as a whole. If Shakespeare on film is now an established discipline, then the constituent parts of its necessary content have not been explored in any uniform or comprehensive fashion. Tracing the individual release careers of An Athens Summer Night’s Dream and The Maori Merchant of Venice, and investigating the circumstances of their fleeting visibility, point to the multiple significations of Shakespeare in the cinema in particular and in mass media more generally. Certainly, the relative anonymity of some films suggests fundamental variations in the universal cultural imprimatur with which Shakespeare is invariably associated. In the same way that Shakespeare is a fluctuating register of associations, so do filmmakers adopt complementary and competing attitudes towards his deployment as a spokesperson. His symbolic capital differs and modulates according to localized circumstances of production and dissemination, and the cinematic forms in which his language is

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transformed and revived reveal no one model for the transmission and commodification of words on the global scene. The passing material signatures of An Athens Summer Night’s Dream and The Maori Merchant of Venice foreground questions of access and accountability. Of the seventy-three Shakespeare and world cinema examples instanced or examined in this study, I have personally viewed every single film. This seemed essential to ensure a confident authorial voice; I was also keen to counter a tendency in some compilations of information where titles are listed with no viewing experience attached. In pursuit of acquiring copies of hard-to-find Shakespeare and world cinema titles, beginning with the film festivals, and tracing a moment of appearance, has been one method. Another has been going back to source, writing to or cold-calling producers and directors. I have tried saying ‘Good Morning’ in Malayalam, ‘Many apologies for bothering you’ in French, and ‘Thank you very much’ in Brazilian Portuguese (‘Muito obrigado’). Chasing an item, and wishing to pin down a particular director, I have eschewed the modern forms of communication and resorted to the old-fashioned telephone. I have had pleasant chats with proud and some less proud mothers-in-law. I have got to know some grandfathers. I have interrupted daily routines, dinner tables and more than one baby being put to bed. In short, and as the combined thanks and apologies recorded in the acknowledgements to this book suggest, I have made a complete nuisance of myself. Eager to secure one elusive DVD, I asked a visiting student – now a friend – to act as go-between in Hyderabad. In an extraordinary concatenation of coincidences, my friend realized that he and the son of the director I sought were both to feature in a local radio station broadcast; from this brief encounter a further meeting was set up and a time and place, for the handover of the film, agreed. As I waited for news of the outcome, I thought of the young man setting out for his assignation at Rangoon Villas. What did Rangoon Villas look like? Would the film, apparently a single original negative, have emerged from its hiding-place in a canister in a vault? How on earth would I repay this extraordinary kindness? In due course, a slim, plain-wrapped package arrived. This was only one of the many moments when, in the writing of this book, I became acutely self-conscious about the accidents of what is written about and what is not and about the implications of participation in the global traffic of cinema. In several instances the ‘how’ of acquisition, and the subscription to personal contact, has fortuitously led to a face-to-face interview, and it will be apparent from this book that one of its attendant methodologies is

236

Epilogue

the inclusion of the director’s voice as a route to analysis. But, in those exchanges between myself and the director, English has not always been the default position; translators and mediators have been used, and I am aware, for all I cite ‘original’ perspectives and aspirations, that other elements – filters and interpreters – have been part of the conversation. This is particularly the case with the films themselves. On more than one occasion a film arrived with me without subtitles and, where my own languages were insufficient (and they often were), I commissioned translations from graduate students or subtitles from professional language organizations. Introducing another language to a work which never inhabited an English manifestation places me in the role of the translator who, as Brenda Longfellow notes in a discussion of cinematic subtitles, enacts a ‘certain violence’ so as to present a ‘facsimile of intimacy’.14 As part of an effort to circumvent what is lost – and gained – through the subtitle, I have watched a number of the films discussed in Shakespeare and World Cinema with native speakers. I have wanted, where possible, to find out more about syntactic idiosyncrasies and archaic rhythms, knowing that there are indexicalities and vocalities that will have escaped me. Certainly, I have tried to treat the traversed texts of Shakespeare introduced here with a due regard to their entanglements. In the same way that some of my examples highlight issues of voice and authority, so have I been enjoined to recognize the parts we academics play in the increasingly diversified – yet still insufficiently global – world of Shakespearean studies. NOTES 1 Richard Burt, ed., Shakespeares after Shakespeare: an Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture, 2 vols. (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood, 2007). 2 See ‘International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio’, http://bufvc.ac.uk/shakespeare (accessed 4 February 2012). For a discussion, see Olwen Terris, ‘An International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio’, Shakespeare Survey, 64 (2011), 52–8. 3 See ‘Global Shakespeares’, http://globalshakespeares/org (accessed 4 February 2012). The resource is discussed in Alexander Huang, ‘Global Shakespeare 2.0 and the Task of the Performance Archive’, Shakespeare Survey, 64 (2011), 38–51. For Shakespeare and the online environment, see Christy Desmet, ‘Paying Attention in Shakespeare Parody: from Tom Stoppard to YouTube’, Shakespeare Survey, 61 (2008), 227–38; Lauren Shohet, ‘YouTube, Use, and the Idea of the Archive’, Shakespeare Studies, 38 (2010), 68–76. A general overview is

