Welles, Kurosawa, Kozintsev, Zeffirelli: Great Shakespeareans: Volume XVII 9781472555564, 9781441150721

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Series Editors’ Preface

What is a ‘Great Shakespearean’? Who are the ‘Great Shakespeareans’? This series is designed to explore those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. Charting the effect of Shakespeare on cultures local, national and international is a never- ending task, as we continually modulate and understand differently the ways in which each culture is formed and altered. Great Shakespeareans uses as its focus individuals whose own cultural impact has been and continues to be powerful. One of its aims is to widen the sense of who constitute the most important figures in our understanding of Shakespeare’s afterlives. The list is therefore not restricted to, say, actors and scholars, as if the performance of and commentary on Shakespeare’s works were the only means by which his impact is remade or extended. There are actors aplenty (like Garrick, Irving and Olivier) and scholars too (Bradley, Greg and Empson) but our list deliberately includes as many novelists (Dickens, Melville, Joyce), poets (Keats, Eliot, Berryman), playwrights (Brecht, Beckett, Césaire) and composers (Berlioz, Verdi and Britten), as well as thinkers whose work seems impossible without Shakespeare and whose influence on our world has been profound, like Marx and Freud. Deciding who to include has been less difficult than deciding who to exclude. We have a long list of individuals for whom we would wish to have found a place but whose inclusion would have meant someone else’s exclusion. We took long and hard looks at the volumes as they were shaped by our own and our volume editors’ perceptions. We have numerous regrets over some outstanding figures who ended up just outside this project. There will, no doubt, be argument on this score. Some may find our choices too Anglophone, insufficiently global. Others may complain of the lack of contemporary scholars and critics. But this is not a project designed to establish a new canon, nor are our volumes intended to be encyclopedic in scope. The series is not entitled ‘The Greatest Shakespeareans’ nor is it ‘Some Great Shakespeareans’, but it will, we hope,

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be seen as negotiating and occupying a space mid-way along the spectrum of inclusivity and arbitrariness. Our contributors have been asked to describe the double impact of Shakespeare on their particular figure and of their figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, as well as providing a sketch of their subject’s intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider context within which her/his work might be understood. This ‘context’ will vary widely from case to case and, at times, a single ‘Great Shakespearean’ is asked to stand as a way of grasping a large domain. In the case of Britten, for example, he is the window through which other composers and works in the English musical tradition like Vaughan Williams, Walton and Tippett have a place. So, too, Dryden has been the means for considering the beginnings of critical analysis of the plays as well as of the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays influenced Dryden’s own practice. To enable our contributors to achieve what we have asked of them, we have taken the unusual step of enabling them to write at length. Our volumes do not contain brief entries of the kind that a Shakespeare Encyclopedia would include nor the standard article length of academic journals and Shakespeare Companions. With no more than four Great Shakespeareans per volume – and as few as two in the case of volume 10 – our contributors have space to present their figures more substantially and, we trust, more engagingly. Each volume has a brief introduction by the volume editor and a section of further reading. We hope the volumes will appeal to those who already know the accomplishment of a particular Great Shakespearean and to those trying to find a way into seeing how Shakespeare has affected a particular poet as well as how that poet has changed forever our appreciation of Shakespeare. Above all, we hope Great Shakespeareans will help our readers to think afresh about what Shakespeare has meant to our cultures, and about how and why, in such differing ways across the globe and across the last four centuries and more, they have changed what his writing has meant. Peter Holland and Adrian Poole

Acknowledgements

We are immeasurably grateful to the series editors, Peter Holland and Adrian Poole, for their patience and forbearance as well as for their generous critical counsel. We would also like to thank Margaret Bartley, our editor at Bloomsbury, for her enthusiasm and sterling editorial acumen. Materials from the Orson Welles Manuscripts are reproduced courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. An earlier incarnation of part of the discussion of Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well was published in the journal, Shakespeare, 9.4 (2013), and we are indebted to Taylor and Francis/Routledge for permission to reproduce an amended version of that material.

A Note on References

For quotations from Shakespeare’s works, we have used The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997). Quotations from King Lear are taken from the Norton ‘Conflated Text’.

Notes on Contributors

Mark Thornton Burnett 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 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007; 2nd edn 2012) and Shakespeare and World Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Courtney Lehmann is Professor of English at University of the Pacific. She is the author of Shakespeare Remains: Theatre to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002) and Screen Adaptations: Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (London: A & C Black, 2010) and the co-editor of Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema (Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002) and The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory (Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002). Marguerite H. Rippy is Professor of English at Marymount University. She is the author of Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009) and of numerous essays on Orson Welles, adaptations of Shakespeare, gender and race theory, and performances of female sexuality. Ramona Wray is Reader in English at Queen’s University, Belfast. She is the author of Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century (Plymouth: Northcote House, 2004), the editor of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, Arden Early Modern Drama (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012) and the co-editor of Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First

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Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) and The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).

Introduction Mark Thornton Burnett

The ‘Great Shakespeareans’ discussed in this book – Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Grigori Kozintsev and Franco Zeffirelli – are themselves bywords for Shakespearean cinematic production. Of the many Shakespeare films produced by the four, all have stood the test of time. Films such as Macbeth (dir. Orson Welles, 1948), Throne of Blood (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1957), Korol Lir (dir. Grigori Kozintsev, 1971) and Hamlet (dir. Franco Zeffirelli, 1990), to name but some of those examined in what follows, are taught on college and university courses across the world, and they invariably represent an early port of call for any engagement with the fortunes of Shakespeare’s plays on screen. It is also the case that the films have coincided with some of the major developments in the translation of Shakespeare to the cinematic medium and with key moments in the development of Shakespeare on film as a discipline in its own right. In that sense, the four figures we investigate can all stake a legitimate claim to have transformed interpretative approaches to Shakespeare, and it is a measure of their success that their creations continue to be watched, debated and appreciated. When assembled together, as they are here, an immediate question is the degree of interconnection obtaining between the four directors. To what extent were these four ‘Great Shakespeareans’ aware of each other, and how did such knowledge reveal itself in cross-reference and cross-fertilization? As the ensuing chapters indicate, there were some direct points of contact. According to his writings on Shakespeare, Kozintsev enjoyed many conversations with Kurosawa about a love of Shakespeare, art and culture (Kozintsev, 1977, 12), with the Russian director responding enthusiastically to his Japanese counterpart’s capacity for melding ‘plastic images’ onto ‘tragic poetry’ in such a way that ‘ancient traditions’ (Kozintsev, 1966, 30–31) of theatre are clearly invoked. Nor did the process operate only in one direction. At the close of Ran (1985), Kurosawa’s adaptation of King Lear, the Fool figure remains alive to berate the gods rather in the manner of the comparable Fool figure in the final scenes of Kozintsev’s Korol Lir (1971), whom we glimpse playing a melancholy air on a flute:

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the borrowing can only be judged an act of homage from one director to another. Welles’ final completed Shakespearean work, Filming Othello (1978), does not instance fellow Shakespeareans Kozintsev, Kurosawa and Zeffirelli specifically, but it is revealing for its postmodern reflections on issues of self-representation, the role of the auteur and genre, displaying sensitivity to the means whereby Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted for celluloid. In his reflections on his career, notably in his autobiography, Zeffirelli likewise, with the exception of Laurence Olivier, mentions few of his Shakespearean cinematic peers, although it is clear that the Italian director was energized by, and alluded to, the work of other film-makers. To cite but one instance, in the image of the drunkard displayed in a cage at the start of Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew (1967) one finds an echo of the comparable incarceration of Iago in Welles’ Othello (1952), suggesting a self-conscious meditation on the visuals of that earlier undertaking. Yet interrelations between Welles, Kurosawa, Kozintsev and Zeffirelli did not always take the form of emulation, and this grouping is as interesting for what was declined as what may have been imitated. For example, wishing to ‘do something with Shakespeare’s Macbeth’, but hearing that ‘Welles’ version’ was about to be released, Kurosawa decided to ‘postpone’ (Richie, 1998, 115) his own film, and it was only many years afterwards that he decided to watch Welles’ screen interpretation of the tragedy (Cardullo, 2008, 14). More assertive still in eschewing the models offered by his contemporaries, Kozintsev, although he was drawn to Welles for his inventive approach to Shakespeare, decried his and Zeffirelli’s predilection for filming in authentic locations, observing, ‘I have never been convinced by the idea of filming Shakespeare in the actual settings of the plays … historical naturalism is alien to the poetry’ (1977, 80). In establishing interrelations among the four figures, then, one must be cognizant both of those elements that are recast and those that are left behind. As much as there may have been mutual admiration between Welles, Kurosawa, Kozintsev and Zeffirelli, there were also differences, a degree of tension and departures in alternative directions. Perhaps more important is the fact that Welles, Kurosawa, Kozintsev and Zeffirelli were individual artists and practitioners, and it is on the unique contributions of each that this book has chosen to concentrate. Accordingly, the four chapters are organized so as to spotlight the distinctive achievement of each ‘Great Shakespearean’. In terms of the relationship between the chapters, we have traced a more-or-less chronological journey from the early to the later films, with Welles’ Macbeth (1948) being discussed in the opening chapter and Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990)

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in the last. At the same time, each chapter reflects upon the particular director’s background, training and career, includes close analytical and contextual readings of the films and (if pertinent) related Shakespearean activities, and concludes with an assessment of that director’s influence and legacy. In this way, the films investigated can be addressed in terms of their singular qualities and the specific conceptions and reception histories whereby they were characterized. Chapter One by Marguerite H. Rippy explores American film director Orson Welles (1915–85). As Rippy observes, Welles’ engagement with Shakespeare needs to be seen inside the many parts he played – radio entertainer, political activist, magician and commercial actor in film and television – as also in relation to a number of ground-breaking theatre productions that paved the way for his later Shakespeare on film work. The discussion illuminates the multiple virtues of three films: Macbeth (1948), enlivened by its vision of a primitive world populated by Christian and pagan figures and deathly properties such as crosses and scaffolds; Othello (1952), set in North African locations and employing characteristically vertiginous camerawork alongside a film noir aesthetic; and Chimes at Midnight (1966), which, centring on the Hal-Falstaff relationship, is distinguished by its epic landscapes, dissonant voiceover and scenes of chaotic battle action. But, as Rippy shows, fully to understand these films, attention must be extended to Welles’ other Shakespearean projects, such as a television broadcast of King Lear (1953), an unfinished film adaptation of The Merchant of Venice (1969), and Filming Othello (1978). No less suggestively, Rippy argues, account needs to be taken of the ways in which Welles’ own geographical peregrinations – the latter part of his career made him something of a pan-European émigré – shaped his Shakespearean filmic corpus. Only then, the chapter maintains, can the richness of Welles’ ideas and practices be appreciated, not least the director’s cultivation of the educative power of art, expressionistic and experimental film techniques, and participation in a spectrum of media forms and events. It is via such a plethora of projects and pursuits, Rippy concludes, that Welles has come to be seen as a directorial brand name. In Chapter Two, Mark Thornton Burnett discusses Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (1910–98). Kurosawa’s three Shakespeare films – Throne of Blood (1957), an adaptation of Macbeth; The Bad Sleep Well (1960), an adaptation of Hamlet; and Ran (1995), an adaptation of King Lear – are revealing for their striking compositions and painterly aesthetic as well as their humanist orientation and inventive localization of Shakespeare’s imagery and language. And it was through a highly imaginative transposition

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of Shakespeare’s works onto Japanese customs and conventions that Kurosawa was, in time, to inspire a host of related Asian reimaginings of the Bard in theatre and film alike. Throne of Blood (1957) impresses as a jidai-geki (or period) genre film that, set in feudal Japan, combines the formalities of Noh theatre and Buddhist theories of impermanence with stunning visual renderings of Shakespearean motifs so as to reflect upon the protagonist’s loss of moral compass and Japan’s own recent history of militarism. By contrast, The Bad Sleep Well (1960) is a gendai-mono film (one set in the modern world), but, in this instance, too, the chapter suggests, prevailing Kurosawa preoccupations are registered in the plight of another solitary protagonist, Nishi/Hamlet, and his individual battle with corporate corruption. In particular, Burnett contends, the film mediates Hamlet in foregrounding twinned themes of revenge and sacrifice, thereby illuminating contemporary tensions between Japanese and American ideologies. A further jidai-geki genre film, Ran (1985), Kurosawa’s adaptation of King Lear, is discussed next; here, Burnett argues that the film’s representation of an arbitrary order is inseparable from its concern with processes of ‘chaos’ as evidenced in scenes of hierarchical dissolution and spectacles of human misery. In this majestic and sweeping epic, Hidetora/Lear’s internecine wars have, it is suggested, unleashed a cataclysmic series of events for which he himself must bear a tragic responsibility. As the dates of these three films indicate, Kurosawa returned to Shakespeare at various points over the course of his career, and one of the parallel arguments of the chapter is how skilfully the director negotiated the multiple roles that he found himself playing, from studio boss and individual auteur to international collaborator. Chapter Three, by Courtney Lehmann, addresses Russian film director Grigori Kozintsev (1905–73). To grasp the complexities of the director’s two Shakespeare films, Gamlet (1964), or Hamlet, and Korol Lir (1971), or King Lear, Lehmann argues, it is to the political vicissitudes of his time, and a concomitant enabling and repressing of creative thinking and artistic practice, that we need to turn. Accordingly, despite the so-called political ‘thaw’ that obtained at this historical juncture, Lehmann sees in Gamlet (1964) a reflection of living through a period of oppression. In particular, she pinpoints in the film’s representation of Elsinore as a state machine a concern with social imbalances and in the conceptualization of Hamlet and Ophelia as prisoners an indictment of totalitarianism. By the time Kozintsev came to make Korol Lir (1971), Lehmann shows, the state had once more imposed its rigorous control over artistic expression, and the film is correspondingly dystopian, privileging stark imagery of rocky

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outcrops and enervated riverbeds, a procession of war refugees and a castle whose precipitous walls indicate the distance of the protagonist from any understanding of the plight of the populace. Such are the ways in which the two films refract the conditions of their moment and develop the credo of socialist realism. To support the thesis, Lehmann additionally sketches in her chapter the background of Kozintsev’s involvement in the FEKS, or the Factory of the Eccentric Actor, arguing that, through his work for this radical theatre movement, the director was encouraged in the application of an agitki (agitational) theory of art. And, as she notes in generalizing upon the director’s accomplishments, Kozintsev’s political method was to have far-reaching implications, touching any number of thinkers beyond Russian shores, as her concluding discussion of British and Egyptian Shakespearean theatre directors intimates. In the final chapter on Franco Zeffirelli (1923–present), Ramona Wray takes as her point of departure the notion that the Italian director’s early absorption in theatre and opera provided him with the resources, inspiration and models to progress to working in filmic idioms. She details therefore the peculiar aesthetic qualities of Zeffirelli’s adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew (1967), arguing that the film is buoyed by the intertextual associations that gather about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who played the central leads. Echoing the couple’s off-screen chemistry and battles, The Taming of the Shrew stirs into the heady mix a range of invigorating features, which embrace, variously, a fantastically imagined Padua, saturnalian excesses and scenes of farcical slapstick. Responding to the zeitgeist of the time, Wray maintains, Zeffirelli in his next film, Romeo and Juliet (1968), caught the youth orientation of the 1960s, notably through his casting of unknowns as the doomed lovers. The film, via location shooting and deployment of natural light, makes for stunning aesthetic impressions, not least through interrelated images of the sun and mist, an emphasis on physical movement and an innovative use of the soundtrack. Although 22 years separated Romeo and Juliet from Hamlet (1990), the latter, and last, Zeffirelli Shakespeare film nevertheless bears many of the director’s hallmarks, namely, a detailed recreation of a historical look, an underscoring of the domestic drama at the heart of the tragedy, and, in this instance, the prioritization of an Oedipal subtext. On the one hand, Hamlet represented a radical break with tradition in its casting of ‘action-hero’ Mel Gibson as the titular protagonist; on the other hand, as Wray outlines, the film is nostalgic for the director’s formative experiences, harking back, as it does, to the virtues and valences of popular Italian theatrical styles and forms. In this sense, the chapter suggests, Hamlet brings full circle

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Zeffirelli’s abiding subscription to popularizing Shakespeare even as it also marks the way forward for subsequent Shakespeare films aimed at the broadest of audiences. What emerges from the four discrete studies contained in this book is a more amplified sense of how Shakespeare moves and works in relation to a range of geographical and cultural contexts. The four figures discussed – Welles, Kurosawa, Kozintsev and Zeffirelli – hail from very different points of origin, and, in a field in which the international dimensions of Shakespeare’s applications are not acknowledged as often as they might be, it is instructive and enlightening to plot and pursue how the Bard functions across a spectrum of national locations and twentieth-century experiences. In the films we examine, one can discern not only the engagements of one directorial figure with Shakespeare but also how that connection sheds light on broader historical shifts, changes in the film industries and emergent conceptions of the Bard’s significances. It is for this reason that each chapter concludes by considering how a particular ‘Great Shakespearean’ has impacted on creativity beyond the immediate life of a film, and we have endeavoured in making this critical move to reflect retrospectively as well as projecting into the future. In mapping these afterlives of the films, it is clear that their influence on thinking and practice throughout the world is ongoing. Thanks to Welles, Kurosawa, Kozintsev and Zeffirelli, and their art, the horizons of the global Shakespearean community continue to widen.

Chapter 1

Orson Welles Marguerite H. Rippy

The feeling that Welles hurls himself against Shakespeare merely to gratify himself with the sound of the collision is as common as it is misleading. (McBride, 1972, 106) George Orson Welles formed a complex and personal relationship with Shakespeare’s works at an early age. He told both epic and intimate tales of his initial experiences of Shakespeare and how they affected his sense of himself as an artist and a performer, describing encounters with Shakespeare through tutorials with his mother, Beatrice, and while on his own romantic journey, hiking the Atlas mountains in Morocco. Throughout his career, Welles used Shakespeare as a touchstone, and his productions always intertwined the intimate and the epic, focusing primarily on Macbeth, Othello, Falstaff and King Lear as tragic protagonists. Welles became a dominant directorial personality whose completed films embody the auteur theory of modernist cinema, but his adaptations of Shakespeare are deeply inflected by his work as a radio entertainer, political activist, magician and commercial actor. By the time of his death in 1985, he had adapted Shakespeare numerous times on stage, radio, television and film, and many of these productions overlapped with or informed each other. From his earliest Shakespeare endeavours, the textturned-recordings of Everybody’s Shakespeare (later re-titled The Mercury Shakespeare) and the formation of his Mercury Theatre group, Welles wanted to provide versions of Shakespeare that were entertaining, experimental and popular. While Welles is best known for his first completed feature film, Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and his infamous 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast, he also came to be known as a Shakespeare aficionado. Welles’ adaptations of Shakespeare – whether on stage, screen, or radio – often experimented with light, sound and narrative, and his experimentation reflected the integration of techniques

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from one performance medium into another. His Shakespeare films can be seen as multimedia events, borrowing stage or radio techniques for the purposes of reinventing cinema. As Michael Anderegg argues, Wellesian cinema should be examined only ‘in the context of a rich and complex career in theater, film, radio and television’ (Anderegg, 2004, 106). One cannot understand his cinematic style without understanding the intertextual nature of Welles’ work.

Biography and Background George Orson Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on May 6, 1915. Following his mother’s death when he was nine, Welles enrolled in the Todd School for Boys, where he met his mentor, Roger Hill, and began to explore both magic and Shakespeare, two interests that he would often commingle. Hill later collaborated with the teenage Welles on the performance guide, Everybody’s Shakespeare. Welles’ best known Shakespeare adaptations include a mixture of films and stage productions: Othello (1952), the 1936 WPA Negro Theatre stage adaptation of Macbeth and his later screen version of Macbeth (1948), and his composite view of Falstaff, Chimes at Midnight (1966). Shakespeare remained a lifelong preoccupation for Welles, and at the time of his death he was working on a film adaptation of King Lear. Welles repeatedly explored tragic figures in Shakespeare with whom he felt an affinity, and he adapted and starred as Falstaff, Othello, Macbeth and Lear. Welles was a collaborative artist, and he often formed personal connections with other actors and film-makers who shared his interests in the adaptation of and experimentation with Shakespeare. For example, as an unknown young actor, Welles insinuated his way into performing at Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 1931 where he met Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir, whose theories of theatre greatly influenced him. Both actors also later appeared in his film adaptation of Othello, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1952, and in the self-exploratory documentary, Filming Othello (1978). Upon his return to the US from Ireland, his collaborator and Mercury Theatre co-founder, John Houseman, discovered him as he played Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet with Katherine Cornell. Houseman would become Welles’ major collaborator for the next decade, and many of Welles’ narrative techniques for rapid script adaptation developed from his partnership with Houseman. From 1936–7, Houseman and Welles worked for the Federal Theatre Project, where they produced a Haitian Macbeth with an all-black cast.



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Often referred to as the ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth, this performance sought to address contemporary politics via experimental dramatic form and was widely praised in the black press for providing prominent work to black actors of the day. This early stage performance greatly influenced Welles’ later film version of Macbeth, although the connections between the two productions are often overlooked because the film version eliminated the racial dimension of primitivism present in the Haitian adaptation, instead focusing on Scotland as a location of uncivilized, Christian and pagan barbarity. In 1937, Houseman and Welles founded the Mercury Theatre together with the explicit goal of bringing classic literature – in particular Shakespeare – to the masses. Houseman described this pursuit to Burns Mantle in October 1937: Although Orson Welles and I have left the Federal Theatre, we believe we are in a sense continuing the work which we began there. We believe that with the Mercury we are launching a real people’s theatre in New York, by which we mean a theatre at which the public may see exciting productions of great plays at prices easily within their reach. While our top is $2.00, we will have at least four hundred seats at $1.00 and less. (Lilly, 13 Oct 1937, Box 1) Houseman and Welles formed the Mercury with a clear desire to meld classical and experimental performances to ‘attract fresh, vital writing into the theatre’ (Lilly, 13 Oct 1937, Box 1). Welles retained these performance values – to instruct and entertain through innovative adaptation – throughout his career. His productions reflect his belief that art should ‘have an educational function and serve a social purpose’ (Anderegg, 1999, 167). One of the Mercury’s early theatre projects was a compilation of Shakespeare’s history plays called The Five Kings. The production turned out to be a financial fiasco, but the idea would later inform Welles’ Chimes at Midnight, a film compilation of various scenes from the tetralogies which focuses on a study of Falstaff as he appears throughout the Henriad. Chimes at Midnight reflects the legacy of Welles’ attempts from 1937 to 1939 to condense Shakespeare’s tetralogies into two evenings of theatre. The ambitious effort unravelled by August of 1939, when Welles’ publicist, Herb Drake, lamented in a memo that ‘Welles doesn’t know what he’s going to do with the damn thing’ (Lilly, 1939, Box 1). Both the pastiche approach to Shakespearean adaptation and an interest in Falstaff as a character study resonated in Welles’ later work. Although only one part of The Five Kings

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was produced (starring Burgess Meredith as Prince Hal), Welles’ performance of Falstaff initiated an imaginative relationship that would interest him throughout his career. Chimes at Midnight offers a counter-reading of the Henriad that elevates Falstaff while undermining the future Henry V. Many critics view this film as a thinly veiled exploration of Welles’ own fall from grace and power within the commercial world of film, as well as a critique of the rise into stardom of his contemporary and competitor in Shakespearean acting and directing, Laurence Olivier. Welles’ ties to stage acting as well as theatrical conventions and innovations shaped Welles’ cinematic vision of Shakespeare. Equally influential, however, was Welles’ work on radio. In 1938, Welles expanded the Mercury Theatre onto radio in the series, First Person Singular: Mercury Theatre on the Air. During the first year of this series, Welles and Houseman adapted Shakespeare just once, recapturing some of the excitement of their 1937 stage version of Julius Caesar, set in a contemporary Fascist Italy, in a September broadcast. A hallmark of the programme was extensive experimentation with first-person narration. Welles and Houseman combined this very personal form of storytelling with other narrative strategies to engage listeners. In particular, Welles used flashback and a blending of aural genres to create compelling storytelling techniques that he would use in his films, and first-person connections to Othello, Macbeth and Lear infuse his later interpretations of Shakespeare. This method of storytelling demanded a focus on the central character to the exclusion of all subplots with the goal of creating intimacy with the listener. This formation of a first-person intimacy with listeners and viewers became a characteristic of Welles’ performance style. It also led to liberal interpretations of the text that eliminated Shakespeare’s subplots in favour of a focus on key moments of the protagonist’s speech or action. In addition to experimenting with methods of building audience identification with the protagonist, Welles also explored techniques for manipulating the perception of ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ in this radio series, another trait that would define his later cinematic style. Welles’ innovative imitation of journalistic style in the 1938 radio version of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds infamously created panic among listeners who believed that Martians were actually invading New Jersey. The intense media scrutiny that followed this broadcast won him the sponsorship of Campbell’s Soup, and led to the series being renamed as Campbell Playhouse. But his relationship with this sponsor would be tense and at times fractious. Even at this early stage of his career, Welles had difficulty balancing the demands



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of the entertainment industry against his own need for artistic expression, a tension that would vex his later film productions. The Mercury Theatre expanded into Mercury Productions when Welles moved to Hollywood, and from 1937 to 1955 Mercury Productions created a body of work across stage, screen and radio that shaped industry concepts of how to use mass media for innovative storytelling and, in particular, how to adapt classic literature for large audiences. Welles was hired by RKO as a prestige producer, a director/actor/writer who could sell the image of quality. Whether on stage or screen, the Mercury sought to challenge American audiences with adaptations of literature that tapped into contemporary political and cultural trends. The Mercury productions include a fascist Julius Caesar (1937), adapted onto the radio in 1938, a 30-minute radio King Lear in 1946, and the films of Macbeth (1948) and Othello (1952 world premiere/1955 US). With the advent of the Mercury brand, Welles created a unique, recognizable artistic persona and a trademark style of narrative that allowed him to move to Hollywood as an actor/director/ writer with a record-setting contract in terms of both money and power – all by the age of 23. By 1938, he had also linked his name inextricably to that of Shakespeare through his WPA and Mercury interpretations of Macbeth and Julius Caesar. Welles’ stage Caesar and Macbeth presage Welles’ career in terms of their innovative experimentation with spectacle and contemporary themes, but he would never be able to reproduce their commercial success on film. By the age of 40, Welles had left Hollywood for Europe, and he never returned to Hollywood insider status. His adaptations of Shakespeare after 1955 consisted of post-structural reflections on the film-making process, character studies, or even incomplete sketches, as in the case of his The Merchant of Venice and King Lear. However, he remained a marketable commodity in his own right until the time of his death, and he increasingly shifted to the realm of television and commercial entertainment in order to make money, often performing excerpts from Shakespearean monologues that evoked his reputation as a respected actor and orator, even as he remained marginalized as a film-maker. One of Welles’ major contributions to film-making was to establish the potential power of the director as a brand name. While Welles was not ultimately associated with commercial success, he was associated with quality experimentation and innovative technique. Welles marketed himself as the main creative presence in the Mercury Theatre, and his RKO contract consolidated both his power and the expectations for him by stipulating that he write, direct and act in an original production each year. Welles

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immediately violated this RKO mandate by co-authoring the screenplay for Citizen Kane with Herman Mankiewicz, while the resolution of a subsequent dispute with Mankiewicz (the argument centred on who wrote what) also helped establish the power of the director as a visionary over that of the writer or actor. His creative ownership of Citizen Kane helped define the primacy of directorial vision over the screenplay, and established the postscreenplay adaptation to film as the most lucrative stage of movie-making. Welles established that to direct was of far greater value than to write for the screen. Critics and organizations like the American Film Institute hail Citizen Kane as one of the greatest films ever made, but ultimately Welles preferred to work with co-authors who were long dead – Shakespeare being one of his favourite collaborators. Many of the remarkable narrative and visual techniques that Welles used in Citizen Kane are also employed in his Shakespeare films. He privileged a tightly woven but non-linear narrative structure, imaginative cinematography (often the result of collaboration with quality cinematographers like Gregg Toland and Gary Graver) and thematic exploration of the human experience, particularly moral darkness. Certain components of Welles’ adaptation strategy appear in virtually all his realized Shakespeare projects from his 1936 ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth all the way through to his 1966 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Falstaff plays, Chimes at Midnight. Welles focuses on the central character with the goal of creating intimacy with the listener/viewer. In part because of this desire to focus on a single protagonist, Welles makes severe cuts and rearrangements to Shakespeare’s text, using a method that was controversial at the time in that, to many, it seemed to disrespect the Shakespearean text. In Welles’ 1946 radio performance of Lear and in the later Peter Brook television adaptation, for example, the Edgar/Edmund subplot is cut, which has serious repercussions for the meaning of the text and the trajectory of the drama. Finally, Welles would often focus on a theme that may have been secondary to Shakespeare’s text in order to create a contemporary connection with his audience. He cut original texts brutally, manipulated the often-sacred language of Shakespeare, and was not afraid to ‘sacrifice clarity for dramatic point’ (Anderegg, 2004, 107). The combination of these elements helped establish a new vocabulary for cinema. His experimentation with deep focus, high-contrast lighting, extreme low or high angle shots, and long takes in order to create or adapt narrative influenced other film-makers like François Truffaut, even as these techniques reflect his own influence by film-makers as diverse as Sergei Eisenstein and John Ford. Despite his aspirations to appeal to a mass audience with his adaptations of classic literature, Welles was never a general audience favourite,



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and many of his films performed poorly at the box office. Welles never produced a mainstream Hollywood version of Shakespeare, instead working at the margins of European and American cinema to produce three innovative adaptations of the Bard that were released, one documentarystyle meditation on the making of Othello, and a few incomplete projects, some of which exist only in concept and others which have actual filmed segments or appeared on television. One of Welles’ greatest contributions to cinema is a history of complex, inventive cinematic projects that were never fully realized and yet are enormously compelling and influential. Although many critics continue to yearn for ‘definitive’ versions of his films, Welles – like Shakespeare – established an oeuvre that rejects easy definition. A vast chasm opened between the potential for his creative ideas and their technical realization, particularly during the final phases of editing and marketing. On occasion, his involved narrative concepts proved to be unworkable experiments even in their early stages. His first proposed film, for example, was an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This film’s thematic exploration of the corruption of power closely parallels that of his later adaptation of Macbeth, and is evoked in Othello and Chimes at Midnight as well. In his original proposal, Welles was to play both Kurtz and Marlow and use the camera to represent the audience’s gaze – equating the ‘I’ of the narrator with the viewer’s eye (Lilly, Box 14, folders 16–19). Although the project was shelved at a cost of over $160,000, Welles recycled parts of it on radio and continued to experiment with first-person connections to his cinematic protagonists. But the failure of this first project undermined his relationship with RKO and set the tone for his future relationship with studios, producers and financial investors. His enthusiasm for and yet inability to execute complicated narrative ideas often caused him to move on to the next project before the last was fully completed and resulted in a significant loss of creative control in many projects. Perhaps, most famously, his last RKO project, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), was re-edited without his approval while he was in Brazil making his next proposed film. Welles disowned the studio cut of the film. In many ways, the disavowal of Ambersons marks Welles’ departure from traditional commercial film-making and heralds his later pattern of fractious post-production relationships, including tensions over the re-dubbing of his Macbeth. Welles increasingly pursued narrative experimentation at the expense of commercial polish. The 1940s and 1950s represent a time of aesthetic and political shifts for Welles. He remained politically active during World

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War II, broadcasting many anti-fascist and pro-ally wartime radio shows. He maintained a high profile in Hollywood, and married (and divorced) actress Rita Hayworth, with whom he co-starred in The Lady from Shanghai (1947). Macbeth was his last project before permanently leaving the United States for Europe (1948). As he moved abroad, his interest in Shakespeare continued, including his ongoing adaptation of Othello. He continued to work in various media simultaneously, appearing in Peter Brook’s television Lear in 1953, and in the Harry Lime radio series, which was loosely based on the character he played in The Third Man (1949) and which inspired the film, Mr Arkadin (1955). Structurally, Arkadin is a radical experiment in various methods of telling a story, and of lying to the audience for entertainment, but it is also a relic of the popular crime/drama genre of the time period. Participating in the detective/thriller/noir movements helped shape Welles’ approach to Othello, which employs a distinctly film noir look and feel. Scott L. Newstok (2005) has deftly connected Othello to Touch of Evil (1958), another crime genre film, which has been described as a ‘daringly expressionistic nightmare vision disguised as a B-movie crime thriller’ (McBride, 2006, 127). But on this project, too, Welles found himself at odds with the Hollywood studio establishment. Universal Studios barred him from the lot during post-production, and he disavowed the version of Touch of Evil that the studio released, much as he had Ambersons years earlier. Returning to Europe, he was embraced as an avant-garde director by film-makers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and Godard’s study of his own failed King Lear bears a striking conceptual resemblance to Welles’ Filming Othello (1978). While filming his 1962 adaptation of Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial, Welles met Oja Kodar, his artistic and romantic partner for the last portion of his life, with whom he worked on The Deep from 1967–9, even as he finished Chimes at Midnight (1966). Filming Othello represented a new phase in his career, a phase hinted at in earlier projects like the unfinished 1940s’ Rio Project, It’s All True, and the 1973 F for Fake. Welles became increasingly interested in testing the boundaries of documentary form and probing its potential for selfrepresentation, manipulation and self-critique. He returned to Hollywood in 1970, where he met collaborator and cinematographer Gary Graver, who helped him adapt his cinematic style to reflect his interests in deconstruction and self-interrogation. His films of the 1970s, F for Fake (1973), Filming Othello (1978), the unfinished The Other Side of the Wind – and to an extent his final King Lear – reflect this preoccupation. Welles left a distinct legacy to the entertainment industry: the development of a cinematic rhetoric that intertwined modernist cinematography



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and experimentation with a postmodern resistance to narrative closure. He established an expressionistic visual style that reflected the practice of modernist auteurs and influenced a broad range of later film-makers and entertainers. In particular, his manipulation of the line between fact and fiction (and his exploration of the ability of aural and visual media to distort, obscure or eliminate this line entirely) remains a central theme in contemporary entertainment. Welles’ interests in the fact/fiction divide emerged as early as his 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast and are reiterated in It’s All True, F for Fake and Filming Othello. Welles became adept at representing the state of modern consciousness as it devolved toward postmodern disorientation, and his protagonists often suffer from being unable to construct any single ‘truth’ when it comes to personal or public history. Welles tends to emphasize these themes in his Shakespeare adaptations, and perhaps this explains why his compilation of Falstaff images in Chimes at Midnight is often seen as an autobiographical riff via Shakespeare, although he is no less connected to Lear, Macbeth and Othello. But Chimes’ collage narrative captures Welles’ (and Shakespeare’s) interest in conscious self-construction. Equal parts theatre huckster and literary master, Welles left behind more unfinished directorial projects than completed ones, and he can also be seen as an early proponent of independent film-making. He flourished as a prolific actor with a sense of both self-mockery and self-aggrandizement, and ultimately he became known as much for playing himself as for producing, directing or writing material. His resonant voice, the most recognizable feature of his radio broadcasts, became his trademark and a cultural touchstone. At the end of his career, he peddled an aura of quality through commercial endorsements. But his famous voice also lent itself to delivering Shakespearean soliloquies with gravitas in decidedly non-traditional venues, like the I Love Lucy show or his Las Vegas act. In this way, he embodies a nineteenth-century theatrical tradition of the Shakespearean monologue delivered in a lowbrow, mass context. Welles’ performances problematize the position of Shakespeare as highbrow entertainment in that they are often accompanied by self-reflexive strategies or media manipulations, eschewing notions of a fixed text or a formal performance. Current digital technologies allow the broadcast of his monologues to a wide audience within dissonant performance genres like the situation comedy – what Ayanna Thompson has called ‘disruptive junctions’ (2010, 9) – that reposition Shakespeare as a contemporary cultural text. Welles’ performances thrive on the friction between the traditional fixed space of the actor upon the public stage and the new media paradigm of an actor

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dispersed over the public airways, ultimately delivered into the personal domestic space of a modern audience. Welles’ distinctive style and willingness to experiment with fresh methods for adapting Shakespeare established a ‘personal and idiosyncratic’ set of Shakespeare films that Anderegg argues ‘constitute a small sub-genre all of their own, the “Welles/Shakespeare film”’ (2004, 106). In part due to the complexity of his work, Welles received an honorary Academy Award for superlative artistry in 1970. In 1975, the American Film Institute recognized his work with a Lifetime Achievement Award. The year before his death, the Directors Guild also gave him a Lifetime Achievement award, its highest honour. Welles died at his home in Los Angeles on 10 October 1985, and is buried on a private estate in Ronda, Spain.

Finished Films: Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952) and Chimes at Midnight (1966) Each film captures a different Shakespeare, a different Welles, while all three are undeniably Shakespeare, undeniably Welles. (Anderegg, 2004, 108) Welles’ approach to adapting Shakespeare was both distinctive and yet indebted to his interaction with the film-makers and actors of his era. Early stage and screen scripts demonstrate that Welles’ technique of adaptation consisted of literally cutting and pasting parts of the text to develop a script (Lilly, Box 5, folder 32). The result is a type of Shakespeare pastiche or collage that stays true to the text in terms of individual scenes or lines, but that cuts large sections of the text, elevates marginalized characters to central roles and emphasizes themes that interested Welles. In particular, Welles’ Shakespeare adaptations explore issues of alienation, spiritual and moral corruption, self-creation, and tension between the individual and society. Stylistically, his first two Shakespeare films, Macbeth and Othello, retain a focus on language that reflects Welles’ radio and theatre experience. Often the films subordinate plot elements to dwell on great monologues as delivered by Welles. Even Chimes at Midnight takes great interest in the rhetoric of Falstaff, although it often plays with the audience expectation of conventional monologue delivery by having characters turn away from the camera, mumble or speak while in motion. At the time of their release, Welles’ films shocked audiences and critics with their bold adaptation style, in particular their willingness to cut



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and edit the conventional Shakespearean text. Macbeth (1948) marks what Anthony Davies refers to as ‘a turning point in the development of Shakespearean cinematic adaptation’ (1988, 83). As Davies points out, Welles’ free adaptation style came almost a decade before Kurosawa’s acclaimed Throne of Blood (1957), and his fearless and shameless process of cutting and rearranging the traditional text stands in sharp contrast to the adaptation technique of his rival, Laurence Olivier. In addition, Welles tended to refocus his cinematic interpretations on contemporary themes, whether or not those themes were considered central to the original Shakespearean text. Michael Anderegg observes that ‘Welles often transforms a latent thematic strand into a manifest one, drawing on issues in Shakespeare that are particularly meaningful to him’ (2004, 108). Some recurrent issues that Welles explores include abuse of power, love and betrayal, nostalgia for a lost or imagined innocence, and the instability of truth. While modernist in his visual technique, Welles was postmodern in his process, embracing pastiche, collage, and open-ended collaborative works. Stylistically, Welles’ films were highly original in their creation of a modernist aesthetic through a distinct sense of mise-en-scène, compositional balance, and editing and camera angle to create dramatic effect. However, they are also significant in that his films evoke an unpolished quality that Welles himself described as the sense of a charcoal sketch. This lack of a polished commercial veneer is often seen as a flaw in Welles’ work, but stylistically it laid the groundwork for contemporary experimentation with the medium itself, including the growing role of independent film-makers and opportunities for digital manipulations of partial works (Rippy, 2009, 142–69). His unfinished or undistributed projects should be seen in this light as representative of a body of work that evokes elements of postmodernity in its rejection of finality, closure or a sense of definitive text.

Macbeth (1948) Macbeth held deep appeal for Welles, both because of the protagonist’s inability to resist moral decline and his surrounding environment of dark magic. The theme of moral decline pervades many of Welles’ works, as does an otherworldly ambiance. Macbeth was an important play for Welles, wedding his interests in the supernatural with human themes of ambition and betrayal, and it was his choice for both his stage debut directing Shakespeare for the 1936 WPA Negro Theatre Project and for his 1948

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debut as a film director of Shakespeare (Buhler, 2002, 98). Critics struggle to define the diverse stylistic elements of Welles’ Macbeth, as well as to reconcile Welles’ own characterization of the film as a hasty production – a ‘violently sketched charcoal drawing’ (Jorgens, 1977, 151) – with deep roots in his earlier performance history. In fact, the 1948 film bases itself on and closely follows many scenes of his 1936 ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth and the Salt Lake City stage production of the play in May and June of 1947 (Rothwell, 2004, 71). However, the film returns the setting to Scotland from Haiti and replaces Hecate with a character named Holy Father as the central image of supernatural power in the play. This shifts the focus of the production from the witches, who were central to the experience of the 1936 ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth, to a pagan/Christian struggle in which Macbeth embodies elements of both, and in which any religion is tied to brutal forces not only of the supernatural but also of human will. On both stage and screen, Welles emphasized the dramatic allure of the witches, and presented Macbeth as a play about a supernatural curse thrust into Macbeth’s subconscious by the sounds and sights of witchcraft: fog, drums, screams. The film is obviously influenced by both the earlier Harlem stage production and the stage version he presented in Salt Lake City immediately prior to the film (Anderegg, 1999, 20; Rothwell, 2004, 71–2). Welles’ lifelong interest in magic explains some consistencies between his 1936 ‘Voodoo’ stage adaptation and his 1948 film, in particular his visual and aural emphasis on the witches and their trickery. Even the pre-credit prologue establishes the voodoo framework for Welles’ Macbeth, depicting a small statue of Macbeth emerging from the witches’ cauldron. As scholars like Celia Daileader (2010, 11–20) have established, the witches have far more to do with Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton’s vision than with Shakespeare’s, but they offer a performative opportunity for spectacle, and Welles loved them as a showman. Welles’ style of adaptation inevitably drew on previous works – both by other authors and himself – and thus his earlier success with Macbeth on stage made the play a natural choice to recycle. The set design of the castle exterior, the use of a prominent drumbeat in key scenes, and the closing exclamation of the witches that the ‘charm’s wound up’ (1.3.35) all echo his 1936 stage production (Anderegg, 1999, 87; Welles, 1978). In addition, the actors in essence rehearsed the entire film in the Salt Lake City stage production from May to June prior to filming, with the support of the Utah Centennial Commission and the American National Theatre Association. But the overall feel of the film is far different from its stage predecessors, and Welles makes innovative use of the camera to convey the weird sisters



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as emblematic of one side of a moral struggle within the protagonist, the other side of which is represented by the character, Holy Father, an inaccessible manifestation of Christianity. Macbeth was also a chance to prove to Hollywood that Welles could produce a prestige film under budget and quickly, and thus refute his growing reputation as wasteful and unprofitable. His profligate reputation was reinforced by The Lady from Shanghai wrapping production in March of 1947 at more than $400,000 over budget, followed by his request that the studio delay the film’s release to 1948 so he could revise it even further (Leaming, 1985, 336; Buhler, 2002, 98). Welles needed to prove to Hollywood studios that he could be a profitable film-maker, and so he shot Macbeth in around three weeks. As Welles’ assistant Richard Wilson notes, the actual script preparation, rehearsals and stage performances resulted in a preparation period at least three times that long (Anderegg, 1999, 80). Nevertheless, the production process of Macbeth was cheap and efficient when compared to other Welles projects. Welles’ Macbeth meditates on the relationship between the Christian and the pagan, and the film is infused with Christian images, Celtic crosses, and the invention of a central character called only ‘Holy Father’ whom Kenneth Rothwell describes as ‘some kind of high priest looking like a character out of Alexander Nevsky’ (2004, 71). Holy Father (Alan Napier) speaks lines taken from a variety of characters, including Ross (John Dierkes), Banquo (Edgar Barrier) and Malcolm (Roddy McDowall). In the first scene of the film following the prologue, ‘The Three’ (Welles’ onscreen cast-list identifier for the witches) are driven away from Macbeth following their prophecy by a messenger and Holy Father, who enters brandishing a standard of the cross, warning, ‘Go away. Say thee no more’. He shows up in several key scenes, warning Lady Macduff (Peggy Webber) of her imminent death, watching Macduff (Dan O’Herlihy) and Malcolm flee and later joining them in exile, and his fatal skewering by Macbeth opens the final battle of Macbeth. Holy Father plays a pivotal role in the symbolism of the film, acting as a sign for nascent Christian civilization at odds with the primordial power of the witches. Notably, neither form of power is presented as desirable, but Macbeth is caught between these two very different icons of the supernatural. Holy Father’s vision of civilization is equally brutal to that of the witches, and he presides at a ritualistic execution of the Thane of Cawdor that is a central scene in terms of critical commentary (Manvell, 1971, 56; Rothwell, 2004, 72). To understand Welles’ reconstruction of scenes 1.3–5 of Shakespeare’s play, which can act as a model for his adaptation style overall, it is helpful to look at

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his process of editing both script and shots, and in particular his adaptation of the Shakespearean aside. Welles has characters deliver lines that are pivotal to the play – often as asides – in voiceover, performed as though reading or thinking aloud. In this way, Welles maintains a stage sense of intimacy with his screen audience. The condensing of 1.3–5 reveals a Wellesian ballet, as the characters of Shakespeare’s text merge into and separate from each other. In close-up, Macbeth speaks his aside, ‘Stars, hide your fires, / Let not light see my black and deep desires’ (1.4.50–1), to himself in voiceover, although immediately prior to this he has been pondering the incident aloud to Holy Father and Banquo. These lines, provoked by his encounter with Duncan as the latter promotes Malcolm with the title of Prince of Cumberland in Shakespeare’s text, emerge from Macbeth’s meditation on his meeting the witches in Welles’ film. The result is to emphasize the conflict between the moral codes of the witches and Holy Father, who sits behind Macbeth on screen as he ‘thinks’ these lines, rather than to present the unfolding difficulties of power and corruption under systems of royalty and primogeniture, as offered in Shakespeare’s play. Welles accentuates Macbeth’s role as a figure caught between two supernatural forces, lured into a compelling moral darkness from which he cannot escape. As a composite character, the moral darkness of Holy Father is itself consolidated from several characters in Shakespeare, and the overall journey into darkness often reverses itself in Welles’ film. Characters move forwards and backwards through Shakespeare’s text, often changing the moral trajectory of the original lines. For example, the progression of Act 1 is reversed in lines taken from 1.4 and 1.3. In Welles’ adaptation, Banquo, like Macbeth, is relegated to the position of a pawn caught between dark forces, and his assertion of caution in the face of the supernatural is reassigned to the darkly supernatural Holy Father. Holy Father delivers Banquo’s cautionary statement, ‘oftentimes to win us to our harm / The instruments of darkness tell us truths, / Win us with honest trifles to betray’s’ (1.3.121–3), after Macbeth’s mediation on hiding his ambition – it comes too late in the film to have any impact other than irony. In Welles’ film, Holy Father’s warning prompts Banquo to cross himself, evoking the Christian/pagan dialectic central to the film. Immediately, however, both Macbeth and Banquo take heart from their rise in fortune, a further reversal of the trajectory of Shakespeare’s text, as Macbeth reminds Banquo his children shall be kings, and Banquo, smiling, reminds Macbeth, ‘You shall be king’ (1.3.84). The darker observations on Macbeth’s moral decline are left to Holy Father, whereas Banquo acts as more of a foppish companion in Welles’



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adaptation. As Macbeth ponders his fate before the fire with Holy Father and Banquo, meditating on his chances of being crowned king, Banquo takes up his Shakespearean lines again, remarking, ‘Look … our partner’s rapt’ (1.3.141), in a jovial tone. But Holy Father responds to Banquo’s observation of Macbeth’s dreamy ambition by evoking the witches’ prophecy, darkly echoing their chorus in 1.3, ‘Hail, King that shalt be’. Far from being at odds with the weird sisters, Holy Father represents a part of the collective tale that builds the story of Macbeth, a counterbalance rather than a counterpoint to the witches. Having Holy Father share in the witches’ incantation shifts the act of storytelling from a paraphrase of the encounter with the witches by Macbeth to a strange collaborative narrative, woven by multiple storytellers: the witches, Holy Father, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Lady Macbeth, played by Jeanette Nolan, is more peripheral than in Shakespeare’s play, evoking the femmes fatales of the noir era only in her initial lethal seduction of Macbeth. She loses her dramatic power more quickly than in the play, and the film is often criticized for either the weakness of the role or of its acting. Our introduction to Lady Macbeth comes during the scene in which Macbeth sits before the fire with Holy Father and Banquo, rapt with ambition. Welles first shows Macbeth thoughtfully composing aloud the letter (1.5.1–28) that will be delivered to Lady Macbeth, then fades with overlapping dialogue to Lady Macbeth reading the letter aloud in her bedroom, while reclining on animal skin blankets. Her association with primitivism and sexuality are established in this brief transition from Macbeth’s mind to her body, reclined, available, ambitious. She is Macbeth’s muse, a manifestation of dark inspiration. This dark collaboration between the witches, Holy Father, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth is perhaps nowhere more visible than in Welles’ added scene of the execution of the Thane of Cawdor, which takes place in Macbeth’s castle upon his arrival home. The brutality of this scene combines the sexual and emotional reunion of Lord and Lady Macbeth with the decapitation of the Thane of Cawdor at the literal hands of Holy Father. In addition, this scene evokes Welles’ 1936 Haitian stage interpretation of Macbeth through the use of a strong, loud drumbeat that accompanies the execution, with a low-angle close-up of the drummer intercut with the progression and execution of Cawdor. Bare-chested and dominant visually and aurally, this prominent drummer takes us back to the drummers of Welles’ Haitian Macbeth and returns the viewer to the primitive world of dark, corrupt forces suggested by that production (Rippy, 2009, 73–8). At the conclusion of the scene, Lord and Lady Macbeth embrace before the silhouette of

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an unidentified hanging body, an allusion to the ongoing brutality of their surroundings in which the Thane of Cawdor is one more step in a progression of violent occurrences rather than an event symbolizing the conclusion of a bloody war. The hanging man as an allusion to brutality is an image that reappears consistently in Welles’ Shakespeare films, swinging through Macbeth, Othello (1952) and Chimes at Midnight (1966). This scene of the Thane of Cawdor’s execution solidifies the visual vocabulary of the film, which evokes the witches through stick-like Y symbols and Christianity through tall, tree-like crosses often carried as pikes – the Thane of Cawdor’s head sits upon one after his death. Malcolm delivers his observation that ‘Nothing in his life / Became him like the leaving it’ (1.4.7–8) while looking at his decapitated head high on the pike. Similarly, Duncan remembers his ‘absolute trust’ (1.4.14) in the disembodied head that looms over his shoulder. Macbeth himself is dubbed Thane of Cawdor under the ghastly head, and an instant later poisons Duncan’s wine while standing before the anonymous body suspended in the background throughout the scene. This string of images of wooden scaffolds and hanging bodies foreshadows not only the woods that will ultimately storm the castle, but Macbeth’s own decapitation and the pall of death that enshrouds his castle more generally. There are few scenes in the film that do not feature twisted sticks that suggest the witches or various forms of primitive crosses, ranging from stone Celtic crosses to the pikes featured in Cawdor’s decapitation scene. Anthony R. Guneratne points out that Welles has a sense of Eisenstein’s ‘rhythmic montage’ (2008, 187) in this film, and that the Thane of Cawdor’s execution in particular evokes this sense of montage. These montage elements, combined with his hallmark deepfocus, long-angle shots and the presence of himself as the protagonist, came to define the visual feel of Welles’ Shakespeare films. Welles uses an expressionist visual style in the film – what Rothwell calls a ‘chiaroscuro lighting of German expressionism’ (2004, 73) – as he attempts to convey the psychological state of the protagonist through extreme camera angles juxtaposed with light and sound. Just as he did in his early film projects for RKO, Welles explicitly uses the camera to represent the disorientation and exaggerated sense of self that emerge in the protagonist as he pursues and loses power. However, as Anthony Davies notes, the camera in Macbeth does not take on any fixed position, and the fragmented images and shifts in perspective ‘break down any development of a consistent point of view’ (Davies, 1988, 94), which actually makes the film more emotionally suggestive. Having learned the limitations of first-person perspective in film from his failed Heart of Darkness, Welles uses the camera



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in Macbeth in an expressionistic manner to intimate emotional states and social relationships rather than the character’s consciousness (Rippy, 2009, 28–32). Joseph Conrad’s central metaphor of darkness at the centre of the human soul echoes in Welles’ Macbeth, and critic Jack Jorgens notes that ‘What seems important to Welles is not the moral and social dimension of Macbeth’s acts … but the subjective experience of pushing deeper into the heart of darkness’ (1977, 152). Indeed, Welles’ Macbeth would fit nicely in a Welles box set with Citizen Kane and Heart of Darkness as a trilogy studying the morally corrosive effects of power. The film is generally more balanced in its style than was originally acknowledged by critics, who paid less attention to its innovations than its aural and technical deficiencies. These deficiencies, while often momentary, disrupt the flow of the visual narrative. The film oscillates between staged long-takes to extreme low and high angles rapidly intercut with abstract imagery that would also be central to Welles’ Othello and Chimes at Midnight. Guneratne describes Welles’ mise-en-scène as consisting of ‘symmetrical compositions, the overlapping of profiles of speaking characters, and geometrical phalanxes’ (2008, 186). In contrast to the short-takes associated with Othello, Welles relies on more long-takes in Macbeth, and Rothwell attributes these to a mise-en-scène approach rather than decoupage (2004, 74). The longtakes are held in check, however, by the Eisensteinian style that Guneratne identifies. Anderegg best sums up the technical balance between long-takes and decoupage by defining the Wellesian ‘stylistic trademarks’ as ‘relatively long-takes, mid-distance staging, [and] respect, in general, of the integrity of time and space’ (1999, 90). Increasingly, Welles would incorporate the visual imagery of evil into his Shakespeare films in the form of twisted branches, high pikes and stabbing, horizontal lines. Often these images conjure themes of human struggle against dark supernatural forces. For example, the scene in which Macbeth struggles with supernatural darkness in the form of a storm strongly suggests Welles’ later vision of Othello’s death speech, with the camera gazing down at the protagonist’s face swallowed in darkness from an extreme high angle. The sense of composition in such images is photographic more than filmic, begging the stasis of the central image and privileging the delivery of the monologue. Welles reinforces his visual vocabulary in his reinterpretation of 5.5.7–8. Lady Macbeth leaps to her death off a precipice, driven by the twisted stick-like symbols of the witches, which are hinted at in the bars of her very castle, a conjuration of evil within her home. Although Kenneth Rothwell points out that the low-cost filming provides ‘a $53.36 special effect as she hurtles into a bottomless gorge’ (2004, 74), the lead

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up to her B-movie fall evokes a decidedly Wellesian cinematic vocabulary. The increasing images of twisted trees and primitive crosses close in upon the bodies of the characters even as Birnam Wood closes in on Dunsinane, while early images of decapitation and hanging proliferate throughout. Seyton’s lifeless body dangles from a bell over Macbeth’s head as he groans, ‘I ’gin to be aweary of the sun’ (5.5.47). Seyton’s body literally rings the alarum bell. At the same time, Holy Father is skewered by a spear, an echo of his own skewering of Cawdor, as Macbeth proclaims, ‘We might have met them dareful, beard to beard, / And beat them backward home’ (5.5.6–7). The death of Holy Father unleashes the battle, and the chaos released implies that neither witch-like stick nor stick-like cross embody human evil so much as the men themselves. Welles’ Macbeth solidifies the cinematic vocabulary that he uses in the later Othello (1952) and Chimes at Midnight (1966) in terms of images of evil that surround the protagonist’s fatal struggle against moral decline. Welles also demonstrates an increasing interest in the use of camera angle and rapid cuts to create a sense of juxtaposition and movement, even when the actors themselves are static. While he had used this technique as early as Citizen Kane (1941), he deploys it to the point of disorientation and narrative deconstruction in Macbeth. Additionally, Welles begins to fracture the marriage between sound and word that was so central to Hollywood films of his era and, by exploring this division, he secures his exile from the mainstream studio narratives of the mid-twentieth century.

Othello (1952) Othello poses specific problems of adaptation in the mid-twentieth-century era of civil rights and advocacy, since it is a text marked by power struggles in terms of gender, race and culture that resonated deeply with its contemporary culture. Welles’ film bears witness to the problematic political context of adapting Othello, but it also reflects his hallmarks in terms of visual style, narrative experimentation, self-reflexivity and an aggrandizing focus on the director/actor at the heart of it all. Othello is reminiscent of Welles’ Macbeth in its use of Christian imagery juxtaposed with a ‘primitive’ landscape, but the epic exterior shots of the film indicate a Western desire to explore the Moorish Other, invoking Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism (1979). The Anglocentric urge to reimagine the Moorish culture of Andalusia and North Africa is in Shakespeare’s text, but the location shooting of Welles’ Othello production reflects desires for



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intimacies, explorations, and artistic relationships with the landscape of North Africa that have an altogether twentieth-century inflection. Both the literal landscape of the film and the experience of shooting it can be described as epic in nature. Shot over the course of four years, the film is best regarded as an ongoing project rather than a completed artefact. At least four versions of the film emerged, as well as Welles’ own reflection on the project in his auto-documentary, Filming Othello. The version that premiered at Cannes in 1952 is not the same as the more widely available 1955 version, the BBC version aired in 1982, or the 1992 ‘restoration’. Thus, as is also the case with Macbeth, to talk of the film as a single entity is disingenuous. However, certain key elements of these multiple productions can be seen as markers of the project overall, and these provide insights into Welles’ stylistic transition from the more cautiously adapted Macbeth to the joyous pastiche of Chimes at Midnight. Part of Shakespeare’s allure for Welles is that of a fellow showman, one who embraced the open-ended nature of theatrical production and eschewed the notion of a fixed text. Shakespeare’s Othello revisits several key themes that echo his Macbeth: a tragic protagonist lured into moral decline, the juxtaposition of the primitive and the civilized, and the tension between perception and reality when manipulated by visual and rhetorical trickery. The style of Welles’ Othello bridges the theatrical adaptation of Macbeth and the textual and visual pastiche of Chimes at Midnight, combining a rhetorical focus on the ‘great speeches’ of Othello and a cinematic sense of collage and adaptation. The ‘great speeches’ approach echoes nineteenth-century traditions of using Shakespeare to advance a solo actor’s reputation and career, whereas textual collage is more associated with postmodern techniques of ensemble adaptation. In this way, Welles embodies a fascinating mixture of old and new twentiethcentury approaches to Shakespearean adaptation, one that is notably out of tune with that of contemporaries like Laurence Olivier. Still not willing to take the textual and visual liberties with Shakespeare’s work that he would in Chimes at Midnight, Welles nevertheless offers a much freer, and therefore more cinematic, adaptation of Othello than he had attempted in his Macbeth. This adaptation technique was questioned even prior to the US release of the film. In a review of Micheál MacLiammóir’s memoir of the filming, Put Money in Thy Purse (1952), Robert Hamilton Ball posed the question of ‘whether Welles’s “invention” results in a fresh interpretation of Shakespeare or only a desperate originality foreign to what Shakespeare intended’ (Ball, 1953, 481). This question of whether Welles’ free adaptation style was ‘desperate originality’ or innovative

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interpretation remained an issue over the course of his career, and often marks a tension in his reception by critics and audiences alike. As with his Macbeth and Falstaff, Welles inextricably binds himself to the protagonist, who is more recognizably Welles than Othello. Far from disappearing into his roles, Welles uses Macbeth, Othello and Falstaff to highlight himself as an actor and creator, an image that Nicholas Jones argues makes ‘the film-maker and his main character seem intertwined’ (Jones, 2005, 9). In addition, his emphasis on his role as a great actor delivering great speeches brings to mind the nineteenth-century tradition of the instructive and elevating delivery of Shakespeare, embodied by actors like Edmund and Charles Kean, John Philip Kemble, Edwin Booth, Samuel Phelps and Henry Irving. This style of delivery, however, also led to sharp criticisms of Welles’ delivery as ‘anesthetized’, a ‘hollow and heartless’ vision of Othello (McBride, 1972, 118; Crowther, 1955, 27). Welles was not the only star of his day to use Shakespeare’s protagonists to build his star persona. Laurence Olivier acted as both foil and provocateur for Welles. It is, in fact, difficult to resist looking at Welles’ Othello in the light of Olivier’s, and comparisons with the Olivier Othello (in the 1965 film directed by Stuart Burge based on the National Theatre production) abound, most famously drawn by Welles himself in his commentary to Filming Othello (Buhler, 2002; Jones, 2005; Davies, 1988). The divergent choices in how to play Othello’s skin tone have also been remarked upon, as have the implications of Welles’ ‘bronze’ make-up as a racial marker (Jones, 2005). As actor/directors, both Olivier and Welles were interested in creating popular adaptations of Shakespeare that enhanced their own careers by association, and their adaptations contrast with each other in interesting ways. Their very different approaches to Othello (Olivier’s extreme use of blackface and attempt to capture ‘West Indian’ authenticity, versus Welles’ use of a bronzed Othello that emphasized himself as actor set against Othello’s landscape) can be seen as engaging in an aesthetic argument over the limits and potential of mid-century cinematic Shakespeare. Buhler summarizes this relationship by suggesting that ‘Welles’s Othello is in many ways a direct assault on Olivier as well as an attempt to justify Welles’s own approaches to film-making and to Shakespearean adaptation’ (2002, 100). Both Olivier and Welles sought to engage audiences in the interpretation of race through performance, but whereas Olivier donned legendarily dark make-up and vowed to portray an authentic African diasporic Othello, Welles eschewed blackface and instead used film noir lighting and on-location filming as racial and moral markers. For Welles,



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Jones argues, ‘the inadequacy of makeup becomes a proud mark of fakery, a knowing and sophisticated stance of skepticism about the meaning of race and the limits of representation in general’ (2005, 13). Welles’ choice not to use blackface resonates all the more considering his previous embrace of blackface performance as a viable strategy in his beloved games of disguise. He often repeated a perhaps apocryphal tale of his taking the stage disguised in blackface in the road tour of his ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth, for example (Rippy, 2009, 76, 186). But, in Othello, Welles seems sensitive to the fact that such a use of make-up would obscure rather than highlight his focus on the self-construction and deconstruction of the protagonist. Olivier and Welles are easily contrasted in terms of their acting styles – Olivier’s more gestural style differs from Welles’ rhetorical focus. Paradoxically, the gestural Olivier stayed closer to the text, whereas Welles chopped the language of Shakespeare to highlight passages that emphasize his own delivery of key lines and speeches, resulting in a text that ‘must be reassembled in the mind of the viewer’ (Rothwell, 2004, 76). Finally, both actor/directors promoted themselves as mediators between high and low culture, but their methods of mediation were very different. Whereas Olivier focused on the creation of an ‘authentic’ Othello and a desire to ‘become the black Othello’, Welles attempted to examine the implications of the concept that ‘to pretend was not the same as to be’ (Jones, 2005, 10, 11). Samuel Crowl calls them both ‘actor-managers who thrived on being in the spotlight’ (2003, 7). Indeed, both used Othello to promote themselves as actors and directors through their performances. Welles’ Othello is by far the more cinematic work, however, exhibiting his liberal use of camera angle and expressionistic technique as a counterbalance to the rhetorical nature of the text itself. If Olivier is associated with adaptations that focus on Shakespeare’s language (in part due to his theatrical performance style), then Welles is associated with adaptations that conjure Shakespeare as image set against sound: Welles’ films ‘offer us a dazzling variety of camera angles, jump cuts, and vivid images, which carry the narrative far more powerfully than the substandard soundtrack that rumbles along, often awkwardly, with them’ (Crowl, 2003, 143). This dissonance would become a marker of Welles’ later cinematic works, and of his deepening interest in post-production artistry. Welles revelled in the power of editing while filming Othello, in no small part because of the duration of time over which the project unfolded. Forced to film over a span of years in several different countries, Welles completed the project only by embracing aggressive editing; as Kenneth Rothwell suggests, ‘Welles’s editing at the movieola finally defines the production’s

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value’ (2004, 79). Indeed, Welles’ post-production commentary in Filming Othello highlights the act of cinematic creation as primarily an act of editing and re-creation. Welles calls the movieola the place where ‘films are salvaged, saved sometimes from disaster, or savaged out of existence … the last stop on the long road between the dream in a film-maker’s head and the public when that dream is addressed’. In Filming Othello (1978), Welles attempts to reinscribe his own artistic endeavours and to reposition earlier works like The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Macbeth (1948) as failed, in the sense that the final edited versions did not receive his imprimatur. Welles was largely successful in positioning his works as those of a creative genius whose control was often wrested from him at the last minute and, as Scott L. Newstok has remarked, Filming Othello can be seen as one of Welles’ most successful acts of ‘re-fabularization’ (2011, n.p.). The auto-documentary strikes a symmetrical balance with his Othello in that ‘Othello marks his first released European film … Filming Othello marks his last released film’ (Newstok, 2011, n.p.). Filming Othello positions Welles’ Othello as an authentic act of cinematic experimentation with a very different relationship to Shakespeare from that of Olivier’s project. Welles tells the story of creative pastiche in both the filming process and its editing, recounting that, in Othello, ‘Iago steps from the portico of a church in Torcello, an island in the Venetian lagoon, into a Portuguese cistern off the coast of Africa’ (Welles, 1978). In his own journal of the filming experience, MacLiammóir recalls, ‘Hardly a shot has lasted more than fifty seconds … Sometimes we make a shot four times, sometimes forty’ (MacLiammóir, 1952, 101). The filming sequences and the limitations and creativity of the editing process thus have implications for the widely praised mise-en-scène of the film itself, as well as for the widely criticized audio quality of the erratically dubbed dialogue. Indeed, the jarring quality of Welles’ dubbed voice for Roderigo (Robert Coote) can disorient the viewer, and yet it also creates an essential connection between the two characters. For good or ill, the dispersal of the actors during filming contributes to the pastiche effect, creating an innovative, if disjointed, narrative. The film’s mixture of comic and tragic has often been overlooked by critics, and the comic element comes through most clearly in Welles’ use of the character of Roderigo. In Welles’ narrative, ‘Roderigo is a parodic inversion’ (Anderegg, 1999, 116) of Othello, an interpretation of the original text that emphasizes Iago’s position relative to the character. MacLiammóir’s Iago is the dark line that connects the characters in this collage and, from the opening sequence when he skitters past the bodies of Desdemona through to his darkly comic



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murder of Roderigo, he provides a powerful element of both suspense and humour. Welles adds the presence of Roderigo’s small lapdog to the film, and the combination of Iago, Roderigo and ‘A Dog’ gives a burlesque feel to several scenes. The white dog visibly undermines the very darkness of the plot. As Iago holds the dog, it nips at Roderigo; as Iago murderously pursues Roderigo, the dog scampers across the screen. Roderigo’s murder scene, which Jorgens calls ‘a forerunner to the shower murder in Psycho’ (1977, 185), is remarkable in its suspense, pathos and beauty, and all the more so because of its contrast with the earlier use of humour in the same bathhouse setting. The scene also recalls many of the earlier shadows and textures of Macbeth, as the jagged stabbing of Iago’s sword penetrates the horizontal lines of the wooden walkway under which Roderigo hides. Stylistically, Welles’ Macbeth echoes in Othello, particularly in its expressionist, vertiginous style. Jack Jorgens suggests that the ‘sense of vertigo and warped perspective’ in Macbeth (1977, 152) predicts a similar ‘sense of vertigo, a feeling of tottering instability’ in Othello (1977, 179). In Filming Othello, Welles paraphrases Jorgens’ interpretation, creating an endless loop between artist and critic that means ‘we can no longer tell when Welles is citing Jorgens and when he is commenting on his own person’ (Anderegg, 1999, 101). Cinematically, although Welles deepens his expressionist use of image and montage in a method that recalls that of Sergei Eisenstein, what is perhaps more interesting is the way in which he shifts from treating the film as a singular product to incorporating critical and aesthetic feedback into the ongoing project itself. In a distinctly postmodern move of artistry, he embraces what Aaron McKain refers to as the ‘tail-eating snake’ (2005, 426) of media, using his primary artistic experiment to set up later postproduction commentary and self-referential projects like Filming Othello that then take on a life of their own. The vertiginous visual style, whether observed by Jorgens or intended by Welles, links Othello to Welles’ earlier cinematic vocabulary in Macbeth. His style is consistent not in the length of takes (as many critics have pointed out, Macbeth relies more on the staged feeling of long-takes, whereas Othello peppers viewers with snippets of dialogue and image), but in the interpretation of Shakespeare’s words relative to images that challenge or reinforce these words: darkness and moral decline enfold the protagonists even as they struggle against these shadowy forces. Welles undermines the nobility of Othello by keeping or enhancing scenes that are traditionally marginalized or eliminated from adaptations because hard to reconcile with the nobility of the Moor: notably, these are

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the epileptic fit and the eavesdropping scene (Anderegg, 1999, 108). In Welles’ versions, these scenes are striking and effective. Othello’s epileptic scene in 4.1 crucially captures the strengths of the film’s style. Welles’ Othello is driven to seizure by Iago’s seductive stories of dark betrayal. When Welles shows Othello in the grip of his fit, the camera reels with him, and the imagined laughter of a crowd at his cuckoldry melds with the cawing of the gulls. As in Macbeth, fateful images of darkness enclose characters behind shadowy bars and prop them prematurely and unwittingly on images of their funeral biers. Images of hanging bodies swing ominously through the frames of both films: behind the embrace of the Macbeths, above the bodies of Othello and Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier), even in the soap dangling above a bathing Roderigo. Both films share a visual poetry that operates in an entirely separate register from the dazzling verbiage of Shakespeare. The interplay of light and dark, and black and white, is more starkly defined in Othello than in Macbeth, which seems fitting for a play that pivots on problems of both ocular and moral darkness. Welles’ stark expressionistic use of white/black evokes the film noir tradition, and it can be argued that the film is noir style without a noir heart. The set-up of the film is noir – ‘like so many of Welles’s films, a mystery story’ (Anderegg, 1999, 103). The glorious opening sequence, about which much has been written – arguably one of the most stunning of the whole film – is a blend of modernist film technique and narrative ‘hook’. In the pre-credit sequence, Welles pulls the viewer out of darkness only to expose us to a jarring funeral sequence in which the processions bearing the bodies of Othello and Desdemona cross paths with the shackled Iago, moving in stark angular lines across the screen while accompanied by the rhythmic, operatic chanting of the chorus. Our introduction to Othello is the image of his inverted, dead face, a favourite image that Welles uses in The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Touch of Evil (1958) and The Trial (1962). McBride associates the inverted visage with moments of ‘acute powerlessness’ (1972, 122) and thus chooses impotence as a central theme of the adaptation, a motive that MacLiammóir (1994) also recalls Welles repeatedly invoking for Iago. But the disorientation and disintegration at the heart of Othello seem more complicated, nihilistic and universal than mere human impotence. Welles’ opening sequence suggests a civilization in decline, visually conjuring a funeral procession in which monks, heroes and villains move among and through each other like figures on a chessboard, all dwarfed by ominously towering yet insubstantial stick-like crosses that again evoke Welles’ Macbeth. The thin, perilous icons of Christian civilization seem



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insufficient to balance the darkness and chaos. Even as the processions march in a ritual designed to enclose and resolve death for the living, the bodies of Othello and Desdemona confront each other and Iago, who is very much alive. In a reference to the Olivier parallels, Stephen M. Buhler compares the funeral scene that closes Olivier’s Hamlet to that which opens Welles’ Othello: Welles’s Othello begins where Olivier’s Hamlet leaves off: the contemplation of the tragic hero in close-up, again upside down; the pallbearers here accompanied by bishops, priests, and monks, some of whom carry an oversized cross. (Buhler, 2002, 100–1) The opening funeral scene is beautifully and expressionistically shot using extreme angle long shots combined with close-up shots on the visages of Othello and Desdemona behind shrouds or glimpsed in silhouette. This technique invokes that of Welles’ unfinished 1942 Brazilian documentary fiction project, It’s All True, particularly the jangadeiros section of the film, which constructs stylized images of heroic individuals in tandem with vibrant crowd shots. Welles brilliantly oscillates between the crowd and individuals – bodies and faces of Othello and Desdemona, snippets of Iago as he is ferreted to his high-slung cage – to convey the theme of people struggling to survive within a larger social context. Welles is also interested in the individual’s relationship to landscape, in this case the Mediterranean landscape that Welles found so powerful. The sharpness of the voices in mourning foreshadows the jagged stabbing of Roderigo and Othello, and the darkness from which the camera brings the viewer before plunging us back again suggests the death that surrounds the text. Emerging from darkness, the viewer hovers at first over the long procession, then drops below into a low-angle close-up. The images of blurred, obscured faces and silhouetted bodies confuse the viewer, but they also predict the overall narrative of the film. Like the Greek chorus, this sequence lays before us the full pattern of the tragedy to unfold, enveloping us in a funeral veil before we have even met the bridegroom. This particular vision emerges only via piecemeal fragmentary visions, ‘glimpses [that] tantalize rather than identify’ (Jones, 2005, 15). Welles quickly shifts the camera’s focus in the opening sequence from the tragic hero to the villain at the centre, Iago. The opening sequence is filled with visual images of chessboards and cages that haunt the film, along with mirrors and labyrinths, familiar images from Welles’ earlier work. Michael Anderegg identifies the major visual motifs of Welles’ Othello

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as ‘the Cage, the Bed, the Mirror, the Pit, and the Maze’ (1999, 106). This list of motifs could easily serve as a list for the primary images of film noir as well as for Welles’ earlier Macbeth, and the psychosexual darkness of Welles’ Othello builds upon his cinematic vocabulary nicely. Although Welles offers us a film noir vision of an Othello in moral and civil decline, he maintains a modernist love for the beauty of the protagonist’s universe, even as it unravels. The film lacks the sense of ego/id at the heart of conventional noir and ‘the urban, vice-ridden cynicism and moral messiness’ (Buchanan, 2005, 106) associated with a noir world. Instead, Welles explores nobility under the assault of moral terror. Welles’ vision creates an interesting friction between the black/ white imagery of Shakespeare’s text and Welles’ own use of noir in that Othello is fair rather than dark, and the femme fatale in this case is embodied by Desdemona, but characterized by Iago. This creates a tension between the black/white moral imagery of noir and the black/ white images conjured by Shakespeare’s rhetoric. Visually, Othello is mapped to darkness in the funeral sequence, emerging from black shadow, borne by black-robed monks, and returning to shadow once more. In addition, his final monologue is delivered from the bottom of a well of darkness with just the high angles of his face visible through the shadows, as though he is literally drowning in blackness. Perhaps the most famous publicity photo for the film, one used on many of the jackets of the restored version, features Othello’s face emerging from blackness over Desdemona’s white-clad body, reclined in sleep, soon to be everlasting. Welles thus makes literal the ‘Put out the light, and then put out the light’ speech (5.2.7). Yet Welles plays Othello lightly, without the emphasis on Othello as an outsider to Venetian culture. As Jones points out, Othello’s face is actually lighter ‘than the blackness that encompasses’ (2005, 19) it throughout the film. Welles’ ‘bronze’ Othello forms a contrast with the darkness that surrounds him, particularly in the opening funeral scene and in the closing murder scene. His Othello is clearly more Welles than Othello, and the exoticism of the text is displaced from the Moor to the Moorish mise-enscène, which becomes a filmic character in its own right. Crowther praises the production for its use of setting to create an overall texture for the film, saying ‘it would be hard to improve on this rendering of Othello for sheer mise-en-scène’ (1955, 27). Similarly, Jones remarks that the ‘color differentiation of race, like truth and justice in the film noir genre on which this work is based, is both essential and at the same time constructed’ (2005, 20). In other words, characters in moral darkness are



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organically drawn to darkness, using darkness to hide themselves and their intentions, to cloak themselves physically and morally. The exterior location shots of Othello sharply contrast with the theatrical feel of Welles’ Macbeth, which accounts for many critics feeling that the overall style of these films radically differs. Welles sought the Moorish setting for Othello in part because of his own desire to film on location, and then because subsequent financing changes forced him from Italy to Spain and Africa. His love for the topography that inspired his version of the tale inflects his characterization of Othello – and himself – as a performer operating at and across the margins of various cultures. This desire to envision Othello in his own world facilitates narrative experimentation, since the need to piece together Othello over a broad variety of Mediterranean terrains over a number of years is congruent both with the choppy visual feel and with the editing and audio obstacles that are the most remarkable aspects of the project. Welles’ love of the landscape and architecture of Spain defines his interpretation of Othello as one of his larger-than-life protagonists caught in the net of his environment. The ‘real’ locations of this film are often distorted, exoticized and reinterpreted to create a self-conscious fantasy of Moorish culture. As in the film, It’s All True, a documentary sense of detail within location shots reveals a love for but also a misinterpretation of the landscape, which dictates Welles’ interpretation of ‘the Moor’. Othello is, in fact, a part of this fantastical landscape – a world whose resistance to colonization resonates throughout. By inhabiting Othello, however, Welles generates tension between the European protagonist and his exoticized self-representation. Welles gives us ‘an Othello whose racial constructedness is as complex as the racial awareness that Welles brought to his film’ (Jones, 2005, 23). An awkward hero uneasy in his own world, Othello swoons beneath tall turreted walls on the beach, is entrapped by a labyrinthine web of underground iron gates, and becomes entombed in his bedroom. We are left with another larger-than-life protagonist caught and stifled by his world: Othello becomes another Kane, Kurtz, Macbeth or Quinlan. The film is most often criticized for the lack of synchronicity between the soundtrack and the visual frames, as well as for the awkward dubbing of characters’ voices – including Welles’ choice to dub his own voice in for several characters. Certainly, Welles’ use of sound creates an unsettling dissonance with the images on screen. While the absence of funding for polished sound recording and editing may be a primary factor in the flawed soundtrack, Welles’ interest in the effect of such cinematic rupture

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would increase in future projects. With his background in radio, Welles was far from unaware of the importance of sound, but his processes, and the material conditions in which he produced films in the latter stages of his career, led him to embrace the use of sound to disrupt image and to challenge the viewer’s comfortable suspension of disbelief. He chose Italian composer Angelo Francesco Lavagnino to compose a soundtrack for the film that would establish a specific stylized feel, and he was pleased enough with the result to seek Lavagnino out again to work on Chimes at Midnight. The overall effect is to deconstruct Shakespeare’s text into an experimental, avant-garde cinema rather than to adapt it to audience expectations. As if to illustrate that the use of sound in Othello is at least as much a product of intention as circumstance, Welles more fully explores the disruption of sound/image and its influence on narrative form with his interpretation of Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight.

Chimes At Midnight/Campanadas a Medianoche/Falstaff (1966) Each of Welles’ Shakespeare films represents a capstone for a portion of his career. Even though his three completed films span only about fifteen years of his fifty-year career, each enshrines a set of themes and images that preoccupied him for decades. Macbeth embodies Welles’ reworking of interests in the supernatural, primitivism and the dark workings of human ambition; Othello explores the susceptibility of the noble human soul to the seductive voice of darkness, as well as the impact of social exclusion and self-construction; Chimes at Midnight portrays the complexities of friendship betrayed, the devastating pull of divided duty, and the decline of age. As Joseph McBride argues, this film, completed in 1966 ‘after almost forty years of contemplation and experimentation’ (1972, 108), reflects Welles’ prolonged meditation on the compelling nature of Falstaff relative to the man who would become Henry V. Chimes at Midnight expresses Welles’ fullest relationship with a Shakespearean protagonist. As Robert Hapgood has noted (1987, 39–52), Welles played with the idea of compressing the history plays in his early, failed stage production of Five Kings (1939) for the Mercury Theatre, and eventually staged his vision of the Henriad, titled Chimes at Midnight, in Belfast in 1960 (dir. Hilton Edwards), but it took him an additional six years to raise money for the filming and distribution of the film version. As with all Welles’ European productions, one can choose from among several dates for the film: its completion in 1965, its debut at Cannes in 1966, or its US premiere



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under the title Falstaff in 1967. Chimes at Midnight eliminates much of the historical, sweeping and epic ambition of Five Kings, choosing instead to focus on the relationship between Falstaff (Welles) and Hal (Keith Baxter) as the latter evolves into Henry V. Welles’ vision of Falstaff is not unlike his later proposed vision of Lear as one who is betrayed in the twilight of his life, left powerless and alone when he had planned to be most comfortably embraced. Welles’ Chimes at Midnight uses both exterior shots and a visibly constructed stage set, combining the visual styles of Macbeth and Othello. The film exhibits Welles’ hallmark layered visual style, use of angled shots, deep focus, and thematic juxtapositions of individuals against crowds and epic landscapes to create an overall sense of expressionist externalization of internal emotional states. Thematically, Chimes at Midnight – like Citizen Kane and Othello – uses a flashback narrative frame to examine an outsider’s rise to power and then exile to the margins of society. Welles once again uses black and white photography to intimate moral light and darkness, although this time as a critical commentary on the contemporary war film rather than as a noir effect. Falstaff is not the only tragic figure in this film, and Welles closely parallels Falstaff’s fall with that of Henry IV (John Gielgud), also an outsider who rises to power and then declines into death. Adding Sir John Gielgud’s representation of Henry IV triangulates the pairing of Hal and Falstaff and doubles the film back on itself, intensifying Shakespeare’s own parallels between these two fatherly figures. Welles’ complex rendering of this triangulation of love, power and betrayal positions him to succeed ‘as few interpreter-adaptors have in preserving Shakespeare’s double perspective, the tensions, contrasts and discontinuities which give the drama life’ (Jorgens, 1977, 109). Double vision had been a speciality of Welles’ artistry since he first began playing double roles in his radio performances (a theme manifest perhaps most overtly in his 1938 Tale of Two Cities, in which he played Carton and Manette). Explorations of duality marked his earliest proposed film project, Heart of Darkness, in which he wanted to play Kurtz and Marlow, and his first completed film, Citizen Kane, in which he interrogates the construction of public and private selves. If there is a preoccupying theme of almost every Wellesian production, it is doubleness – or multiplicity in many cases – and its impact on selfhood, themes ideally suited for an exploration of Shakespeare’s Henriad. In Chimes at Midnight, Welles once again conjures many aspects of himself within his protagonist, and the film is often referred to as Welles’ personal interpretation of Falstaff (McBride, 1972, 148; Jorgens, 1977, 111;

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Rothwell, 2004, 82). Certainly, the film encompasses a set of thematic and adaptive interests that recall Welles’ concepts for Five Kings that may have originated as early as his days at the Todd School (Anderegg, 1999, 125). However, coming at this later point in his career, Falstaff can be regarded as a meta-cinematic reflection on Welles’ own rise and fall from studio favour as well (Rothwell, 2004, 82). Joseph McBride interprets Chimes as a wintry vision of Welles’ own freeze-out from Hollywood at a time when he hoped for a ‘thaw’ that ‘ultimately proved to be just another big chill’ (McBride, 2006, 134). But, as critics have also pointed out, the climate in which this film debuted at Cannes and then later in the US was highly distinctive in that – partly due to the rise of Cahiers du Cinéma – Welles had become a figure celebrated by European film-makers and proponents of auteur film theory. The film was positively reviewed by Andrew Sarris, Judith Crist and Pauline Kael, but failed to win the approval of New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther, to whose 1967 review many attribute the general lack of interest in an American distribution of Chimes (‘Orson Welles’s FALSTAFF’, 2009, n.p.). The critical respect for the film firmly established Welles as ‘an artist at the top of the pantheon’ (Anderegg, 1999, 137), but an avantgarde artist, not a popular movie-maker. Once again Welles is haunted by Laurence Olivier’s work in the critical reception of this film, if not in its composition. Olivier’s fame for popularizing Henry V contrasts with Welles’ much narrower critical respect for deconstructing the figure of the modern Christian king. Stephen M. Buhler suggests that the Falstaff/Henry competition establishes Welles and Olivier as primary inheritors of English-language adaptation of Shakespeare. For Buhler, Chimes at Midnight represents Welles’ attempt to get the last word in his career competition with Olivier by taking ‘an insistently unheroic view of the future Henry V as it celebrates … Falstaff’ (2002, 103). Similarly, Rothwell sees Chimes at Midnight as showing ‘the dark side of the youthful monarch whom Laurence Olivier sanctified’ (2004, 81). Indeed, Henry is overshadowed (sometimes literally) by Falstaff in Chimes. Welles positions Falstaff as a symbol of England betrayed and, in a widely cited Spanish language interview, asserts that the film is not so much a ‘lament for Falstaff, but for the death of Merrie England’ (Cobos and Rubio, 1966, 159; Lyons, 1988, 261–2; Buhler, 2002, 104; Rothwell, 2004, 84). But, as Anderegg points out, there is not much of ‘Merrie England’ (1999, 125) in this film, which is a dark and brooding meditation on loss and aging that recalls King Lear in its overall tone. The film seems far more interested in deconstructing the possibility of a just war and interrogating the genre of historical chronicle than in exploring the shifting English early modern worldview.