Epilogue

4

5 6

7 8

9

10

11 12

237

provided in ‘Shakespeare and New Media’, a special issue edited by Katherine Rowe of Shakespeare Quarterly, 61.3 (2010). Elena Oumano, Cinema Today: a Conversation with Thirty-Nine Filmmakers from around the World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), p. 148. Ibid., p. xi. Eve-Marie Oesterlen, ‘Guide to Distributors and Retailers’, in Olwen Terris, Eve-Marie Oesterlen and Luke McKernan, eds., Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio: the Researcher’s Guide (London: British Universities Film and Video Funding Council, 2009), p. 205. Mark Thornton Burnett, Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), p. 164. When Marianna/Titania (Marianna Kalbari) instructs the director, Akis/ Oberon (Christos Solomos), to cut a number of scenes, he explodes, ‘What are you talking about? This is Shakespeare!’, only to be silenced with the rejoinder, ‘Shakespeare died four hundred years ago: he won’t come asking for explanations.’ Belmont is discovered in terms of indigenous costumes, practices and artefacts, such as elaborate wooden figures, feather cloaks and a formalized karanga (welcome) and wero (challenge) at the arrival of Portia/Pohia’s (Ngarimu Daniels) suitors. Catherine Silverstone, Shakespeare, Trauma and Contemporary Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 71. In this regard, it is perhaps not surprising that the film should open with the (displaced) scene of Shylock/Hairoka’s ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ peroration, that it should feature an interpolated sequence in a gallery in the Venetian market in which the contemporary painter, Selwyn Muru, is seen completing a canvass entitled Holocaust, and in which the final moment should belong to Jessica/Tiehika (Reikura Morgan), who is given the words, ‘if my fortune be not crossed, / I have a father, you a daughter lost’ (The Merchant of Venice, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus [New York: W. W. Norton, 1997], 3.1.49–50, 2.5.54–5). Interview between Dimitri Athanitis and Mark Thornton Burnett, 30 April 2009. The Shakespeare Association of America showing and film are discussed in Kenneth S. Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen: a Century of Film and Television, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 272. Other critical reflections include: Mark Houlahan, ‘Hekepia? The Mana of the Maori Merchant’, in Sonia Massai, ed., World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 141–8; MacDonald Jackson, ‘All Our Tribe: The Maori Merchant of Venice’, in Krystyna Kujawin´ska Courtney and R. S. White, eds., Shakespeare’s Local Habitations (Ło´dz´ University Press, 2007), pp. 165–75; Valerie Wayne, review of Te Tangata Whai Rawa o Weniti, The Maori Merchant of

238

Epilogue

Venice, Contemporary Pacific, 16.2 (2004), 425–9; and Houston Wood, Native Features: Indigenous Films from Around the World (New York and London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 94, 161–9. 13 Interview between Shyam Benegal and Mark Thornton Burnett, 2 November 2010. 14 Brenda Longfellow, ‘The Great Dance: Translating the Foreign in Ethnographic Film’, in Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour, eds., Subtitles: on the Foreignness of Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 343.

Filmography

The filmography of Shakespeare and world cinema titles that follows identifies the play or plays to which a particular film relates, the language or languages, and the country or city-state of origin. Where there is a significant co-production element, this has been noted.