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Welles often pits sound against image and against history via Ralph Richardson’s voiceover as he reads excerpts from Holinshed’s Chronicles. This more calculated use of the dissonance already present in Othello creates an ironic visual commentary on Holinshed’s definitive voice of history. Richardson’s voiceover rarely operates without being at odds with the images that accompany it, establishing a pattern that opposes the expectations of conventional documentary narration. This ironic use of voiceover demonstrates Welles’ ongoing interest in using imagination to confront history and in challenging notions of ‘truth’ versus fiction. The ‘official’ chronicle of English history is challenged by Welles’ history of Falstaff, nowhere more clearly than in the final scene. Richardson narrates: ‘The new king, even at first appointing, determined to put on him the shape of a new man’; a ‘prudent, humane king’, he left ‘no offence unpunished nor friendship unrewarded … [he was] famous to the world.’ But the image that accompanies this laudatory speech is Falstaff’s coffin, laboriously being pushed across a barren heath toward a lonely grave. Henry V’s castle looms large, cold, stony and immobile over Falstaff’s receding coffin. The Henry of the visual imagery has betrayed his friend, broken his heart, and left him to a lonely and anti-climactic death. This Henry seems the very opposite of prudent and humane, and is deeply unrewarding of friendship. Welles employs black and white cinematography both to bring a sense of gritty realism and to create a mournful visual style that sets a very different tone from the noir darkness of Othello. His use of blacks, whites and greys undermines the sense of noble nationalism in other war films of the day, peppered with reds, whites and blues that support British and/or US imperatives. Welles’ palette specifically contrasts with Olivier’s colourful, jingoistic depiction of warfare in Henry V (Buhler, 2002, 106). Perhaps the most famous scene of the film is the brilliantly composed Battle of Shrewsbury sequence, in which Falstaff, horseless and awkward in his armour and his heaviness, stumbles through a number of chaotic frames of massive horseback charges, hand-to-hand combat and individual duels on the battlefield. Critic Daniel Seltzer calls this sequence ‘some of the finest, truest, ugliest scenes of warfare ever shot and edited for a movie’ (Anderegg, 1999, 132). Indeed, here we find a spectacular exhibition of Welles’ use of visual line and editing to create cinematic narrative. The scene starts in a familiar battle mode, establishing shots of Henry IV’s men coming from the one side and Hotspur’s men from the left. But, in the chaos of the cavalry charge, the vulnerability of the individual is embodied in the clumsily horseless Falstaff, around whom riders charge. As the riders clash, the viewer’s sense of continuity descends into chaos.

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Always shooting from the horseless low angle of a pedestrian soldier, the rapid-fire shots reveal images of frightened horses, men clubbed over the head and blood pouring forth. Smoke and fog engulf the field, and men disappear into and out of it, brandishing swords or falling, impaled, before the camera. The soundtrack features a chorus composed once again by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, Welles’ composer for Othello, and it is reminiscent of Othello’s funeral music in the strident chanting that punctuates the individual clashes. There are also the sounds of the thuds of wood and metal hitting bone and flesh, and although there is sound, there is no speech. Anderegg notes that this is ‘a history stripped of all rhetoric, denuded of language, and at the same time supremely eloquent’ (1999, 132). The images work beautifully in tandem with the sound. The camera assaults the eye, showing us the beating of dead horses and dead men, as well as quick shots of the dead as horses ride by and over them. Through the chaos, Falstaff runs from tree to tree, bush to bush, seeking cover. As in Othello, Welles shows himself adept at mixing the comic and the tragic. The unremitting camera angle offers us no bird’s-eye view, no sense of overall movement, or of winning or losing. Viewers are positioned as groundling soldiers, while Falstaff, seeking to hide behind the blurred bodies of horses, trips over men on the ground, their faces shown in shocking close-up. The vulnerability of the viewer’s position, and the establishment of this vulnerability as at once funny and horrifying, recalls Welles’ aptitude at similar combinations of horror and humour in early radio broadcasts like War of the Worlds (1938) and Oliver Twist (1938), as well as in the film versions of Macbeth and Othello. But the graphic violence in Chimes also undermines the ability to rationalize war as an honourable pursuit. At the close of the Shrewsbury sequence, we are repeatedly reminded, via a cinematic concentration on heavy mud and the exhaustion of the soldiers wielding weapons in slow motion, of the atrocities underpinning national rule. The reign of Henry IV is marked by a general condition of violence, by the hanging of British ‘traitors’ who are seeking to reclaim the throne from a king who has ascended to the throne by treachery. Once again, as in Macbeth and Othello, the image of the hanging body becomes central to the film’s thematic commentary. These hanging bodies first appear in the pre-credit sequence to the film and, after the Shrewsbury sequence, they provide a visual bridge back to Henry IV at court. Richardson’s voiceover overlays the image of bodies dangling from scaffolds, as he reads from Holinshed’s history: ‘From the first, King Henry’s reign was troubled by rebellion. But in the year of our Lord 1408,



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the last of his enemies had been vanquished.’ This line is delivered as the camera lingers on the bodies hanging high, against a grey sky. The image suggests Welles’ admiration for the Western genre, which he felt delivered a stylized yet authentic sense of history and of setting. If Othello invokes film noir, then Chimes at Midnight employs the visual code of the Western. It experiments with and reinvents the genre, even as it borrows key images from Welles’ contemporaries. As Joseph McBride points out, Welles paraphrases the work of John Ford in several scenes of Chimes at Midnight, perhaps most notably in his reference to Stagecoach (1939) in the battlefield duel between Hostpur and Hal (1972, 152, 156). Welles found that Westerns could address a disjunction between setting and theme that he found typically present in filming: ‘the problem that the real world outside … doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the décor’ (Cobos and Rubio, 1966, 159), he stated. Welles felt that ‘The only place where you don’t feel this is in Westerns’ (Cobos and Rubio, 1966, 159). By using the Western sense of landscape – wintry horizons, lonely scaffolds, and vulnerable bodies against a grand and deadly landscape – Welles surrounds Falstaff with symbols of his weakness and creates a setting that reflects struggles between ambition and fidelity. In contrast to the traditional Western genre of its era, however, Chimes at Midnight maintains a strong interest in the theatricality of its protagonists. It highlights issues of self-performance, and emphasizes acute awareness of the complexity of self-construction for a king. Hal’s abandonment of Falstaff to become Henry V enables his transformation. By publicly rejecting and refuting the inappropriate friendships and actions of the past, Hal rehabilitates himself through performance, and specifically through speech and silence. Falstaff is the dominant visual image of the film, often shot from low angles to emphasize his largeness and centrality; in contrast, both Henry IV and V are creatures of rhetoric: ‘As Falstaff seems to be all flesh, Henry [IV] seems all words’ (Anderegg, 1999, 133). Their rhetoric illuminates the process of kingly self-construction, as well as the very construction of narrative film itself, as they literally talk themselves into being public leaders. While the conversational dialogue is often frustratingly chaotic or inaudible, key moments of introspection by Henry IV in particular are illuminatingly ambivalent regarding kingly self-construction. The awkward and at times inaudible conversational sequences contrast with the mutual effect of sound and image in the Shrewsbury sequence, and these muddled scenes have frequently been subject to negative critique. As we struggle to overhear pivotal conversations of the king

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with himself, or of Hal and Falstaff, it is often difficult to attend to lines or to match voices to the speaking body. As Anderegg remarks, ‘we can follow the sound track of Chimes at Midnight more easily if we keep our eyes closed. In effect, Welles generates a constant tension between what we see and what we hear’ (1999, 130). And yet sound has a purposeful function in this film: in the battle scene, chaotic sound reflects the chaos of war. In contrast, the ‘conversational’ feel of scenes in which a character delivers a traditional soliloquy not as a private speech, but as a monologue before a private audience, initiates a conversation that implicates the extradiegetic audience as well (Anderegg, 1999, 131). Welles once again uses his cut-and-paste composition process in Chimes at Midnight, and refocuses Shakespeare’s text to privilege an exploration of the relationship between the protagonists’ public and private selves. In order to maintain this focus, he minimizes the Hostpur/Henry dyad and many of the other several subplots in the play itself. In addition, Welles reformulates Henry IV and Hal’s rhetoric to resist the unity of sound and image. For example, private monologues are at times delivered as performances rather than ruminations. The effect is to give the sense of the father and son as public men, involuntary actors on a public stage, even in private moments. Hal most often uses this to comic effect – hiding in plain sight in bed with a paramour as soldiers look for the ‘thieves’, himself and Falstaff. For Henry IV, however, the public stage illustrates the burdens of kingship rather than the pleasure in deferral of this public title. Perhaps most notably, Welles has Henry IV deliver speeches (that in the play show internal debate) to an audience of attendants. For example, in Shakespeare’s text, Henry IV delivers the following speech in Act 3 to himself. But Welles has him speak these lines before Warwick, Surrey and attendants:     O sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frightened thee, That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down … Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude, And in the calmest and most stillest night, With all appliances and means to boot, Deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. (Part Two, 3.1.5–7, 26–31)



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As with Hal’s ‘I know you all’ (Part One, 1.2.173) address (which is delivered in Falstaff’s hearing), making this speech a semi-public act calls attention to the potential effects of a division within the kingly self, and reveals the bitterness of divided duties to the very public who must accept Henry IV as king and his son as heir. The rendering of the speech illuminates both the elder and the younger Henry’s struggles to establish themselves as kings, but it also highlights the theatrical nature of power, and by extension the power of cinematic narrative. This type of meditation on performance within the film itself, rupturing the cinematic narrative and bringing the audience into the film, became a hallmark of Wellesian performance, most clearly manifest in Welles’ unfinished projects and in his reflective meditation on the making of Othello, Filming Othello (1978). Ultimately, if Chimes at Midnight contains an autobiographical element, it is the internal critique of the power (and burden) of performance rather than a critique of Welles’ relationship with the Hollywood studio system.

Welles as Actor, Documentarian and Critic I belong to a generation of directors who decided to make films after seeing Citizen Kane. François Truffaut (Mereghetti, 2011, 5) An eclectic performer, writer and director, Welles accumulated over the course of his career many more unfinished film projects than finished. He was also an omnipresent figure in the entertainment industry, appearing in live television, variety shows and theatre even as he was working on film and radio projects. Two of his completed Shakespeare projects extend the usual boundaries of film adaptation into other visual genres: a television production of King Lear (1953) and his self-documentary about the tortuous process of filming his Othello project, Filming Othello (1978). Both are significant not just to his own career or to his vision of Shakespeare, but in their influence on his contemporaries and on later film and television writers, directors and actors. Both also build on earlier performances to create a sense of intertextuality between Welles’ own performances, as well as between Welles and Shakespeare. Additionally, Welles had at least two incomplete Shakespeare adaptations which were conceptualized to the point of filming scenes and searching for funding, but remain accessible only through materials in archival collections: these are his proposed film adaptations of King Lear and The Merchant of Venice.

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The Merchant of Venice (1969) Jonathan Rosenbaum calls this film the ‘most unknown of all Welles’s invisible features’ (2007, 79) and, indeed, even fragments of this film are hard to access. We know that Welles played Shylock, that Charles Gray played Antonio, and that the film was shot on location in Venice and Yugoslavia using colour film. Welles’ partner, Oja Kodar, has observed that the film was set in the eighteenth century (Rosenbaum, 2007, 79–80). Rosenbaum offers a synopsis of the film project, which again focuses on Welles-asprotagonist, even going so far as to cut Portia from the film (Rosenbaum, 2007, 79–80). The elimination of the Edgar/Edmund plot in King Lear in earlier radio and television adaptations seems to have emboldened Welles to push his radical adaptation style even further. Fragments from the film can be seen in Vassili Silovic’s 1995 documentary, Orson Welles: The One Man Band (Anderegg, 1999, 171), and have been shown at limited film festivals and conferences, but are otherwise not in mainstream distribution. The film, while apparently completed by Welles, lacks sound because – in the type of drama that seems to haunt Welles’ career – two reels were stolen from the production office in Rome (Rosenbaum, 2007, 79). As with many of Welles’ projects, there are variants to the story of this project: that a segment of the film may exist in Hollywood, that the missing footage was lost rather than stolen, that parts were shown on television (Rothwell, 2004, 89). Excerpts of the film were shown at the 2009 Transnational Welles conference at Yale University and are available at the Munich Film Museum, but related materials concerning the project’s concept and overall execution remain elusive. No complete versions of the film appear to exist, and no full script treatment has been made available to the public at this point.

King Lear (Radio Adaptation, 1946; Television, dir. Peter Brook, 1953; Unfinished Film Project, 1985) King Lear provoked one of Welles’ more complicated relationships with a Shakespearean character, and he worked with the play in various forms for most of his career. Although he never wrote, directed and filmed a fulllength version of Lear, he adapted and performed in a radio version of the play in 1946, then performed in the 1953 Omnibus 75-minute production directed by Peter Brook, and performed the role again in 1956 in his stage production of King Lear at New York City Centre. In the final phases of his



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life, he scripted and filmed scenes from a version of King Lear to be funded by the French film ministry. These productions shared certain qualities: a desire to create a sense of intimacy between the audience and Lear, a style designed to engage and entertain a broad spectrum of audiences, and a compulsion to reinvent the text for a contemporary audience. King Lear had almost been the subject of Welles’ first Shakespeare film. He had originally proposed to stage it, rather than Macbeth, at the Utah drama festival that he used to rehearse the ‘Scottish play’ film. However, Macbeth was a short, entertaining play that Welles had successfully staged before; Lear would have proved more challenging subject matter, less easily adapted for popular consumption. So Welles turned to his own earlier stage adaptation of Macbeth as a quick source for a movie script that could also work as a stage performance. Whereas his affair with Macbeth lasted a decade, however, his love for Lear would span his lifetime, even as it evaded his adaptation to screen. To begin with the only vision of a Wellesian Lear available to contemporary viewers, one starts in the middle of Welles’ performance chronology, the 1953 Peter Brook Lear. The closest we come to Welles’ Lear is to see Welles as Lear in the Brook production. Since the young Brook shared Wellesian interests in modernizing adaptation, experimenting with absurdism and reflexivity, and integrating avant-garde philosophies of performance, the visual style of the production fits well with Welles’ oeuvre. Although seen as a success at the time, contemporary critics disagree regarding Welles’ performance in the Omnibus adaptation of Lear. Welles’ Lear has been called both ‘sonorously sleepy’ (Callow, 2006, 344) and ‘striking both for [its] modesty and pathos’ (Anderegg, 1999, 31). His vision of Lear is unorthodox in its truncated form – the Edgar/Edmund subplot having been eliminated – and it seems likely that the Brook/Welles pairing was designed to challenge as well as engage audiences. The match between Brook’s artistic vision and Welles’ seems a good one. The production has a formal visual feel that emphasizes Brook’s interest in blocking, balance and extreme use of light and angle, all visual aspects that matched Welles’ own aesthetic preferences. The adaptation format itself was familiar to Welles: the need to condense a full-length classic Shakespearean work down to an entertainment package of a little over an hour recalls radio adaptation, and would have particularly reminded Welles of his own even more abbreviated 1946 Mercury Summer Theatre radio production of Lear. Even the music echoes Welles’ earlier style, with the composer Virgil Thomson, who had worked on Welles’ ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth stage production, working on Brook’s Lear. The overall effect is

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a Lear that looks and feels very Wellesian and that gives Welles a solid platform on which to perform his own vision of the play, particularly since the elimination of the Edmund/Edgar subplot places the focus of the production squarely on Lear himself. The opening scene of the Brook production reveals a dominant King Lear on his throne, literally tearing the map of his kingdom into parts as he divides it before his daughters, who sit perpendicular to him, and alternate between being profile to the camera or, via close-up, looking directly into it. The effect is very much one of the game shows of the day, positioning the daughters as contestants in a game for their father’s property. Using this television-style blocking is awkward and yet effective in its implications. Cordelia (Natasha Parry) sits profile to Lear and speaks the following lines, ‘Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty / According to my bond; nor more nor less’ (1.1.90–2), directly to camera. The blocking offers a highly stylized vision of the three sisters in a row, angled toward their father’s throne, an image which Brook repeats in the final tableau of the film with Cordelia’s body prostrate at the foot of the throne on which Lear has himself died. The effect is powerful, but avoids the vocabulary of traditional stage or cinema realism. The elimination of the Edgar/Edmund subplot transforms one of the play’s strongest scenes into one of its strangest. The encounter with Poor Tom, played by Micheál MacLiammóir in another conjunction with Welles’ theatrical familiars, loses its power because Poor Tom’s arrival has no context. Strongly lit from below, Tom, the Fool and Lear create a triangular image of chaos, but one that makes little sense to a viewer unfamiliar with the play. MacLiammóir, as Tom, delivers Edgar’s cautionary speech on what he was versus what he has become and the dangers of female treachery in extreme close-up, recalling that he ‘swore as many oaths as I spake words, and broke them … slept in the contriving of lust, and waked to do it. Wine loved I deeply, dice dearly; and in woman out-paramoured the Turk’ (3.4.82–6). But what are viewers to make of this random encounter? Without a context, Poor Tom ‘becomes one extra, babbling mad person too many’ (Anderegg, 1999, 32). This scene is intrinsically necessary to the action of the play in terms of offering Lear shelter from the storm, a hovel that also provides a transition between exile and Dover, but, without the Edmund/Edgar subplot, its deeper meanings are eliminated. This is the only scene featuring Poor Tom in the production, and he enters and exits like a figure in a madman’s dream. And yet, despite its flaws, the Brook Lear is essential to Welles’ overall Shakespearean performance genealogy. We can tell quite a bit about



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Welles’ ambitions for King Lear from the combination of his role in the Brook adaptation, his radio Lear, and his later carefully developed script proposal for a film Lear. Jonathan Rosenbaum’s transcription of Welles’ proposal for a Lear project in the 1980s echoes many aspects of the Brook production – in particular, Welles’ desire to ‘make it new’ and to address Shakespeare ‘directly and uniquely to the sensibility of our own particular day’ (quoted in Rosenbaum, 2007, 86). Welles regards the story of Lear as a deeply human one, the tragedy being ‘not that the tragic hero is an old king, but that he’s an old man’ (Rosenbaum, 2006, wellesnet.com). In fact, all three Lear projects focus on Lear as a figure embodying the tragedy of old age and decline, a wreck that sinks during the course of the play. Welles explores a familiar shipwreck metaphor in his proposed film, and this image is tangibly represented in Brook’s adaptation of 4.5 in which a seaweed-covered Lear perches on what looks like a postapocalyptic shipwreck at Dover. Frozen like a statue with sounds of surf in the background, Lear murmurs, ‘they cannot touch me … I am the king himself’ (4.6.83–4). The radio Lear does not reference a shipwreck, but does convey the destruction of a storm that blows throughout the last half of the broadcast, very nearly drowning out the actors’ lines. In Brook’s production, 4.5 is awkwardly paced, in no small part due to the excision of the Edmund/Edgar plot. During Lear’s moving ‘Aye, every inch a king!’ (4.6.105) monologue, he has to drop the following lines, since Edmund and Edgar are not present: ‘for Gloucester’s bastard son / Was kinder to his father than my daughters / Got ’tween the lawful sheets’ (4.6.112–14). In Shakespeare’s play, these lines are spoken to Edgar and Gloucester as listeners, and the speech is part of their journey toward redemption, allowing them to reflect on their own participatory roles in the cycle within the kingly cycle. Without the Edmund and Edgar subplot, the speech focuses solely on Lear’s daughters and their betrayal, and the blind beggar Gloucester has no particular connection to the story Lear tells. The moving relationship between Gloucester and Edgar does not exist and, as Anderegg notes, ‘without the subplot and … revelation of Gloucester’s metaphoric blindness, the physical blinding is entirely gratuitous, having neither thematic nor symbolic significance’ (1999, 33). In Shakespeare’s play, Edgar and Gloucester are moved by Lear’s speech in which he demonstrates his lucidity and reunites with Gloucester for at least a moment: If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes. I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloucester:

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Thou must be patient. We came crying hither; Thou knows’t, the first time that we smell the air, We wail and cry. (4.6.170–4) But the cycles of birth to death, of honour to banishment, and of mistaken paternal loyalty in the face of unwavering filial faith, are unwitnessed in Brook’s version of King Lear. Edgar offers a sense of honourable witness in the original play, and his presence promises some balance in the world, if not redemption. But in the Brook Lear there is insufficient time to explore the possibilities of redemption or the concentric circles within the play. The plot moves on apace without lingering to dwell long on the wheels and revolutions that are contained within Shakespeare’s King Lear. Like Brook’s Lear, Welles’ proposed 1980s’ version of the play would have retained an intimate, chamber feeling, would have been shot in black and white, and would have doubtless featured a similar degree of experimentation with visual field and language, offering a character study of aging decline. Welles describes Lear as: impotent, from side to side he swings like the clapper in a bell, ringing soundlessly. He is then a castaway, banished to the desert island of his loneliness, cast out indeed from his own personal identity. ‘Who is it?’ cries the old King Lear. ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ He has given up not only his crown; he has given up himself. (Rosenbaum, 2006, wellesnet.com) Certainly, this echoes Welles’ interpretation of Lear for Brook, right down to the watery, washed-up images of Lear at Dover. However, these reflections also provoke questions about the resonance of Welles having his partner, Oja Kodar, play Cordelia while shooting himself primarily in close-up (again, reminiscent of the extreme close-up shots of Lear in the Brook production). Would not Welles’ impotent and aging Lear opposite the vibrant Kodar have enhanced the autobiographical interpretation of the actor/director’s protagonist? It would seem that this project offered an opportunity to explore the wane of power in a personal way that the production of Lear a generation earlier could not possibly have achieved, if for no other reason than there is a difference in youth playing age and age reflecting on its own decline. Despite the positive reviews for Brook’s television Lear, Welles’ youthful and overly made-up transformation into Lear is unconvincing. He sports a prosthetic chin and make-up startlingly reminiscent of his publicity



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photos for his proposed screen debut as Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (Rippy, 2009, 109). A comparatively young Welles is playing old age, even to the point of his moustache very nearly and visibly blowing off in 3.2. When Lear cries ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!’ the viewer is slightly worried that one of Welles’ cheeks may actually take off into the wind (3.2.1). By the 1980s, one would anticipate a greater gravity and self-reflection in Welles’ Lear, particularly playing opposite Kodar, and interpreting Lear specifically through the lens of the inevitable loss of power in old age. It is also helpful to regard these later intersections between Welles and Lear in light of his earlier 1946 radio adaptation of the play and, in terms of all three Lear projects, a shared thematic focus. (One major difference: the young Welles is much more easily able to play the aging Lear in an audio performance than on television. His voice could mask youth in a way that make-up could not). There are several structural parallels between the radio and television Lears that feature Welles, most notably the exclusion of the Edgar/Edmund plot. Because the storm in Act 4 of the play is also a vehicle for the reconciliation of Gloucester and Edgar, eliminating this subplot makes the storm of old age even more hopeless and chaotic, and in both the 1946 radio and 1953 television Lear there are no opportunities for reconciliation or witness. Instead, these Lear versions focus on a tenuous invocation of the image of a wheel of fortune that will spin round only after all have died. When the narrator, a key figure in Welles’ radio adaptation, invokes the imagery of the revolving wheel of fortune, this fails to reassure. The brevity of the invocation has an undermining effect since it is followed by the spoiler alert that universal destruction will precede order’s restoration. The 1946 radio King Lear anticipates Brook’s brutal adaptation of the play even as it recalls the nineteenth-century ‘great monologues’ approach. It makes no pretence of actually being the play itself. Rather, Welles sets the production up as a quick presentation of key scenes from ‘Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy’. Welles fearlessly cuts the play down to a few scenes in which he stars, a strategy shared with the Brook production. He uses a narrator to frame the experience of the play itself and minimize confusion in an expository method similar to his use of Richardson’s narration in the later Chimes at Midnight. The narrator moves the audience efficiently across what would be hours of performance in a full-text adaptation. The result is a rapid tour of the play, rather than a meaningful dramatic experience, a half-hour show that centres on Welles-as-performer, a familiar feature within his Shakespeare adaptations.

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Welles’ radio Lear shares with Brook’s Lear and his own late film project an interest in Lear as a representation of humanity in decline. Unjust disempowerment was a situation that Welles himself came increasingly to identify with, and even in 1946 Welles was starting to investigate the perspective of being an outsider in an entertainment world that had once celebrated him. This performance represents a phase in his career when he was exiled from Hollywood but had yet to be discovered by auteurists. The parallels between Lear’s exile from power and Welles’ exile from Hollywood only strengthened over the course of his career, and for over four decades Welles consistently interpreted Lear’s tragic fall in terms of personal marginalization. Lear offered Welles the same kind of personal metaphor – a human connection to the essence of spirit – that Falstaff had provided him with in Chimes at Midnight. Had he been able to complete his final King Lear in the 1980s, the difference might have been that, whereas Welles’ Falstaff offers us his vision of friendship in decline, of waning power and visions of alienation, Lear makes available an even bleaker, more pessimistic view of the arc of comedy leading to tragedy. One is almost relieved that the project remains unrealized. If it stands only as a Wellesian concept in the actor/ director’s last stages, we can avoid a concrete vision of greatness staring at the abyss of failures, betrayals and ultimate death.

Filming Othello (1978) This is to be a conversation, certainly not anything so formal as a lecture, and what we’re going to talk about is Othello. Welles in Filming Othello Welles’ influence on other directors and actors is due as much to his embrace of self-referentiality and improvisation as it is by his stylized vision of shot and mise-en-scène. Most obviously in Filming Othello (a documentary made for West German television), Welles’ exploration of the act of filming itself, and the implications of public self-performance for both the audience and the actor, left a legacy that enabled the rise of genres like reality television, fake news and postmodern self-interrogation. In addition, he stretched traditional boundaries of genre, and at times his improvisation and experimentation are best appreciated through their musicality. As Scott L. Newstok has argued (2011, n.p.), Welles’ musical influences hail from widely disparate origins – from Verdi to jazz. Welles addresses



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this musicality explicitly in Filming Othello, but, of course, if Othello is opera, then Filming Othello is surely jazz. This pseudo-documentary form perhaps best embodies the cinematic concept of first-person narration that Welles explored in his work from his earliest proposal for Heart of Darkness to this late-career reflection on the process of film production. Welles often gives readers, viewers and critics the sense of being alone in a room with him, held in conversation, and Filming Othello succeeds in setting the tone of an intimate and challenging conversation that engages the viewer with the director and the actors, who in this case are often overlapping entities. Filming Othello bluntly discusses the themes of artistry and exclusion that had infused Welles’ earlier Shakespearean works, leading Paolo Mereghetti to describe it as a ‘cryptofilm’ that ‘highlight[s] (for the viewer and all the more for Welles himself) the feeling of powerlessness he was experiencing’ (2011, 93). Filming Othello – like all of Welles’ work – is as much about Welles as it is about filming Othello. In the documentary, Welles describes what he calls ‘beautiful accidents’ of film-making: If you have a master plan for what you’re going to do, exactly where the camera is going to be, exactly what the scene is supposed to state, if you are locked into that, you are depriving yourself of the divine accidents of moviemaking. Everywhere there are beautiful accidents … my definition of a film director is the man who presides over accidents, but doesn’t make them. Welles also acknowledges that a lack of studio support and infrastructure led in part to his improvisational style. Addressing just one example of the consequences of his distance from the studio film industry, Welles raises and dismisses the importance of the anonymous ‘script girls’ of Hollywood and their role in producing commercial narrative: ‘I had no script girl,’ he states, continuing, ‘There was no way for the jigsaw picture to be put together, except in my mind.’ Putting aside the under-discussed and yet essential enabling function of the ‘script girl’, it is this jigsaw of the mind, the pursuit of the beautiful accident, that kept Welles from succeeding in commercially driven Hollywood, pushing him beyond national boundaries into his world of incomplete, imperfect and fascinating cinematic experimentation. Lacking the fundamental units of polished Hollywood production, Welles invented a new, independent style of cinema, which is perhaps one of his greatest legacies. In his examination of Welles as ‘an ideological

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challenge’ (2007, 271–6), Jonathan Rosenbaum categorizes all of Welles’ work as that of an independent film-maker – even Citizen Kane. Welles’ films were experimental and independent in concept and execution, although this independence often came at the cost of completion and distribution. Certainly, however, Welles’ cinematic brand wields more influence now than ever in no small part because of its rejection of traditional commercial formulae and finality. The very incompletion and proliferation of Wellesian ‘texts’ beg for examination, and his fascination with self-referentiality, discussed at length in Filming Othello, demands that his works be analyzed as creations in dialogue with each other and with their audiences. The result of his experimentation is an entertainment brand that lends itself to the contemporary form of intertextual narrative (multimedia serials, cross-marketed products, and entertainment packages that accompany DVD narratives). Filming Othello has been called a ‘re-fabularization’ (Newstok, 2011, n.p.) of the past, a dramatic interpretation of autobiography, performance and history. Indeed, the documentary re-mythologizes both the film and its film-maker through conversations with Welles, Peter Bogdanovich and Micheál MacLiammóir, and through their reflections on and reinventions of the act of film-making. This later work not only redefines, but also recreates, Welles’ earlier Othello by incorporating the reactions of critics and reflecting on the first work in the later work. In other words, Welles created a DVD ‘extra’ before the format of the DVD existed.

Impact and Influence Analyzing Wellesian cinema offers unusual pleasures in that many of the projects remain unfinished in a commercial sense, but are still ripe for exploration in a creative sense. Welles’ work extends beyond the traditional economic and national boundaries of American movie-making, and the very ‘unfinished’ nature of his work is undeniably part of its intrigue. His completed films (Citizen Kane in particular) are widely acknowledged as profoundly influencing post-war European film-making. The release of Citizen Kane in Paris in 1946 stimulated an aesthetic debate over the relationship between modernist expressionism and social realism that drew in the major figures in cinema and philosophy. While Jean-Paul Sartre reacted negatively to the film and André Bazin leapt to its defence, to young film-makers like François Truffaut Citizen Kane represented the ‘manifesto of a generation’ (Baecque and Toubiana, 2000, 35–6). James



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Naremore argues that Bazin’s essay, ‘The Evolution of Film Language’, defined a Wellesian aesthetic which film critics and directors alike had to address in their later work (1989, 34–6). Indeed, Bazin’s support for Welles helped solidify his role as a pivotal player in European film. Welles influenced Hollywood film-makers as well, in part by working beyond its confines for the majority of his career but remaining familiar with and connected to its rising directors and actors. He was always far enough from Hollywood to maintain critical distance, but close enough to know its secrets. His later films comment explicitly on this complex relationship, and his unfinished The Other Side of the Wind, filmed in 1974, casts John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich in pseudo-documentary roles that reveal ‘the process of being altered by film, as opposed to being filtered through it’ (Naremore, 1989, 255). This meta-cinematic depiction of Hollywood and of the artist struggling to survive might have been Welles’ most devastating production in its self-interrogation. The film examines the final hours of an exiled director, the fictitious J. J. Hannaford, played by John Huston. At Hannaford’s birthday party, close to death, he screens a surreal film about love that ends among the ruins of a film studio. Welles described the film as an interrogation not of the mystery of the nature of Hannaford’s death, but of ‘his nature as a man, the definitive truth about the man as an artist, as a maker of masks’ (Mereghetti, 2011, 92). The film makes explicit the allusions of doubling, masking and cinema that Welles explored in many of his tragic Shakespearean roles, including Macbeth, Othello, Falstaff and King Lear. In part because of his critical distance from Hollywood, Welles is often viewed as a maverick film-maker, an inspiration for and originary point of the independent film movement. But Welles also solidified the notion of the ‘star’ director by negotiating a record-breaking contract with RKO at the earliest phase of his career, and then by developing a unique brand of cinematic narrative that bore his imprimatur. In these ways, Welles can be seen as a precursor to directors like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas who created their own directorial ‘brand’ of film-making only because earlier directors like Welles consolidated the economic power of Hollywood and the aesthetic power of auteurism according to a directorial position (Rippy, 2009, 142). Unlike many star directors, however, Welles maintained a sense of autonomy and experimentation even as he performed in television comedies and Vegas nightclub acts. His unique blend of high and low entertainment broadened the possibilities of how directors could market themselves and their work. Welles was equally influential through his

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innovations in style and through his negotiations of the line between the director’s business and his art. Welles’ final area of influence is to have bridged the divide between modernist and postmodernist techniques. He incorporated a collage style of creativity that heralded the rise of the postmodern even as he helped to define modernist cinematic styles of expressionism. Welles’ collage method of adapting material for performance draws from a multitude of sources, including his own multimedia adaptations. Welles would simultaneously borrow from and reinvent a form, and would often position himself as a part of the performance itself, both as a fictional character and as a looming authorial presence, often expressed through his alliance with the protagonist. This looming presence, added to his continual defiance and reinvention of the expectations of genre and his exploration of the boundaries separating fiction and fact, created a brand of performance that Welles himself equated with music – a creative language, polyglot by nature, expressive and often improvisational, striving for rhythmic coherence even when it misses a beat. Later Shakespearean adaptors often reiterate aspects of Welles’ style and thematic focus: the use of mirrors, extreme angle expressionist shots, and fearless cutting of Shakespeare’s text for the sake of narrative relevance to contemporary audiences. Welles’ self-reflection in Filming Othello inspired a genre of filmic meditations on the processes and limits of Shakespearean productions, whether realized or partial, including Looking for Richard (dir. Al Pacino, 1996) and the documentary, Shakespeare Behind Bars (dir. Hank Rogerson, 2005). Welles’ relationships with contemporaries was symbiotic, and Godard was influenced by Welles’ experimentation and failure with film initiatives, even as Welles’ Filming Othello was undoubtedly influenced by Godard’s open pondering of the notion and process of a ‘failed’ project. Even when Welles did not adapt Shakespeare to film, his stage and radio adaptations influenced his contemporaries. His ‘fascist’ Julius Caesar informed Joseph Mankiewicz’s MGM Caesar (1953). Like Welles, Mankiewicz used the play ‘to comment on the chilling combination of demagoguery and conformism’ (Buhler, 2002, 135) that was shaping contemporary politics – McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Within African American theatre circles, Welles’ Haitian Macbeth achieved a ‘complicatedly iconic status’ (Newstok, 2010, 91) due to its advancement of the practice of colour-blind casting, even as it suggested stereotypical racist images of the time. Welles’ aesthetic diaspora is vast, ranging from Latin America to Eastern Europe and Asia. His innovative uses of the camera and experimentation



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with narrative influenced the work of film-makers worldwide, ranging from European cineastes like Truffaut to modern Latin American film-makers such as Iván Lipkies (Burnett, 2011, 416). Welles’ early international project, the unfinished It’s All True, inspired controversy and admiration in Brazil, and most directly affected director and critic Rogério Sganzerla (Benamou, 2007, 289; Johnson and Stam, 1995, 399–400). Welles has been cited as influential on Slovenian cinema in the 1960s, even acting in Veljko Bulajić’s infamously expensive and international all-star film of 1969, Bitka na Neretvi (Battle of Neretva) (Stankovic, 2012, 47). His growing auteur reputation made him instrumental in offering film-makers a vocabulary to complicate, if not to rebut, the realist aesthetic of Soviet film-makers in the mid-twentieth century. Through his relationships with fellow filmmakers and the distribution of his own films, Welles played a pivotal role in opening international film markets and inaugurating an international discourse community for cinema. In contrast, Welles also serves as a cautionary tale to directors of Shakespeare on film. His inability to work within the studio system provided a clear vision of the professional consequences of deep tensions between artistic and commercial processes, even as he hawked his famous voice via commercial products and used his showmanship to help fund his films. In this way, Welles is both a parable that continues to inspire and haunt film-makers who seek commercial success at any artistic price, and a lesson for those artists who believe their work can operate in a purely aesthetic register, untainted by the economic demands of media production and distribution. Despite his many economic failures and incomplete projects, Welles was undoubtedly one of the most influential film-makers of the twentieth century, and his work continues to resonate in unpredictable ways and with new audiences. His Shakespeare productions helped push the boundaries of adaptation in terms of bold editing of the plays themselves, humanistic explorations of the tragic heroes, and creative methods of generating resonances with contemporary audiences through experimentation with media and performance.

Chapter 2

Akira Kurosawa Mark Thornton Burnett

Akira Kurosawa (1910–98) is rightly celebrated as one of Japan’s most important, exciting, inventive and accomplished film-makers. The director of thirty films across a long and productive career, Kurosawa has been extolled for the ways in which he combines a dynamic and affective film style with an expressive and gestural aesthetic. An assured command of sound and image, a cutting-edge mastery of the tracking shot and an inspired deployment of multiple camera angles – these and other formal features lend his art a virtuoso technical assurance. Singled out for his creativity as artist, Kurosawa has been equally lauded for the extent to which he has embedded, across his oeuvre, a humanist philosophy that privileges questions of conscience, fate, social relationships and selfknowledge. ‘Respected and renowned’, according to film critic Aristides Gazetas, on account of the ‘ethical or moral’ dimensions of his ‘art’ as well as his ‘painterly visual elegance’ and the ‘beauty’ of his ‘compositions’ (2008, 172), Kurosawa is a film persona of unrivalled authority. As such, he occupies a unique position in the history of twentieth-century cinema. Both Kurosawa’s philosophical outlook and the technical dimensions of his film-making are abundantly on display in his three Shakespeare films: Throne of Blood (1957), an adaptation of Macbeth; The Bad Sleep Well (1960), an adaptation of Hamlet, and Ran (1985), an adaptation of King Lear. Throne of Blood represents a sober reflection on the place of militarism; The Bad Sleep Well comprises a discussion of revenge and the rise of the corporate sphere; and Ran appears as a disquisition about loss, chaos and despair. This chapter examines each of these films in turn, but also draws attention to the consistency of Kurosawa’s auteurial vision – the shared aesthetic and intellectual predilections that stamp all three films with the mark of their maker. Separated by time and space, these works also offer a fluent engagement with the contexts of Kurosawa’s historical moment. With Throne of Blood and The Bad Sleep Well, echoing in the respective narratives



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is the post-war situation of a Japan aiming at economic recovery, contemplating issues of national identity and testing the opportunities afforded by globalization. In Ran, the animating context is a more personalized one; from the vantage-point of old age, Kurosawa reflects on a bleak late career period in which he had fallen out of favour with the Japanese film industry and been marginalized as film-maker. Operating as a common denominator in the films is a form of cross-cultural artistry. Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well and Ran bring Japanese mentalités and conventions to bear on Shakespearean utterances and situations, importantly refiguring them in the process. Via a melding of Shakespeare’s plays and Japanese cultural forms, Kurosawa gives energy and fresh meaning to Shakespeare, underlining that singular capacity of the Bard to be reworked in distinctively localized ways. In so doing, as the conclusion to this chapter argues, Kurosawa was to establish a template for Asian Shakespearean adaptation that was to shape filmic and theatrical realms alike for succeeding generations.

Career and Biography Kurosawa was born in Tokyo and, as a young man, after a period as a member of a proletarian youth movement and working as a painter, he won a place at the PCL, or Photo Chemical Laboratories, as a trainee assistant director. Here, under the tutelage of Kajiro Yamamoto, he quickly gained in experience and expertise, producing his first individually directed film in 1943. But it was not until 1950 and Rashomon (a medieval-set modernist fable which tells, from contradictory points of view, the story of a bandit’s involvement in a murder and rape) that Kurosawa was to enjoy international recognition and success. Indeed, it was in part because this film garnered the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival that the West became cognizant of Japanese cinema for the first time. Across the breadth of Kurosawa’s films, it is his alternation between two genres that makes a vibrant impression. On the one hand, he has repeatedly favoured the jidai-geki (or period) genre of films, as is testified to by such works as Seven Samurai (1954), in which masterless samurai defend a group of villagers, Yojimbo (1961), a comic realization of a samurai’s exploits in a divided town, and Kagemusha (1980), in which a feudal lord employs a double to outwit his foes. On the other hand, Kurosawa has utilized the gendai-mono (modern or contemporary) genre: here, salient examples include Drunken Angel (1948), a narrative concentrating on the

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vexed relationship between a doctor and a gangster; Stray Dog (1949), concerning a young detective; and Rhapsody in August (1991), a contemplative, end-of-career reflection on the psychic effects of Japan’s nuclear legacy. Within these generic parameters, Kurosawa demonstrates again and again a fondness for literary adaptation. As befits a director who, as Hiroshi Komatsu notes, leans towards ‘western-style montage’ and ‘European and Hollywood modes’ (Komatsu, 1996, 716), Kurosawa, as well as revivifying older Japanese narratives, pursues an enthusiasm for reinventing ‘Western subject matter’ (Galbraith, Jacoby and Rayns, 2010, 38). Emblematic in this connection are The Idiot (1951), an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novel, Ikiru (1952), which was inspired by Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych and Goethe’s Faust, and The Lower Depths (1957), an adaptation of Gorky’s play of the same name. And, as with his better-known Shakespeare adaptations, Kurosawa reimagines these precursor texts according to both jidai-geki and gendai-mono generic rubrics. It was, then, not just Shakespeare to which Kurosawa was drawn; he found in the German and Russian classics, as well as in the works of the Bard, abiding sources of inspiration, and it was arguably from this spectrum of Western influences that some elements of his humanist philosophy derived. From the mid-1960s onwards, Kurosawa’s output lessened; there were only seven films in the post-1965 period compared with twenty-three productions prior to this date. In part this was due to shifts in the Japanese film industry itself. The 1940s saw cinema dominated by anti-American and anti-British censorship regulations; in the 1950s, the major studios came to power and democratization and modernization were encouraged; and, from the late 1960s onwards, the studios lost much of their influence and prestige, leading to a diminution in film production. Over the course of the 1960s, the influence of the major studios declined, sources of funding withered and the rise of television posed a genuine challenge to the place of cinema as an art form. Certainly, Kurosawa, in the wake of an unsuccessful sojourn in Hollywood, was affected by these developments; for some, he came to be seen as outmoded, while a suicide attempt in 1971 marked a personal and professional nadir. One body of opinion maintains that, despite the epic verve and thematic sweep of a film such as Ran, Kurosawa’s final Shakespeare adaptation, the director’s later works can lay a less confident claim to originality. These later films, centred on questions of representation, history and age, have been judged increasingly didactic, and the fact that a number were internationally backed, by American, Russian or other combinations of funding, is held up as an index of Kurosawa’s distance and even divorce from a national Japanese



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film culture. Taking the 1960s as a watershed, and acknowledging the tone of his final work, critic Stephen Prince thus proposes separating out Kurosawa’s films into ‘four creative stages: the early films, the heroic works of post-war reconstruction, the transitional and pessimistic films of 1970–85, and the psychobiography of the last films’ (Prince, 1999, xxii). The divisions are not without merit, but they disguise the extraordinary way in which Kurosawa’s career weathered and traversed the ebbs and flow of a national film industry in which he played a series of key roles. The unique achievement of Kurosawa – and, once again, the Shakespeare films are an eloquent witness – is suggested in his determined dexterity for reinvention. That is, the director showed himself acutely flexible in terms of the exigencies of film creation, occupying different parts – studio boss, auteur and international collaborator – at different career points. Such a development is testified to not least in his three Shakespeare films. Throne of Blood was a production of the Toho film studio, one of the largest film studios in Japan at the time; The Bad Sleep Well marked Kurosawa’s first work under the banner of his own ‘Kurosawa Productions’ company; and Ran was made possible by a co-production agreement between Masatoshi Hara (of Herald Ace Productions) and Serge Silberman, the French film producer (Richie, 1998, 214), a genuinely transnational enterprise. These films confirm in their variety and versatility Kurosawa’s difference from his film contemporaries. Of course, Kurosawa did not invent either the localized Shakespeare or Shakespeare à la Japonaise. Adaptations of Shakespeare had been a core component of Japanese culture since at least the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. Translations of Shakespeare – by, for example, Shoyo Tsubouchi of Julius Caesar – first appeared in 1884, while the first stage production (The Merchant of Venice) took place in 1885, the play being presented as a Kabuki-style drama (Anzai, 1999, 3). Indeed, at least until the first decade of the twentieth century, Shakespeare was remodelled and manipulated (domesticated) to suit the mores and motifs of the Meiji period, as suggested in a Hamlet adaptation of 1886 performed according to the codes of the samurai and within a feudal milieu (Kadono, 1999, 106–7). In responding to the Bard creatively, and freely dispensing with much of the dramatic text, then, Kurosawa was following in the footsteps of an established appropriation practice and local imaginary. In what has been identified as the subsequent period of Japanese Shakespeare, which lasted from the second decade of the twentieth century to the 1950s, Shakespeare, as Graham Bradshaw and Kaori Ashizu observe, ‘became the object of academic reading and scholarly translation and annotations’ (Bradshaw

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and Ashizu, 1998, 356). Inside this shingeki or ‘new drama’ phase, as one group of critics explains, ‘modern European realism’ was ‘transplanted to Japan’ (Gillies, Ryuta, Li and Trivedi, 2002, 261), a process that necessitated theatrical approximations of supposed Renaissance authenticity: the use of padded costumes, props, extravagant sets and orotund delivery. As Theatre of Blood reveals, Kurosawa had little time for this particular manifestation of theatrical fashion; instead, he looked constantly to anterior forms as a means of transposition and sought indigenous surrogates. For Kurosawa, despite his love of western art forms and, in particular, the Western, the shingeki phase must have seemed a retrograde step, one that imposed artificial tastes inimical to Japanese traditions. But Throne of Blood, as much as it glances back, also anticipates. From the 1960s onwards, theatrical culture in Japan was overtaken by the ‘Little Theatre’ or ‘Underground’ movement, an initiative which aimed, as part of a retrospective orientation, at the recovery of conventional ‘Japanese values’ (Anzai, 1999, 9) and styles. These more recent and ‘deeply localized Japanese productions’, as Minami Ryuta, Ian Carruthers and John Gilles add, ‘have become a medium for pan-Asian communication’ (Ryuta, Carruthers and Gillies, 2001, 7). We know from interviews and his autobiography that Kurosawa was a devotee of ‘yosé [traditional Japanese vaudeville] and … kodan [a story-telling entertainment where … samurai tales were told]’ (Richie, 1998, 11), not to mention the ‘popular arts’ (Kurosawa, 1983, 82) in general. Throne of Blood stands as an early proponent, in film, of some of the ideals of the ‘Little Theatre’ or ‘Underground’ movement, while Ran, as we will see, can be judged as lending approval to, and according with, this contemporary theatrical project. Embodying a range of styles, approaches and ideological investments, Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well and Ran place Kurosawa, when judged against his generational counterparts, in a singular category. For instance, where Kurosawa’s work is characterized by a disparate array of subjects and interests, that of a contemporary such as Yasujiro Ozu (1903–63), whose best-known film is Tokyo Story (1953), is less ambitious. Ozu’s camera is a formal and static one; his preferred genre is that of the shomin-geki or domestic drama; and his prevailing outlook, as Donald Richie notes, can be likened to mono no aware, a quality of ‘resigned sadness’ and ‘knowing serenity’ (Richie, 1971, 69). Similarly, if one considers another contemporary of Kurosawa’s, Kenji Mizoguchi (1898–1956), whose best-known work is Sansho the Bailiff (1954), a comparable tightness of vision is noticeable. Although technically wide-ranging, this film-maker was primarily occupied with the position of women and the cultural dispensations under which



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they laboured. Even a more radical film-maker such as Nagisa Oshima (1932-present) – independent, politically interrogative and technically experimental – concerned, as he has been, with ‘local targets’, including ‘the victim mentality … Japan’s legacy of imperialism … racism … and … oppression’ (Freiberg, 2000, 183), appears more circumscribed when juxtaposed with Kurosawa; his is not so much a philosophy as a mode of iconoclasm. Crucially, as will be argued here, Kurosawa’s three Shakespeare films are important not simply as adaptations but also as revealing instances of the vision, density and breadth of his productions in their own time and context.

Throne of Blood (1957) An adaptation of Macbeth, Throne of Blood belongs clearly to the jidai-geki (or period) genre, with its action unfolding in the sixteenth century, a time of civil war. Congruent with the temporal setting is the film’s representation of disappearing samurai codes of conduct or bushido and their replacement by lawless forms of individualism. More specifically, the film draws upon accounts of the gekoko-jo in which a retainer murders his lord; as Kurosawa stated, once he had identified a parallel Japanese narrative to Shakespeare’s, ‘Macbeth appealed to me very much, and it was easy for me to adapt’ (Cardullo, 2008, 177). For Kurosawa, the dispassionate reflections on militaristic aspiration made available by Macbeth also struck a chord with his own experience of Japan’s militarism during World War II. The invocation, in the film, of a society plagued by disorder resonated with the realities of the post-war reconfiguration. Shakespeare’s play, in its sober delineation of a world ravaged by bloody conflict, may well have stimulated memories of Japan’s own recent emergence from the catastrophic loss of its territories and power. Flanked, as it is, by images of ruination and destruction, Kurosawa’s adaptation is haunted by the equivalent and traumatic spectacle of bombed-out, levelled and deserted Japanese cities characteristic of the war in its final phases. Throne of Blood is a work that, while carefully recreating an illusion of the feudal past, speaks to the contemporary. Particularly distinctive in Throne of Blood is Kurosawa’s deployment of Japanese theatrical elements. In the fixed postures of the characters, the studied choreography of key scenes and the stylized nature of the image, we see a productive merging of Shakespearean source and Noh theatre practice. A conscious aim was for the actors to imitate mask-like features and

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studied mannerisms as part of their individual performances. According to Kurosawa, to achieve a desired formality of effect, he showed Toshirô Mifune, who played Washizu/Macbeth, ‘the [Noh] mask named Heida … the mask of a warrior’ (Cardullo, 2008, 65). ‘To Isuzu Yamada’, who plays Asaji/Lady Macbeth, Kurosawa goes on to state, ‘I showed the [Noh] mask of a beauty no longer young, and represented the image of a woman about to go mad’ (Cardullo, 2008, 65). In an interview many years after the making of Throne of Blood, Yamada recalled that Kurosawa was ‘adamant that her face remain stiff and unmoving … She was not to blink and her head was not to make sudden movements, enabling her to displace all emotion through her subtle body language and intense vocal variations’ (Bergan, 2012, n.p.). As a result of these strictures, in a film which highlights the operations of prediction, the characters inhabit a suitably predetermined register of meaning, and their struggles are played out against convention. Visual identifiers of Noh in Throne of Blood are enhanced by aural accompaniments. A classical film soundtrack (by Sato Masaru) is understated, allowing for emphasis to fall on layered musical Noh elements such as the drums and the nokan or bamboo flute. The latter, whose wail pierces the action at several points, can resemble a human shriek and, in the film as a whole, Kurosawa is at pains to blur ‘real’ and ‘simulated’ sound so as to stimulate an emotive response. True to its subscription to a Noh-like exteriority, Throne of Blood limits the use of close-up and relies, instead, on wider angle shots, a static frame and horizontal wipes that draw attention to the movement between light and dark. Illuminating in this regard, and again evocative of theatrical motifs, are the film’s bold contrasts (as in the stark interplay of black and white afforded by the cinematography), diagrammatically realized primal conflicts (assisted by the use of backlighting) and positioning of the characters against architectural backgrounds, which places a formal gloss on expressions of human will. The impact of Throne of Blood inheres in part in its studied application of a stage aesthetic. For European audiences encountering Throne of Blood in the 1950s, and for generations of subsequent spectators, the power of the film can also be traced to the ways in which these traditional Japanese elements operate alongside more familiar forms of filmic expression. As Erin Suzuki states, Kurosawa is distinctive for alternating between ‘the “realistic” style [of] … Western contemporaries’ and ‘more specifically Japanese … practices’ (Suzuki, 2006, 100). A vivid exemplification of the method occurs in the scenes centred on the Cobweb Forest. At these points, a shrill laughter, evocative of the nokan flute, is counterpointed by shots of sunbeams and rain that criss-cross the branches of the trees, hinting at imprisonment



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and entrapment (a Japanese soundscape, then, complements the stark visuals). The figures of Washizu/Macbeth and Miki/Banquo (Minoru Chiaki) on horseback – their stocky armour and fluttering pendants identify them as professional samurai – are both glimpsed through, and framed by, the tangled branches. Nature, it seems, is a containing and determining force. As the camera appears to race with the riders (several long takes were spliced together to represent one sequence), a sense of a fruitless trajectory is suggested, the movement from left to right and then back both reinforcing an idea of impasse and pointing up Kurosawa’s purposeful deployment of the Western film genre (including horse-riding action and the suggestion of a chase or flight). Not surprisingly, given that Washizu/Macbeth and Miki/Banquo find themselves in what is described as a ‘natural labyrinth’, they launch arrows and spears in a vain attempt at a ‘way out’. Their actions, and the various strategies of representation, point up a theme of disorientation and the situation of lives about to lose direction. After the encounter with the Witch (Chieko Naniwa), Washizu/ Macbeth and Miki/Banquo are further figured as lost, although in this case it is the natural element of the fog rather than the matted appearance of the forest that makes the physical and metaphorical point. Crucially, confusion is conveyed in a sequence in which the riders come in and out of shot. And, as Brian Parker notes, the continuing nature of the situation in which Washizu/Macbeth and Miki/Banquo find themselves is stressed via camerawork that records them ‘crossing the same location no fewer than twelve times’ (Parker, 1997, 516). Atonal strings and a drawn-out drumbeat confirm in a musical key the wandering that is visually described, and the fact that these sounds are superimposed over western-style orchestration makes for productive alienating effects. Once the fog has lifted, however, only a limited sense of relief obtains. Once again, a characteristic static shot places Washizu/Macbeth on one side of the screen and Miki/Banquo on the other, with Cobweb Castle positioned between them in the distance. The implication is that this is the possession over which the two will fight – the cause of dissension and disunity. Through contrasting means, and in a communicative vein that identifies a Japanese imaginary within the Western film scenario, Throne of Blood establishes its immediate thematic parameters while simultaneously hinting at the narratives to ensue. At first sight, Cobweb Castle, to which Washizu/Macbeth ascends following the murder of Kunimaru Tsuzuki/Duncan (Hiroshi Tachikawa), would seem to be at several removes from the Cobweb Forest in appearance and form. Its hard-edged and low geometrical design composed of striking horizontals mark it out as the visual opposite of the ascending, vertical and

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distorted shapes of the forest; its inner order is contrasted with external disorder. Yet, as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly obvious in the mise-en-scène that these are only surface distinctions. Decorative details in the castle, such as the ornamental balustrade, recall the twisted structures of Cobweb Forest; more emphatically, towards the end, the fog that has previously swirled beyond the walls begins to percolate through to the fortification’s inner sanctum. Throne of Blood begins with a construction of sharply demarcated and separate environments; it closes with the suggestion that the boundaries imposed are artificial and fragile and that Washizu/Macbeth’s fated and fateful career path belongs with a more general condition. The trajectory is prefigured in the film’s Japanese title, Kumonosu-jô, or ‘Castle of the Spider’s Web’. The more expressive, and thematically suggestive, title intended for a national market reflects back on the film’s elaboration of entrapment and its suggestion of constricted choices. At least in this titular manifestation, Washizu/Macbeth lacks autonomy, and the castle he gains serves only to limit him further. (Throne of Blood was the English language title used for international distribution and, in contrast, works more straightforwardly to underline the bloody background to the pursuit of power.) To ascend to the castle, as the Japanese title has it, is to be claimed by supernatural forces and to complete an unalterable life trajectory. The determining presence of a higher agency in Throne of Blood is referenced in such a way as to highlight the film’s arresting marshalling of localized interpretations. In her strangeness and other-worldly authority, the Witch, a single entity rather than the three ‘weird sisters’ (2.1.19) of Shakespeare’s play, recalls the demonic woman at the centre of the Noh play entitled Kurozuka. The aim here was to make legible in Japanese terms a supernatural type familiar to western audiences. In terms of her predictions (‘Men are vain mortals; life is but a thread, / A leash at which men strain and yelp’), the Witch brings to mind Buddhist philosophies of earthly vanity. Her words stress the circularity of existence and the idea of the struggle to escape destiny. The Witch’s words are made manifest in the two spinning wheels, on which the thread is being wound, that she controls. To expand the analogy, the tension of the spool on the wheels mimics the tugs and pulls of human action, while the rhyming cadences of the pronouncement stress a strictness and formality to the pattern of existence. Crucial is the fact that the Witch controls two wheels with complementary significances. As Saviour Catania states, the ‘large wheel which rotates slowly’ signifies Miki/Banquo’s ‘gradual’ movement towards good ‘fortune’, while ‘a smaller wheel which rotates faster’ represents



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Washizu/Macbeth’s ‘meteroric rise and fall’ (Catania, 2005, 153). The suggestion that Washizu/Macbeth is unable to escape what has been preordained is clarified in a shot that places him against the Witch’s bamboo enclosure (a further registration of his incarceration) and in a zoom outwards towards a pile of skulls and weaponry that shows the fateful end-point to his agitations. Jack J. Jorgens notes that the scene in its entirety alerts us to ‘Kurosawa’s act of creation – film too winds from spool to spool, and the director, like the spirit, has god-like power and detachment’ (Jorgens, 1977, 156). Certainly, a metatheatrical and metacinematic self-consciousness is at work. When Washizu/Macbeth opens the flimsy door of the bamboo enclosure to reveal the Witch within, the gesture implied is that of drawing a curtain aside, which lends the moment a quasitheatrical insubstantiality and pretence. Moreover, at the point where the Witch is accosted, she disappears as quickly and easily as gossamer, or even a spider’s web, suggesting the ephemerality of performance and the likeness between the supernatural being and her forest environment. A more pronounced sense of the illusory or the transient is also mobilized on the second occasion of Washizu/Macbeth’s supernatural encounter. Here, as spectral samurai after spectral samurai is raised from the dead in a transposition of the procession or ‘line of kings’ (3.1.61) from Macbeth, the influence of Noh ‘warrior ghost plays’ (Bowers, 1952, 15), as they are termed, is clearly felt. Not only is circularity stressed – in the Noh drama genre, samurai restage former violent acts in an attempt to gain salvation – but so, too, is trickery. The Witch is represented as changing shape and form and as shifting between gendered and generational categories: the spectacle is one of impersonation and instability. Washizu/Macbeth’s moment of ‘success’ (1.3.131), it is implied, will be as evanescent as the apparitions he is invited to witness. Throwing into stark relief the restless pageantry of this episode are those images of stillness associated with Asaji/Lady Macbeth, particularly during her first appearances. The controlled poise of her bodily demeanour, coupled with a downcast look that would seem to signify subjection, complement her proverbial generalization of her husband’s position. ‘Every samurai longs to be the master of a castle’, she states, in a matter-offact summation of his present state. When Asaji/Lady Macbeth does cast a glance at Washizu/Macbeth, the eye movement is unexpected and dramatic. Of even greater impact is the discovery, towards the close, of an Asaji/Lady Macbeth driven insane following the delivery of her stillborn child; because she appears dishevelled and stripped of her kimono, a shocking impression of both vulnerability and shamefulness is afforded. But perhaps the most

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expressive Asaji/Lady Macbeth moment is that immediately following the offstage murder of Kunimaru Tsuzuki/Duncan. Caught from behind in medium shot, Asaji/Lady Macbeth is seen leaving the chamber – the so-called ‘forbidden room’ – through a door that engulfs her in darkness. Notably, the camera remains in place, not deigning to cut to an alternative scenario. One extended pause later, Asaji/Lady Macbeth comes back, the frontal shot allowing her form to fill the black void. The idea is of a movement between moral states or of a transition between thresholds of experience. Ostensibly, Asaji/Lady Macbeth disappears to wash her hands of incriminating blood but, as Ana Laura Zambrano observes, the dominant suggestion is of a ‘silent phantom who has vanished into hell and then returned’ (Zambrano, 1974, 269). It is as a type of ‘phantom’ that Asaji/Lady Macbeth invites comparison with the Witch, her supernatural counterpart. In the same way that Cobweb Castle and the Cobweb Forest are imagined as mutually constitutive, so, too, are Asaji/Lady Macbeth and the Witch seen to inhabit similar frames of reference. Verbally, the connection is made in such observations as ‘I have been haunted by an evil spirit’: Washizu/Macbeth alludes here to his experience in the Cobweb Forest, but the fact that he addresses his remarks to Asaji/Lady Macbeth allows for a play with identification and a blurring of his descriptive field. Visually, the whitened appearance of Asaji/Lady Macbeth invites a parallel with the Witch, not least because both are marked by a mask-like rigidity of countenance and a deathly pallor. Such continuing interrelations are affirmed in the scene where Washizu/Macbeth departs to commit the fatal deed. As the murder is being executed, Asaji/Lady Macbeth performs a strange, whirling dance that is arresting both for its seeming spontaneity and its resemblance to the rotations of the Witch’s wheels. The effect is to place Asaji/Lady Macbeth in the position of the Witch’s demonic assistant. As Tony Howard observes, the film’s preoccupation with the ‘uncanny’ is realized in readings of women as ‘expressionless, white-faced and immobile creatures murmuring temptations almost to themselves’ (Howard, 2008, 42). For Washizu/Macbeth, who is figured in Throne of Blood not so much as ambitious as endeavouring vainly to stave off the inevitable, the situation with which he is faced is a doubled one: he is prevailed upon both by his wife and her ‘spirit’ equivalent. Of course, as generations of critics have argued, citing linguistic and rhetorical tropes of consanguinity, Lady Macbeth and the witches in Macbeth share a malign kinship. Of Kurosawa’s three Shakespeare films, Throne of Blood is arguably the closest in incident, design and articulation to source; certainly, it openly acknowledges its debts, unlike the two



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other works, in an on-screen credit, ‘Based on Macbeth’. The formulation highlights Throne of Blood’s status as adaptation in the same moment as it shows the film confessing to one of its primary influences. Notably, in a production which is otherwise characterized by representational concision and a pared-down dialogue, traces of Macbeth appear in visual effect and recurrent filmic metaphor. For example, the combined rain and sunshine conditions of the Cobweb Forest scenes approximate the play’s reference to ‘So foul and fair a day’ (1.3.36); here, as elsewhere, aesthetic decisions render dramatic equivocation and antithesis. At points, even within the representational parameters he has set himself, Kurosawa expands upon a Shakespearean detail; hence, the notion of a ‘spot’ (5.1.30) of blood on ‘hands’ that ‘will … ne’er be clean’ (5.1.37) is developed in Throne of Blood to encompass the space of the ‘forbidden room’, with its irremovable ‘bloodstains’, in which the ‘traitor’, Fujimaki, committed seppuko or took his own life. The ‘bloodstains’ operate as a reminder of the fragility of loyalty and of the possibility that history will repeat itself. Incrementally, the stain takes on additional meanings, for, resembling in its shape the foggy forms that lie between castle and forest, it looks forward to the fate of Washizu/Macbeth himself. Perhaps the most fully fledged response to a Shakespearean image, however, occurs in relation to the horse. In Macbeth, Duncan’s horses, ‘Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race’ (2.4.15), are described as having ‘Turned wild in nature, broke their stalls [and] flung out, / Contending ’gainst obedience’ (2.4.16–17), the lines encapsulating a metaphorical disorder and lack of restraint. Not once, but four times, are horses in Throne of Blood deployed as a commentary on events. On the first occasion, during the initial conversation between Washizu/Macbeth and Asaji/Lady Macbeth, a roped horse is glimpsed in the courtyard circling around its trainer. The composition, which purposefully juxtaposes Washizu/Macbeth and the horse in the same frame, bespeaks a smoothly functioning relationship and an ideal hierarchy between man and beast. Not surprisingly, Washizu/Macbeth’s simultaneous, but unpersuasive, claim to contentment – ‘I am satisfied with my lot’ – is borne out by the actions of an animal that observes the dictates of instructional procedure. When horses appear again, it is as part of a stampede brought on by the temporary defeat of the rebel, Inui, a significant force that is ever present but never seen. Distinctive is the way in which horses are inseparable from the general mayhem and work as an index of an increasing state of lawlessness. Interestingly, at precisely the point where Inui is being crushed, his counterpart, Washizu/Macbeth, is enacting his murderous plot against

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his overlord. Thirdly, the camera dwells on the resistance of Miki/Banquo’s horse to being saddled; coming, as it does, immediately after Asaji/Lady Macbeth’s announcement that she is pregnant, the scene casts a pall over the news and hints at the inherent impermanence of structures of control. Finally, Miki/Banquo’s horse returns to Cobweb Castle without its mount, its riderless condition confirming the death of the general at Washizu/ Macbeth’s hands. From decorum to abandonment, and from stability to unruliness, horses in Throne of Blood follow a trajectory that parallels the course of the film in such a way as to offer a synoptic narrative of its essential considerations. Clearly, animal as metaphor is a key representational strategy and in this regard, too, Kurosawa takes his cue from Shakespearean example. Macbeth separates out its birds into those that signify a dire portent, as when Lady Macbeth observes that ‘The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements’ (1.5.36–8), and those that indicate a divine harmony, as when Banquo notes that ‘The temple-haunting martlet … does approve / By his loved mansionry that the heavens’ breath / Smells wooingly’ (1.6.4–6). Generally, Throne of Blood eschews an ameliorative construction of the natural world, the exception being the scene in which Kunimaru Tsuzuki/Duncan and his men arrive at North Mansion, Washizu/Macbeth’s first stronghold; at this point, the spectacle of agricultural workers in the fields, the skipping beat of bright music and the sound of laughter point up a halcyon calm before the storm. Most often, the film understands nature, and its inhabitants, accordingly to a grim prophetic logic. Thus, when Washizu/Macbeth goes to murder his lord, there is a gloomy shot of a bird of prey flying across the face of a crescent moon; the image calls to mind the feudal insignia of Kunimaru Tsuzuki/Duncan himself even as it also stands out as an striking instance of the film’s black and white cinematography. Later, Washizu/Macbeth’s council chamber meeting is interrupted by a flock of birds. Robert Hapgood notes that the episode’s ‘ominous’ undercurrent is echoed in the Japanese ‘The Tale of the Heike’ (Hapgood, 1994, 237) in which samurai, fearing retribution, flee from an nocturnal avian invasion: there is a folkloric power here as well as the charge of authenticity. Yet the episode also derives its impact from the abrupt and anxious movements of Washizu/Macbeth’s generals, who up to this point have been sitting in strict ranks, and from the suggestion that the birds are escaping their Cobweb Forest home. The dull thuds on the soundtrack mime the sound of axes on wood, clarifying that this film’s version of ‘the wood / Of Birnam’ (4.1.113–14) is about to move, that forces of opposition are in the offing, and that the boundaries



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that keep Washizu/Macbeth intact are on the point of collapse. Throne of Blood even raids other Shakespearean sources for animals’ thematic applications. ‘My horse! My horse!’, cries Washizu/Macbeth as his enemies draw near, the conjuration of Richard III’s exclamation, ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ (5.7.13), functioning intertextually to emphasize the fate of another tyrant and to suggest the outcome of what will be a decisive military encounter. Via such invocations of other endings, the film signals the proximity of its own. As troops of messengers enter to inform Washizu/Macbeth of a critical state of affairs, and as stormy conditions threaten, it is implied that natural and human actions will be repeated. The wheel, it seems, has come full circle. However, as Elihu Pearlman remarks, ‘Throne of Blood can be thought of as ending three times’ (Pearlman, 1986, 71). The death of the protagonist himself is at the hands – or rather arrows –  of his own soldiers, which, although treasonable, as Washizu/Macbeth protests, is entirely in keeping with the ethos of this unstable feudal world. Foreshortened camera angles, a speeded-up montage and a focus on Cobweb Castle’s cornered spaces stress the desperation of Washizu/ Macbeth’s predicament, a further indication of his plight inhering in the cage-like latticework created by the arrows: wood and feathers, birds and trees, signal his downfall. Any Shakespearean sense of self-awareness is denied for, at the moment of death, Washizu/Macbeth, not so much a human porcupine as, in Anthony Dawson’s words, ‘an archer’s dummy or a particularly grotesque portrait of St Sebastian’ (Dawson, 2006, 172), shows a face that is frozen and immobile, transfixed into a mask-like grimace. Ultimately, Washizu/Macbeth dies as type, defeated by the very elements he has agitated to resist. The second ending takes place immediately afterwards, although it is of much briefer duration. A single full-shot shows us Noriyasu/Macduff’s (Takashi Shimura) troops processing towards Cobweb Castle in what amounts to an exposure of illusion. Men are clearly visible beneath the trees, and even Noriyasu/Macduff acknowledges the dissolution of pretence, saying, ‘They can see us from the castle!’ As the film’s final words, however, these hardly indicate an affirmative conclusion or efforts towards reconstitution. Stephen M. Buhler writes that Kurosawa purposefully ‘withholds any victory speech … he frustrates any hope on the audience’s part that a new order can or should be established’ (Buhler, 2002, 170), which suggests that the film insists upon a general equivalence between the central players. Even Kunimaru Tsuzuki/Duncan was, we may recall, according to Asaji’s question, simply another rebellious warlord: ‘Have you forgotten His Lordship killed his own master?’ she cryptically

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asks. The forces remaining at the close of Throne of Blood are cast in the same mould as Washizu/Macbeth himself, the effect of which is to draw attention to the open-endedness of the political process and to undermine providentialist projections. We are returned, at the very close, to the start, to a dour choric moan, pitched in a low key, and to the memorial that both marks where Cobweb Castle once stood and recalls Washizu/Macbeth’s rise and fall. Or, as the screenplay has it, the ‘ruins show the fate of demonic men with treacherous desire’ (Kurosawa, 1992, 266). The key impression in this third ending is of denudation: the forest has disappeared, to be replaced by a desolate and lunar landscape (Mount Fuji, where parts of Throne of Blood were filmed, appears particularly uninviting and sombre). These, it is implied, are the consequences of a dedication to internecine warfare and individual aspiration. The philosophy singled out here – ‘A mortal’s lust for power … will always lead to doom’, the choric soundtrack chants – has been prepared for before, not least in the earlier banquet scene when the elderly general rises to offer a dispassionate disquisition on his new lord’s transgressions: ‘O spirits, when a man rebels … he incurs heaven’s vengeance’, he intones. Highlighted is the typical subject matter of much Noh theatre – what Faubion Bowers describes as ‘the after-life, the sin of killing, the transience of the world’ (Bowers, 1952, 25) – and the fact that these considerations are enunciated at several points over the course of the film lends to it a unity of design and a consistency of moral outlook. The aural message finds support in montage effects. As the image of Cobweb Castle recedes, to be engulfed again by fog, the retrospective mode of Throne of Blood is underscored, bringing to mind the ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ (5.5.18) soliloquy (Sheplock, 2011, 6). The effect is to play up that reflection’s notion of the insubstantiality of the moment and a typical concern with the fruitlessness of ambitious projections. In this visual and verbal framing, the thematic investments of Throne of Blood come together, suggestions of circularity (that recall the Witch’s spinning wheels), repetitive patterns and ideas of national destruction commingling in a bleakly rendered registration of a despoiled environment.

The Bad Sleep Well (1960) The Bad Sleep Well belongs to the gendai-mono or modern story genre, with action firmly rooted in the twentieth century. Although not immediately identifiable as an adaptation of Shakespeare, The Bad Sleep Well merits



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inclusion as one of Kurosawsa’s Shakespeare films since, as will be seen, it significantly incorporates Hamlet, mobilizing the play in fragments, reversals and passing allusions. Ascertaining the nature of the relationship between Hamlet and The Bad Sleep Well involves identifying recurrent echoes and several spheres of meaning. The film trades in partial (rather than exact) parallels, breaks up and distributes Hamletian themes in a more wide-ranging fashion, and substitutes different characters for the Shakespearean ‘originals’ at different points. As Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson state, the whole constitutes a series of ‘pertinent likenesses’ where ‘one can intuit how features of the version text would not be there save for the original text’ (Thompson and Thompson, 2006, 17). A summary of the action of The Bad Sleep Well suggests the ways in which these various Hamlet elements circulate in the filmic narrative. Central to the situation of Nishi/Hamlet (Toshirô Mifune) is the loss of his father, Furuya, an official at the Housing Corporation. Part of the trauma of the Nishi/ Hamlet character is his father’s apparent suicide; he allegedly jumps to his death from a seventh-floor window. Subsequently, Nishi/Hamlet becomes a secretary in the Housing Corporation and marries Yoshiko/Ophelia (Kyoko Kagawa), daughter to the company’s boss, Iwabuchi/Claudius (Masayuki Mori), as part of a plan to expose the latter’s involvement in his father’s death. At an immediate level, then, Kurosawa’s film prioritizes the revenge motif; Nishi, cast in the mould of his Shakespearean forbear, and determined to ‘get revenge for my father’, is questioning and cynical (his is a ‘prophetic soul’ [1.5.41]), while Yoshiko/Ophelia, in that she suffers and is used, recalls Hamlet’s delineation of her psychologically fragile counterpart. Once the villainy of her father is revealed, Yoshiko/Ophelia is afflicted with madness. There are, in addition, various underlings that resemble the flattering courtiers of Elsinore, but essentially The Bad Sleep Well pivots its Shakespearean affiliations around this triad of intersecting personalities. The film ends with the Nishi/Hamlet character murdered and Iwabuchi/Claudius triumphant. What distinguishes the film is the extent to which the murder of the father is synonymous with, or symptomatic of, corporate corruption. Throughout, we are confronted with the seamy, underlying realities of mutually profitable alliances between business and government: ‘Something’ is indeed ‘rotten’ in the ‘state’ (1.4.67) of modern Japan. Underpinning the operations of the Housing Corporation is a consistent policy of bribes to secure building contracts. The representation is timely. As James L. McClean notes in a discussion of election campaigns in post-war Japan, ‘To meet their need for satchels stuffed with cash, politicians turned to large corporations

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and well-heeled individuals’ (McClean, 2002, 568–9). Crucially, in The Bad Sleep Well, political and corporate spheres are imagined as mutually reinforcing and venally entangled. The film offers a graphic instance of the bribe culture in the sequence in which Nishi/Hamlet, having raided the company deposit box, plants money on Shirai (Kô Nishimura), a senior executive, lodging it in the latter’s briefcase. As with Hamlet’s use of the play-within-a-play, Nishi here acts behind the scenes to trick the executive into a confession of guilt. Elsewhere in The Bad Sleep Well, montages of newspaper headlines fill the screen. Headlines such as ‘Building Costs Under Fire’ and ‘Evidence of “Hospitality”’ not only point up the attempts of the popular press to expose double-dealing but also hint at the more deeply rooted forms of corruption that Nishi/Hamlet hopes to ‘set’ to ‘right’ (1.5.190). The difficulty of effecting any kind of exposure is reflected in the omnipresent smoke, a constitutive part of the film’s miseen-scène; whether from Nishi/Hamlet’s cigarettes or Iwabuchi/Claudius’ cigars, a foggy obfuscation casts a haze over events, much in the manner of Throne of Blood’s thick mists and obscured locales, suggesting a general condition of impenetrability and indistinctness. Part of the edginess of The Bad Sleep Well comes from the fact that Nishi/ Hamlet’s role in identifying wrongdoing is not immediately apparent. At least at first, it is not clear who is behind a series of tip-offs aimed at bringing scandals into the open; hence, when incriminating materials are leaked to the press, or when trials are given a sensational twist thanks to new evidence, we can only guess at the agency at work. Half-way through, once Nishi/Hamlet is identified as the insider sending ‘anonymous information’, his role as a vengeful force – an instrument for institutional reformation – is clarified. The effect is to affirm the film’s representational procedure; point-of-view is purposefully muddied, suspense is kept to the forefront, and a slow-drip method of discovery keeps an audience in a state of heightened anticipation. In this sense, Kurosawa shows himself delighting in intertextuality, playing with some of the American film types to which he was indebted, including the thriller and film noir. Addressing systemic corruption in Japan, Kurosawa, in charge for the first time of his own production company, had to tread carefully. The director describes wanting ‘to make a film of some social significance … But even while we were making it, I knew that it wasn’t working out … I was simply not telling and showing enough’ (Cardullo, 2008, 17). In the wake of post-war censorship, Kurosawa’s mode of representation is understandably hesitant. The Housing Corporation, over which Iwabuchi/ Claudius presides, and the Dairyu Construction Company are discovered



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as in league with each other, yet, apart from the former’s involvement in land issues and the latter’s in building work, there is little detail as to what the organizations actually do. In a complementary way, The Bad Sleep Well exhibits a seeming reluctance to locate its action within a recognizable imaginary. The city-setting is Tokyo, although Tokyo is never unambiguously instanced, and the lack of establishing shots could be seen as diluting a sense of topicality. The Bad Sleep Well is acerbically angled towards some of the major public issues of its time; it is also conditioned by a culture of censorship that militates against more direct forms of cinematic engagement. Despite the generalization of the situation, The Bad Sleep Well espouses a dissident stance in continually confronting critically the manifestations of corporate culture, with all of its obligations and casualties, notably via verbal suggestion. For example, the dialogic interchangeability of zaibatsu (businessmen) and yakuza (gangsters) hints at the fine lines keeping these apparently separate categories distinct. Similarly, observations like ‘You’re going into politics … You may even become a minister’, which is addressed to Iwabuchi/Claudius, suggest easy conduits of communication between public and private sectors. And recourse to the term yoroshiku, with its multiple meanings of ‘act correctly’, ‘act morally’, ‘return a favour’ and ‘commit suicide’, points up the ways in which a subscription to propriety can mask insidious and damaging kinds of social and company pressure. Over the course of the film, there are no fewer than four real or apparent suicides: those of Furuya, Nishi/Hamlet’s father; Miura, the accountant who throws himself in front of a truck to safeguard his superiors; Wada (Kamatari Fujiwara), another accountant who attempts to launch himself into a volcano to avoid the consequences of a police enquiry; and Nishi/ Hamlet himself. In these episodes (versions of samurai-style acts of ritualistic suicide), as well as in the nuances of the dialogue, is a powerful registration of the film’s dispassionate treatment of the kinds of obedience and protectorship that ostensibly supports traditional Japanese corporate values. Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw’s observation that The Bad Sleep Well evokes a ‘familiar conflict in so much traditional Japanese drama … between obligation (or giri) and personal inclination (or ninjo)’ (Kishi and Bradshaw, 2005, 141) is illuminating: the film reanimates questions of ‘duty’, whether to the corporation, to friends, to the family or to an idea of ethics. If The Bad Sleep Well is critically responsive to cultural practice, then it also engages with broader seams of political discontent. In 1960, when The Bad Sleep Well was released, writes Rachael Hutchinson, ‘the renewal

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of the US-Japan Security Treaty was set to ensure Japan’s status as a shield for the US against East Asian communism in the Cold War, and protest was widespread’ (Hutchinson, 2006, 180). The demonstrations, and the general strike, resulted in the desperate attempts of the then Prime Minister, Nobusuke Kishi, to force American policy through in the Japanese Diet. Such was the volume of discontent precipitated that Kishi resigned at the end of the year. Part of the crisis facing post-war Japan was the collision of different kinds of cultural attachment. The Bad Sleep Well is unique in recognizing that, at this historical juncture, the country was divided in its loyalties. For instance, at the bombed-out munitions factory that is their hideout, Nishi/Hamlet and Itakura/Horatio (Takeshi Katô) reflect on what their lives were like in the war’s immediate aftermath. Widescreen shots of twisted metal, amputated structures and piles of debris, about which swirl wind and dust, recall the firestorms of 1944 and 1945 that laid waste to Tokyo, destroying up to fifty per cent of the metropolis (McClean, 2002, 505). Here, in these yake-nohara or ‘scorched fields’ – a version of the graveyard from Hamlet – is discovered the obverse of the smart-suited Japanese business world and its slavish subscription to the corporate good. Recalling that they, too, were involved in racketeering, Nishi/Hamlet and Itakura/Horatio are able to draw lessons from the hellish scene and resolve to move on from their previous lives. In their affirmative honesty there is implied an alternative paradigm in which the institution cedes place to the individual. Such starkly realized images of urban blight are in sharp contrast to the richly appointed opening scene of the Nishi-Iwabuchi wedding reception (a mediation of the post-wedding inauguration scene from Hamlet). Notably, the occasion makes manifest a conflict between old and new: bowing officials, the epitome of deference, perform ritualized movements at the same time as music associated more with the western marriage ceremony (by, for example, Mendelssohn, Strauss and Wagner) blares as accompaniment. The visual-aural partnership is an uncomfortable one. Not only does the joylessness of the reception run up against the buoyant, rousing mood of the music; costumes, too, suggest traditions and cultures in imperfect alignment. Hence, the male wedding guests are represented as wearing morning suits. In contrast, the bride, Yoshiko/Ophelia, appears in a ceremonial kimono, weighed down by an elaborate headpiece, a picture of conformity, showing how, in the film, the legacies of World War II in Japan are also played out along gendered lines. Kaori Ashizu describes The Bad Sleep Well as conjuring ‘an extraordinary mixing of feudal and modern attitudes’ (Ashizu, 1995, 97) and, indeed, an audience is privy to



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a clash between identities and identifications throughout, to the implicit force, in this instance, of American and European influences. The wedding reception is important in The Bad Sleep Well in that, extending for a sequence of twenty or so minutes, it sounds many of the major themes. Typical is the moment at which the ‘auspicious’ nature of the occasion is upset by the stumble of Yoshiko/Ophelia: a low shot reveals that she is disabled and wears an elevated slipper to counteract a halting gait. ‘Seems? … Nay, it is’ (1.2.76), states Hamlet, and it is precisely such a dichotomy that informs The Bad Sleep Well and its concern with secretive behaviours. This is felicitously illustrated in the scene where, as champagne corks pop, Moriyama (Takashi Shimura), another company executive, registers an expression of shock: an audience’s immediate response is to speculate about the existence of a covert crime. Appalled reaction shots are again to the fore when, soon afterwards, a wedding cake in the shape of the company building, with a rose inserted into the seventh-floor window, looms into view. As this wedding cake engulfs the filmic frame, suggesting a general responsibility, we recollect the commentary, moments previously, of the assembled reporters, who recall the death of Furuya and his fatal leap from the Housing Corporation headquarters. In that its appearance elicits a shocked reaction, the cake brings to mind Hamlet’s play-withina-play, the difference being that Kurosawa has extracted this set-piece of Shakespearean metadrama from its central position and relocated it at the start of his filmic narrative. Marion D. Perret likens the cake to a kind of ‘dumb show’ (Perret, 1990, 6) and, indeed, in its inappropriateness and flouting of decorum, the wedding cake is of a piece with the tonal incongruities of The Mousetrap sequence. The performative emphasis of the wedding reception is summed up by a reporter, who notes, ‘The best one-act play I ever saw’, to which his colleague, Reporter A (Kôji Mitsui), replies, ‘One act? This is only the prelude’. A tip-off that a corporate scandal is about to break at the reception explains the reporters’ presence. Kenneth S. Rothwell regards the reporters as versions of the Japanese ‘benshi … an all-purpose narrator who explained to the curious audience … what was going on’ (Rothwell, 1995, 176), and their remarks are certainly instrumental in identifying characters and establishing relationships. In particular, the cynicism of Reporter A has the effect of introducing a critical note (as in the manner of Hamlet himself) while also (as in the manner of the thriller or film noir) aiding suspense and throwing an audience off the scent. The remark, for example, that Nishi/Hamlet is a social climber bent only on the advancement of his own career (‘As the saying goes’, Reporter A notes, ‘“An heiress is desirable,

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even before she can walk”’) urges us to think about questions of motive but, at the same time, deflects attention away from the construction of the protagonist as revenger. In this way, The Bad Sleep Well tempts us into alignment with unreliable narrators, the effect of which is to add to the atmosphere of obfuscation and to exacerbate the sense of hidden realities. Conjuring various characters and situations from Hamlet, but not always in precise equivalents, the wedding reception is typical of the strategy of the film as a whole. For example, Iwabuchi, as the manifestation of venality, suggests Claudius; however, he is simultaneously separated out into other characters, and fashioned as a Polonius type (he becomes Nishi/Hamlet’s father-in-law) after the wedding. The effect is to both blur and broaden the Shakespearean source. Similarly, Nishi/Hamlet is divided, caught, as he is, in the bind of having to function as an employee, husband, son-in-law and would-be righter of wrongs all at the same time. This is no typical salary man or sararî-man but a more nuanced self split among incompatible social and moral imperatives. More fundamentally, there is not one ghost but several. One of Nishi/Hamlet’s most successful actions against the Housing Corporation involves his imprisonment of Wada, the accountant, and use of him as a ghost to shock other company members into confessing their offences. Even outside the film, in the intricacies of its historical contexts, lurks a further phantom, Prime Minister Kishi, who was known as Shōwa no yōkai (or Shōwa period ghost/monster). Properties and states of mind with which the ‘original’ characters are associated are, in the film, fractured and inconsistent. Hence, madness is pervasive in The Bad Sleep Well and shows itself in the ‘nervous breakdown’ of Shirai, the company senior executive, and in the sweaty anxiety of any number of other officials, suggesting an emphasis or exaggeration of central Hamlet preoccupations. A comparable shift in perspective occurs in the scene in which Nishi/Hamlet confronts Shirai with a photograph of his dead father (as in the play, images are placed side-by-side). At this climactic point, where Nishi/Hamlet threatens to repeat history and tip Shirai to his death from an upper window, the focus resides not with the tensions of the Hamlet-Gertrude connection but with a conflict between male co-workers. In a further barbed representation of the corporate world, Kurosawa points an accusatory finger at the ways in which power is premised on relations between men, at masculine structures of authority. Filial and collegial imperatives combine to reactivate the ‘closet scene’ as a moment of revelation in which company loyalty, rather than sexual guilt, is prioritized. But Kurosawa, it seems, was not simply reacting to Hamlet per se in The Bad Sleep Well; he was also incorporating aspects of Hamlet adaptations, not