Title

Play

Language

Country/ city-state

Amar Te Duele/Love Hurts (dir. Fernando Sarin˜ana, 2002) Angoor (dir. Gulzar, 1981)

Romeo and Juliet

Spanish

Mexico

The Comedy of Errors A Midsummer Night’s Dream Romeo and Juliet The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Hindi

India

French

France

Danish

Denmark

Portuguese

Brazil

Greek

Greece

Hamlet

Mandarin

China

Othello and The Taming of the Shrew

English, German, Hungarian, Romanian and Spanish Cantonese and English French

Germany, Hungary, Romania and UK

L’Appartement (dir. Gilles Mimouni, 1995) Arven/The Inheritance (dir. Per Fly, 2004) As Alegres Comadres (dir. Leila Hipo´lito, 2003) An Athens Summer Night’s Dream (dir. Dimitri Athanitis, 1999) The Banquet (dir. Xiaogang Feng, 2006) Bibliothe`que Pascale (dir. Szabolcs Hajdu, 2009) Chicken Rice War (dir. Chee Kong Cheah, 2000) Conte d’hiver/A Tale of Winter (dir. Eric Rohmer, 1992)

Romeo and Juliet The Winter’s Tale

239

Singapore France

Filmography

240 (cont.) Title

Play

Language

Country/ city-state

Didi, O Cupido Trapalha˜o/Didi, the Goofy Cupid (dir. Paulo Araga˜o and Alexandre Boury, 2003) Dil Bole Hadippa! (dir. Anurag Singh, 2009) 8 pa¨iva¨a¨ ensi-iltaan/8 Days to Premiere (dir. Perttu Leppa¨, 2008) Eklavya (dir. Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 2006) Era Uma Vez/Once Upon a Time (dir. Breno Silveira, 2008) Fat Stupid Rabbit (dir. Slava Ross, 2006) The Frivolous Wife (dir. Won-kuk Lim, 2008) Gedebe (dir. Nam Ron, 2002) Go! (dir. Yukisada Isao, 2001) Le Grand Roˆle (dir. Steve Suissa, 2004) Gunasundari Katha (dir. Kadiri Venkata Reddy, 1949) Hamlet (dir. Aleksandar Rajkovic´, 2007) Hamlet Goes Business (dir. Aki Kaurisma¨ki, 1987) Hobak Nar/Loving You is Hard (dir. Ihab Radhi, 2004) Huapango (dir. Iva´n Lipkies, 2004) Iago (dir. Volfango de Biasi, 2009) In Othello (dir. Roysten Abel, 2003) Istakoza/Lobsters (dir. Inas al-Degheidy, 1996)

Romeo and Juliet

Portuguese

Brazil

Twelfth Night

Hindi

India

Romeo and Juliet

Finnish

Finland

Macbeth

Hindi

India

Romeo and Juliet

Portuguese

Brazil

Hamlet

Russian

Russia

The Taming of the Shrew Julius Caesar

Korean

Korea

Kelantanese

Malaysia

Romeo and Juliet The Merchant of Venice King Lear

Japanese

Japan

French

France

Telegu

India

Hamlet

Romany

Serbia

Hamlet

Finnish

Finland

Romeo and Juliet

Arabic

Egypt

Othello

Spanish

Mexico

Othello

Italian

Italy

Othello

Assamese, English and Hindi Arabic

India

The Taming of the Shrew

Egypt

Filmography

241

(cont.) Country/ city-state

Title

Play

Language

Jarum Halus (dir. Mark Tan, 2008) Je rentre a` la maison/I’m Going Home (dir. Manoel de Oliveira, 2003) Josh (dir. Mansoor Khan, 2000) Julie et Rome´o (dir. Boubakar Diallo, 2011) Just Heroes (dir. John Woo, 1987) Kaliyattam (dir. Jayaraaj Rajasekharan Nair, 1997) Kanenas/Nobody (dir. Christos Nikoleris, 2010) Kannaki (dir. Jayaraaj Rajasekharan Nair, 2002) Kebab Connection (dir. Anno Saul, 2004) Le lait de la tendresse humaine (dir. Dominique Cabrera, 2001) Macbeth (dir. Bo Landin and Alex Sherpf, 2004) Macbeth (dir. Pauli Pentii, 1987) Makibefo (dir. Alexander Abela, 1999) The Maori Merchant of Venice (dir. Don Selwyn, 2002) Maqbool (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2004) Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor/Mare´, Another Love Story (dir. Lu´cia Murat, 2008) A Midsummer Okinawan Dream (dir. Yuji Nakae, 2009) The Midwinter Night’s Dream (dir. Goran Paskaljevic´, 2004)