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least Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film version of the play, itself indebted to film noir conventions. The scene at the volcano, for example, in which Wada’s suicide attempt is thwarted by Nishi/Hamlet, models itself on Olivier’s cinematography, particularly in its atmospheric use of smoke and dust, a booming score, dark figures, sulphurous fires, upper-angle camerawork and precipitous landscape shots. The sequence’s emphasis on a suicide deferred also recalls Olivier’s realization of the ‘To be, or not to be’ (3.1.58) soliloquy, staged, as it is, on a dangerous castle ledge, suggesting that Kurosawa was drawn to the English director’s spectacular rendering of a state of troubled consciousness. By the same token, Olivier’s film is notable for stressing cavernous, unbridgeable spaces that prevent Hamlet (Laurence Olivier) and Ophelia (Jean Simmons) from coming together. The Bad Sleep Well extends this notion of a doom-laden relationship, and the fact that the Nishi/Hamlet and Yoshiko/Ophelia marriage is unconsummated points to a condition of paralysis in which the protagonist’s obligation to his father prevents him from expressing desire for his wife. At the close, when Nishi/Hamlet confesses his new-found love for Yoshiko/ Ophelia, and the couple kiss, there is no suggestion that the psychic stranglehold has been broken, an idea of paralysis continuing in the suggestive architectural details. The low wall in the abandoned munitions factory over which Nishi/Hamlet and Yoshiko/Ophelia embrace, for example, represents an insurmountable barrier. And, in the film as a whole, similar structures, such as doorframes, pillars and colonnades, feature in the miseen-scène in an imprisoning capacity, offering a link both with comparable features in Olivier’s film and with Hamlet’s conviction that ‘Denmark’s a prison’ (2.2.239) that prohibits freedom of action. Constrictions on action emerge from a social world in which practices of surveillance are abundantly apparent. The Bad Sleep Well translates Hamlet’s eavesdropping theme into a filmic preoccupation with glass (windows, windscreens, spectacles and mirrors are everywhere) as a spying device. The scene that most succinctly illustrates the idea occurs when Wada, rescued from his suicide attempt by Nishi/Hamlet, but officially reported as having killed himself, is forced to watch his own funeral. As Nishi/ Hamlet wipes away the condensation in the car, and Wada registers shock at murderous colleagues uttering insincere condolences, the film’s twin thematic imperatives of clarification and obfuscation are foregrounded. Not only is the funeral a false event (as in Hamlet, ‘ceremony’ [5.1.207] and ‘obsequies’ [5.1.208] are found wanting); it is also incongruous. A multilayered aural landscape made up of Buddhist chants, the voices (that Nishi/Hamlet has put on tape) of Wada’s crowing colleagues, and a

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piece of jaunty samba music from a nightclub has a grimly comic effect; because each of these elements unfolds simultaneously, the formality of the occasion is grotesquely upset. Cumulatively, the choric cacophony operates so as to prompt in Wada a realization that he has been exploited, that he is viewed as an expendable element in a corporate machine. A culture of surveillance is also announced in the ways in which, in keeping with an emphasis on performance, some activities are spectated upon or recorded. The narrative is regularly punctuated by press conferences, at which phalanxes of cameras and microphones bristle, which suggest a concerted effort mechanistically to document. Patrolling guards, moments of overhearing, and the unseen work of the detectives hired by Iwabuchi/ Claudius to check up on Nishi/Hamlet – all bespeak a suspicious mindset and a state of affairs in which individuals’ lives are not their own. In these ways, The Bad Sleep Well once again shows itself sensitive to its moment, embedding in its narrative fabric the anxieties animating the superpowers in the Cold War era and their support of surveillance systems. Nishi/ Hamlet’s spectated-upon status mirrors that of his larger political world. In a world in which people are divided from themselves and others, the logical endpoint is that the subject becomes a spectral version of himself or herself, a species of ghost. Pertinent are the two resonant scenes in which Shirai is tricked into thinking that he sees Wada as a ghost, but there are also ghost-like existences, as when the desperately impassioned Wada states, ‘Sometimes I don’t know who I am, whether I’m alive or dead’. A typical official, Wada emblematizes and incarnates the limbo-like condition generated from the contradictions of his environment. Something similar might be said of Nishi/Hamlet; as the film reveals in its latter stages, he has, in fact, exchanged identities with his friend, Itakura/Horatio, so as the more effectively to execute revenge. The Bad Sleep Well extrapolates the Shakespearean motif of the ‘antic disposition’ (1.5.173) in an extreme sense in that Nishi/Hamlet occupies Itakura/Horatio’s place: legally, the protagonist is not what he appears to be and, once the impersonation has been exposed, he can no longer maintain the fantasy of his alter ego. The shaky foundations of Nishi/Hamlet’s identity are spotlighted in the moment of his death. In contradistinction to Hamlet, Nishi/Hamlet’s actual death occurs off-stage: he is injected with alcohol (the reference to the poison plot of the duel scene reminds us of the film’s preoccupation with revenge), made unconscious and placed in a car with which a train collides. It is a sombre dénouement to an even more sombre parable: as Stephen Prince states, ‘The intensity of Nishi’s protest has not even bruised the institutions of power … individual heroism is an inadequate form



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of protest against the corporate state’ (Prince, 1999, 184). The general hopelessness is summed up by Itakura/Horatio when he notes, picking up an earlier sentiment uttered by Tatsuo/Laertes (Tatsuya Mihashi), that Nishi/Hamlet’s ‘sense of justice’ has come to naught. Because revenge is cut short at precisely the point where it might have been successful, Nishi/ Hamlet appears again as an incomplete or uncompleted self. Psychic disassociation inheres not only in death but also in its specific effects. ‘Look at her’, demands Tatsuo/Laertes, enjoining Iwabuchi/Claudius to heed the grieving and distracted Yoshiko/Ophelia, ‘When you killed Nishi, she died too’. The implication is that ghostly memory of Nishi/Hamlet persists, producing other ghosts in its wake and determining Yoshiko/Ophelia’s fraught condition. Nishi/Hamlet’s story continues beyond him. More broadly, Nishi/Hamlet’s death makes tragically visible the invulnerability of the corporate sphere and its attendant practices, reinforcing an ultimately dystopian vision. For Itakura/Horatio, Nishi/Hamlet’s successor, there may be no further protest; the fact that his ‘real’ identity is now extinguished, and the lack of tangible proof of villainy, mean that he is reduced to silence: ‘I’m Itakura … no … Nishi … now I can never become Nishi again … I … can say nothing’, he states. Legally deceased, Itakura/Horatio is represented here not so much as a ghost as a vitiated force, and the overriding impression is of him as a lost personality who lies outside official structures. His accompanying prediction that ‘all Japan will be hoodwinked’ not only confirms his powerlessness; it also prepares the way for the subsequent scene in which the previously cynical reporters are represented as accepting at face value the seeming distress of Iwabuchi/Claudius, bowing in acknowledgement of his authority. They, too, have been fooled. The ‘system’, it seems, resists attempts from within or without to bring about its reformation while retaining the capacity to shape public opinion. The reporters, already compromised as benshi, are here demythologized still further as instruments of discovery. Like Horatio and Fortinbras, they are imagined as imperfect tellers of the Hamletian narrative. In the same way that the reporters are positioned hierarchically in the closing stages, so, too, is Iwabuchi/Claudius. On several occasions, Iwabuchi/Claudius speaks on the telephone to a higher force: ‘everything has been taken care of’, he states at the end, adding, ‘I’m sorry to have caused you so much worry’. It is the one moment in the film where the character acknowledges a superior and, as Kurosawa stated in interview, ‘an even worse man is at the other end … everyone in the audience must have deduced that it must be then Premier Kishi who is the ultimate source

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of corruption’ (Cardullo, 2008, 17, 141). Here, more so than at any other moment in The Bad Sleep Well, is the intimate relation of the political and corporate spheres writ large. Moreover, it is via an emphasis on the connections shared by these two institutions that the meanings embedded in the film’s title come into view. During his final speech, Iwabuchi/Claudius mistakenly bids ‘good night’ instead of ‘good morning’: ‘I’m confused’, he apologizes, ‘I was awake all night’. Throughout The Bad Sleep Well, metaphors of sleeping recur, not least in the way in which Nishi/Hamlet is put to into a drunken sleep by Iwabuchi/Claudius in preparation for death. Such metaphors also gesture beyond the film to its title, Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru, which, in Japanese, might more accurately translate either as ‘The Worst Sleep Best’ or as ‘The Worse You Are The Better You Sleep’. Playing with the aphorism that it is the just, rather than the unjust, who sleep best, the title suggests that the bad sleep well because their villainy goes undetected. Clearly, Prime Minister Kishi, who, it is implied, enjoys uninterrupted sleep, is the butt of the satire, as opposed to Iwabuchi/ Claudius, whose sleep is disturbed. And it is in the act of invoking different states that The Bad Sleep Well pays its final tribute to Hamlet, conjuring the protagonist’s ‘To be, or not to be … To die, to sleep’ (3.1.58, 62) soliloquy, with its multiple associations of sleeping, dreaming, escape and suicide, and recalling, through the celebrated meditation, his vexed attempts to fulfil an avenging ‘purpose’ (3.4.101).

Ran (1985) With Ran, Kurosawa’s final Shakespearean undertaking, the director was once again back in the territory of the jidai-geki or period genre of films. Specifically, the director elected to concentrate on a reimagining of the sengoku jidai era, also known as the ‘Age of the Country at War’ (1392– 1568), bringing to his project a sense of historical rootedness. In interview, Kurosawa stated that he ‘started out to make a film about Môtonari Mori, the sixteenth-century warlord whose three sons are admired in Japan as paragons of filial virtue’ (Cardullo, 2008, 126). What fired Kurosawa was the opportunity for exploring the narrative from an alternative perspective and highlighting the immorality of the warlord’s offspring instead of their supposed admirable qualities. This shift in emphasis quickly led to the parallels with King Lear, with Mori and Lear becoming inextricably entangled. Emerging from the imaginative process is thus a hybrid narrative that layers on top of each other



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primary familial tales from different national cultures; as Judith Buchanan states, there is a ‘Japanese half’ to Kurosawa’s ‘Anglo-Japanese tryst’ (Buchanan, 2005, 80). The Lear-like qualities of Ran are made immediately apparent in the film’s stress on pride, hubris, folly, abasement and loss, as these features are represented in the personal trajectory of Hidetora/Lear (Tatsuya Nakadai), the aging and imperious warlord at the centre of the action. Equally, King Lear expresses itself in the episode in which Hidetora/ Lear relinquishes his lands and power to his children, a revealing change being that, in this adaptation, the three daughters have been replaced by three sons. Other parallels evince Shakespearean resonances at the level of characterization. Hence, Saburô (Daisuke Ryû), Hidetora/Lear’s third and youngest son, brings both Cordelia and the Fool to mind, not least in Saburô’s recognition of his father’s frailities: ‘Pathetic … A senile old fool!’, he announces. A similarly composite character is Hidetora/Lear’s second son, Jirô (Jinpachi Nezu). At once, Jirô functions as the narrative surrogate for Regan, a further connection with Shakespeare’s ‘unkind’ and ‘pelican’ (3.4.68, 72) daughter suggesting itself in the way in which Jirô falls out with his elder brother, Tarô (Akira Terao), just as Goneril and Regan become disaffected in King Lear. Distinctive to Kurosawa’s interpretation of sibling estrangement is the issue of birth order. Also a type of aggrieved Edmund, Jirô is important in Ran as a mediation of a key Renaissance preoccupation – the position of the second son. As Jirô chafes, ‘I have had to grovel at his feet all my life! … I will break this tradition!’ In this way, Jirô serves to concatenate the film’s concern with broken ‘bonds’ and the overlapping logic of early modern attitudes and Japanese feudal ideologies. Indeed, throughout Ran, Kurosawa radically localizes the act of Shakespearean reinvention. At once, therefore, Kyoami (Peter), a satirical ‘conversationalist’, in the director’s words (Cardullo, 2008, 135), stands in for Lear’s Fool in the puncturing force of his aphorisms and proverbs. For example, his song – ‘Gives away his house … Gives away his land … His bounty earns him a new title … Lord of the rice fields’ – arraigns Hidetora/Lear by prioritizing social diminution, destructive generosity and a sensitivity to issues of status. But Kyoami/Fool is enabled as a critical spokesperson in Ran in that he does not wear a sword, suggesting that he is not of the samurai class; his impunity is linked to his bypassing of military conventions and makes sense within a filmic construction that places him in a specific social niche. Tied to Ran’s evocation of a discrete time and culture is a sense of prevailing disorder, a state of affairs summed up in the film’s title, which translates as ‘chaos’. Ran’s epic vision prioritizes the descent of the isolated individual into a chaotic universe and, as characters lose their psychic and

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geographical frames of reference, or are stripped of civil accoutrements, the camera focuses on clouds forming and reforming and swirling mists as metaphors of movement, change and unpredictability. ‘Crack Nature’s molds, all germens spill at once’ (3.2.8) states Lear in a reflection upon nature’s turmoil that Kurosawa, in discovering chaos as the constituent element of the Ran world, may well have taken as his point of interpretive departure. Actions in Ran are defined through a concentration on bigger processes that dwarf articulations of human need and will. In this way, repeated cloud images, in addition to refracting King Lear’s realization of the ‘to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain’ (3.1.11) as pathetic fallacy, invite contemporary readings and conjure the terrifying nuclear emblems of the cessation of World War II. Chaos is also the determining condition of the protagonist himself, with Hidetora’s questions – ‘Where am I?’ and ‘Who am I?’ – mirroring Lear’s own demand, ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ (1.4.205). The ‘confusion’ (2.4.89) endemic in King Lear appears in Ran in an interweaving of natural and psychic situations that both confirms chaos as a universal and hints at the inherent fragility and illusoriness of any construction of order. Because formal hierarchies in the film are premised on chaos, their propensity for disintegration is soon exposed, a graphic illustration of the development being the crumbling of authority. The altercation between rival retainers over Hidetora/Lear’s ‘banner’, for instance (whoever lays claim to the symbolically freighted ‘banner’ is able to proclaim himself ‘head’ of the familial ‘house’), replays the scenes involving the riotous behaviour of Lear’s knights and, in so doing, reinforces the film’s preoccupation with domestic space, appropriate conduct and the familial complexions of rule. A comparable set of motifs comes into play when Hidetora/Lear visits the First Castle, which has been given to Tarô, his firstborn son, only to find that his concubines must press themselves to the wall to allow Kaede (Mieko Harada), Tarô’s wife, to pass. ‘Intolerable!’ is the protagonist’s reaction. But the episode, as well as highlighting Hidetora/ Lear’s waning power, operates no less suggestively as an illustration of Kaede’s situation. ‘Scandalous! I am the mistress!’, she exclaims, her response indicating a subscription to propriety and establishing a measure of empathy in that Kaede is permitted to speak to her own experience. Similarly, when Kaede cuts the neck of Jirô, her brother-in-law, the better to lick the blood and seduce him, she is imagined as acting to avoid being consigned to a marginal status as a widow. ‘What concerns me is my own future’, she explains. Ran may make of Kaede a vampiric stereotype, an embodiment of demonic eroticism, yet it simultaneously contextualizes



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her conduct in terms of cultural constraints and attitudes inimical to the woman as independent agent. On occasions in Ran, the appearance of Hidetora/Lear and Kaede in the same scene crystallizes the film’s investment in collapsing authority structures. Tensions come to a head in the ‘family gathering’ (a conflation of Lear’s reception at his daughters’ houses) in which the destabilization of hierarchical relations is registered in a refusal to address Hidetora/Lear with the correct nomenclature. ‘The honourable father of my husband’, Kaede’s formulation for Hidetora/Lear, is one that installs the domestic institution of marriage over and above the political system of lordship to purposefully demeaning effect. Dynamics of place are again to the fore; Hidetora/Lear is accommodated in an inferior location to Kaede in the chamber, which results in his exasperated demand, ‘Am I to sit below you? Who do you think I am?’ The question paves the way for later reflections on identity precipitated by Hidetora/Lear’s descent into madness; at the same time, it alerts us to the role gender plays in the protagonist’s disaffection from family (he is dictated to not only by his own son but also by his son’s wife). To Tarô, Hidetora/Lear states, ‘the hen pecks at the cock and makes him crow’, the idea being that the son performs on demand when Kaede requires. To Jirô, who marries Kaede after his elder brother’s death, Kurogane (Hisashi Igawa), a general, notes, ‘Kaede barks and you grovel again’. Here, the objection is that Jirô’s feelings of social exclusion are exacerbated by Kaede, whose machinations are seen as part and parcel of her ambitious traits. For Hidetora/Lear, the sense of displacement is doubly galling, with women and systems of kinship coming together to rob him of his customary position. In this tussle of wills, individual readings of deference and convention, which are themselves based on concepts of ownership and space, indicate authority’s constantly shifting foundations. Over the course of Ran, Kaede, entangled with the brothers in triangulated fashion, is discovered not only as an emasculating instrument but also as a force of political instability. As later sections of Ran make clear, such jockeying for position emerges from the bitterness precipitated by the nature of Hidetora/Lear’s earlier regime. In interview, Kurosawa reflected on being ‘troubled’ by the fact that: Shakespeare gives his characters no past … How did Lear acquire the power that, as an old man, he abuses with such disastrous effects? Without knowing his past, I’ve never really understood the ferocity of his daughters’ response to Lear’s feeble attempts to shed his royal power. In Ran, I’ve tried to give Lear a history. (Cardullo, 2008, 125)

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Developing a backstory – one that privileges a Macbeth-like tyranny – is one of Ran’s most creative departures. In a previous dispensation, it is established, Hidetora/Lear murdered Kaede’s father and brothers, and it is this that shapes Kaede as a vengeful figure. The contest for domestic space, we come to appreciate, is not so much a local familial matter as an expression of revenge working inexorably and incrementally. In a parallel movement, the murder of Kaede’s father and brothers is replicated in the murder of the parents of Sué (Yoshiko Miyazaki), wife to Jirô, in internecine wars. By comparison with Kaede, Sué is elaborated as pursuing an alternative path to come to terms with Hidetora/Lear’s demagoguery. Her absorption in religion (when she first appears, she is positioned near a shrine) suggests her function as a foil, while her stress on mercy (‘I don’t hate you’, she states to Hidetora/Lear, ‘The Buddha embraces all things’), as well as referencing the redemptive orientation of the end of King Lear, associates her with sufferance and forgiveness. In her key introductory scene, Sué is filmed against a refulgent sunset, her contentment, the sound of cicadas and golden colours pointing up a sense of tranquillity. Details of setting establish Sué as the embodiment of the deity, the ‘Eternal Buddha’ or, more specifically, the ‘Amida Buddha’ (searching for his daughter-in-law, and calling her by name, Hidetora/Lear initially finds only the icon of the godhead she worships). ‘Amida’ is the Japanese expression for ‘immeasurable light and life’, and the Amida Buddha, as one of the central female divinities in the Buddhist pantheon, is regarded as a parent who oversees paradise, offers comfort and love, and ensures salvation (Graves, 1962, 427–8). The derelictions of the past, it is implied, may yet be overcome. When, later in the film, Sué is dispatched on the orders of her now-suborned husband, her role as past victim is taken over by her brother, the flute-playing Tsurumaru (Mansai Nomura). At once, Tsurumaru, isolated in a hut in the wilderness, resembles Poor Tom, but he is also, in his blindness, akin to Gloucester; concerns of dispossession, treachery and inhumanity common to both Shakespearean types play across the figuration of his character. No less suggestive is the part played by Tsurumaru in Ran’s backstory, for, as a boy, his eyes were ‘gouged out’ by Hidetora/Lear, meaning that his body bears the marks of a tortured history. Notably, Tsurumaru’s situation echoes that of Semimaru, a Noh play about a blind musician, and Atsumori, another Noh play in which, as John Collick notes, ‘the ghost of a samurai is disguised as a flute-playing reaper’ (Collick, 1989, 184). As in Throne of Blood, Kurosawa engineers an emotional effect by wedding prevailing motifs from different cultural traditions. These intertextual associations, as well as the fact that Tsurumaru



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is the son of a warlord, lend him nobility and endow his words with a particular importance. Indeed, the film closes with Tsurumaru, suggesting both Hidetora/Lear’s material legacy and the ways in which the backstory of Ran continues to assert itself in the film proper. The preoccupation in Ran with the effects of inhumanity is most obviously suggested in a discourse of animals and animality. Even at the start, the boar hunt is prioritized as an index to characters’ behaviour. At once, of course, it is the boar that is hunted; later, the film makes clear, human prey (Lear is pursued by his ungrateful sons) is the intended target. ‘Would you eat me?’, Hidetora/Lear asks the assembled company jokingly, the darker point being that the protagonist is vulnerable to the consuming desires of others and that he comes to occupy an animal-like register. Popular conceptions of animal actions are a repeated point of reference. Thus, Hidetora/Lear’s remark on being turned out (‘Only the birds and the beasts live in solitude’) both rephrases the Shakespearean instance that life is no better than that of a ‘poor, bare, forked animal’ (3.4.99–100) and suggests the psychic damage caused by exile. In this context, the comparison seized upon by Kyoami/Fool to delineate the situation makes logistical sense: ‘Men are beasts!’, he exclaims. Particular animals connote particular traits. As in Throne of Blood, metaphors of horses and horse-riding introduce issues of mastery and control; also similar to that film, birds indicate a perversion of the proper order of things. Kyoami’s remark, ‘The bird raised the snake and is eaten by it’, brings to mind the Fool’s ‘The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long, / That it had it head bit off by it young’ (1.4.190–191) even as it also underscores an idea of breeding gone awry. But it is with Kurogane’s extended tale of women who transform themselves into foxes that the film’s concern with animal-human proximity comes to the fore. ‘There are many foxes about here,’ he states, adding, ‘they often play tricks on people.’ The context for the remark is the order that Kurogane has been given – to dispatch Sué, decapitate her and produce her head as proof. When the general unveils, instead, the stone head of a fox, and addresses himself to a furious Kaede, the implication is that she, like Goneril, is being arraigned for her ‘wolvish visage’ (1.4.285). ‘The fox in Japanese mythology’, writes Julie Kane, ‘carries two distinct sets of meanings … benevolent aspects … [and a] hidden, treacherous nature’ (Kane, 1997, 150). Both areas of association are mobilized in Ran, and it is arguably because she believes the stone head to represent the malevolence of the fox that Kaede is roused to anger. At the same time, the stone head as a surrogate for Sué (who, at this point in the film, still lives) recalls the

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virtuous mythological associations of the fox, playing a variation on the backstory of Ran and rephrasing the comparison between the two women who have suffered at Hidetora/Lear’s hands. Distinctively, where animals feature in Ran at the level of language, they are often granted strikingly powerful visual representations. The image of the stone fox belongs with Ran’s emphasis on spectacle as a communicative device. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the scenes in which Hidetora/Lear goes mad in the Azusa Castle ruins; seen above all in terms of Noh acting conventions, the protagonist here takes on an increasingly mask-like appearance. A suggestive use of make-up (that accentuates a lined countenance and a deathly pallor), coupled with a resistance to close-up shots, accentuates wild-eyed features, showing, once again, how for Kurosawa Noh forms are an index of emotional extremity. Intimations of character are similarly registered in the film’s vibrant palette. Family members, for example, are colour-coded: Tarô is dressed in yellow, Jirô in red and Saburô in blue, which allows for a ready distinguishing of Hidetora/Lear’s sons. These are also the colours of the differently represented warring troops, with primary hues placed in spectacular juxtaposition pointing up a conflict that is cinematically conceived of in terms of rich contrasts. And, because of the sustained use of reflectors and gels as part of the cinematography, such colours are brighter than they might otherwise be. To experience Ran is to be confronted with a boldly elaborated and visually sumptuous statement. Arguably, the sequence at the Third Castle (which Tarô has taken over from Saburô) makes the most forceful spectacular impression. It is to this castle that Hidetora/Lear has travelled in search of succour, only to find that a furious battle ensues upon his arrival. Samuel Crowl describes the battle as representing ‘a vision of the Apocalypse’ (Crowl, 1994, 116) and, certainly, in its look and tenor, the sequence is suggestive of King Lear’s allusions to ‘the promised end’ (5.3.262) and ‘image of that horror’ (5.3.263). For the sequence as a whole, Kurosawa’s governing conception was pictorially inspired. The published screenplay specifies that ‘a terrible scroll of Hell is shown depicting the fall of the castle’ (Kurosawa, Oguni and Masato, 1986, 46). And, in referencing the so-called musha-e scroll art of medieval Japan, the film equates the battle with the traditional notion of hell as a place of chaos in which fighting souls are presided over by Asura, the demon-deity associated with anger and pride. Further details in the screenplay – the soldiers are described as having ‘the appearances of screaming demons’ (Kurosawa, Oguni and Masato, 1986, 47) – strengthens the association, an aspect of which makes its way into the film proper



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in such expostulations as ‘We are truly in hell!’. The spectacle of piles of slaughtered bodies, punctured by arrows or broken by explosives, is harrowing, with the whole appearing as a kind of dreadful ballet premised on a fatal choreography or even a grim echo of the Holocaust. Here, in the confusion of differently coloured flags and swarming troops, is the material expression of the chaos which has underpinned the film as a whole. Part of the anguished effect is due to the lack of diegesis or ‘real’ sound (as in King Lear, silence is a prelude to action); at least in the first half, an audience hears nothing but the swell of Tôru Takemitsu’s classical score whose slow pace and measured beat contrasts markedly with the frenzy of what takes place on screen. It is only at the moment where Tarô is killed that the expected diegetic accompaniment – shouts and gunfire – is introduced, and then it is as a veritable cascade of noise. The return of ‘real’ sound is transformative in terms of audience engagement since it both focuses attention on the plight of Hidetora/Lear and moves us into the realm of the personal and the domestic. Hence, Hidetora/Lear is represented as attempting to take his own life (the ritualistic act of seppuku is an honourable one in the samurai tradition) but, finding his sword missing, electing not to do so; as Ib Johansen states, he no longer possesses ‘the visible symbol of his status as a member of a privileged warrior caste’ (Johansen, 1994, 80). As the troops part to allow Hidetora/Lear to leave, a glimpse of his naked leg beneath his kimono reinforces an idea of diminution: he has become one of his namesake’s ‘Poor naked wretches’ (3.4.29). The static shot of Hidetora/Lear surrounded by carnage and the crowd functions to engineer a double response: although the protagonist is old and feeble, he retains an aura, with camerawork reinforcing both his vulnerability and traces of his former majesty. A subsequent shift in perspective – shots of massed troops cede place to a focus on the isolated figure of Hidetora/Lear – stresses the ongoing process of his exclusion and ostracization. It is here, in the charred and twisted remains of Azusa Castle, that Ran affords the most succinct statement of Hidetora/Lear’s ‘unaccommodated’ (3.4.99) condition. After a leap from the cliff, Hidetora/Lear sees above him the shimmering, white-garbed appearance of Sué, with an upper-angle shot suggesting the possibility of a more affirmative perspective. The implication is later reinforced via Hidetora/Lear’s question, ‘Am I in the other world? Is this paradise?’. Yet, as the end approaches, Ran reveals such a prospect as illusory and ironizes it as the product of a crazed imagination. Rather than ‘paradise’, dialogue and cinematography point up the theological alternative. A downward-looking camera shot of Hidetora/Lear and Kyoami/Fool in a

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gully conjures a hellish rut, while the underground vault in which they find refuge and the foggy winds on the plain connote an infernal habitation. Kyoami/Fool’s approximation for the location and the experience – ‘Hell!’ – seems resonantly appropriate. In the published screenplay, Kurosawa offered a complementary reading of the ideological thrust of the narrative, summing up the end of Ran in one word: ‘Wretchedness!’ (Kurosawa, Oguni and Masato, 1986, 106). Certainly, the descriptor is a telling one in the context of a filmic journey that privileges increasingly downward spirals of action: we move, in a carefully orchestrated set of stages, from the apocalyptical frenzy of the Third Castle scenes and the hellish scene of Azura Castle through to the reunion of Hidetora/Lear and Saburô, Saburô’s subsequent slaughter in the wilderness at the hands of the rebel army, and the cataclysm of the close (a climactic battle in the First Castle and the deaths of the distraught Hidetora/Lear, Jirô, Kaede and Sué respectively). Glimpses of restitution or recovery are correspondingly compromised. The Hidetora/Lear and Saburô reunion (formulations such as ‘When we’re alone … we will talk, father to son’ recapitulate the Shakespearean ‘We two alone … we’ll talk … who’s in, and who’s out’ [5.3.9, 14, 15]), for example, is framed on either side by carnage and desecration which rob the episode of its ameliorative instincts. Similarly, the death of Sué, graphically illustrated in the shot of her headless corpse in the grass, functions in such a way as to call into question the spirituality with which she has been consistently associated. Coming, as they do, immediately before the revelation of the fate of Sué, the pronouncements delivered over the body of Hidetora/Lear suggest a nihilistic direction for Ran in its concluding stages, bringing to mind Gloucester’s conviction that ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport’ (4.1.37–8). Kyoami/Fool’s protest – ‘Are there no gods?’, he demands, adding, ‘You are mischievous and cruel! … Are you so bored up there you must crush us like ants?’ – is a despairing summation of the implications of the narrative’s events. The speech is notable for coming from the Fool figure, who, in this adaptation of King Lear, lives on to offer a non-comic reflection, and for its length, unusual in a film in which the dialogue is generally tight and economic. Where Shakespeare’s King Lear retains on stage the familiar triptych of Lear, Kent and Cordelia for its conclusion, Kurosawa’s Ran elects to privilege an alternative and solitary figure. Earlier, Sué had given her brother, Tsurumaru, a scroll on which the image of the Amida Buddha appears: ‘This … will protect you in my place’, she states. Through the gift, Sué is imagined as exercising a guardianship role. Yet, as Ran settles in its final frame on the silhouette



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of Tsurumaru alone on a precipice (an upper fortification of the ruined Azusa Castle), it is implied that abandonment, rather than care, predominates. For the scroll of the Amida Buddha has slipped from Tsurumaru’s grasp, suggesting the loss of his sister’s support, while a close-up of the goddess’ blessing hand is undermined by the simultaneous and grating wail of a high-pitched nokan flute. Sound and image come together to recall Hidetora/Lear’s earlier dismissal of faith – ‘Buddha again! He is gone from this evil world’ – and to illuminate Kurosawa’s oft-quoted remark on the end of Ran: ‘We must make an attempt to take responsibility for our own lives … [and] rely upon ourselves’ (Tessier, 1985, 67). The implication at this point is that Tsurumaru, tapping with his cane to the fortification’s very extremity, may fall, enacting a Gloucester-like suicide. His death, we surmise, will constitute a type of sacrifice (Tsurumaru is framed by cross-like structures on the castle battlements that hint at crucifixion and martyrdom) whose symbolic force resides not in deliverance but in the continuing expression of an arbitrary and unfeeling order. In what is arguably a personal vision, Kurosawa understands King Lear at its bleakest, replacing the ‘general woe’ (5.3.318) of the play with an ending that is more desperate still and closing with the image of wounded body defeated by the world’s chaotic operations.

Influence and Legacy Within Asia, Kurosawa’s influence can be seen both in the increased amount and visibility of Shakespearean theatre and film and explicitly in the work of particular directors such as Yukio Ninagawa and Ong Ken Sen. The latter part of the twentieth and early stages of the twentieth-first centuries in Japan have been marked by a distinctive resurgence in forms of localized Shakespeare in theatrical and filmic arenas. Notably, there have been revivals of a number of the works from the first period of Shakespeare in Japan, and these include productions of the 1886 Hamlet adaptation, Hamlet Yamoto No Nishikie, in Kabuki style in 1992 and 1997 (Brandon, 2001, 50). The success of these and related endeavours confirmed the prestige of the Tokyo Globe Theatre, founded in 1988, a venue in which many of these sorts of recovery of Japanese Shakespeares were enacted. There have also been during this period stage interpretations of Shakespeare according to cognate Japanese theatrical expressions and modalities. Among these one may list Noriko Izumi’s striking Noh Macbeth of 2006, characterized by serried arrangements of characters and eloquently slow movement,

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which was performed by the Experimental Theatre of Japan, and Yoshihiro Kurita’s stately Hamlet of 2007 performed by the Ryutopia Noh Theatre, in which Bunraku-style puppets were deployed for the culminating duel. Perhaps the best-known of more recent Asian interpreters of Shakespeare is theatre director Yukio Ninagawa. Akihiko Senda observes that Ninagawa ‘is among the most ardent admirers of Kurosawa’, adding, ‘the intensity of theatrical expression that characterizes Ninagawa’s directing indicates the influence of Kurosawa’s cinematography upon him’ (Senda, 1998, 22). The connection that leads back to Kurosawa is richly revealed in Ninagawa’s Macbeth (1980) which, set in the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1568–1600), boasted fast-fading cherry trees and an imposing Buddhist altar; before it, two old women worshipped, and inside it unfolded the familiar Shakespearean narrative, making the production a wonderfully evocative reflection on the medieval past, evanescence and metatheatre. Similarly indebted to Kurosawa was Ninagawa’s The Tempest (1987) or, as it was also termed, ‘A Rehearsal of a Noh Play on the Island of Sado’. Approximating Zeami (the supposed founder of Noh theatre) with Shakespeare’s Prospero, and invoking the former’s own exile to Sado (Matisoff, 1979, 449), allowed Ninagawa to make telling parallels between a number of Japanese folk arts and the early modern stage and to present the central dramaturge figure as an intricately elaborated East-West creation. Detectable here is a chain of influence. Productions by the likes of Ong Ken Sen (his best-known works are the intercultural King Lear, Desdemona and Search: Hamlet) took their cue from Ninagawa, finding licence in his precedent, and demonstrate the extent to which Kurosawa’s model, or perhaps ghost, still declares itself. One theatre director has been informed by another in a sequence of links that, it could be argued, has Kurosawa as a point of origin. In this way, Kurosawa’s legacy makes itself felt not just in singular practitioners but also in a wider Asian cultural environment of Shakespearean reimaginings. If Kurosawa’s influence is felt in the theatre, it is no surprise that it is also felt in cinematic realms. It would certainly appear that, wherever a localized aesthetic in Shakespearean world cinema is subscribed to, there are echoes of Kurosawa’s concepts and transpositions. Within Japan, as a Hamlet film adaptation such as Castle of Flames (dir. Kato Tai, 1960) shows, the symbolic capital that accrued to Throne of Blood as an interpretation of Shakespeare deeply impressed itself. Kato Tai had been an assistant director of Kurosawa, famously clashing with him on the production of Rashomon (Yoshimoto, 2000, 188), and when he came to set up independently he applied the conceptual lessons he had learned. Castle of Flames is a jidai-geki genre production set amongst the samurai conflicts of the feudal



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era and reworks Shakespeare in self-referential conjurations of Kurosawa’s film aesthetic. Outside Japan, and in broader cinematic terms, it is difficult to conceive of the recent efflorescence of Asian Shakespeare films – which include, to cite but two instances, Maqbool (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2004), an Indian adaptation of Macbeth located in the contemporary Mumbai underworld, and The Banquet (dir. Xiaogang Feng, 2006), a visually sumptuous Chinese adaptation of Hamlet enlivened by martial arts and unfolding in the period of the ‘Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms’ – without Kurosawa functioning, in some capacity, as a guiding spirit of possibility. If nothing else, these films strongly evoke Kurosawa in mises-en-scène comprised of intriguingly realized artefacts and architectures and distinguished by regional particularity. Nor is Kurosawa’s influence confined to the Asian scene. Alexander C. Y. Huang notes that a film such as Throne of Blood ‘has … been cited as inspiration for new works beyond Asia’ (Huang, 2010, 122). When, for example, American director Michael Almereyda was in the planning stages for his millennial, dystopian and New York-set Hamlet (2000), his first thought was to go back to Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well, with its simultaneously ‘poignant’ and ‘dingy’ evocation of a ‘corrupt corporate world’ (Almereyda, 2000, 133). In a wider context, such is the authority that has gathered about Throne of Blood and Ran that Kurosawa’s films have become the measure of comparison for any world cinema enterprise. An ‘era of Shakespearean filmmaking’, states Kenneth Branagh in interview, is reflected in the productions of ‘Welles, Olivier, Kurosawa’ (Wray and Burnett, 2000, 177), his bracketing of Kurosawa with these other auteur figures indicating the strength of his influence. Directors Bo Landin and Alex Scherpf, reflecting on Macbeth, their 2004 Sámi language film adaptation set in the Arctic Circle, state: ‘We have often been asked if the actors are dressed in traditional Sámi clothing, and if the story is set in a Sámi environment, in a manner that is similar to Japanese director Akira Kurosawa in his samurai version of Shakespeare’s play’, adding testily, ‘This is not the case with our film’ (Landin and Scherpf, 2012, n.p.), in a felt gesture of differentiation which, at one and the same time, recognizes Kurosawa’s determining example. So do the interpretative energies released by Kurosawa express themselves in the current generation of Shakespearean film-makers. Thanks, in part, to the imaginative stimulus Kurosawa exercises on filmmakers, his works have come to enjoy enshrined positions among critics of Shakespeare on film. There is barely a title in the discipline that does not reference Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well and Ran as among the

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most salient examples of the genre, and, as this chapter has sought to demonstrate, there is every justification for lending approval to this kind of canonical pre-eminence. But the effect of privileging of Kurosawa is that he has come to stand in for every non-Anglophone Shakespeare on screen statement. He (and to a lesser extent Grigori Kozinstev) surrogates for auteurs and activities that, for whatever reason, are not as easily visible. As I argue elsewhere, this is unfortunate, for it means that we neglect at our peril the wealth of Shakespeare and world cinema examples that have undeservedly slipped beneath the radar (Burnett, 2013, 1–19). As this begins to change, it may be that Kurosawa’s influence – another one of his legacies – will be to encourage us to attend to other auteurial engagements with Shakespeare on a global basis. So, to the felicities and challenges of Ran we might elect to add those of Gunasundari Katha (dir. Kadiri Venkata Reddy, 1949), a Telegu language film based on King Lear distinguished by its stylized engagement with the Indian epics, or those of Romani Kris: Cigánytörvény/Gypsy Lore (dir. Bence Gyöngyössy, 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. Considering Throne of Blood, the decision could be made simultaneously to reflect on Yellamma (dir. Mohan Koda, 1999), a Telangana language adaptation of Macbeth set in the state of Hyderabad which explains the play by emphasizing a historicized representation of southern Indian rebellion. And, when we think about The Bad Sleep Well, a future priority might be to speculate about the ways in which its reading of Shakespeare anticipates, contradicts or bypasses altogether two other world cinema Hamlet adaptations, A Herança (dir. Ozualdo Candeias, 1971), a Brazilian film which pushes the action of the play to the arid sertão regions, and Intikam Meleği/Kadin Hamlet (dir. Metin Erksan, 1976), a Turkish production which deploys colourful interiors and a pastoral estate setting as support in canvassing its concern with women’s efforts at emancipation. Broadening the field of exploration in this way will surely lead us back to Kurosawa and enable us to appreciate once again his significance as a major auteur and the depth and extent of his Shakespearean film achievements. Accordingly, we can continue to recognize and situate Kurosawa, in his own time, before, beyond and in the world, even as we become attuned to the potential of welcoming and enfolding other great Shakespeareans. But this will only be possible because the technical virtuosity, philosophical reach and aesthetic acumen of Kurosawa represent points of comparison and examples of what is to be gained from the work of Bardic adaptation. Arguably, Kurosawa’s accomplishments will continue to shine brightly even



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as other film-makers will be seen to have learned and profited from the imaginative models he has made available. Inside the arena of Shakespeare and world cinema Kurosawa’s art – the brilliance of his cinematography and the versatility of his camera – sets standards of excellence and is assured a position of pre-eminence for some time to come.

Chapter 3

Grigori Kozintsev Courtney Lehmann

I Shakespeare was involved with all the enormity of historical injustice. (Kozintsev, 1966, 166) Seeking a metaphor to describe what would become his life’s work, Grigori Kozintsev likened the figure of the artist to a ‘seismograph, recording the inner shocks of his epoch’ (1959, 158). Anyone familiar with Russian history knows that this analogy is all too apt. During a career that spanned half a century, Kozintsev’s life and art were repeatedly disrupted by the political earthquakes that defined twentieth-century Eastern Europe. Born in the Russian-ruled Ukraine in 1905 within two months of Bloody Sunday (when unnamed petitioners to the Tsar were slaughtered by the Imperial Guard), Kozintsev lived during the apex of the Russian empire’s long history of conflict. His career began during the combined onslaught of World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Civil War and the Great Famine; it continued throughout Stalin’s Purges, World War II and the Cold War; and it ended amidst an apocalyptic variation on these fatal themes: the mutually assured destruction of the nuclear arms race. Kozintsev’s work is all the more remarkable as an exemplar of all three of Russian cinema’s major periods: the Golden Age of the avant-garde, Stalin’s Socialist Realism and the ‘Unknown New Wave’ of the 1960s. Likening Kozintsev to Luis Buñuel, film historian Barbara Leaming describes the director as ‘one of the most remarkable examples in cultural history of the difficult art of survival’ (1980, 7). A truly precocious thinker, Kozintsev – not yet a teenager when the Bolshevik Revolution occurred – was quick to develop a uniquely cinematic means of processing the chaos that surrounded him. His recollection of going to class in a gymnasium demonstrates the workings of an



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encyclopedic mind that was not only capable of assimilating dissonant sources of information, impressions and ideas, but also highly adept at engaging in lyrical, rapid intercutting between them: I was born in Kiev and attended the gymnasium there … not far from the gymnasium, the twisted corpses of shot men lay in the ditch. Our teachers described the flora and fauna of Africa, explained the conjugation of Latin verbs; and meanwhile, machine guns chattered in the suburbs. (1973, 91) During the Ukraine’s unsuccessful war for independence against Lenin’s Red Army, Kiev’s artistic population surged, and Kozintsev became a pupil of the extraordinary Constructivist painter, Alexandra Exter. Somewhat paradoxically, it was in her still-life class that Kozintsev began exploring the dynamics of movement and fragmentation, along with radical abstraction, pastiche and the absurdist themes that would characterize his early filmmaking ethos. When Exter’s colleagues invited Kozintsev to help construct an ‘agit-train’, a Soviet propaganda vehicle that wandered the countryside to announce the latest victories for the Revolution, Kozintsev embarked on a journey into the Benjaminian ‘politicization of the aesthetic’ from which he would never turn back. It was not long before Kozintsev found himself working for the Lenin Theatre alongside Sergei Yutkevitch, who would go on to create his highly acclaimed film adaptation of Othello in 1955. Upon discovering their mutual admiration for the radical Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as their shared interest in circus aesthetics, Kozintsev and Yutkevich founded a theatre company in the basement of an abandoned cabaret venue, staging productions that ranged from adaptations of Russian classics to puppet theatre. Recognizing Kozintsev’s potential to further the cause of the Revolution, the burgeoning Soviet regime relocated him to Leningrad (at the time Petrograd), where he initiated a relationship with Leonid Trauberg, forming ‘one of the truly great partnerships in the history of world cinema’ (Leaming, 1980, 22). Shortly thereafter, Trauberg and Kozintsev, along with Yutkevich and several other aspiring revolutionaries, founded Fabrika Ekstesentricheskogo Aktëra, or The Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS) in 1921. The word ‘factory’ is anything but incidental, as FEKS was closely allied with Russian Constructivism, which, like the Futurist movement in western Europe, was based on a fascination with machinery. FEKS was also indebted to Vsevolod

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Meyerhold’s practice of biomechanics, an intensely demanding series of athletic and balletic movements intended to enable actors to integrate, internalize and actualize the psychophysical dimensions of their character. Biomechanics provided a living analogue to the mass industrialization of society that so intrigued painters like Ferdinand Leger, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso and Umberto Boccioni, offering a means of highlighting the mode of production while exposing its human impact. A somewhat stranger bedfellow, American silent cinema was a major source of inspiration for FEKS, whose ‘art workers’ particularly appreciated the absurd humour, circus-like acrobatics and mechanical mime routines of Charlie Chaplin. The distinctly urban setting of Chaplin’s films also appealed to Kozintsev and Trauberg, who transposed his Manhattan-based miseen-scène to Moscow, where they began their exploration of this rapidly changing cityscape through the lens of Leninist doctrine. A close ally of Constructivism, Russian Formalism enhanced FEKS’ eclecticism through the introduction of alienation effects and strategies of defamiliarization – techniques that would be fully realized in Brechtian theatre – while extending the Constructivist interest in machinery to more explicitly ‘degraded’, distinctly non-aesthetic material and modes of production. This process of ostranenie, or ‘making strange’, uprooted expectations and associations, hurtling the audience into a free-fall experience wherein disorientation and shock effects replaced normative perception – a practice that occasionally led to the detonation of fireworks under the audience members’ seats! It was cinema, however, that presented the young visionaries with their first opportunity to create genuinely mass art. Upon seeing the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph in 1896, Russian writer Maxim Gorky dubbed cinema ‘the kingdom of the shadows’. Despite being something of a latecomer when compared with the prolific output of early French and Italian cinema, the Russian film industry was quick to distinguish itself through innovative approaches to the nascent medium. Early experiments with perspectival sets and recorded sound were soon followed by developments that had a major impact on cinema around the world: the founding of the Stanislavski school of ‘method acting’ and the rise of the agitki (agitational) genre. Recognizing the unprecedented ideological power of cinema, Lenin nationalized the industry in conjunction with the consolidation of the USSR, famously observing that, of all the arts, film was ‘the most important’. Presiding over a nation with a 73 per cent illiteracy rate and a massive rural population, Lenin seized the opportunity to make film the handmaiden of Soviet propaganda, calling for the ‘cinefication’ of the countryside at a time when the ascendant empire



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was aggressively seeking to assimilate outlying territories. What became known as the ‘Leninist proportion’, which set the production standard for 75 per cent entertainment to 25 per cent propaganda, emboldened young artists to help rebuild an industry that had been grossly depleted during the violence of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War. Although many of the most gifted directors fled to safer shores between 1917 and 1922, it was precisely this sudden dearth of talent that enabled Grigori Kozintsev to make his first film at the age of nineteen. In 1924, Kozintsev and Trauberg teamed up to release The Adventures of Octyabrina, sparking a collaboration that lasted more than twenty years. The first of many films they would make together, Octyabrina was, in large part, a response to the demand for anti-capitalistic propaganda. Dziga Vertov, who would go on to create Man with a Movie Camera (1929), spoke to the urgency of the situation when he claimed that ‘film drama is the opium of the people. The film drama and religion are a fatal weapon in the hands of the capitalists’ (Beumers, 2009, 49). In Octyabrina, Kozintsev and Trauberg turned Vertov’s concerns inward, creating a satire about entrepreneurial corruption during the rise of the New Economic Policy (NEP). Simultaneously a step forward and a retreat, Lenin devised the NEP as a compromise between total socialism and partial capitalism to spur Russia’s crippled economy following the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Civil War and the Great Famine. Although Lenin sought to rekindle the faith of the peasantry on behalf of the Socialist agenda by granting them greater economic autonomy, the policy led to abuses and the further entrenchment of class disparities across the burgeoning republic. Like Vertov, then, Kozintsev and Trauberg wanted to ensure that Soviet cinema worked against the bourgeois contagion associated with western Europe and, of course, the United States. Hence, the capitalists in The Adventures of Octyabrina are depicted as buffoons who cannot even succeed in committing suicide. The frequent extra-narrative interjections of title cards containing overt Socialist propaganda – such as ‘Buy from state and not from private businesses’ – not only undermine the continuity of their conversations, but also frustrate any effort on the part of the bourgeoisie to mobilize. Finally, in a particularly bold move, Kozintsev and Trauberg explicitly link corruption within the Soviet Union to the masterminds of the West when they combine the surnames of the US President, along with the British and French Prime Ministers, to create one of the film’s most deplorable characters, ‘Coolidge Curzonovich Poincaré’. Two years later, the prodigious duo achieved widespread acclaim for The Devil’s Wheel (1926). This film epitomizes Kozintsev and Trauberg’s early

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aesthetic and technical achievement. Typical of the radical eclecticism of FEKS, The Devil’s Wheel involves dissonant combinations: Soviet propaganda is interlaced with the maritime adventure genre and the love story; the characters resonate with both allegorical qualities and unpredictable idiosyncracies; and the mise-en-scène swings between seedy visions of the NEP criminal underworld and the carnivalesque. The cinematography, inspired by the film’s setting in an amusement park, simulates the dizzying undulations of a roller coaster as a means of eliding the gap between screen and audience. The Devil’s Wheel is the first fully articulated example of Kozintsev’s juxtapositional aesthetic; in fact, one year before Eisenstein published his path-breaking reflections on the ‘montage of attractions’, Kozintsev published his manifesto on ‘the chain of tricks’. Although both directors worked virtually side by side while developing their respective formalizations of ‘collision montage’, Eisenstein remains the figure to whom this revolution in film-editing is attributed. Kozintsev and Trauberg would soon form a career-altering partnership with Dmitri Shostakovich, the extraordinary composer who would continue to work with Kozintsev until the director’s death in 1973. The talented triumvirate made their first film, The New Babylon, in 1929. Widely considered to represent the height of the silent film tradition in Soviet cinema, The New Babylon was commissioned by the State to commemorate the 1871 uprising of the Paris Commune, one of the founding narratives of the proletariat movement. The short-lived but vicious conflict pitted workers and defected soldiers against the Paris bourgeoisie and government forces, becoming a war of attrition that resulted in mass slaughter on both sides. Although the workers’ rebellion was ultimately defeated, the uprising was quickly appropriated as a victory for the underdog, emerging as the Socialist equivalent of ‘the Alamo’. With a startling score that creates constructive dissonance between image and sound, along with the strategic use of filters and distortion lenses that approximated Marx’s metaphor of the city-as-ghost, The New Babylon is an artistically revolutionary film. Its equally powerful political impact was reaffirmed in 1971, when a proposal went forward to air the film on French television to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the bloody spectacle. There was no debate: having screened the film, the authorities banned it based on the certainty that the film would be ‘an incitement to revolt’ (‘La fin des années vingt’, 1971, 6). In the face of Stalin’s rising power, The New Babylon marked the end of an era of giddy experimentation, earnest activism and remarkable technical achievement for Russian cinema that would only be rivalled by the French Nouvelle Vague.



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Although Kozintsev and Trauberg made the successful transition to sound with Alone (1931), Stalin’s mandate requiring all art to conform to the tenets of Socialist Realism had already left its mark on the film’s uninspired content and dispirited execution. Created in the year that Stalin banned the importation of foreign films on the grounds that they enkindled capitalist sympathies, Alone marked an unmistakable shift away from the eccentric and avant-garde toward the facile and predictable. As Birgit Beumers explains, the new aesthetic required film-makers to ‘varnish reality and show life in a positive light that would allow people to trace the path to the bright (communist) future’ (2009, 2). The ‘hero’ of Socialist Realism was forced to cut a similar swath. Alternately referred to as a ‘positivist hero’, the ‘Stalinic hero’ and the ‘State-driven man’, the protagonist follows a course that is also teleological, steadily evolving to affirm Socialism as the pinnacle of human development. This trajectory was often depicted as a movement from (bourgeois) self-interest to (Socialist) selfdedication to ‘the people’ – precisely the approach that Kozintsev and Trauberg adopt in Alone. The aesthetic template associated with Socialist Realism offered even less room for error, demanding ‘realism’ stripped of any conspicuous artistry, intellectualism, formal (or Formalist) techniques or ambiguity. From Stalin’s perspective, creativity was more than a repository for bourgeois indulgence – it was a blueprint for organized sedition. Hence, the only permissible ‘aesthetic’ was transparency, motivated by dostupnost’ (accessibility), narodnost’ (the spirit of the people), and partiinost’ (the Communist party). With few noticeable deviations, Alone complies with this radically contracted horizon of expectations, featuring an uncomplicated story about an unremarkable woman who rejects self-interest – once she sees the (Socialist) light – and devotes her life to serving the greater good. Whereas cinema flourished under Lenin, averaging more than one hundred feature-length films per year, under Stalin, output was almost immediately cut in half and declined precipitously for the next thirty years. By 1952, the year before Stalin’s death, the average output had been reduced to a staggering five films per year. The banal focus on the overdetermined psychology of the State-driven man, the concomitant rejection of Formalism and Constructivism, the insistence upon continuity editing over collision montage, and the adoption of the positivist trajectory of ‘triumphant Stalinism’ proved to be a soul-killing mandate for the vast majority of Soviet film-makers. Socialist Realism also claimed lives. Vsevolod Meyerhold, the single most important figure in twentiethcentury Russian theatre, was among the many casualties; but unlike the

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incidental transgressions of other unfortunate artists, Meyerhold wilfully defied the system and continued to produce work in his style, rather than do the bidding of the State. Indeed, he preferred to part with his life rather than be complicit in the death of Art. Quietly and in a cowardly way, Stalin had him privately murdered in 1938. Meyerhold offers one of the most profound examples of what Barbara Leaming astutely describes as ‘the frozen Revolution’ – the process whereby radical art is ossified and then ‘codified in the aesthetic of Socialist Realism’ (1980, 59). The frozen Revolution devastated not only art but also the artist, as a diary entry from Alexander Dovzhenko, a contemporary of both Meyerhold and Kozintsev, makes painfully clear: ‘In this inertia of suspicion and degradation one can lose not just one’s talent, but one’s sanity and desire to go on living’ (1973, 126). For a time, Kozintsev and Trauberg survived better than most. The Youth of Maxim (1935), the first of three films in their epic bildungsroman, won the Stalin Prize in 1935. Along with Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938), The Youth of Maxim is considered to be one of the only great Socialist Realist films – very likely because the film-makers took several calculated cinematic risks in the process of its creation. Not content to play Stalin’s game without a subtle inscription of their own signature, Kozintsev and Trauberg take the State-mandated focus on individual psychology to an absurd extreme through their relentless use of ‘microphysiognomy’. A term coined by Béla Belázs, ‘microphysiognomy’ refers to the process of embedding diegetic exposition in minute facial movements, the cumulative effect of which is a ‘silent soliloquy’ (1992, 263, 265). Much in the same way that Maxim’s obligatory political ‘maturation’ is conveyed in a radical refiguration of the close-up, so, too, the directors subvert the stifling constraints of continuity editing by frequent outbursts of non-diegetic noise and off-screen sounds, which repeatedly disrupt the plodding succession of film frames. Kozintsev and Trauberg even include a nod to FEKS at the beginning of Maxim, employing collision montage and an unabashedly carnivalesque aesthetic to illustrate the wildly disorienting spirit of a New Year’s celebration. Disguised in the pretence of repudiation, the directors thus acknowledge their stylistic origins while simultaneously establishing a narrative trajectory that mirrors the totalizing goals of Socialist Realism: with their fool’s caps on, Kozintsev and Trauberg point Maxim straight down the narrowing road that leads from chaos to order, and from bourgeois decadence to mass conformity. Ten years later, however, the winds had shifted in the direction of an ever more stringent totalitarianism, catching Kozintsev and Trauberg in



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the backdraft of State scrutiny following the release of their 1945 film, Simple People (also known as Plain People). Although the Kremlin’s grasp had slackened slightly due to the exigencies of World War II, by 1946 the Communist Party issued a public warning to all film-makers to toe the Party line, singling out Lukov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Kozintsev and Trauberg for violations involving an unacceptable degree of ambiguity, dishonesty toward their subject matter, and betrayal of the State-defined role of cinema in the lives of the people. In no uncertain terms, the decree indicated that failure to heed this warning would result in the ‘disappearance’ of these same ‘film workers’. Though the long-time collaborators were never told what, precisely, they did in Simple People to incur such a threat – the vagueness of the charge was Stalin’s standard means of justifying punishment without due process – the film’s uncompromising vision of suffering undoubtedly had much to do with it. As its title promises, Simple People rejects the required focus on the psychology of the individual in order to draw the contours of the masses through the lens of war. Under such circumstances, the directors could not sufficiently mask their message within the shiny optimism of Socialist Realism, nor could they adopt the narrative trajectory that leads unproblematically to ‘hope’ and the prospect of ‘renewal’ at the film’s conclusion. A tragedy on many levels, Simple People was banned from circulation until after Stalin’s death, and Kozintsev and Trauberg would never work together again. By the end of the decade, Kozintsev was in danger of losing his way; former colleagues had opted to parrot rather than provoke the State, Eisenstein had died without completing his Ivan the Terrible trilogy, and Trauberg – who received another threat in 1949 – retreated from film-making altogether. When Kozintsev staged his return from self-imposed exile, he did so with a final ‘trilogy’ of his own, making his solo debut with Don Quixote in 1957, and ending his career with Gamlet (1964) and Korol Lir (1971). *** Shakespeare’s migration into the Russian imagination began in the mid-eighteenth century. First mentioned in Alexander Sumarokov’s Epistle on Verse Composition in 1748, Shakespeare started a promising career in Russia – initially by way of French and German adaptations. But it was not long before the European ‘middle men’ were eliminated. In 1787, Nickolai Karamzin produced the first English-to-Russian translation of Shakespeare, adapting Julius Caesar into idiomatic Russian. Karamzin’s decision to make Shakespeare more plain-spoken than scholarly enabled the Russian people

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to conceive of the Bard as a popular figure from the start, quite removed from the tradition of European elitism. But Julius Caesar turned out to be an unfortunate choice; Catherine II, who had witnessed (and probably helped to orchestrate) the assassination of her husband and, later, her son, found the play distasteful and ordered the text to be burned. Even before this debacle, Hamlet had succeeded in ruffling the feathers of Imperial Russia. Adapted from a francophone version in 1748, Hamlet, like Julius Caesar, was completely banned from performance between 1762 and 1809, when a string of royal murders and battles over succession made the play’s subject matter rather unpopular. However, in 1828, the play avenged its reputation when it, too, was translated into idiomatic Russian. An impressive flurry of performances followed, initiating an ongoing debate over the merits of French, German and Russian ‘Hamletism’, which, in turn, marked the birth of Russian literary criticism. By the mid-nineteenth century, Shakespeare’s work had become the unlikely model for Russia’s burgeoning movement toward a consolidated national literature. The prodigious rise of Shakespeare in Russia was also distinguished by its subversive applications. The reactionary treatment of Shakespeare’s plays from mid-eighteenth to turn-of-the-century Russia alone suggests their predisposition for counter-political interpretations. But Shakespeare was destined for a grander stage, which materialized in the work of Russia’s legendary nineteenth-century writers, who deliberately appropriated the plays as a means of protesting the status quo. Pushkin, who lived under the watchful eye of Nicholas I, was arguably the first to employ allusions to Shakespearean characters as a means of cloaking his anti-Tsarist sentiments. His friend, Wilhelm Kuchelbeckler, who was one of the leaders of the 1825 Decembrist uprising, completed a version of Macbeth while in prison. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Ivan Turgenev produced Shakespearean spin-offs that localized more regional concerns, as suggested by the rather humorously titled ‘Hamlet of the Shchigrov District’ and ‘King Lear of the Steppes’. Receiving homage in works ranging from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov to Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Shakespeare established deep roots in Russian soil. Although the seeds had been planted over the course of two centuries, Boris Pasternak – the Nobel Prize-winning author of Doctor Zhivago – secured Shakespeare’s position as an honorary Russian for all of posterity, publishing the definitive translations of Shakespeare’s major plays during the horrors of Stalin’s Purges, a time when original poetry was de facto illegal. His words made it possible for Kozintsev to imagine a poetic, visual translation of Shakespeare for the screen.



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II For some time, Shakespeare has been much in demand as a script writer. (Kozintsev, 1966, 28) The film genre known as ekranizatsiia, or adaptation, emerged in Russia during the first decade of the twentieth century. Shakespeare, however, made his debut much later on the Soviet screen, immediately following the death of Stalin. Although a recording of the Bolshoi performance of Romeo I Dzhulyetta was produced in 1954, the first legitimately cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare was Yan Frid’s Twelfth Night (Dvenadtsataia Noch, 1955). Frid’s version was distinguished by his masterful use of combinatory filming – a sleight-of-hand technique that allowed Viola and Sebastian (both played by the same actress) to appear on screen simultaneously. Kozintsev’s former collaborator, Sergei Yutkevitch, raised the bar one year later with Othello, which earned him best director honours at Cannes. In rapid succession, Kozintsev responded with his first filmic foray into non-Russian literature in 1957, beginning not with Shakespeare but with Cervantes. Reversing the Marxist axiom that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, Kozintsev’s decision to direct Don Quixote prior to Hamlet and Lear suggests much about his state of mind in the wake of Khrushchev’s 1956 address to the Twentieth Party Congress. Known thereafter as the ‘Secret Speech’, the general contents were largely rhetorical, serving as the official condemnation of a man who had killed at least twenty million people by way of execution, exile and labour camps, imprisoned millions more, and terrorized everyone else. But the more-orless expected revelation of Stalin’s atrocities was followed by a disclosure that was in many ways more devastating: the great Socialist experiment had not only failed – it had failed by design. For three decades, Stalin had baited his own people with visions of the ‘promised end’, which, in the end, led only to the ‘image of that horror’: the grotesque spectacle of their own suffering – for nothing (5.3.262–3). Thus, when Khrushchev proceeded to announce the immediate shift in policy to ‘de-Stalinization’ and ‘liberalization’, the Soviet people – with their sense of trust already eviscerated – could not know if this, too, was just another deadly ruse. Referring simultaneously to Hamlet and the immediate aftermath of the Secret Speech, Kozintsev observes that ‘everything proved to be unstable; things found continuation in nothings; no affirmations proceeded from the negations’ (1966, 20).

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The year 1956 proved to be a particularly disillusioning time for Kozintsev, whose initial experience of the Thaw epitomized its inherent contradictions. Having pledged to ease restrictions on artistic expression, Khrushchev – as a symbolic gesture and an act of good faith – decided to lift the ban on Simple People. Kozintsev had never given up his hope of distributing the film to a mass audience, and, twenty years later, it seemed as though his ‘perturbèd spirit’ would finally be put to rest (1.5.183). But as the film passed through the various bureaucratic channels in preparation for re-release, it underwent a process known as ‘re-editing’ – the euphemism for the intervention of the Kremlin. Hence, when ‘Simple People’ was screened for Kozintsev just prior to its public exhibition, the director knew that he had been, like Ophelia, ‘the more deceived’ by Khrushchev’s strange overture (3.1.121). Without his knowledge or permission, the film was ‘re-edited’ beyond recognition, and Kozintsev refused to have his name associated with it. Indeed, the path toward the liberalization of Soviet culture during the Thaw was nothing if not quixotic, and Kozintsev could never fully abandon the search for hidden strings thereafter. In this context, the release of Don Quixote in 1957 is especially provocative. On the one hand, the fallible and often pathetic protagonist represents a total rejection of the flawless, teleologically driven Stalinist hero. On the other hand, the picaresque narrative – with its circuitous forward and backward movement, punctuated by expectations and disappointments – points to the film’s historical conditions of production during the Thaw, a period of unprecedented confusion for the Soviet citizenry. The figure of Don Quixote, with his undeterrable idealism, endearing courage and tragic aptitude for being deceived, certainly must have appealed to Kozintsev at a time when he, too, was working through the humiliation, bewilderment and anger that followed from his initial experience of ‘liberalization’ under Khrushchev. Significantly, this cinematic detour turned out to be the road that led the director straight to Hamlet. Though a peculiar pairing, these equivocal heroes have been juxtaposed in the Russian imagination since 1860, when Ivan Turgenev published his essay on ‘Hamlet and Don Quixote’. Turgenev’s claim was straightforward: the Russian people suffer from too many Hamlets and not enough Don Quixotes. The scourge of ‘Hamletism’ – a disease associated with overthinking and underacting – quickly became sedimented in Russian literary criticism, condemning the prince to a life of craven cogitation while elevating Cervantes’ protagonist to the ranks of a revolutionary. Kozintsev deviates from this tradition by arguing that Don Quixote and Hamlet are more alike than they are different: both are revolutionaries



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in spirit – but fools by reputation. The director contends that Hamlet’s flaws are not inherent but are foisted upon him by armchair orators, who eagerly identify him as a ‘superfluous man’ or, in the Russian version of ‘Hamletism’, as an ‘Oblomov’ – a cog in the bourgeois machine who quietly greases the wheels of the status quo. Thus, seven years after releasing Don Quixote, Kozintsev sets out to redeem his protagonist from the extra-literary scourge of ‘Hamletism’ in all its forms – in part to convince himself that returning to film-making during the Thaw would amount to more than jousting with windmills.

Gamlet (1964) The element in this work which exercised such an unusual degree of influence during this period was the destruction of silence. Both the content of the play and its style were defiant. The gag had fallen out. (Kozintsev, 1966, 123) Stalin’s hatred of Hamlet was well known; it was not merely his least favourite of Shakespeare’s plays, it was a text that he held in unqualified contempt. Particularly in this context, the decision to adapt Hamlet – Gamlet in Russian – suggests Kozintsev’s identification with the play’s agitational properties. Consistent with an ‘agit-film’ approach, the director argues that the play’s status as a tragedy ‘lies not in the inactivity of its hero’, but in the failure of the audience to heed its ‘provocation to action’, for, above all, ‘Hamlet is a tocsin that awakens the conscience’ (1966, 174). Appropriately, the film opens with the ‘tocsin’ of a tolling bell as a massive, menacing shadow looms over a violent sea. A series of similarly ominous shadows follows the first, each one adding to the monstrous mosaic of a castle that never materializes as a whole. Much like living in the shadow of Stalin, whose subjects could only speculate as to how far the invisible hand of the State might stretch, in Hamlet, the castle architecture never appears in its entirety, emerging only in fragments that terrorize the imagination with thoughts of the enormity of the whole. Throughout the film, the viewer’s sense of spatial dislocation is further aggravated by the camera’s almost total avoidance of eye-level perspectives. Instead, extreme low- and high-angle shots establish disequilibrium as the norm; rarely does the spectator occupy a standard – let alone privileged – viewing position, leading the audience to wonder if it is they who are being watched. The shocking staccato intrusions of Shostakovich’s score augment the sense of paranoia by intermittently jolting the audience

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into a state of extreme vigilance; even if the cinematography allows the eye to come to rest, the violent musical punctuation agitates the ear. Gamlet’s opening frames thus situate the spectator squarely within a double-bind, depriving the audience of any bearings whatsoever, while assuring them of an enemy in their midst. With an abrupt shift from sea to land, the beginning of the film-proper is announced by a panoramic shot of a desert dotted with sagebrush, accompanied by the sound of thundering hooves. Men on horseback flash across the screen, kicking up dust as they post at breakneck speed towards an undisclosed destination. This unmistakable reference to the mise-enscène of the Western is reinforced by a closer shot of the lead rider, who is distinguished from the others by his white horse. The possibility that this figure is Hamlet does not occur to the audience, whose first assumption is that the men are couriers bearing urgent news from Norway. But as the riders cross over the drawbridge leading into the castle, only the first one dismounts and bounds up the steep stone stairs leading inside. The exacting composition of this scene replicates the iconic image of Olivier’s prince striding up the stairs of Elsinore Castle, removing any doubt that the stern, handsome stranger is in fact Hamlet. Although the startling juxtaposition of Olivier’s genteel, if not effeminate, protagonist with the bold masculinity of the American Western seems more than a little strange, the conflict between these references is too obvious not to be strategic. As J. Lawrence Guntner observes of Kozintsev’s film, ‘the average length of the shots (twenty-four seconds) allows the viewer to note the careful mise-en-scène of each frame’ (2000, 121). By deliberately grafting an actionoriented genre onto the quintessential personification of ‘Hamletism’, Kozintsev suggests a complete rejection of the latter. What better way to liberate his protagonist from this paralyzing tradition than to identify him as an agent of manifest destiny? However, the conflict that resides within these competing frames of reference offers an important establishing shot for the film as a whole. Hamlet’s ambivalent positioning between the relentlessly forward movement of the Western and the debilitating stasis of Olivier’s ‘Hamletism’ points to the film’s own historical conditions of production, for these opposing temporalities parallel the radical discontinuity that resulted from the collision of Khrushchev’s Thaw with Stalin’s freeze. For Soviet artists, who had no means of determining – except through potentially fatal trial and error – just how wide or how narrow the road to ‘liberalization’ might be, the experience of the dichotomy was acute. As Alexander Prokhurov observes of the period that followed Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, ‘Soviet



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culture experienced the shock of its first internal split: the country seemed to divide overnight into victims and executioners, Stalin’s heirs … and the liberal children of the Twentieth Congress’ (2001, 8). Thaw literature responded to a culture torn between past and future, retreat and progress, by inventing a new protagonist – a figure who, like Hamlet, embodies a ‘dual existence’ (Osborne, 1995, 339) – while Thaw cinema navigated the shifting political terrain by engaging the dialectical themes of fragmentation and coherence. The connection to Shakespeare’s play, wherein, Kozintsev explains, ‘there is a disunification of the past, of the present, and of the future’ (1966, 20), is not difficult to extrapolate. Moreover, the fact Kozintsev casts Innokentii Smoktunovskii as Hamlet – an actor who was captured by the Nazis, imprisoned under Stalin, and rehabilitated under Khrushchev – makes these historical implications unavoidable. Hence, in an environment in which directors still feared the consequences of making original films, Hamlet provides Kozintsev with a convenient alibi for negotiating his own ‘dual existence’ as a film-maker in a world that is profoundly ‘out of joint’ (1.5.189). Kozintsev tempers the uncertainties of the present by way of the past, re-engaging his Constructivist roots by depicting Elsinore as a corrupt bourgeois machine. Before Hamlet sets foot within the castle walls, the wellhidden strings of a totalizing power activate their human functionaries in preparation for his visit. A servant ventriloquizes the king’s voice, reading the better part of Claudius’ opening speech as a public proclamation; armed guards travel around the perimeter of the fortress; anonymous underlings unfurl massive black flags, draping the castle in a display of mourning staged for the prince alone. Everything that occurs within the castle boundaries does so on cue; it is as if the fortress walls delimit ‘the shop of a mad watchmaker’, who constructs his clocks from human hands and faces, synchronizing their movements to his whims (Kozintsev, 1977, 125). Each gesture is invisibly yoked to a corresponding action; a pointed finger closes a gate, a waving hand releases cannons, a nodding head swings the sexton’s axe. However, this illusion of an autonomous State is compromised when a cut to filthy, sweating peasants reveals the human manufacturers of the king’s power, as Kozintsev indulges the classic Constructivist technique of ‘exposing the apparatus’. As these living cogs strain to turn the massive wheel that controls the drawbridge, Kozintsev emphasizes the paradoxical nature of their labour, which is immediately effaced when the iron planks of the bridge ‘magically’ appear to rise on their own. The tableau is brought to closure by an obscene deus-ex-machina effect that begins with an uncomfortably tight shot of the bridge’s jaws.

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Before coming to rest in an upright position, the metal maw flares to reveal its sharp, canine-like teeth as they, in turn, interlock to seal the castle off from escape. Kozintsev’s anatomy of power hereby culminates in a vision of the State as a monstrous vagina dentata. ‘[I]n speaking of the prison that was Denmark’, the director observes, Shakespeare ‘spoke against all states that were jails’ (1966, 124). The play’s central metaphor is literalized in Elsinore’s interior spaces, which are visually connected by an elaborate structure of banisters and railings that imply an infinite regress of prisons within prisons. Like the representation of the castle exterior, here, too, the architecture is complicit in the treachery that takes place within its walls, providing ample enclaves for espionage and sabotage. At court, as Kozintsev explains, ‘cunning traps, double games, [and] ambushes’ are in fashion; it is a place where business is conducted ‘on the quiet, in hiding, in secrecy’ and murder is the shortest path to preferment (1977, 166). Indeed, more vicious than Claudius himself are the bureaucratic gargoyles that surround him on all sides. With their faces frozen in ingratiating expressions, their heads starched by suffocating frocks, and their bodies tethered to the king’s every move, these superfluous men are the embodiment of a culture in which ‘[m]uteness betoken[s] loyalty’ (1966, 123). With obvious reference to his own experience, the director explains that such sycophants made a career out of meekness. The speechless memory, noiseless sorrow, and gagged anger were terrifying. Reason was replaced by instruction, conscience by ceremony. You were not supposed to think; just do the job. The police protected the silence, and it was guarded by sleuths; they oppressed by persecution if not by the noose, by despair if not by poverty. (1966, 123) Within this totalitarian regime, Hamlet swiftly emerges as Elsinore’s only conscientious objector. Even before he utters his first words, his insubordination is expressed by his posture. In contrast to the well-coiffed members of the king’s privy council, all of whom sit perfectly upright awaiting their cue to applaud him, Hamlet sits outside their circle, slumped irreverently in a chair. When Claudius turns to address the heir apparent as ‘my cousin Hamlet, and my son’ (1.2.64), the prince’s reply, ‘A little more than kin and less than kind’ (1.2.65), is deleted, as Kozintsev conveys Hamlet’s rejection of the king’s presumptuous greeting with a quick cut back to an empty chair. The polar opposite of Olivier’s Hamlet, Kozintsev’s prince is direct with his words and deliberate in his actions. In fact, he is prevented from heading



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straight into a confrontation with the king by Gertrude, who intercepts and consoles him, while Claudius drinks and urges his guests toward the nuptial celebration in an adjoining room. As eager ‘sponge’-like creatures vie for the opportunity to soak ‘up the King’s countenance’ (4.2.11, 14), the camera follows Hamlet’s back, which serves as an unfriendly usher into the noisy room. With cocktails in hand, countless courtiers bow obsequiously to the prince, but he remains impervious to their flattery. As he looks through and beyond the crowd with eyes that convey his status as an in absentia guest, Hamlet delivers his first soliloquy as an interior monologue – a method that Kozintsev had explored with Sergei Yutkevich long before Olivier employed this technique in his 1948 adaptation. (Kozintsev uses this form for all of the soliloquies in the film). Throughout this scene, Hamlet appears almost to float above the other guests, an effect that is less a function of Smoktunovskii’s impressive height than it is a reflection of the camera’s treatment of everyone else as scenery. The very moment a courtier approaches to pay his respects, the camera sharpens its focus on Hamlet and literally blurs everything else into the background. The sole occupant of Elsinore’s moral high ground, Hamlet is the one honest man ‘picked out of ten thousand’ Oblomovs (2.2.180). If Hamlet is a prisoner of conscience, then Ophelia is incarcerated by custom, and Kozintsev’s deliberate, detailed conceptualization of her character is one of the most distinguishing features of the film. The treatment of Ophelia emerged from a series of conversations with Shostakovich, who had particularly strong feelings about her musical accompaniment. Both director and composer arrived independently at their prevailing perception of Ophelia as a doll – an image that conveys her inherent innocence and fragility, as well as her infantilization and manipulation at the hands of others. Her room is decorated with tapestries of unicorns, peacocks and other fantastical creatures culled from children’s literature, and her naïveté to the dark deeds that occur outside her door is conveyed by the bright lighting and soft focus through which she is repeatedly framed. Although Shostakovich created several fully orchestrated refrains for the film’s other major characters, Ophelia’s theme is the most discernible, as she is the only figure whose music is composed for a single instrument. The result is perfect union of sound and image: when a celesta intones the familiar notes of a slow-moving carousel ride, Ophelia comes to life as a music-box dancer. Appropriately, she is introduced in the middle of a dance lesson, twirling with mechanical precision to satisfy her teacher’s disapproving eye. Just as Shostakovich creates a gentle, joyful melody for Ophelia that inscribes his

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fondness for her character, Kozintsev implies his kinship with Ophelia by associating her with the visual and performing arts. Following her opening recital, she is successively shown weaving at her loom, poring over Hamlet’s poetry, day-dreaming under embroidery, losing her sanity in song, dying in the form of a pre-Raphaelite painting and, finally, returning to her music box – now a coffin – as an alabaster cherub. Kozintsev was a student of all of these arts as a teenager, but, like Ophelia, it was not long before he, too, was forced to confine his craft to rigid templates, at one point observing that ‘they wanted to dub me … to synchronize my lips to someone else’s text’ (1984, I, 345). Ophelia is the personification of a life synchronized to someone else’s text, and, like a matryoshka, or Russian ‘stacking doll’, she is systematically reduced to ever smaller versions of herself. One of her final scenes offers a cinematic allegory of this process. Positioning Ophelia behind a bannister, Kozintsev films her in close-up through the bars; as the camera steadily pulls backwards, she shrinks before the viewer’s eyes until her tiny figure fits perfectly within two rails, giving her the appearance of a little baby in a big crib. This tableau underscores the fact that, unlike Hamlet, who represents the unbearable accretion of possibilities and pitfalls associated with the Thaw, Ophelia symbolizes the fatal diminution of the subject under the shadow of the Stalinist patriarch. The Ghost reflects the monstrous collision and corresponding asynchrony of these eras. Although scholars tend to focus on the physical enormity of the spectre, the Ghost’s entry is also distinguished by its peculiarly hindered movement, which creates the illusion of a figure whose upper and lower body function independently of each other. While graduated slow-motion photography conveys the robotic, distinctly mechanical movement of the Ghost’s legs, its upper body, ensconced in a majestic, billowing cape, creates an illusion of continuous motion. The disunification of the Ghost’s ‘two bodies’ suggests the influence of Bakhtin’s writings on the split social organism – a concept that began to receive serious attention from Soviet intellectuals in the 1960s. Based in large part on the work of Rabelais – a writer whom Kozintsev frequently references in describing the FEKS aesthetic – Bakhtin’s work elaborates on the medieval division of the social body into upper and lower ‘strata’. Whereas the lower bodily stratum corresponds to the natural, disorderly, degraded and anarchic, the upper stratum is the site of the official and hegemonic. Although organized hierarchically, their relationship is symbiotic, interacting organically as two parts of a functioning whole. During periods of carnivalesque celebration, such as public festivals, holidays and feasts, the hegemony is temporarily inverted, creating a self-equilibrating system of checks and balances that



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allows for subversion as well as an eventual return to order. However, industrialization eliminated this vital expression of the ‘positive grotesque’, mechanizing the function of the lower body and systematically co-opting its labour in the service of the upper, thus rendering their division absolute and permanent. Kozintsev alludes to this tragic schism in his representation of the Ghost’s two bodies, whose asynchronous movements stem from a perverse mutation in Natural laws. The spectre’s enormity thus reflects more than its command of physical space, for its massive dimensions correspond more directly to time. Indeed, as Kozintsev concludes, the Ghost is ‘the shade of an era’ in which ‘time’ has suffered ‘a painful mutilation’ (1966, 152). No less provocative than the Ghost’s entry is its exit, which offers another study in asynchrony by drawing on two stunningly diverse manifestations of the heroic tradition: the Noh theatre of Japan and the American comic strip series, Batman. A Hamlet spin-off, Batman is the story of Bruce Wayne, a brooding, bereft son who vows to avenge the murder of his father and mother by becoming ‘Batman’, alternately known as the Dark Knight and the Caped Crusader. When Batman became a television series in the 1960s, a ‘Russian’ villain named ‘Olga, Queen of the Cossacks’ was introduced in keeping with Cold War ideology. Significantly, at the same time, the plural version of the hero’s name came into popular parlance in the Soviet Union, when ‘batmen’ – a military term for an officer’s servant or ‘wingman’ – published memoirs about driving generals to the front throughout World War II. The confluence of these disparate meanings during the Thaw were not lost on Kozintsev, whose representation of the Ghost as a former war hero – poised with a billowing black cape on the castle ramparts overlooking Elsinore – suggests a conflation of the military figure of the wingman and the iconic image of Batman presiding over Gotham City from his urban perch. However, the most breathtaking encounter between the cultures and aesthetics of East and West is evinced by a fleeting close-up of the Ghost in the final seconds of its visitation. When the Ghost retreats backwards from Hamlet to return to whence it came, a sliver of light creates an inverted, Lone Ranger-style mask on its face, exposing a pair of searing eyes. Bowing its head to shun discovery, the Ghost immediately exposes another, more abstract face etched in the visor atop its helm. Though made by a sixteenth-century armourer, the visor looks uncannily similar to the mask of the Noh warrior – a figure who, in this most ancient of Japanese theatrical forms, returns as a spectre in search of justice. Kozintsev would fully engage his lifelong fascination with Noh theatre in King Lear, but

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traces of this interest are clearly visible in the representation of the Ghost’s ‘two faces’. Combining arched, expectant eyes with the downward turn of a slight frown, the warrior mask reveals an expression locked in frozen exasperation against the inertia of history as two kindred, ‘perturbèd’ spirits (1.5.183) collide across space and time. It is not the Ghost, then, but Claudius for whom Kozintsev reserves his representation of the ‘negative grotesque’. Claudius is a massive man, permanently puffed up with the assurance of his own worth. Although his commanding stature is not perverse in and of itself, the king is almost immediately linked to images that identify him with obscene appetites. For instance, as the over-sized king and his swelling litter proceed ceremoniously toward the performance of ‘The Mousetrap’, Claudius appears as though he has just stepped out of a Holbein painting. Positioned in the very middle of a static frame, the king’s girth, gaze and garments unmistakably replicate Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII, a painting that is rumoured to have mortified seventeenth-century viewers. In another wordless tableau, Claudius chases Gertrude into her bedroom in a frenzy of lust; his broad, hunched torso and heavy breathing resemble the posture of a rapacious minotaur (a creature also featured as a dancer in this scene’s revels), whose behaviour he imitates when he forcefully pushes the Queen onto the bed. More disturbing are the ways in which the furnishings of Claudius’ castle comment on his nefarious ‘tastes’, as sculpted effigies of severed torsos, heads and limbs scatter throughout the interior chambers in a Dionysian orgy of dismemberment. Like the alienated labour of the serfs outside the castle, the bodily degradation that occurs within not only invokes the systematic ‘cutting off’ of the lower bodily stratum but also the pleasure of its selective appropriation as an accomplice to the king’s relentless pursuit of self-gratification. A monstrous montage of the negative grotesque, the king attempts to gild the weeds that spring from his steps with parades of truckling courtiers and other distracting fineries, but nothing can obscure the ‘nasty sty’ of his court (3.4.84). The figure that most embodies this salacious ethos is Polonius, the character whom Kozintsev holds in the highest degree of contempt as a ‘cog in the machine of state’ (1966, 120). Cleverly literalizing the notion that Polonius is ‘in bed’ with the State, the director inserts a scene in which he enters Gertrude’s bedchamber as the queen sits on her bed in her nightgown – an intrusion that is wildly out of keeping with royal propriety in any era. Polonius’ perverse familiarity with the royal family jars sharply with his treatment of his own flesh and blood, from whom he demands constant displays of filial loyalty. The blocking of his first scene with Ophelia cements



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this impression of Polonius as a figure who will sell his soul in exchange for a comfortable life. As Ophelia sits at her father’s feet and tends to his shoes, she strikes the viewer as vaguely reminiscent of Mary Magdalene anointing the feet of Christ; and, indeed, when his hopes of preferment are at stake, Polonius does not hesitate to prostitute his own child as a pawn in the king’s chess match with Hamlet. Sitting idly by as Ophelia is physically and verbally abused throughout the nunnery scene, Polonius rebuffs her as one whose utility is spent when she runs crying to him. Polonius’ true offspring are neither Ophelia nor Laertes but rather the Osrics and Oswalds of the world – fellow Oblomovs decorated in ‘ostrich plumes’, ‘velvet’ and ‘silk’, and destined for a dull life of ‘picturesque posing’ (Kozintsev, 1966, 128). Appropriately, Polonius is killed amidst a backdrop of extravagant gowns posed on headless dress forms, joining the ranks of the royal dummies who licked the king’s boots before him. It is therefore particularly important to establish Hamlet as a figure firmly allied with the popular traditions of the people, as a decisive break from the traditional, elitist portrait of the petulant prince. For Kozintsev, Shakespeare’s greatest talent lies in his ability to create a language that resonates with ‘a familiar humanity’, which, in turn, leads to plays comprised of ‘plain everyday contents … ramshackle houses, crooked destinies’ (1966, 9–12). As ‘a man without any mysterious capital letters’, Kozintsev’s Hamlet is a figure who ‘walks on the ground’ (1966, 143, 14). This connection between Hamlet and the commoners is vividly rendered in the scene with the travelling players. Doubling as a homage to the circus aesthetic of FEKS, the players imitate the stifling ceremony of the court in a low mimetic register, as jugglers, tumblers and nimble-footed jesters bounce in and out of view from all corners of the screen, announcing the temporary triumph of the carnivalesque. Reminiscent of a rehearsal from Meyerhold’s school of biomechanics, athletic acrobats walk on their hands, celebrating the ‘positive grotesque’ by thrusting their lower bodily strata into the extreme foreground of the frame. As Hamlet strolls through the dust-strewn barnyard where the players have set up shop, his body appears relaxed and his anger seems to fall away from him. In this most prosaic of environments, he proceeds to perform Greek tragedy for an audience comprised mostly of squawking chickens and panting dogs. The focus on Hamlet’s ease in these ‘ramshackle’ surroundings reflects Kozintsev’s belief that the prince’s poetry is often ‘not separable from the low, popular style that nonetheless expresses the weightiest thought and the very sense of tragedy’ (1966, 141). The scene with the players is, in many ways, the defining moment of the film because it crystallizes the director’s approach

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to Hamlet as a kind of messianic figure – a man whose suffering does not set him apart from but rather connects him to the ‘crooked destiny’ of ‘a great people whose spiritual forces were paralyzed and who could find a way out only through melancholy’ (1966, 121). This more heroic view of Hamlet also explains why the prince neither feigns nor feels madness as a lasting affliction – for that way lies ‘Hamletism’. Appropriately, the scene with the travelling players provides a stage for Hamlet to exorcise his tenacious doppelganger. Kozintsev stresses the metatheatrical nature of this process by depicting the prince’s battle with the madness of ‘Hamletism’ as a performance within a performance. Watching the players’ enactment of ‘Priam’s slaughter’ (2.2.428) under the canopy of the troupe’s covered wagon, Hamlet is positioned among Italian carnivale masks, musical instruments and other basic tools of the trade. An easily missed detail, this miniature playing space explicitly recalls the ‘agit trains’ where the director began his career – a tableau that implicitly aligns Hamlet with the tradition of interventionist art. But before Hamlet can assume this role, he has to experience the effects of agitation for himself. Hence, as the players continue to recite and mime the fall of Priam, Hamlet becomes so disturbed that he launches himself into his ‘rogue and peasant slave’ (2.2.527) soliloquy while they are still performing, producing a cacophony of internal and external voices. This audible expression of madness is complemented by Kozintsev’s use of the visual minutia of ‘microphysiognomy’, as the subtle tremor of Hamlet’s index figure denotes the beginning of much greater distress. When both hands fly up to his temples and press in against the sides of his head, he appears as though he is fighting a losing battle to keep his wits from seeping out of his ears. Simultaneously, however, Hamlet’s facial expression conveys his more desperate struggle to prevent the outside world from breaking in – a world that resembles Hitler’s Germany more than Hamlet’s Denmark, as Kozintsev makes plain: ‘a modern Elsinore would have no objection to closing the barbed wire of concentration camps around humanity like a crown of thorns’ (1966, 168). When Hamlet seeks shelter from such horrors by retreating to the back of the wagon, he experiences a precipitous fall from melancholy to madness. Seating himself among absurd theatrical masks that loom overhead, Hamlet becomes fixated on an empty crown and an oversized nose – a reflection, perhaps, of Old Hamlet’s Hyperion to Claudius’ satyr. As his gaze roves anxiously between his mute observers as though he were awaiting stage directions from them, Hamlet becomes increasingly agitated, giving the viewer the impression the masks are, in fact, chiding and taunting him.