Othello

Bahasa Malaysia and English French

Malaysia

Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet King Lear

Hindi

India

French

Burkina Faso

Cantonese

Hong Kong

Othello

Malayalam

India

Romeo and Juliet

Albanian, Greek and Russian

Greece

Antony and Cleopatra Romeo and Juliet Macbeth

Malayalam

India

German, Greek and Turkish French

Germany France

Macbeth

Sa´mi

Sweden

Macbeth

Finnish

Finland

Macbeth

Malagasy

The Merchant of Venice

Maori

France and Madagascar New Zealand

Macbeth

Hindi and Urdu

India

Romeo and Juliet

Portuguese

Brazil

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Japanese and Okinawan

Japan

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Serbian

Serbia

The Tempest

France

Filmography

242 (cont.) Title

Play

Language

Country/ city-state

Nanjundi Kalyana (dir. M. S. Rajashekar, 1989) 1942: A Love Story (dir. Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 1994) Oldboy (dir. Chan-wook Park, 2003) Omkara (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2006) One Husband Too Many (dir. Anthony Chan, 1988) The Phantom Lover (dir. Ronnie Yu, 1995) Prince of the Himalayas (dir. Sherwood Hu, 2006) Qayamat se Qayamat Tak (dir. Mansoor Khan, 1988) Rami og Julie (dir. Erik Klausen, 1988) Rendez-vous (dir. Andre´ Te´chine´, 1985) Romani Kris: Ciga´nyto¨rve´ny/Gypsy Lore (dir. Bence Gyo¨ngyo¨ssy, 1997) Rome´o et Juliette (dir. Yves Desgagne´s, 2006) Romeo Juliet (dir. Andibachtiar Yusuf, 2009)

The Taming of the Shrew

Kannada

India

Romeo and Juliet

Hindi

India

Titus Andronicus Othello

Korean

Korea

Hindi

India

Romeo and Juliet

Cantonese

Hong Kong

Romeo and Juliet Hamlet

Cantonese

Hong Kong

Tibetan

China

Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet King Lear

Hindi

India

Danish

Denmark

French

France

German and Hungarian

Bulgaria, Germany and Hungary

Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet

French

Canada

Baha Indonesia and Baha Sundanese Spanish

Indonesia

The Merchant of Venice Macbeth

Dutch

The Netherlands

Arabic and English

Germany and Yemen

Othello

French and Malagasy Russian

France and Madagascar Russia

Sangrador (dir. Leonardo Henrı´quez, 2000) Shylock (dir. Michal Shabtay, 2008) Someone is Sleeping in My Pain (dir. Michael Roes, 2001) Souli (dir. Alexander Abela, 2004) The Story of Richard, Milord and the Fine Firebird (dir. Nino Akhvlediani, 1997)

Macbeth

Richard III

Venezuela

Filmography

243

(cont.) Title

Play

Language

Country/ city-state

Sud Side Stori (dir. Roberta Torre, 2000) Throne of Blood (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1957) A Time to Love (dir. Jianqi Huo, 2005) Trouble Couples (dir. Eric Tsang, 1987) uGugu no Andile/Gugu and Andile (dir. Minky Schlesinger, 2008) Ulysses’ Gaze (dir. Theo Angelopoulos, 1995)

Romeo and Juliet Macbeth

Italian

Italy

Japanese

Japan

Romeo and Juliet The Taming of the Shrew Romeo and Juliet

Mandarin

China

Cantonese

Hong Kong

English, isiXhosa and isiZulu

South Africa

Romeo and Juliet

Valentı´n (dir. Juan Luis Iborra, 2003)

Antony and Cleopatra, Othello and Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet

Albanian, Bulgarian, English, Greek, Romanian and Serbian Spanish

Albania, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Romania and UK Spain

Japanese

Japan

Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet

Hindi

Canada and India

Swedish

Sweden

Macbeth

Telangana

India

Warai no daigaku/ University of Laughs (dir. Mamori Hoshi, 2004) Water (dir. Deepa Mehta, 2005) Wellka˚mm to Verona/ Welcome to Verona (dir. Suzanne Osten, 2006) Yellamma (dir. Mohan Koda, 1999)

244

Filmography other films, documentaries and television broadcasts are as follows:

Amores Perros (dir. Alejandro Gonzales In˜a´rritu, 2000). Bandit Queen (dir. Shekhar Kapur, 1994). Beyond Limits 3D (dir. Alexander Abela, 2009). The Children’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (dir. Christine Edzard, 2001). Cidade de Deus (dir. Fernando Meirelles and Ka´tia Lund, 2002). Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (dir. Ang Lee, 2000). Elizabeth (dir. Shekhar Kapur, 1998). Get Over It (dir. Tommy O’Haver, 2003). The Godfather (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1972). Hamlet (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 1997). Hero (dir. Yimou Zhang, 2002). House of Flying Daggers (dir. Yimou Zhang, 2004). It’s All True (dir. Orson Welles, 1942). Love Is All There Is (dir. Joseph Bologna and Rene´e Taylor, 1996). Madagascar (dir. Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath, 2005). Medea (dir. Pier-Paolo Pasolini, 1969). Much Ado About Nothing (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 1993). Nanook of the North (dir. Robert Flaherty, 1922). Pizza My Heart (dir. Andy Wolk, 2005). Prospero’s Books (dir. Peter Greenaway, 1991). Pulp Fiction (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 1994). Rules of Engagement (dir. William Friedkin, 2000). Shakespeare on the Estate (dir. Penny Woolcock; BBC2, 27 October 1994). She’s the Man (dir. Andy Fickman, 2006). Tabu (dir. F. W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty, 1931). Ten Things I Hate About You (dir. Gil Junger, 1999). Unreported World: Venezuela, Cult of the Thugs (dir. James Brabazon; Channel 4, 21 November 2008). West Bank Story (dir. Ari Sandel, 2005). West Side Story (dir. Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, 1961). William Shakespeare’s Romeo þ Juliet (dir. Baz Luhrmann, 1996). Y tu mama´ tambie´n (dir. Alfonso Cuaro´n, 2001). Zarafa (dir. Re´mi Bezanc¸on and Jean-Christophe Lei, 2012).

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Index

In the index that follows page numbers in bold type indicate major discussions of a widely discussed topic and page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Abela, Alexander, 5, 23–49 adaptation, 4–5 Adelman, Janet, 68 African oral traditions, 33–5 Albanians, 201 Alexandria, 207, 209, 224 Alker, Sharon, 188 Allatson, Paul, 107 altered endings, 223–6 Alvaray, Luisela, 118 Amar Te Duele, 200, 212 Anand, Dibyesh, 140 Anderegg, Michael, 2 Andes, 95, 103 Andhra Pradesh, 164, 165, 172 Andrew, Dudley, 6, 44, 49 Ankle Bracelet, The (Tamil epic), 71 Antony and Cleopatra (play), 67–8, 71–2 Appadurai, Arjun, 202, 210 appropriation, 4–5 archetypal scenes, 212–14 Arctic Circle, 180–8 As Alegres Comadres, 89–119, 93–4, 106–7, 110–11, 113–16 Asch, Timothy, 48 Athens, 202, 224 Athens Summer Night’s Dream, An, 233–5 auteurs, 10, 23–49, 55–82 availability of films, 26, 49, 232–6 ballet folklo´rico, 106, 107, 110 Bandit Queen, 81 Banquet, The, 125–54, 128–9, 131–2, 134, 136, 147–8, 149–50 Bardic representations, evolving, 47–8, 58, 91 Barnstone, Willis, 164 Bassnett, Susan, 164 Baudrillard, Jean, 220

Bauman, Zygmunt, 43 Beck, Ulrich, 36, 226 Benegal, Shyam, 234 Benko, Jessica, 183 Berry, Christopher, 147, 152 bestial manifestations, 100–3 Bhabha, Homi K., 39, 42 Bhardwaj, Vishal, 5, 55–67, 77–82 Bharucha, Rustom, 43, 59, 165 black-and-white cinematography, 27, 95, 174 blackface, 91, 115, 118 Bollywood, 55, 62, 65, 205, 206, 216, 217 books, importance of, 217–18 Bowles, Paul, 6 Braidotti, Rosi, 46 Branagh, Kenneth, 47 Brazil, 93–4, 96–8, 106, 110–11, 116, 197, 201, 220 British Universities Film and Video Council, 232 Buddhism, 141, 150–1, 153 Buhler, Stephen M., 171 Burkina Faso, 207 Burt, Richard, 58, 195, 219, 232 Butler, Judith, 224 Calbi, Maurizio, 216, 223 capitalism, 35–6, 144, 147 Carlson, Marvin, 186 carnival, 110–11 Carr, Robert, 42 caste, 59, 69, 73, 79–81, 206. See also race Castles, Stephen, 37 Castro-Go´mez, Santiago, 113 Catholicism, 105, 208 Cham, Mbye, 34 Chandran, T. V., 67 character types, 208–12 Charnes, Linda, 150