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Suddenly, Hamlet lunges violently at them like a caged animal as the props clatter about his head. When they refuse to be dethroned by his pulling action, his apoplectic rage culminates in a ghastly, blood-curdling scream. Immediately, Kozintsev inserts a flash-cut to an aerial view of the raging sea as an elemental approximation of the prince’s inner turmoil – a tableau that also invokes the director’s perception of Hamlet as a modernday Perseus, who ‘gaze[s] into the depths of social relations, depths more frightening than that of a bottomless abyss’ (1966, 152). Particularly in this context, Hamlet’s pathological cry is not a symptom of his eroding sanity; rather, it suggests the collective catharsis of a people seeking release from the madness of an entire century. Though this scene occurs merely one-third of the way through the film, structurally it is far more central, shoring up the sense of resolve that Shakespeare’s Hamlet achieves only at the very end of Act 4. Thus, when Hamlet embarks upon ‘To be, or not to be’ (3.1.58), the entire soliloquy resonates as rhetorical, if not completely redundant. Kozintsev imagined a variety of settings for this much-anticipated speech, rehearsing scenes in which Hamlet walks through a burning forest, braces himself on a ship at sea, and even passes several days (with the help of time-lapse photography). The director’s most vivid version of the scene revisits Denmark’s status as a prison, in which daily life consists of soldiers performing military drills and schoolchildren engaging in rote memorization (1966, 114–15). But in the end, he settled on a rocky beach in the Crimea, a location that implicitly invokes an observation he made years before: ‘To reconcile oneself, to swim with the current, is ignominy. It is better “not to be”’ (1966, 163). Filming this internal monologue on the shore of a vast ocean offers a visual allegory of the ‘sea of troubles’ (3.1.61) that Hamlet, in choosing to swim against the tide, is poised to inherit. That he has already made up his mind to do so is conveyed by Smoktunovskii’s performance of the very first line. Beginning with his eyes closed, he poses the question, ‘To be, or not to be?’ (3.1.58). Then, in the beat that separates the first half of the opening line from ‘that is the question’ (3.1.58), Hamlet opens his eyes and glares with hostility at the audience, as if he were suddenly aware that he is performing a routine exclusively for their benefit. In a film that generally avoids eye-line matches, Smoktunovskii’s sudden use of direct address is unnerving. Here again, this flash of microphysiognomy offers more explanatory power than all the words that follow it, for in the instant that the actor locks eyes with the audience, his pre-emptive gaze clarifies the fact that, for this Hamlet, there is no question: ‘not to be’ is not an option.

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Kozintsev’s desire to decouple Hamlet from the paralyzing equivocation of ‘Hamletism’ leads to the more radical decision to cut his remaining soliloquies. Although the director has, as a result, been accused of rewriting the play (a rather tall order), Kozintsev’s edits are entirely consistent with his approach to Hamlet as a man who knows his course of action and merely awaits the opportunity to execute it. Under these circumstances, there is no place for his next soliloquy, ‘Now might I do it’ (3.3.73). To render this omission more palatable, the director removes Hamlet from the scene in which the king confesses his crimes; the only audience for Claudius’ soliloquy is a mirror. This decision, in turn, solves the riddle of the following scene in which Hamlet kills Polonius. When Hamlet carries out this ‘rash and bloody deed’ (3.4.26) in Shakespeare’s play, his question to the queen – ‘Is it the king?’ (3.4.25) – seems disingenuous, especially since he has just left Claudius at prayer. In Kozintsev’s film, however, Hamlet’s shock to find Polonius behind the arras is as genuine as his disappointment. Hence, the Ghost’s return at this juncture functions more to affirm than to admonish Hamlet. No longer a terrifying, massive, black-clad apparition, the spectre visits him as a flash of light, a metamorphosis which implies that his ‘perturbèd spirit’ (1.5.183) is closer to being at rest. Hamlet neither implores the heavens to defend him from the spectre, nor does he engage it with the anxious question, ‘Do you not come your tardy son to chide?’ (3.4.97). After all, only moments ago Hamlet embraced what he believed to be his first opportunity to revenge his father’s murder. For the same reason, the director cuts ‘How all occasions do inform against me’ (4.4.9.22), since Hamlet is clearly no stranger to bloody thoughts. The prince’s deliberate nature and consistent sense of purpose never abandon him in Kozintsev’s film. After such seemingly drastic cuts, then, the director is able to convey this point with the elimination of only three words; when Osric approaches Hamlet with Laertes’ challenge, Hamlet accepts the wager and, turning to Horatio, informs him simply that ‘I shall win’ (5.2.149). To utter the caveat, ‘at the odds’, would be out of keeping with his character (5.2.149). In place of Shakespeare’s words, Kozintsev develops his characters in stunning cinematic terms, enabling him to indulge in visual elaborations that far exceed the textual cues in Shakespeare’s play. The most profound example of this process emerges in the visual relationship that Hamlet shares with Ophelia. Although Hamlet’s devastating words and actions toward Ophelia seem to belie the prospect of an alliance, Kozintsev forges a far more powerful ontological connection between them through his careful attention to mise-en-scène. Throughout the film, both Hamlet and Ophelia inhabit the same architectural spaces; they are, for example, the



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only two characters who are repeatedly framed behind bars. They are also frequently represented through complementary tableaux. Just as Ophelia shrinks between the posts of a bannister through the lens of a retreating camera, Hamlet appears to grow when an advancing camera frames him sitting behind a bannister, ultimately giving him the appearance of a grown man in a child’s crib. More striking are the ways in which Kozintsev employs imagistic cathexis to suggest their intertwined fates. For instance, when Hamlet becomes a prisoner on a ship bound for England, Ophelia is represented as a captive within an enormous metal bodice that looks more like a full-body cage than a corset or farthingale. Functioning similarly to Hamlet’s double-dealing escorts, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Ophelia’s black-clad dressers surround her as they secure the latticework of her torture chamber with a zeal reminiscent of Achilles’ myrmidons. This image of Ophelia’s body armour is, in turn, revisited in the armour breastplate that Hamlet wears in the very next scene. Their final appearance in the film ‘together’ underscores this sense that they are living parallel lives, as Ophelia departs and Hamlet arrives through the sea. As Hamlet is ferried across the sea in a ship that contains the order for his death, Ophelia is headed toward the ocean that claims her life. Indeed, whereas Hamlet cleverly frees himself from the vessel that takes him across the sea to his doom, Ophelia has little choice but to release herself from a shackled life in the eddying sea beneath her window. Introduced through the image of a caged bird outside her room, Ophelia exits the film as a seagull, whose journey is depicted in a montage that consumes seventyfive seconds of screen time. The sequence begins with a tracking shot that slowly moves away from Ophelia, panning gradually outward until it focuses on a lone seagull winging its way upwards from the sea. The ensuing minute-long focus on the bird’s flight suggests that it covers a considerable amount of distance, and, in fact, the camera follows the seagull all the way to another port, where it arrives at its destination high above Hamlet’s head. Captivating the prince for a full fifteen seconds, the bird exits the frame, its purpose served: Ophelia’s spirit is the first to welcome him back to Denmark’s craggy shores. This motif, which Kozintsev will repeat in Lir, functions as metaphor for his theory of film-making, which the director refers to as ‘winged realism’. One cannot help but speculate that he coined this term quite deliberately as an antidote to Socialist Realism; however, of greater importance than the tension between these methodologies is the conflict within the phrase ‘winged realism’ itself. In terms of their elemental counterparts, ‘winged’ casts itself into the air while ‘realism’ binds itself to the earth;

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their oppositional energies mingle and clash in a dance of centripetal and centrifugal motion. This contrapuntal combination is fundamentally Shakespearean, as well as quintessentially Russian, for like the collision montage that he and Eisenstein championed in the 1920s, the ‘study of Shakespeare’ is neither a teleological nor continuous process – in Kozintsev’s metaphor, ‘it is not like the gradual erection of a brick wall’. Rather, ‘knowledge’ emerges from forging cracks in the foundation; it is only ‘achieve[d] … through conflict and struggle’ (1966, 132). The film’s conclusion demonstrates the colliding forces that animate both Kozintsev’s theory of ‘winged realism’ and his approach to Shakespeare, emerging in the images that frame Hamlet’s death. Moments before Hamlet accepts the wager that will end his life, he eyes a cawing seagull flying overhead, a sight that seems to temper the inauspicious feeling he shares with Horatio when he observes ‘how all[’s ill] here about my heart’ (5.2.150). Moments after the duel with Laertes, as Hamlet expires on the stony outcroppings that border the sea, the camera moves slowly past his body until it comes to rest on an extremely tight shot of the grainy cliff face. The solidity and finality of the image exists in tension with the image of the flying bird – particularly given Kozintsev’s decision to cut Horatio’s famous farewell: ‘Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’ (5.2.302–3). Although it could be argued that Ophelia’s spirit has proleptically performed this office through the tableau of the singing gull, the implacable density of the rocky earth below suggests that Hamlet’s flight has already been grounded. Importantly, however, there is no reconciliation of these images, only a tangled arabesque of opposing energies. Kozintsev underscores this ambiguity with a similar collision that leads out of the film and into the final credit sequence. Immediately following the dead march that marks the end of Shakespeare’s narrative, the camera cuts away from the soldiers’ procession to a shot of the ocean. Gradually, the stony shadow of the castle crosses the screen from right to left, coming to rest in the middle of the frame; at the same time, a lone seagull flies from left to right and beyond the screen, reinforcing the unresolved tensions between air and earth, the winged and the real. To close the film any other way would not be an ending but a capitulation.

Korol Lir (1971) Lear was not a film on which I was working but a life which had entered my own from which it was too late to escape … (Kozintsev, 1977, 131)



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Kozintsev was fond of saying that Hamlet is not staged but suffered, but this was perhaps because he had not yet attempted to film Lear. According to the director, ‘working on the tragedy was unbearable’ (1977, 131) and, indeed, the feelings detailed in his film diary paint a picture of a man on the brink of suicide. While envisioning Lear for the screen, the director found himself ruminating uncontrollably over morbid imagery and ideas. For instance, he pondered the futility of existence captured in Woman of the Dunes, the Kobe Abe novel in which daily life consists only of digging sand; he delved into the dark motivations of Ilse Koch, the Buchenwald artist who allegedly made lampshades of human skin; and he vividly imagined the suffering depicted in Michelangelo’s The Last Day of Judgement, wherein the artist had purportedly etched his self-portrait on the flayed skin of St Bartholomew. For Kozintsev, Lear’s madness is a slight variation on this theme, derived from ‘a self-portrait of his own power stripped from him while he was still alive’ (1977, 63). The director also gleaned ideas for his adaptation from the work of other film-makers, including Peter Brook, Fellini, Eisenstein, Welles, Kurosawa and Zeffirelli, based on correspondence, personal visits and professional impressions. Ironically, though, Kozintsev does not acknowledge the one film that seems to have had the greatest influence on Lir’s mise-en-scène: Ingmar Bergman’s iconic vision of sin, suffering and damnation in The Seventh Seal (1956). Indeed, Korol Lir – with its onslaught of plague-ridden refugees, war-ravaged landscapes and recurring panoramas of tiny silhouettes climbing uphill – appears almost like a sequel to this extraordinary film. In fact, Bergman’s influence is further inscribed in the casting of Valentina Shendrikova as Cordelia, an actress whose long blonde hair, stunning cheekbones and bottomless eyes instantly recall the Nordic beauty of Ingrid Thulin in Wild Strawberries (1957). Though certainly not a replica of The Seventh Seal, Lir offers Marxist variation on its themes, as Kozintsev himself suggests when he characterizes the film’s harrowing mise-en-scène as an apocalyptic trinity of the Last Judgement, the Black Death and the infinite hell ‘secreted in the heart of social relations’ (1966, 74). Though Kozintsev had imagined filming Lear for decades, it was a trip to Japan – of all places – that set the actual shoot into motion. The director had been drawn to Japanese theatrical traditions ever since 1928, when he and Eisenstein attended several performances staged by a Kabuki theatre company that was touring Moscow. Forty years later, Kozintsev turned towards the more obscure representational strategies of Noh drama, discovering therein his inspiration for Lear’s subplot involving Gloucester and Edgar (1977, 7–8). During his visit, the director also became infatuated

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with the sparse aesthetic and spiritual awakening associated with Zen gardens, marvelling at the simultaneous depth of his ‘encounter with art’ and the paucity of his gravel and stone surroundings (1977, 4). But the deep sense of peace evoked by the gardens was brutally undermined by Kozintsev’s experience of a war memorial in Hiroshima. The tiny museum exhibit began with a pictorial rendering of primitive people enjoying the first fire, an invention which, the docents explained, was intended to make life easier, warmer and lighter (1977, 17). In keeping with the minimalist nature of Japanese art, Kozintsev noted that there appeared to be little else to see in the museum, other than a faint hologram of a human shadow on the wall heading toward the exit. The explanation that accompanied this image, however, was unforgettable: ‘“When the heat reached 5000 degrees man disappeared”’ (1977, 18). For Kozintsev, this brief parable of catastrophic devolution – wrapped in the myth of human progress – struck a powerful resonance with his conception of Lear. The challenge, however, was distilling it in cinematic terms. His solution came in the form of another horrendous shock moments later. While still wrestling with the gravity of the hologram, the director’s reverie was interrupted by a noise that struck him as even more disturbing: the sound of incredulous laughter. He turned to discover schoolchildren, cavorting through the displays as if they were all punch lines to the same bad joke. As they continued to giggle through the gravest lesson in their own history, the director was struck by the Artaudian absurdity of the scene; later, he would revive this memory as a means of approaching the otherwise inexplicable ‘humour of cruelty’ that Lear exercises in the face of Gloucester’s blindness. These emotional antinomies are the basis of Lear’s oppositional grammar. According to Kozintsev, what distinguishes Lear from all of Shakespeare’s other plays is the total absence of natural transitions, as the play relentlessly ‘thrust[s] … people from one condition and situation to another totally opposite one … A warm place by the fire contrasted with rain out on the heath; velvet contrasted with a bare dirty body. The strata of life do not mingle but collide’ (1977, 85). Kozintsev’s juxtapositional aesthetic thus reaches its most sophisticated expression in Lir, as the film that most embodies his vision of the artist as a ‘seismograph, recording the inner shocks of his epoch’ (1959, 158). Replicating the violent rhythms of Shakespeare’s play, Kozintsev codifies the tectonic clash of natural and man-made forces in the film’s volatile physical and spiritual topography – a landscape riven with ‘gulfs and chasms’, wrought by ‘architects of hate’ (1977, 85, 131). Scholars and critics have imagined many faces for these anonymous tyrants, but the usual suspects – Stalin and Hitler – quickly rise to the



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surface. John Collick concludes that Kozintsev’s film reveals a man ‘trying to come to terms with the traumatic period of Stalin’s rule’ (1989, 163). Others contend that the adaptation exceeds its Soviet frame and resonates more broadly with the war film genre, as ‘a Lear of the nuclear age’ (Troncale, 1992, 204). In many respects, Kozintsev’s adaptation is indeed an extensive meditation on his experience of the Japanese holocaust museum, reflected in the pervasive threat of incineration that resides in the raging fires and killing heat that drive the cruel consistency of Lir’s mise-en-scène. And, without question, the incumbent allusions to Hitler’s gas chambers and Stalin’s Purges are the other touchstones in this contemporary triumvirate of evil. But Kozintsev adamantly refuses to position his adaptation as an allegory of the present. Instead, he situates Lir along a continuum that stretches from the primitivism of the Iron Age to the contemporary savagery of World War II. For this reason, the director insisted on using only natural materials – iron, leather, wool, wood and fur – for all of the props, costumes and sets, going so far as to commission deliberately rugged, rough-hewn furniture from a craftsman in Lithuania. The purpose was not only to frustrate attempts to locate the film in a specific place and period, but also to eschew the temptation to ‘sugar Lear with beautiful effects’, a practice that Kozintsev refers to as ‘shameful’ (1977, 37). The choice of black and white film stock achieves both objectives, conveying a sense of documentary realism while also approximating what the director refers to as a uniquely ‘Shakespearean’ propensity for conveying ‘the power of reality devoid of anything specific’ (130). Almost coy in his defiance of disclosure, Kozintsev offers an intentionally vague description of space in Lear as ‘a baked remnant’ and time as ‘the rhythm of the dead earth’ (124, 231). Taken together, however, they constitute a set that is none other than ‘the great stage of fools’ itself: the ongoing tragedy of human history (4.6.177). Kozintsev acknowledged early on that choosing the proper places for location shooting would be especially difficult, since all of Lear’s landscapes belong to ‘the space of tragedy’ – a phrase that would become the title of the director’s published film diary. When the production was at last liberated from the studio at Lenfilm, Kozintsev relocated the cast and crew to no fewer than three different countries – Russia, the Ukraine (along with the Crimea) and Estonia – spanning the southerly Baltic to the chilly banks of the Black Sea. Kozintsev was careful to select physical settings that reflected the metaphysical themes of the play. Hence, though radically different – a dried up riverbed in the Sivash Lagoon, rocky outcroppings and fish farms in Kazantip, a plateau formed from a shale-powered factory in Narna – the

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locations are uncannily alike in the sense that they all contain ‘the stamp of centuries … swelling with the blood and tears of generations’ (1977, 124). For such generalizations Kozintsev has incurred the criticism of subscribing to an arcane and ‘dangerously ahistorical image of character and inner self’ (Collick, 1989, 146), but in many ways Lir is oddly more readable than Gamlet. Whereas the camera’s erratic movement, angles and focus in Kozintsev’s earlier adaptation create an aura of inscrutability, in Lir, the viewer’s perspective is stabilized by a well-paced sequencing of close-ups and reaction shots, panoramas and tracking shots. Additionally, the director develops a visual rhetoric of two and three shots that become increasingly frequent as the camera identifies tragic affinities between characters, aligning Lear with Cordelia, and Edgar with Albany and Kent. This cinematic language reinforces Kozintsev’s insistence that ‘tragedy takes place not amongst landscapes but among people’ (1977, 82). Perhaps the greatest challenge that Kozintsev faced in filming Lir was finding the right actor to play the lead. The director once observed that the singular advantage that cinema maintains over theatre ‘is not that you can even have horses, but that you can stare closer into a man’s eyes: otherwise it is pointless to set up a cine-camera for Shakespeare’ (1977, 55). In a play about physical and spiritual blindness, eyes are paramount, and, after nearly a year of unsuccessful screen tests, Kozintsev contemplated giving up the search. He had a hunch, however, about an actor who had auditioned for the non-speaking part of the beggar after whom Edgar models ‘Poor Tom’, and he called him back to the studio to audition for the part of Lear. The man in question, Yuri Yarvet, assumed that there had been a mistake, but, because he had a limited grasp of Russian, he showed up out of politeness. When the tiny man from Estonia walked in the door, Kozintsev recalls: ‘I have at last seen the eyes … the very eyes’ (1977, 74). Although Yarvet ‘did not look the part … he was short, with a small head, and very nervous’ (74–5), the director suddenly discovered that he could not imagine anyone else in the role. The problem, however, was the language barrier. Kozintsev vastly preferred unpredictable sounds, idiosyncratic inflections and even moments of unintelligible speech to the stifling regularity of dubbing, but, at the same time, he could not conceive of a ‘Russian’ Lear speaking with a thick Estonian accent – forgetting, perhaps, the irony of his own position as a Ukrainian director who had envisioned a Soviet adaptation of an English play while flying to Japan. But in the interests of moving forward with Yarvet, Kozintsev decided to commission an Estonian translation of the play; to the director’s surprise, however, when the dubbing script was ready, Yarvet refused to speak a word



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from it. The actor explained to the bewildered director that, although the translation was a perfect word-for-word rendering, it destroyed the poetic spirit of the play. Thus, Yarvet took upon himself the Herculean task of learning Boris Pasternak’s Russian verse translation (although he spoke in Russian on set, he was subsequently dubbed by Zinovi Gerdt, a Moscow actor [Sokolyansky, 2007, 210]), and, when all was said and done, the same director who had shamelessly eliminated more than half of Hamlet’s soliloquies actually added one to Lear. Seeking to highlight Yarvet’s softspoken brilliance, Kozintsev converts ‘reason not the need’ (2.4.259) into a soliloquy that Lear whispers to the wind. The film’s opening frames synthesize Kozintsev’s impressions of ancient and post-war Japan in a tragic register, beginning with the haunting sound of a hollow instrument that recalls a shakuhachi flute. The strange, minimalist tune is accompanied by a tight shot of a stick tapping the ground, followed by the image of feet wrapped in worn burlap; toes peek out from their crude coverings, blistered and burned by the sun. Other feet follow as the camera pans out to reveal a vast wasteland of sand and stones, reminiscent of a giant Zen garden. But there is no peace to be reaped here, for as the camera moves closer to the hobbled masses, they become more distinguishable – but only by virtue of their afflictions: amputees stagger on crutches and canes, quadriplegics drag themselves through the sand with their arms, and a badly injured boy is pushed in a ramshackle cart. Clearly, they are not pilgrims but refugees of war. Evocative of the horror film genre, their dry, gaping eyes and stiff bodies give them the appearance of zombies craving release from a world that has ‘has mangled them with injustice and twisted them with want’ (Kozintsev, 1977, 193). When they at last arrive at the foot of a soaring promontory that forms the foundation of Lear’s castle, the hordes of social lepers gaze upwards in anticipation of a decree. The king emerges briefly to look down on the abject masses below; raising his arms, Moses-like, he drops them just as quickly without uttering a word. There is no proclamation, only the assurance that this empty display of power will keep his subjects in awe – even as they starve before his eyes. The contrast between the outcasts at the foot of the castle and the nobility located within Lear’s small circle of privilege is striking. Positioned according to rank and file, they are well groomed and draped in mantles made of fur pelts – a far-from-subtle indication that they wear their bestial natures on the outside. Kozintsev likens the leaders of this ‘master race’, Edmund and Cornwall, to the white supremacist agenda of the Ku Klux Clan and the Third Reich (1977, 45). A provocative extension of this metaphor

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occurs when Edmund delivers his soliloquy on bastardy to a wall fresco of the Gloucester family tree, a tableau that underscores his genocidal intent to eradicate his entire lineage. Edmund’s female partners in crime, Goneril and Regan, are unequivocally grotesque; twice the age of their youngest sister, Lear’s eldest daughters are the embodiment of Kozintsev’s assertion that ‘there is nothing attractive about the play – it is foul, dirty, and vulgar’ (1977, 66). Indeed, the sisters are distinguishable from each other only by degrees of ugliness: Regan has moles and Goneril ‘carves fatty meat’ (1977, 46). Cordelia, by contrast, is a figure of uncommon natural beauty. The only character dressed entirely in white, brightly lit and filtered through soft focus, she radiates an almost otherworldly nature. In the first half of the film, Cordelia is also the only figure who is framed in close-up, drawing attention to her allegorical status as the face of honesty. In the second half of the film, there are no pure close-ups without a distant view of refugees fleeing the flames of war; the use of deep focus here mirrors the depth of Lear’s own evolving vision as he comes to terms with the suffering that exists beyond the prism of his own despair. Despite his diminutive stature, Lear enters the film as a totalitarian figure, presiding absolutely over the ‘huge concretion which is government hierarchy’ with an iron fist (1966, 65). That Lear is capable of untold cruelty is evident in his visual correspondence with Edmund, both of whom wear mantles comprised of identical fur pelts. The suggestion that these characters are literally cut from the same cloth sets up the reversal whereby the king – through a steady process of disrobing – comes to resemble the beggarly ‘Poor Tom’. The stage business that precedes Lear’s division of the kingdom establishes a similar inversion. Wielding his power casually, the king emerges from behind a door, laughing loudly as the Fool rides in on his coat-tails. Consistent with Kozintsev’s interest in variations on a Noh theme, the director insists that ‘Lear’s face must not be visible; only the mask of power’ (1977, 47). Though the audience expects a ceremonial procession of the mighty king’s retinue to follow, Lear ambles irreverently into his chamber with a mop head in front of his face, laughing loudly as he looks out from behind its crudely rendered eye-holes. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to the blind Gloucester’s ‘parti-eye[s]’ (4.1.10), this makeshift mask of power underscores the fact that Lear will only ‘See better’ (1.1.158) when his royal trappings have been violently sundered from him, just as his clownish antics foretell his imminent reduction to the film’s principal fool. The Fool is a source of particular fascination for Kozintsev as the film’s principal ‘agit’ figure. Parallelling the treatment of Ophelia in Gamlet, the



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Fool’s appearances are routinely preceded by an off-screen noise. Kozintsev initially intended to have this noise ‘ring out and peal as a salute to FEKS’, but he soon came to the more sobering recognition that ‘the time for daring experiments was over’ (1977, 119). In the end, he gave the Fool only a hint of eccentricity: the faint jingle of a bell strapped to his leg, which stands for ‘a tongue stuck out at pomposity and grandiloquence’ (1977, 119). The Fool is also identified with another, more dispiriting sound that issues from a wooden pipe – the very instrument which, in retrospect, the audience recognizes as the source of the melancholy tune with which the film began. Similar to the clock chimes at the beginning of Gamlet, the Fool’s pipe, as Kozintsev explains, is a ‘tocsin’, the ‘call sign of conscience’ (1977, 72). Although the Fool enters the film laughing, he will exit the film crying; thus, it is not long before his character acquires more serious overtones. As the king settles into a stool in front of the fireplace, the Fool crouches at his feet and receives an occasional pat on the head ‘like a dog’, a ‘beggar who wears a dog’s hide inside out’ (1977, 72.). Young in years, he is ancient in experience. With a shaven head and a starved body, Oleg Dal’s character is ‘the boy from Auschwitz whom they forced to play a violin in an orchestra of dead men … He has childlike, tormented eyes’ (1977, 72). Like the shift within Shakespeare’s company from the bombastic jests of Will Kempe to the cynical jabs of Robert Armin, Kozintsev’s approach to the Fool marks a final, sobering transition from the youthful, freewheeling agitational art of FEKS to the painful realism of a disillusioned, aging director. Kozintsev’s treatment of the Fool as a stray dog provides a segue into the film’s thematic interchanges between humans and animals. Like Julie Taymor’s startling juxtapositions of man and beast in Titus (1999), Kozintsev conceives of Lear as an ongoing montage of ‘suffering human flesh’ and ‘the figure of the wild beast’ – images that ‘confront each other and intermingle’ through the recurring motif of ‘the hunt’ (1977, 166). In the play, Shakespeare mentions Lear’s return from hunting (1.3.7), but the actual hunt event occurs off-stage. In Kozintsev’s film, the hunt is depicted in a montage that features rapid intercutting between images of predatory creatures, both animal and human. In a frenzy of rage over Cordelia’s perceived injury, Lear tears out of his castle and mobilizes his cadre of men and beasts for the trip to Goneril’s homestead. The king’s skewed priorities are immediately evident in his choice of ‘companions’, as he selects the best of his salivating mastiffs and hooded falcons before he even considers the throngs of humans anxious to do his bidding. Moments later, however, intimations of a reversal of fortunes are evident in the dehumanizing treatment of his Fool who, at Goneril’s behest, is tethered

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to the royal caravan by the leash around his neck. With his hands bound behind his back, the boy is forced to walk at an uncomfortable clip even as the spoils of the hunt – massive dead boars hanging from wooden spits – are conveyed on men’s shoulders like a king on progress. Meanwhile, Lear’s place of privilege within the horse-drawn carriage affords him little protection from the well-dressed scavengers in his midst. As the selfdeposed king reclines into rest, Goneril watches his peaceful repose as if she were stalking prey; her eyes, as Kozintsev suggests, are ‘full of the spark of the period of primary accumulation of capital’ (Kozintsev, 1966, 89). Shortly thereafter, Regan, a character identified with the garish tastes of the nouveau riche, hosts a dinner for her father replete with elaborate place-settings, implements and décor; but her wolvish nature is exposed the moment that dinner is served, when she rips apart her meat with bare hands and tears into it with bad teeth. Such dynamic inversions of human and beast anticipate the manhunt that reduces Lear to a ‘poor, bare, forked animal’ (3.4.99–100), culminating in the feeding frenzy in which his family members ‘leap at each other’s throats, tear each other’s flesh, and scratch with their nails … all are drawn into the chase, into the snare’ (1977, 167). By design, no one survives this implosion of avarice; the only end of conflict is the annihilation of Lear’s entire royal line. As with Kozintsev’s conception of Hamlet as an internally consistent character, Lear never fully descends into a dramatic expression of madness after he is cast out by his daughters. He is better understood as the keel – not the rudder – of bobbing and dipping emotions; he can control their depth to a certain degree, but their course is wildly beyond his control. During the storm on the heath, for example – a scene that is typically performed with hyperbole and rage – Yarvet’s Lear engages the beggars, fools and madmen softly and in earnest, as he willingly becomes a fellow denizen of their ‘houseless poverty’ (3.4.27). One of the reasons why Yarvet won several international awards for acting, including the highest honour at Cannes, is due to the extraordinary understatement that governs his performance. In a letter of encouragement to the actor, Kozintsev offered him a simple formula heading into the film’s most challenging scenes: ‘The stronger the emotion, the more restrained must be the mode of expressing it’ (1977, 232). This reversal of audience expectations is the ‘first law of eccentricity’ which, as the director explains, establishes the aesthetic paradox whereby ‘[t]he more unlikely the situation the more it must be played like an everyday occurrence’ (1977, 162). Such statements illustrate the extent to which the process of filming Lear brings the director full circle back to FEKS, whose founding principle of constitutive



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inversion produces a temporary, ‘topsy turvy’ world (1977, 159) in which kings become beggars, the mad become wise, the blind see and ‘The worst returns to laughter’ (4.1.6). The consummate irony of Shakespeare’s play and Kozintsev’s film lies in the fact that there is no return to normality, let alone to laughter, for in the process of inversion, humour itself turns cruel. Nowhere are these eccentricities more vividly rendered than in Lear’s encounter with Gloucester in the aftermath of the storm. Like the lengthy sequence involving the travelling players in Gamlet, the exchange between the two old men serves as the structural centre of Kozintsev’s film. The scene begins with a shot of a grassy plain and the sound of rustling; as the camera closes in on the area where the noise is concentrated, the audience expects to find a small animal making its way through the meadow. But Lear pops up instead, nibbling on the frozen beetroot he has ferreted out from the underbrush, having devolved from royalty to rodent. Alternately crawling and foraging, he spits out the coarse residue while quietly spinning proverbs about the nature of kingship. The marriage of the director’s vision of restraint with the actor’s execution here is remarkable. The bitter wisdom that Yarvet’s Lear proffers is not registered in heightened volume or dramatic gesture so much as it is rendered palpable by the acrid food he alternately consumes and expels. When the king’s misery finds company, however, his cynical aphorisms are spiked with venom and discharged in the direction of his oldest surviving friend. Peppering his painful epiphanies with puns that mock Gloucester’s blindness, Lear teases him by using the word ‘case’, meaning socket, to inform him that his empty sockets – his ‘case of eyes’ (4.6.141) – have put him ‘in a heavy case’ (4.6.143). The king also refers to Gloucester as ‘blind Cupid’ (4.6.135) and upbraids him with the wicked question: ‘Dost thou squiny at me?’ (4.6.134–5). Continuing in this vein, Lear laughs at Gloucester for having ‘No eyes in [his] head, nor no money in [his] purse’ (4.6.142–3), before delivering the proverb that concludes his sardonic sermon: ‘A man may see how the world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears’ (4.6.146–7). In an effort to understand Lear’s horrendous behaviour, the director suggests that the king – not unlike the inadvertent laughter of children in the face of a nuclear holocaust – intentionally pours salt into Gloucester’s wounds in order to make them ‘more painful, so that they should never be forgotten’ (1977, 160). Kozintsev’s observation reminds the audience that, in addition to being a gifted filmmaker, he is also a survivor of the most catastrophic century in human history. Through Lear, then, he seeks to fulfil his obligation as an artist ‘to keep alive the memory of man’s most extreme inhumanity to man’ in an effort to keep history from repeating itself (Troncale, 1992, 196).

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Lear’s reunion with Gloucester is also significant as the only scene in Kozintsev’s Shakespeare adaptations in which nearly all of the play’s language is retained, for ‘every omission would be like cutting live flesh’ (1977, 161). In his ongoing correspondence with Boris Pasternak, whose translation the director was working from, Kozintsev was advised by the literary giant to make ruthless cuts to the text. Despite his initial reservations, the director decided to eliminate enormous sections of both plays in the process of adapting them for the screen – a decision that is particularly evident in Gamlet. His rationale for doing so came less from Pasternak than it did from his own nagging sense that creating a film based on the text alone was essentially no different than a standard stage performance. By the same token, decoupage alone – the process of translating the play into discrete shots according to film grammar – is equally problematic, as Kozintsev explains that ‘it is awkward and unnecessary to turn the play into a film script’ (1966, 54). Appropriately, the director found the answer to the riddle in yet another paradox: the more a film-maker focuses on the words, the less they dictate what actually happens on screen. Citing Welles and Kurosawa as masters of this process, Kozintsev concludes that the principal challenge of adaptation is to listen to the text in a way that accords ‘greater attention to everything [else] which strengthens the thought’, for ‘the “superfluous” passages are the main characters in close-up’ (1977, 162, 55). As a provocative extension of this transpositional ethos, Kozintsev develops his concept of the ‘visual proverb’ (1977, 93). A highly condensed example of cinematic poetry, a visual proverb is a framing device that further distils the significance of a particular scene by situating it between two wordless tableaux. The most stunning example of this technique of visual underscoring appears on either side of Lear’s final meeting with Gloucester. The first part of the proverb begins with a shot of Lear and his ragged retinue of beggars, fools and madmen wandering the barren landscape. The endless horizontality of the desolation is briefly interrupted by what appears to be a cross marking a grave. Only Edgar notices the strange remnant and, when he pauses to have a closer look, a face peaks out from under the badly worn burlap and wood to reveal a scarecrow. In the process of filming Lir, Kozintsev was thumbing through a book of Elizabethan engravings when, quite unexpectedly, he stumbled across a depiction of a scarecrow. The figure resonated with the director because it reminded him of the roughhewn ‘Genius Loci’ that stood watch over his family’s tiny vegetable garden in the Ukraine. Kozintsev could not help but associate the scarecrow with fond memories of his childhood and ‘the warmth of human habitation’,



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and he was determined to find a place for it in the film (1977, 82). In Lir, however, the image of a scarecrow presiding over a ‘garden’ of sand and stones suggests the opposite sentiment. Although, on one level, the scarecrow could be interpreted as a folk burlesque of the Zen gardens that Kozintsev so admired in Japan, on another level, its starved frame recalls the incinerated skeletons of Hiroshima and the Holocaust. Appropriately, the sinister implications of the desert guardian become clear when Lear’s entourage is shown struggling up a massive hill, their fragile silhouettes quivering in the haze of unbearable heat. This unmistakable reference to The Seventh Seal – specifically to the iconic image of Death dancing with the departed – clarifies the scarecrow’s function as yet another one of Charon’s minions, ferrying them across the sea of sand to a fire that is everlasting. The bookend tableau that follows Lear’s painful exchange with Gloucester revisits the macabre figure of the scarecrow to complete the visual proverb. The scene begins with an aerial shot of an arid, cloven terrain; looking more like the surface of Mars than any place on earth, the fractured clay reveals an infinite regress of dendritic fingers, which crackle through the landscape as far as the eye can see. When the dwarfed forms of Edgar and Gloucester become discernible, the blind man falters, slowly pulling his guide down with him. Comparable to Lear’s reunion with and subsequent loss of his daughter, Edgar’s bittersweet reconciliation with his father – whom he loses only seconds thereafter – is one of the most powerful scenes in the film. Gasping for air, the old man reaches his trembling arms up towards Edgar’s face and reads it with his hands, discovering his son, only to die in the same instant. The visible rush of killing joy that washes over Gloucester is a stunning realization of Shakespeare’s impossible description of a heart that ‘[b]urst smilingly’ (5.3.198). But Edgar has little time to mourn, as the sound of the enemy’s trumpet summons him to his revenge. Determined to give his father a proper burial, Edgar gently covers the body with dirt and scans his surroundings for a suitable grave marker. Happening upon the remains of a split plough, he uses the wood to manufacture a makeshift cross, binding it with the thorny brambles he wore for Poor Tom’s mantle. As the black flames climb higher in the sky, Edgar turns and marches towards them, leaving part of himself behind to watch over his father’s grave. Hence, what first appeared to Edgar as a cross that turned out to be a scarecrow now reappears as a cross that functions like a scarecrow, warding away the scavengers that would defile his father’s final resting-place. Intercut with this scene is the parallel reunion of Lear and Cordelia which, for Kozintsev, reveals the moral of Shakespeare’s play. In the process

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of envisioning his adaptation, Kozintsev recalled a fable in which a king is asked to solve a riddle: among sugar, a beautiful dress and salt, which is indispensable? The king’s answer – ‘sugar and a beautiful dress are more important to a man than salt’ – parallels Lear’s preference for his elder daughters’ replies to their father’s love trial (1966, 64–73). In the fable, salt immediately becomes impossible to mine, forcing the king to eat bland food and, eventually, to suffer a near-fatal decline in health. When his youngest daughter returns to restore her father by providing him with salt, the king understands the importance of what he valued so lightly. In Shakespeare’s play, the lesson exacts a far greater toll: Lear learned the price of salt. He did not acquire this knowledge because hunger had forced him to taste bland food. Its price came to him in another way: he knew it because he had known the taste of tears. He was not only familiar with the salty taste of his own sorrow, but with that of the grief of all those whose existence he had once not suspected. (Kozintsev, 1966, 73) This entire allegory is embedded in Lear’s question to Cordelia, ‘Be your tears wet?’ (4.7.72), a line which, Kozintsev observes, contains ‘the most powerful words in the whole tragedy’ (1977, 183). The execution of this moment in the film offers a particularly salient example of the synergistic relationship between director and actor. When Yarvet’s Lear questions Cordelia about the nature of her tears, Kozintsev inserts the line, ‘Let me see’, to which Yarvet, in turn, adds a gesture. Slowly extending a trembling finger toward Cordelia, he touches her cheek and then places his finger on the tip of his tongue, tasting the salt of suffering for the first time. The inspiration for this detail stretches beyond Shakespeare and folklore to Dostoevsky, who claimed that ‘the history of a state should be measured by the tears of a child’ (1977, 183). In Kozintsev’s film, a single tear shed by Lear’s own child reveals the history of his state and the inescapable fact that he has ‘ta’en / Too little care’ of it (3.4.33–4). What follows is the product of another remarkable collaboration – this time between director and composer – which culminates in Lir’s spectacular four-and-a-half minute montage, accompanied by Shostakovich’s staggeringly moving requiem. The a cappella lament begins when the bereaved Edgar reluctantly leaves his father’s side, as the chorus becomes his sole companion on the road to war. At first barely audible, the chorus rises in pitch and volume in conjunction with a flash-cut to the grinning Edmund, who lays waste to an entire village by setting it on fire. Rather unexpectedly,