268

Index Chaudhuri, Shohini, 55, 127, 206 Chaudhuri, Sukanta, 12 Cha´vez, Hugo, 112 Chicken Rice War, 126–39, 146–7, 152–4 Children’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, The, 48 Chinese–Tibetan relations, 12, 140, 143–4, 153 Chong, Natividad Gutie´rrez, 106 Chow, Rey, 195 conflict, 197, 198–207 consumerism, 195 Covarrubias, Luis, 96 Covell, Maureen, 37 Craske, Nikki, 106 Cronin, Michael, 176 cuckoldry, 101 cultural convergence, 70–2 cultural value, 118 Daileader, Celia R., 214 dance, 106, 200, 216. See also Bollywood; huapango fandango; teyyam Danie´lou, Alain, 77 Dawson, Anthony, 163 De Groot, Jerome, 93 Delabastita, Dirk, 42 Derrida, Jacques, 210 Desser, David, 219 Diallo, Boubakar, 226, 227 Dick, Bernard F., 68 Dinneen, Mark, 103 Dissanayake, Wimal, 76, 172, 205 Dobson, Michael, 220 Donnan, Hastings, 29 Dresch, Paul, 173 Dudrah, Rajinder Kumar, 71 Dunn, Kevin C., 144 Dwyer, Rachel, 167 economic value, 118 economics, 98 Egypt, 68, 74, 206 8 Days to Premiere. See 8 pa¨iva¨a¨ ensi-iltaan 8 pa¨iva¨a¨ ensi-iltaan, 218, 220, 224, 225 Elena, Alberto, 55 English-language bias, 2 Era Uma Vez, 201, 221 ethnicity, 24, 26–32, 91, 113–16 Faith, Holly, 188 family, 62–3, 126, 152, 172 fathers, 206–7 mothers, 168–70 Farley, Jonathan, 198 Farquhar, Mary, 147 Feng, Xiaogang, 154

Fernandez, M. Sylvia, 144 Fernando, Jeremy, 137 film festivals, 26, 56, 118, 233, 234, 235 Fineman, Joel, 131 French, Patrick, 143 Fu, Poshek, 219 Galt, Rosalind, 189 Garber, Marjorie, 213 Gedebe, 126–8, 129–30, 137, 144–6, 152–4 Geertz, Clifford, 72 Giddens, Anthony, 37 ‘global art cinema’, 189 global availability of films, 26, 49, 232–6 ‘Global Shakespeares’, 232 Go!, 204, 214–15, 224 Godfather, The, 61 Gokulsing, K. Moti, 76 Goldberg, Jonathan, 209 ‘Golden Triangle’, 26 Goss, Brian Michael, 81 Gossett, Suzanne, 1 Greece, 215 Greenblatt, Stephen, 131 Greer, Michael, 2 Grewal, Inderpal, 2 griauteur, 33 Griffin, Eric, 113 griot, 33–4 Gugu and Andile. See uGugu no Andile Gulzar, 64 Guneratne, Anthony R., 61 Hadfield, Andrew, 146 Hafez, Sabry, 175 Halle, Randall, 180 Hamburg, 204, 223 Hamlet, 47, 125 Hamlet (play), 8, 125–54 Hand, Molly, 149 Hannerz, Ulf, 37 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 4 Healey, Thomas, 48 Helsinki, 218 Henrı´quez, Leonardo, 102, 117 Higson, Andrew, 94 Himalayas, 140–4 Hindu religion, 66, 67, 167, 172 Hinz, Philipp, 61 Hipo´lito, Leila, 93, 106, 117 Hobak Nar, 206, 209, 210, 213, 223 Hodgdon, Barbara, 186 Hogan, Patrick, 73 Høje Taastrup, Copenhagen, 202

269

270

Index

Hong Kong, 218 honour, 173 Hu, Sherwood, 153 Huang, Alexander C. Y., 12, 126, 152 Huapango, 89–119, 95–6 huapango fandango dance, 96 Huasteca, Mexico, 95, 103, 107 Ice Globe Theatre, 180–1, 186 Ice Hotel, 180, 186, 187 immigration, 201–2. See also race inconsistent names, 26 Indian cinema, 55–7, 58, 61–2 Indian Rebellion, 166 ‘International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio’, 232 Internet Movie Database, 2 Jackson, Russell, 47 Jameson, Fredric, 5 Jangbu (Chenaktshang Dorje Tsering), 12, 126, 149, 150 Japan, 163, 204, 214, 219, 224 Japanese Noh theatre, 163 Jayaraaj (Rajasekharan Nair), 5, 56–8, 67–76, 77–82 Jess-Cooke, Carolyn, 79 Jørholt, Eva, 207 Julie et Rome´o, 207, 210, 211, 225 Julius Caesar (play), 127, 129–30, 144–6 Kadhaprasangam (storytelling), 71 Kahn, Coppe´lia, 72 Kaliyattam, 67, 74, 76 Kamaralli, Anna, 218 Kanenas, 201, 203, 215, 224 Kannaki, 67–8, 71–2, 74–6, 77 Kaori, Kobayashi, 204 Kaplan, Caren, 2 Karimnagar, 166 Kausani, 205 Kebab Connection, 204, 205, 217, 223 Kennedy, Dennis, 8, 37, 40 Kerala, 56, 67, 68, 81 Kidnie, Margaret Jane, 3 Klausen, Eric, 202 Klein, Herbert S., 201 Koda, Mohan, 166 Koreans, 204, 215 Kuala Lumpur, 127, 144 Kurosawa, Akira, 163, 165, 171, 188 Lahav, Gallya, 37 Landin, Bo, 180, 183 Lee, Adele, 218

Lefevere, Andre´, 164 Leggatt, Alexander, 149 Lehmann, Courtney, 25, 115, 132, 217 Leppa¨, Perttu, 218, 224 Lim, Chee Seng, 12 linguistic hierarchies, 42 linguistic pluralities, 137–9 Lipkies, Iva´n, 117 local actors, 24, 40, 174 Logan, Sandra, 108 Longfellow, Brenda, 236 Loomba, Ania, 69, 79 Lopez, Yvette, 109 Love Hurts. See Amar Te Duele Loving You is Hard. See Hobak Nar Luna, Francisco Vidal, 201 Ma, Sheng-mei, 139 Macbeth, 164–5, 180–8, 188–9 Macbeth (play), 5, 163–89. See also individual film titles MacCabe, Colin, 5 Mack, John, 27, 38, 41 Madagascar, 24, 27, 30, 40–7, 48, 49 Makibefo, 23–49 Malaysia, 137, 144–5 Maori Merchant of Venice, The, 233–5 Maqbool, 58–67, 61–2, 65–6, 78–9, 80 Mare´, Another Love Story. See Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor Mare´, Nossa Historia de Amor, 197, 198–200, 208, 216, 220 Marianismo, 104 masculinity, 72, 108–10 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 232 Maule, Rosanna, 44 McLoughlin, Sea´n, 38 Melhuus, Marit, 8, 109 Me´rida, 95 Merry Wives of Windsor, The (play), 90, 94, 117 Messina, Anthony M., 37 metafilmic, 135–6 metatheatrical, 134 Mexican–American relations, 108 Mexico, 95, 98, 107–10, 113 Mexico City, 200 Middle East–US relations, 179–80 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (play), 8, 233 Mignolo, Walter D., 7 Minas Gerais, 93–4 Mishra, Vijay, 55, 76 modernization, 128 Mollywood, 55 Montreal, 201, 216 Morris, Stephen D., 98

Index Much Ado About Nothing, 93, 115 Mughal empire, 61 multiculturalism, 138, 202–4 Mumbai, 58, 62, 79 Muraleedharan, T., 83 Murat, Lu´cia, 208, 216 Murphy, David, 33 music aesthetic, 59, 103, 114 cross-cultural, 45, 117, 138, 176 to progress plot, 127, 135 thematic, 109, 183, 199, 208, 216–17 Muslim tradition, 174–5 Nambiar, Sita K., 67 names, inconsistency of, 26 Nanook of the North, 43 Needham, Gary, 11 New Zealand, 233 Nigerians, 202, 220, 223 1942: A Love Story, 205, 219 Nobody. See Kanenas nomenclature, 61, 113, 214–16 No´s do Morro theatre, 221 nostalgia, 63, 93–4, 205 Oesterlen, Eve-Marie, 233 Omkara, 56–67, 59–60, 63–5, 66–7, 77–82 Once Upon a Time. See Era Uma Vez One Husband Too Many, 218–19 Ong, Aihwa, 32 Othello (play), 5. See also individual film titles otherness, 12, 32–9, 75, 174 Ouagadougou, 207 Oumano, Elena, 233 Palermo, 202, 213 Parker, Barbara, 146 patriarchs, 206–7 Pauwels, Heidi, 56 Pidduck, Julianne, 106 Pietika¨inen, Sari, 181, 187 politics of location, 81 postcolonial studies, 89 postcolonialism, 34–6, 91, 152 Pottan Daivam, 73 Prince of the Himalayas, 12, 125–8, 130–1, 140–4, 148–51, 152–4 prologue, 136, 198, 204, 208–9 prophecy, 65–7, 167–8 Prospero’s Books, 47 Pulp Fiction, 61 Qayamat se Qayamat Tak, 206 quotation, 214–16, 222

271

race, 113–16, 201–4 Raghavendra, M. K., 206 Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, 166 Rami og Julie, 202, 208, 209, 223 religious transformations, 103–5 Resende, Aimara da Cunha, 91 Richards, Keith, 25, 43, 165 Rinpoche, Sogyal, 143 Rio de Janeiro, 198–200, 201, 221 Roes, Michael, 173, 176, 180 Romeo and Juliet (play), 9, 132–4, 195–227 Rome´o et Juliette, 201, 209, 210, 212, 213, 216, 222 Rostas, Susanna, 106 Rouse, Roger, 38 Royster, Francesca T., 68 Russians, 201, 215 Sakai, Naoki, 42 Sa´mi, 181–5, 187 Sanders, Julie, 4 Sangrador, 89–92, 95, 98, 99, 101–5, 112–13, 116–19 Santos, Rick J., 91 Scherpf, Alex, 180, 183 Schlesinger, Minky, 217, 227 Schoonover, Karl, 189 Sembe`ne, Ousmane, 33 Semenza, Greg Colo´n, 2 ‘Sepoy Mutiny’, 166 Shakespeare as a global icon, 1 Shakespeare Association of America, 1, 155, 234 Shakespeare on the Estate, 48 Shakespeare representations, evolving, 47–8, 58, 91 ‘Shakespeare: Staging the World’, 1 Shakespeares after Shakespeare (book), 232 Shaw, Deborah, 92 Shilappadikaram (Tamil epic), 71 Simpson, Andrew, 138 Singapore, 126, 128, 132, 138, 147 Singapore Film Commission, 126 Singlish, 137 Sinha, Amresh, 42 Skidmore, Thomas E., 107 slavery, 113, 114, 145 Smith, Andrea´, ix, 174, 178 Smith, Bruce R., 216 Smith, Gay, 179 Smith, Peter H., 107 social class, 199–201 Someone is Sleeping in My Pain, 164–5, 172–80, 188–9 Souli, 24–49 South Africa, 198, 217, 225 Southall, Aidan, 32

272 Stam, Robert, 24, 111, 116 status, 73 Stølen, Kristi Anne, 8 subtitles, 41–3, 137, 176 Sud Side Stori, 202, 208, 213, 216, 220, 222, 223 surrealism, 102 Suzuki, Erin, 163 Tamaulipas, Mexico, 95, 107 Tan, See Kam, 137 teyyam, 67, 69–70, 73–4, 76 theyyatam. See teyyam Thokoza, Johannesburg, 198 Thompson, Ayanna, 115, 174 Throne of Blood, 163, 171, 188 Tibet, 12, 140–4, 150–1 Time to Love, A, 195–6, 223 Tiradentes, 93–4, 114 Tollywood, 55, 166 tragedy, 222–6 transformative political forces, 165 translation, 4–5 Trashidawa, 12, 126, 144 ‘travel cinema’, 43 Trivedi, Poonam, 77, 79 Trocki, Carl A., 132 uGugu no Andile, 198, 199, 209, 210, 213, 217, 220, 224 University of Laughs. See Warai no daigaku Uttar Pradesh, 56, 59, 81 vanity, 169 Vaughan, Virginia Mason, 115 Velasco, Marı´a Elena, 108

Index Veltmeyer, Henry, 6 Venezuela, 95, 103, 104, 112–13 Venturino, Steven J., 144 Vieira, Joa˜o Luiz, 221 Waines, David, 65 Wall, Wendy, 94 Warai no daigaku, 219 Warangal, 166 Water, 214, 215 Watson, Paul, 64 West Side Story, 198, 202 Widdicombe, Toby, 2 William Shakespeare’s Romeo þ Juliet, 135, 196, 206, 209 Williams, Linda, 114 Williams, Patrick, 33 Wilson, Thomas M., 29 women female agency, 106, 126, 128, 150 gendered identities, 146–51 Lady Macbeth, 30, 169–70 place in local economy, 30 prominent roles in film, 32 removed from story, 146 as symbol of national unity, 106 world cinema, definition of, 3 Wray, Ramona, 26 Xu, Gary G., 139 Yellamma, 164–72, 165–72, 188–9 Yemen, 173–80 Yong, Li Lan, 8, 135, 137 Zimmerman, Susan, 129