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the minor chords suddenly resolve into a beautiful major key, leading the audience to expect a corresponding shift in action. But what proceeds from the pleasing key change is a tracking shot of continuous carnage, duping the audience into complicity with Edmund’s delight over the spoils. After a brief interval of silence, the chorus resumes and swells until it peaks at a virtually deafening level. Though such a progression is typically associated with rising action leading toward a climax, the disturbing lack of correspondence between sight and sound continues when the camera reveals only a banal medium shot of Edmund and Goneril, who kiss passionately amidst the smoking flesh and fire. Further confusion is generated by the sustained volume of the chorus, which stubbornly remains at peak level for the next four minutes. Noting that ‘[t]here was a particular significance in the conflict of image and sound’ throughout this sequence (1977, 253), Kozintsev decided to extend the montage by inserting nine crowd scenes, intercut with tighter shots of Lear and Cordelia’s desperate efforts to escape the smoke and slaughter. As the chorus continues at full volume, the scene becomes increasingly apocalyptic: cattle burst their flaming enclosures, fireballs catapult over castle walls, and bodies fall in indiscriminate piles. Only at this juncture does the audience understand that the music has, in fact, matched the scenery all along, for its relentless elegiac strains echo the wail of humanity itself. Rising up from the belly of the earth to the burning sky, the mournful majesty of the chorus links Cordelia’s solitary tear to a general ‘cry of grief, bursting through the dumbness of the ages, through the deafness of time’ (1977, 251). ‘We made the film’, Kozintsev adds, ‘with the very purpose that it should be heard’ (1977, 251). The music ceases as abruptly as it began, and Lear and Cordelia are overtaken, bound and separated by Edmund’s forces. Jostled and shoved by the irreverent soldiers, Lear glances backward at his frightened child and urges her: ‘Come, let’s away to prison. / We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage’ (5.3.8–9). The king delivers these lines flatly and in haste, sacrificing their implicit lyricism to grave expedience. But when the chorus resumes, this time softly and plaintively, the cadence of the scene slows dramatically as Lear is briefly overtaken with joy. Disarmed by the king’s inexplicable felicity, the guards step aside while Lear and Cordelia whisper and walk shoulder-to-shoulder. Gradually, the terror etched across Cordelia’s face relaxes into a beatific smile as Lear assures her of their future together. For the audience who knows otherwise, Yarvet’s delivery makes the moment unbearable. Coupling extreme restraint with extreme strain, Yarvet utters his lines like a man minutes away from death: his breath comes to him with difficulty, his face is creased with concentration,

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and his throat stretches with pain to form each word. But his eyes dance with that old, familiar certainty that the king’s word is law, and that what he says is – and will be – because the act of utterance makes it so: So we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too, Who loses and who wins; who’s in, and who’s out; And take upon’s the mystery of things … and we’ll wear out, In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones, That ebb and flow by the moon. (5.3.11–19) In this moment, the little man is positively bewitching, and the audience understands what the director means when he claims Lear is a ‘concerto’, in which ‘the part of the piano [is] being played by Yarvet’s eyes’ (1977, 125). Perhaps more importantly, the audience also understands Kozintsev’s more cryptic argument that, for Shakespeare, ‘love is a martial concept’ (1977, 102). Although the theme of ‘love’ is everywhere in the plays, very few characters engage in its highest expression, because to do so is to take the path of most resistance. Citing Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Desdemona, and, finally, Lear and Cordelia as examples, Kozintsev argues that they are the only characters in the Shakespeare canon who embody ‘martial’ love, because their relationships go to war with the social order itself. Lear demonstrates this love in his final words to Cordelia. As the guards use force to separate them, Lear holds his ground long enough to wipe Cordelia’s tears with the back of his bound hands. Steadying himself between shoves from the guards, the prodigal father regales his daughter with his final decree: my Cordelia … Have I caught thee? He that parts us shall bring a brand from heavens, And fire us hence like foxes. Wipe thine eyes; The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell, Ere they shall make us weep! (5.3.20–5) Lear’s last words to Cordelia, like Cordelia’s first words to him, are an act of apostasy, a mutiny against tyranny in all its forms. A cruel paradox, both



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father and child enter into this battle knowing that they will not survive it, but, by fighting in the first place, they have already won the war – the only kind of war in which there are winners. The death of Cordelia follows hard upon her father’s lyrical farewell. A devastating scene in and of itself, in Kozintsev’s film it is utterly stupefying. Within seconds of establishing the new order that springs from Edgar’s victory over Edmund, a bestial cry pierces the silence from an off-screen space, rivalling the power and volume of Shostakovich’s requiem. The horrific sound crackles through the air as the camera pursues it upwards to the very top of the castle battlements, where there is no beast to be found other than Lear, staring uncomprehendingly at his daughter hanging from a rope. At this juncture, the audience realizes that they, too, have been drawn into a cruel trick: the director has had the audacity to keep his best cinematic poetry in reserve – until now – when he uses it to frame Cordelia’s lifeless body. The most deliberately composed shot in the entire film, Cordelia is framed in the centre of an archway atop the castle battlements, where she sways gently against the backdrop of sea and sky behind her. Beauty and death mingle seamlessly in this image, leaving the spectator wrenched between admiration and despair – between, in other words, ‘the promised end’ and the ‘image of that horror’ (5.3.262–3). When she is cut down, Lear’s voice builds in anger and cracks with grief as he curses the ‘men of stones’ below (5.3.256). The time for understatement has passed, and Yarvet marshals all of his vocal capacity to indict everyone – even the well-intentioned Albany, Kent and Edgar – as complicit in this crime against humanity, arraigning them as ‘murderers, traitors all!’ (5.3.268). But the abused king knows that words will never resurrect Cordelia, and he repeats ‘never’ (5.3.307) until his voice fades to an echo and his wits fail. When the camera cuts back to the archway, only a stump of rope remains where Cordelia’s body was, and the finality of the tableau frays Lear’s lifeline beyond repair. A variation on a Hobbesian theme, the scene suggests that life is nasty and brutish but not short enough when a father outlives all of his children. As in the conclusion of Gamlet, however, Kozintsev grafts wings onto the brutal realism of this conclusion when a lone seagull flashes across the patch of sea framed within the archway. Like her Shakespearean sister, Ophelia, Cordelia slips her cage and returns to sing Lear to his rest – beyond the space of tragedy. ***

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Restoration audiences could not abide the death of Cordelia. Their resistance to the conclusion of Shakespeare’s play was so strong that, shortly after the reopening of the theatres, another playwright took it upon himself to satisfy the demand for a happier – if not entirely happy – ending. Lear’s colourful adaptation history began in 1681, when Nahum Tate rewrote the play in order to give it a classic ‘Hollywood ending’, devising a conclusion in which Cordelia lives and marries Edgar, Lear survives to enjoy his old age, and the problematic figure of the Fool disappears altogether. Unbelievably, Tate’s caricature became the only version of Lear that appeared on stage for the next one hundred and fifty years. Yet, while Tate’s adaptation is egregious in its attempt to make Shakespeare’s play less tragic, so, too, is Shakespeare’s treatment of his source – Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae – which he revises in order to make his play more tragic. Monmouth’s ‘history’ strikes a compromise between Shakespeare and Tate, for in his conclusion Lear dies but Cordelia lives to succeed him. Though it is impossible to know why Shakespeare decided to heave the king’s only honest child onto the existing pile of bodies at the end of Lear, one justification may lie in a theme that he began to develop in Hamlet: the forthright, plain-dealing man picked from ten thousand is not marked for survival in a world in which honesty is inimical to humanity. Just as Shakespeare condemns those who love truly to die, so, too, those who speak the truth – Hamlet, Cordelia and the Fool – cannot live. What makes the Fool particularly compelling in this context is the fact that his honesty begins with, but does not return to, laughter. Although Kozintsev’s lifelong fascination with fools never waned, as he grew older, he saw increasingly less humour in them. The Fool in Lear, he explains, ‘is laughed at not because he is a Fool but because he speaks the truth’; his audiences ‘think that nothing is funnier than the truth’, so they ‘kick truth with their spurs for amusement’ (1977, 71–2). Unlike Shakespeare, who allows the Fool to drop out of the play with no explanation, Kozintsev refuses to relinquish his hold, bringing him back in the film’s final scene. This resurrection, however, is conditional, for the Fool must cry in the end. As in Gamlet, Lir concludes with a dead march. The bodies are borne away without ceremony, accompanied only by the faint sound of off-screen crying, followed by the jingle of a solitary bell. When the camera cranes downward to follow the soldiers’ feet as they carry out the dead, the Fool resurfaces, sitting on the ground among the smouldering remnants, convulsed with fear and grief. As the soldiers head out of the decimated village, the boy peeks up to bid his master goodbye,



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but, in that very instant, he is struck hard by a boot in the abdomen, and literally kicked aside. As if following Shakespeare’s lead, Kozintsev makes the ending of his Lear more tragic. Importantly, though, like Shakespeare himself, the director does not augment the tragedy for its own sake. Rather, through this visual proverb – the last he would ever create – Kozintsev inscribes his final thoughts on the purpose of art in a broken world. In the film’s remaining seconds, the Fool works himself back up from the ground, returning to the position and the place from which he was violently expelled moments ago. Taking a deep breath, he resumes the mournful melody with which the film began, playing haltingly between spasms of grief. In defiance of those who would have him silenced, the Fool continues to play in the very middle of the path of most resistance. It is little wonder, then, that Kozintsev identifies his song as ‘the sad, human voice of art’ (1977, 238). *** One wonders how many times Kozintsev had felt as though he had been kicked in the side, having played – or having been played for – a fool. In 1945, Kozintsev had tricked himself into thinking that an honest portrait of human suffering would meet Stalin’s demand for ‘uplifting’ war films in the aftermath of World War II, nearly paying for this mistake with his life. In 1956, he was duped again – this time by Khrushchev – when Simple People was re-released only after it had been hijacked by censors. Thus, within a year of the ‘Secret Speech’, Kozintsev drove himself into retirement. After forty years of tyrannical scrutiny, he recalls being shocked by the sea-change: no one was looking over my shoulder any more. Did I put in the correction? Did I understand, at last, what they wanted from me? I myself was making the demands … Alone, I felt a link with a great many people. I worked together with them and, consequently, for them. For them, I would present and ‘agitka’. (1984, I, 237) When the director came roaring back from retirement seven years later, he released Gamlet – the first of his two agitki – to international acclaim and earned the distinction of ‘People’s Artist of the USSR’. Although it had taken Kozintsev the better part of a decade to adjust to the Thaw, it was clear that, by 1964, he had hit his stride. But history seemed to thwart

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the director at every turn; within four months of Gamlet’s release, Leonid Brezhnev led a coup against Khrushchev and abruptly reversed his policies, ending the Thaw by reimposing total State control over every aspect of Soviet culture. By the time the director began working on Lear four years later, Brezhnev had reinterpreted the Warsaw Treaty as his right to wield absolute power over his subjects, killing thousands when he sent troops into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring. Fooled, to paraphrase Hamlet, to ‘the top of [his] bent’ (3.2.353), Kozintsev set out, at last, to remake Simple People. He called it Korol Lir.

III I conceive of Shakespeare’s tragedies while I am walking; I hold imaginary conversations with friends who are no longer living and with favourite authors. I argue with them and learn from them. (Kozintsev, 1977, 44) ‘Influence in art’, Kozintsev observes, ‘is not only the result of one artist learning from another, it is the threads of the twisting spiral of history, the continuity of life where old contradictions develop new forms and new generations ask once again the age-old and very simple question: “What does man live for?”’ (1977, 14). Given the highly limited circulation of Kozintsev’s adaptations outside of the former Soviet Union, pinpointing evidence of his influence on the work of other directors is challenging at best. To provide greater perspective on the issue, Kozintsev’s Gamlet, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, has never been shown on US television; Lir, as the less popular of the two plays, has languished in obscurity even more egregiously, despite Sir Laurence Olivier’s opinion of the film as the best Shakespeare adaptation ever made. The belated conversion of Kozintsev’s Shakespeare films to DVD – Russico released Gamlet in 2000 and Korol Lir in 2004 – highlights the fact that the work of this remarkable director has yet to be appreciated by a genuinely mass audience. Under such circumstances, artistic influence cannot be defined in relation to linearity – a trajectory leading from one work to another over time – but, rather, in terms of the ‘continuity’ between works as they intermingle in the ‘twisting spiral of history’. Kozintsev’s relationship with Akira Kurosawa and Peter Brook is particularly demonstrative of this process, as both directors had a strong influence on – and, in turn, were influenced by – Kozintsev. Kozintsev had long



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been fascinated by Kurosawa, referring to his adaptation of Macbeth, Throne of Blood (1957), as ‘the finest of Shakespearean movies’ (1966, 29). When the Soviet director visited Kurosawa in Japan, his thoughts about filming Lear began to coalesce over the course of their conversations, in which the Japanese director explained the tenets of Noh drama and Zen consciousness to him. Kozintsev, in turn, helped Kurosawa to nuance his understanding of the Russian classics – a fascination that had already led the Japanese film-maker to adapt the work of Dostoevsky (The Idiot, 1951), Tolstoy (Ikiru, 1952) and Maxim Gorky (The Lower Depths, 1957). The most provocative example of this continuum of influence is evinced by both directors’ adaptations of Lear. Indisputably, Korol Lir, both its inspiration and conceptualization, emerged in large part from the director’s interactions with Kurosawa; however, it is equally true that Kurosawa’s adaptation of Lear, released in 1985 as Ran, continues their dialogue, revealing Kozintsev’s influence in the construction of the film’s epic war scenes. Forming a chiasmatic – if not Tolstoyan – bond, Kozintsev looked to Kurosawa’s work for expressions of peace, and Kurosawa looked to Kozintsev for his visualizations of war. The relationship that Kozintsev enjoyed with Peter Brook was one of mutual interest and influence. As artists, they were strikingly alike; both directors were passionate devotees of the avant-garde, students of Marxism and, to their surprise, enthusiasts of Japanese cultural traditions. Rather remarkably, both set out to adapt Lear for the screen at exactly the same time and, once they became aware of each other’s plans, they eagerly sought to share, rather than withhold, ideas about their approaches. What makes the two-year period of correspondence that followed so unusual is the way in which each director’s influence on the other led to a refinement of their differences, rather than an assertion of their similarities. For example, while still in pre-production, Brook wrote to Kozintsev to express his interest in using unnaturally long and uncomfortably tight close-ups to generate the film’s primary alienation effect. Concerned that Brook’s plan would backfire, Kozintsev wrote back immediately and advised him that such an approach was far better suited to the conventions of silent cinema. Brook respectfully disagreed and stayed the course, while Kozintsev took his own advice and left the majority of close-ups he had shot languishing on the cutting-room floor. Another suggestion that the two directors were becoming friendly foils in pursuit of the same goal emerged from Kozintsev’s giddy pledge to Brook that his Lear would be filmed entirely outdoors, on location, and without studio sets or scenes. Looking back, Kozintsev had little choice but to laugh at his own hubris; Brook, however,

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took up the gauntlet and headed all the way up to Jutland, Denmark, where he managed to film the whole of Lear out on the frozen tundra. There is certainly no greater difference between the resulting adaptations than Brook’s ‘Lapland Eskimo world’ (1977, 240) and Kozintsev’s desert inferno, and such extreme polarities invite speculation as to how – without the benefit of full disclosure – the directors managed to create their respective versions of Lear as photo negatives of each other’s work. In another letter to Kozintsev, Brook offers a summation of this peculiar reciprocity, observing: ‘I am sure from what I understand of your intentions we are both trying to tell the same story … with very different means within different cultures’ (1977, 241). Although Shakespearean film-makers in the West would have been exposed to Kozintsev’s work on the festival circuit, the director’s adaptations of Hamlet and Lear enjoyed wider distribution in the former Soviet Union, as well as countries which, at some point during the past four decades, have embraced Socialism. Typically, influence takes the form of artistic ‘nods’ – visual allusions to the work of another director in a highly circumscribed context – ranging from a stylistic detail or the construction of an isolated scene. Kozintsev’s work, however, has proven to be the raison d’être of two Hamlet spin-offs: El’dar Riazanov’s film, Beware of the Car (1966), and Mahmoud Aboudoma’s one-act play, Dance of the Scorpions (1989). Riazanov, the director’s former student, had a difficult relationship with his mentor, who considered him to be extremely talented but also lazy and aloof. When Riazanov went on to debut his first commercial comedy in 1956, he did not invite his teacher because he had hoped that Kozintsev would attend without prompting. On opening night, however, it became apparent that the director had no intention of coming to the event and, not long before it was scheduled to begin, Riazanov buckled and called him, agreeing to hold the screening until he arrived. An outwardly serious man, Kozintsev found his student’s farce distasteful and frivolous, and he chastised him with a single remark: ‘This is not what I taught you to do’ (Kozintsev, 1996, 62). The stern criticism seemed to have created a deep wound since, ten years later, Riazanov swept to his revenge. Seeking to strip Kozintsev’s Gamlet of its glister, Riazanov released Beware of the Car in 1966, a contemporary farce about the growing culture of materialism in the USSR. His satire of Gamlet – and of Kozintsev himself – emerges, appropriately, in the play-within-the-film. Like ‘The Mousetrap’, the play-within is engineered to catch the conscience of Kozintsev – not for murder, naturally, but for killing the mirth of Riazanov’s directorial debut ten years earlier. There



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is no subtlety to the satire: not only is the play-within Hamlet, but, also, Riazanov deliberately casts Innokenti Smoktunovskii as the comic hero – a character who just so happens to be playing Hamlet in a bungling amateur theatrical production of the play. The resulting mise-en-abyme effect is provocative but painful. In and of itself, Smoktunovskii’s second appearance as Hamlet within so many years makes the connection to Gamlet automatic, while the pathetic, puttering rehearsal sequences that constitute the film’s subplot explicitly impugn the seriousness, quality and achievement of Kozintsev’s film. However, the most vicious aspect of the satire is Riazanov’s portrait of the director of the play-within-the-film. Depicted as an aging idealist who mingles instruction with manifestos, the director is exposed as an artist who is out of touch with the world as well as with his craft – a brutal caricature of Kozintsev himself. Not content to end the rivalry there, Riazanov goes even further to draw Shostakovich into his snare. As if the fumbling duel between Hamlet and Laertes was not botched enough to begin with, Riazanov adds the blaring disruptions of a tone-deaf orchestra, whose random strains of motley music parody the composer’s complex and often discordant arrangements. Riazanov went on to become Soviet Russia’s most popular film-maker, whose films were adored by the public for their humour, uplifting plots, musical interludes and staunchly apolitical sentiment. In a way, Riazanov can thank Kozintsev for his immense success as a director of comedy, since it was Kozintsev who sent him running in the opposite direction in the first place. Kozintsev didn’t live long enough to learn that he had mentored a much kinder pupil in Mahmoud Aboudoma. Though only ten years old when he first saw Gamlet at a movie theatre in Cairo, Aboudoma recalls the screening as a life-altering experience. The film was shown in honour of Khrushchev’s visit with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1964, and the business of the day was celebrating the building of the Aswan High Dam. An indirect beneficiary of this historical accord, Aboudoma recalls his repeated visits to the Odeon Theatre in his autobiographical short story, ‘Gamlet is Russian for Hamlet’. The title itself draws attention not only to the peregrine nature of influence but also to its power of its persuasion: Kozintsev’s film was neither dubbed nor subtitled in Arabic, but, from that point forward, Gamlet was Hamlet as far as Aboudoma was concerned and, to this day, the Egyptian director has never read Shakespeare’s play. Indeed, the language barrier was immaterial; Aboudoma was hypnotized by the film’s agitational properties, as well as the stunning visual poetry through which the director conveyed them. This combination of lyricism

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and subversion led him to characterize Kozintsev’s adaptation as a ‘political song’ (Litvin, 2007, 76). Aboudoma’s one-act play, Dance of the Scorpions (1989), is neither poetic nor propagandistic; in fact, what makes it such an interesting adaptation is the fact that it bears no likeness whatsoever to Kozintsev’s film. The protagonist lacks charisma as well as a sense of purpose; he is the polar opposite of Smoktunovskii’s striking and determined Hamlet, and the plot that the director composes for him is wildly divergent from Kozintsev’s more heroic narrative. However, the choice of Gamlet as a source is meant to invoke more than an actor’s performance or a director’s interpretation. ‘Influence’ in this case is, paradoxically, non-diegetic: what makes Dance of the Scorpions an ‘adaptation’ of Gamlet is the discrete set of historical circumstances that prompted its creation – circumstances that bear a remarkable resemblance to the conditions in which Kozintsev’s film was produced. Dance of the Scorpions is a meditation on the artist’s own disillusionment with the political crises of post-Nasser Egypt. Aboudoma’s approach to Hamlet’s character as an uninspired – and uninspiring – figure is an attempt to ‘hold … the mirror’ (3.2.20) up to a nation whose people had, by the late 1980s, fallen into a self-preserving malaise – an affliction not unlike ‘Hamletism’. Beginning in 1952, Nasser’s presidency inaugurated sweeping changes in Egyptian life, including the abolition of the monarchy and the end of the British occupation. His decisive turn toward nationalism, socialism, modernization and strong anti-Israeli policies edified Egypt’s identity during a particularly volatile period and, after Nasser died in 1970, his regime was remembered as the Golden Age of Egyptian politics. When Sadat came into office in 1970, Nasser’s policies were reversed: socialism was abandoned, peace with Israel was brokered, and a policy of openness toward the West sent the country hurtling into another identity crisis, which culminated in Egypt’s expulsion from the Arab League in 1979. After Sadat’s assassination in 1981, Mubarak took power, pledging to keep the nation on the road toward Infitah, or liberalization. By the end of the decade, however, the regime seemed to be contradicting itself; personal freedoms were enlarged as dissidents were violently suppressed, parliamentary representation expanded but elections were rigged, and peace with Israel was maintained while domestic terrorism flourished. Hence, it was no accident that Mahmoud Aboudoma turned to the project of adapting Kozintsev’s Gamlet – rather than Shakespeare’s Hamlet – in 1989, for Egypt was then at the height of its ‘thaw’. What better way to mourn the passing of a ‘Hyperion’ era, to navigate the self-contradictory madness of the present, and to agitate a stagnant citizenry into taking charge of its



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future? Kozintsev would have been pleased to know that the student he never met had helped to set the stage for the Arab Spring. *** Who said that the author was reflecting history? He is interfering with the present. (Kozintsev, 1977, 124) By the time Kozintsev ventured out of retirement and into the adaptation of Shakespeare, he had grown tired of revolutions – he had seen many, but never a bloodless one. However, the director remained deeply invested in the ‘agitki’ genre, and he was convinced that the lonely ‘voice of art’ that he had personified in the character of the Fool still maintained the power to steer the course of humanity away from tragedy. In this context, a most potent, but least expected, heroic figure emerges, as Kozintsev explains: in a time of enforced muteness, a rebellious human voice began to sound with all its might, ranging from peals of thunder to a whistling whisper. There was nothing of the military command in it, nor of gallant shouts of enthusiasm, nor of the mellifluence of banal nightingales. A voice of surprising beauty said that it is useless to equate a man with a flute and that it is possible, in a state of helplessness, to laugh with startling energy at everything strong … (1966, 123) Laughter is the revolution that speaks without words and succeeds without violence. Like Hamlet, Lear, too, speaks with this voice when, even as he struggles for breath, the king defeats his captors by smiling at them. Such mutinies are hard to quell. Laughter is, of course, the province where the Fool is king, the figure to whom Kozintsev pledged allegiance long ago. What started as an adolescent contest with Eisenstein to see who could collect the most books on foolery, clowning and pantomime ended with the Fool’s swansong in Lir. Kozintsev had no way of knowing that the visual elegy he composed for his favourite character would also be his own, but, in a sense, their destinies had always been entangled in the ‘twisting spiral of history’. Indeed, it was only in the process of making his final film that the director came fully to appreciate what Meyerhold had told him forty years earlier: that ‘the foundation of “well-adjusted contentment” is shattered in the theatre not by the philosophers but by the “fools”’ (1977, 161). Interfering with the present is a lonely job, but Kozintsev never

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truly walked alone: whenever he went strolling with Shakespeare and his imagined interlocutors, the Fool was there to guide him to the path of most resistance.

Chapter 4

Franco Zeffirelli Ramona Wray

It is hard to imagine a more sumptuous testimony to the impact and influence of Franco Zeffirelli than Caterina Napoleone’s compendium, Franco Zeffirelli Complete Works: Theatre/Opera/Film, first published in 2010. Essentially a visual record of Zeffirelli’s life and work, this opulent Thames and Hudson volume, produced with Zeffirelli’s full co-operation, is a dizzying summation of what the Italian film-maker, opera director, producer and artist has achieved during a career spanning sixty-plus years. The book mines the remarkable extent of Zeffirelli’s output (twenty-five theatrical productions, thirty-seven operas, and twenty-three films and television series), and the magnitude of the career is materially mimicked in the dimensions of the book itself. Franco Zeffirelli Complete Works: Theatre/ Opera/Film comes in at a little under a stone in weight and just over a foot in width; a particularly robust coffee table is required to support its magisterial proportions. The volume is lavishly compiled and amply provided with large-scale, often double-page, glossy illustrations demonstrating the Italian’s flamboyant and excessive directorial style. The book’s frontispiece, for example, features a still from the famous 2006 La Scala production of Aida, complete with burnished columns, a gargantuan golden Pharaoh, glittering statues of divinities and a resplendently robed protagonist dwarfed by her surroundings. It is a purposefully overblown scene, characterized by grandeur and a huge scale, and one very much in keeping with the flair and flourishes with which Zeffirelli is popularly associated. As Matthew Gurewitsch confidently notes in the book’s introduction, ‘No one disputes Zeffirelli’s place as the grand master of spectacle’ (2010, 8). In part archive (there are sketches of sets and costume designs as well as technical drawings), in part homage (the stills are accompanied by academic contributions extolling Zeffirelli’s accomplishments), Franco Zeffirelli Complete Works: Theatre/Opera/Film captures the cornucopia of a figure who has been described in terms of the eponymous Shakespearean

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Antony as bestriding ‘the history of theatre, opera and cinema in the past half century like a colossus’ (Gurewitsch, 2010, 8). Appropriately enough, Zeffirelli was born in 1923 in the shadow of another statement of architectural magniloquence, Florence’s Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, with its towering Gothic dome. As his mother died when he was six, Zeffirelli was raised by his aunt and a community of elderly English expatriate women (this period of his life was recast in the 1999 semi-autobiographical film, Tea with Mussolini, which mixes fact and fiction to portray an early exposure to the Renaissance artists and to European literature). It was, by all accounts, a halcyon upbringing brought to a sudden close by the outbreak of World War II. This was also a highly formative period, for, at one and the same time, the young Zeffirelli was allowed to play in the convent of San Marco (possibly absorbing the spirit of the well-known Renaissance artists and thinkers who had held their meetings there) and imbibed from his female foster community a distinctively ‘Elizabethan’ approach to the arts. From his childhood, indeed, what has been termed his ‘livelong, career-enhancing Anglophilia’ (Rees, 2010, 60) evolved. Although a Florentine by birth, Zeffirelli, even in this fledgling phase, found his interests gravitating to cultural traditions and expressions further afield. After the cessation of hostilities, Zeffirelli entered fully into the vital Florentine art scene, inaugurating his career as a scene painter and set designer. Such was the nature of his profession that he was enabled not only to travel Italy extensively but also generically to sample and experiment. Hence, in the employ of director Alfani Tellini in Siena, Zeffirelli worked on the staging of operas such as Pergolesi’s Livietta e Tracollo (1946) and Traetta’s Le Serve Rivali (1952). Similarly, in Milan, he collaborated with Luchino Visconti on some of his most successful theatre productions, including Italian versions of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1949), Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1949) and Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1952). In what has been described as a ‘decisive boost’ (Gavazzeni, 2010, 204) for Zeffirelli’s burgeoning career, he was hired by Luchino Visconti as assistant director for the film, Senso (1954), giving him a key experience of, and immersion in, the cinematic medium. As early as the 1950s, then, Zeffirelli is already exhibiting his ability to move between forms (opera, stage and screen) and demonstrating an easy familiarity with a range of representational idioms. Critic Giovanni Gavazzeni suggests that Visconti and Zeffirelli came together because both shared the goal of ‘a historical reconstruction that was inspired by a poetical vision’ (2010, 204); that is, master director and



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protégé found a point of mutual connection in an urge to realize a sense of historical authenticity that emerged from a deeply aesthetic response to literary representation. Collaborations with other neorealists such as Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini followed, comparable figures such as Federico Fellini were a constant influence and, throughout his career, Zeffirelli’s vision and method have displayed a neorealist imprint. Later, at the end of the 1950s and in the early 1960s, Zeffirelli established an international reputation as a global director of opera and theatre. In Britain, his Lucia di Lammermoor opened at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden in 1959, this becoming a venue to which he would return on numerous subsequent occasions. Particularly acclaimed was his 1964 Royal Opera House production of Tosca with Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi. Meanwhile, in the US, Zeffirelli established himself as a stalwart of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and his performances there run to over 1500. Landmark productions devised for the Metropolitan Opera include La Bohème and Turandot, and it was thanks, in part, to them that Zeffirelli both set enduring standards for operatic interpretation and cemented the place of the greats of the repertory in the popular imagination. In the same way that Zeffirelli was able to turn his attention to re-envisioning some of the most challenging imaginative creations of the operatic repertory, so was he enthused by the prospect of representing classic characters in cinematic and televisual domains. Biblical types and religious personalities exercised a fascination. To Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972), a screen disquisition on the relation between church and state as mediated through the life of St Francis of Assisi, must be added the iconic television series, Jesus of Nazareth (1977), a pan-European epic enriched by historical details and spiritual investments. In these kinds of undertaking, as in others, Zeffirelli is fired by the impulse to reanimate both monumental figures and canonical works. For example, his theatrical experience of directing classic drama filtered through into his penchant for adapting, in cinema, literary masterpieces, as is evidenced in the film, Jane Eyre (1996). In this adaptation, Zeffirelli cuts to the core of Brontë’s romantic narrative, offering an emotionally emancipatory take on a Gothic tale of horror and repressed sexuality. His is a revisionist approach which is at pains to locate nineteenth-century melodrama in an alternative register. And then, of course, there was Shakespeare. Zeffirelli made three Shakespeare films: The Taming of the Shrew (1967), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; Romeo and Juliet (1968), which made his name and was the most successful film of his career (earning him an Academy Award nomination); and Hamlet (1990), famous for the casting of ‘action

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hero’ Mel Gibson as the eponymous protagonist. These films represent only a part of Zeffirelli’s Shakespearean interactions. For example, in addition to the three films, mention must also be made of Zeffirelli’s stage productions of Romeo and Juliet (1960, Old Vic, London), Othello (1961, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon), Hamlet (1963, Teatro Eliseo, Rome) and Much Ado About Nothing (1965, Old Vic, London). Arguably, in the wake of a sustained exposure to Shakespeare across the course of the 1960s, Zeffirelli was prompted to transfer his experiences, and his enthusiasms, to celluloid. In addition, and over three decades, Zeffirelli’s operatic endorsement of Shakespeare has revealed itself in such productions as Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff (1956) and Otello (1972) and Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra (1966), suggesting how, for Zeffirelli, Shakespeare has been a constant source of inspiration. The Shakespeare films are of disproportionate interest to this more diffuse Shakespearean oeuvre and, indeed, to the readers of this book. But it is also reasonable to suggest that they are among the high points of Zeffirelli’s career as a whole. The Shakespeare films are the most financially profitable of the director-artist’s many ventures and the creations for which he is best known (not least Romeo and Juliet, whose global visibility was never matched subsequently). As later sections of this chapter will detail, Zeffirelli secured for his three Shakespearean films a global audience, rendering the Bard in such a fashion that his plays found favour with a twentieth-century experience and crafting accessible and strategically pitched products which excited the youth market. In this way, to foreground Zeffirelli’s Shakespearean highlights, even if this is in contradistinction to the broad range of his artistic practices, is not necessarily as delimiting or distorting as it might at first appear. While enormously popular in terms of his public reception, Zeffirelli has found a less adoring response at the hands of his critics, be they film commentators or opera and theatre reviewers. As opera historian Marcia J. Citron summarizes, Zeffirelli’s work has often been greeted in a hostile fashion and, more severely, been ‘characterized as fussiness or even vulgarity’ (Citron, 1994, 703). Inside Shakespeare circles, the criticism directed at Zeffirelli is remarkably consistent and centres around what are presented as three types of heresy. In the first instance, censure focuses on the director’s self-confessed popularism, his pride in his films’ marketability and international appeal.1 Ace G. Pilkington awarded Zeffirelli the ‘dangerous’ moniker of ‘populariser-in-chief’ (1994, 164) and, in variant forms, this charge is oft-repeated. Besides populism, it is Zeffirelli’s status as a ‘ruthless cutter’ that has had him routinely visited with a particularly



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acerbic brand of detraction. One again, Pilkington is typical when he notes that Zeffirelli retained only ‘thirty percent of Shrew, thirty-five percent of Romeo and Juliet, and thirty-seven percent of Hamlet’ (1994, 165).2 The mathematical tabulation in itself is sufficient to make the point – the amputation of the ‘original’ is deemed a particular directorial vice. Finally, there are objections to Zeffirelli’s departures from, or ‘rewriting’ of, Shakespearean language. Changing the words of the plays in order to accommodate Shakespeare to the cinematic medium is judged a genuine species of dereliction, not least because the result, in Robert Hapgood’s view, shows Zeffirelli to be not so much a venerator of Shakespearean expression as an ‘adaptor or free interpreter’ (1997, 81). The implication is that Zeffirelli, via his approach to Shakespeare, is an interloper in hallowed terrain. An obvious bardolatry animates the anti-Zeffirelli construction. What is of interest is the way in which these kinds of objection would appear to have Zeffirelli as their unique target. After all, Laurence Olivier cuts the Shakespearean text with no adverse critical effect, related film-makers (such as Akira Kurosawa) dispense with the language altogether without sacrificing their kudos as interpreters, and there can be few directors who aim to produce a Shakespearean film (or any other kind of film) that will be designated unpopular. In fact, the charges levelled at him tell us less about Zeffirelli as they do about the status of Shakespeare studies in the 1970s and 1980s. During the period in which he was producing his Shakespeare films, there hovered over Zeffirelli’s works the ghosts of a fidelity to the author and a respect for the boundaries of dramatic structure – concerns which have become less relevant as the study of Shakespeare on film has become more established. It is not coincidental that, as Zeffirelli was working, full-scale study of Shakespeare on film (the identification of the subject as a valid field of investigation) was in its infancy. From the late 1980s onwards (and, in several senses, Zeffirelli’s Hamlet is a revealing point of departure), Shakespeare on film has solidified its place as a mainstream critical practice and, inside that trajectory, the director has gradually been accorded a more favourable treatment. Crucially, the version of Shakespeare that Zeffirelli brings to the screen remains a highly teachable commodity: Romeo and Juliet has proved resistant to the tarnish of shifts in style; The Taming of the Shrew still lays claim to continuing as the definitive adaptation; and Hamlet persists in its vigour and force. Moreover, it is undoubtedly the case, as the final section of this chapter will argue, that these are works that have impacted significantly on the imaginative thinking of subsequent Shakespearean directors. Yet criticism has been reluctant to

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shake off residual reactions completely, with a number of recent studies beginning and ending with the tried-and-tested Zeffirelli-as-popularizer formulation as an inevitable mantra (Cartmell, 2007, 216–25; Crowl, 2008, 53–60; Howlett, 2000, 20–51). This is changing, and, in keeping with a newer emphasis on the singularity of Zeffirelli’s interpretive achievement, the current chapter is envisaged as one element in a broader effort at rehabilitation. One of the arguments here is that the contexts in which Zeffirelli was first read have resulted in a corresponding underestimation of his artistic contribution and influence. Throughout, I maintain that Zeffirelli’s Shakespeare films are original, salient and satisfying creations, that they have put a stamp on the act of Bardic interpretation and that they have shaped the course of Shakespearean film-making in ways yet to be properly acknowledged. If Zeffirelli’s Shakespeare films serve as a stimulus for later directors, then they also encode within themselves traces of the auteurial personality. Zeffirelli has given various interviews over the course of his career and, of course, has written an autobiography.3 But, most recently, it is clear that his thinking in terms of legacy has sharpened. In his late eighties, and reviewing his career for the purposes of the Franco Zeffirelli Complete Works: Theatre/Opera/Film volume (something he describes as ‘a deeply emotional process’ [2010, 6]), Zeffirelli seems to have been stimulated into reflecting upon issues of inheritance – as Jasper Rees notes, a foundation is planned for after his death (2010, 56–65) – as well as the threads that bind his oeuvre in its entirety. What emerges most strongly from the act of retrospection is Zeffirelli’s consciousness of the consistency of his all-important set design (‘a reference to the culture of the Renaissance … is superimposed onto … emotions … music … chorus [and] … stagecraft … in order to achieve a complete sense of spectacle’ [Zeffirelli, 2010, 6–7]). He also notes a renewed sense of his use of the close-up and ability to direct actors (‘The job of director requires you to have a comprehensive [and] … figurative vision that is derived from the … set design, and that actors and crew take an active part in’), and the essential part played by an openness to collaborate through the development of ‘brotherly’ relationships with others (Zeffirelli, 2010, 6–7). Here, it is revealing that Zeffirelli picks out as particularly important his relationships with ‘difficult, fragile women such as Maria Callas, Elizabeth Taylor and Anna Magnani, or young, inexperienced women such as Olivia Hussey’ (Zeffirelli, 2010, 6–7). Finally, Zeffirelli observes, it is ‘music’ that operates as the ‘common denominator’; ‘thanks to music’, he concludes, ‘I have been able to win over audiences around the world’ (Zeffirelli, 2010, 7). In the kinds of features



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that Zeffirelli privileges we find an entry-point into his particular brand of Shakespearean cinema. Although this chapter explores each film in turn, it discusses throughout the technical, casting and imaginative decisions that lend his work a thematic coherence and that illuminate his status and progression as auteur. Like his theatrical and operatic productions, Zeffirelli’s Shakespeare films, I suggest, place on display the subjective and inventive energies of their originator.

The Taming of the Shrew (1967) The Taming of the Shrew, Zeffirelli’s first Shakespeare screen outing, is unusual in that, in contradistinction to Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, the film has no direct theatrical precursor (that is, Zeffirelli never directed the play for the stage). Yet it is possible to argue that the director’s 1965 production of a Victorian-set Much Ado About Nothing (Old Vic, London) served as the blueprint – or rehearsal – for the later take on Shakespeare’s feisty and squabble-ridden taming tale. The hugely acclaimed Much Ado About Nothing production starred Maggie Smith (Beatrice), Robert Stephens (Benedict), Albert Finney (Don Pedro), Derek Jacobi (Don John) and Ian McKellen (Claudio). Connections with The Taming of the Shrew film abound: both exploit Italian or Sicilian imagined locations, direct audience attention to visuals (which embrace an extensive deployment of reds and yellows), prioritize noted couples (Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith were a wellknown couple at the time), involve strong female leads, boast scores by Nino Rota, trade upon an extravagance of dress, capitalize on stately set designs and revel in carnival atmospheres. In orientation and emphasis, the stage production and the subsequent film are synergistically allied.4 Much Ado About Nothing was also crucial in bringing Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on board for The Taming of the Shrew. Of course, Burton was himself both a Shakespearean actor of considerable repute (the Broadway production of Hamlet directed by John Gielgud in which he starred in 1964 broke box office records) and an aficionado of the Old Vic (his Caliban, Coriolanus and Henry V earned him extensive plaudits), and, in the wake of the success of the National Theatre production of Much Ado About Nothing, was actively agitating to work with Zeffirelli. (The autobiography records that, having seen a performance of Much Ado About Nothing, Burton left Zeffirelli a note: ‘I would give my right arm to work in a production like this’ [1986, 202]). In contrast to the extent of Burton’s Shakespearean experience, and the participation in the film of such seasoned theatrical

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luminaries as Cyril Cusack, Victor Spinetti and Michael York, The Taming of the Shrew represented Taylor’s first encounter with Shakespeare, making it, at least for her, a new departure. In addition, The Taming of the Shrew was Burton and Taylor’s first co-production, with the alliance providing not only substantial funding but also, as Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger write, underscoring a ‘star magnitude [that] did much to elevate Zeffirelli’s status’ (2010, 166). When Burton and Taylor took on the project, they were arguably the biggest stars in the world – at the height of their powers, both individual and collective. Burton’s most recent biographer, Tom Rubython, describes the 1966–67 period as ‘unquestionably … the best years of Richard Burton’s life … creatively, financially and personally, he was untouchable’ (2011, 589). It was in the golden glow of this moment that The Taming of the Shrew was made. If the Much Ado About Nothing precursor text was distinguished by its nineteenth-century stylistic associations, The Taming of the Shrew took the action back to an earlier, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century landscape. Filmed on created sets at Dino de Laurentiis’ Dinocitta studios in Rome, The Taming of the Shrew opens with a scene that, in substituting for the Christopher Sly Induction, is modelled according to the aesthetics of ‘Renaissance’ art; this was conceived, as Zeffirelli describes, as a cinematic realization of a ‘moving painting … inspired by the pictures of Giorgione, Paolo Veronese, Giovanni Bellini, Paris Bordone and Parmigianino’ (Napoleone, 2010, 52). Yet the evocation of an era represents no slavish imitation of an Olivier-like mise-en-scène (one recalls the studied medievalism, which references the Book of Hours, of Henry V [1944]); rather, the desired effect of the ‘painterly look’, as Robert Hapgood notes, was to invite ‘viewers to be onlookers, sitting back and enjoying the beauty of the film as it unfolds’ (1997, 86). Certainly, there is much to savour in Zeffirelli’s cinematography. As with his representation of Renaissance Verona in Romeo and Juliet, Zeffirelli’s visuals in The Taming of the Shrew are luscious and pleasurable, as testified to in shots of ‘Padua’ that showcase narrow streets with quaint cobbles and brickwork, dappled golden light, red and yellow hues, luxuriant greenery, flowers and laden orange-trees. Even Petruchio’s ruined castle possesses a sensually appealing exterior. Interiors, too, are attractively rendered, with the sepia shades of the frescoes gratifying the eye. Lighting decisions – candles, lamps, torches and bonfires add flickering illumination to the proceedings – allow for a smooth movement between interior and exterior locales. Interviewed for the film, Zeffirelli recalls using ‘lighting’ with a ‘poetic pastel tonality’ that functioned as ‘the perfect foil … for … the reconstruction of … a dreamlike Padua’



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(Napoleone, 2010, 52–3) and, certainly, The Taming of the Shrew is suffused with a surreal glow throughout. In this sense, the setting is a fantastical one, which purposefully blurs the boundaries between theatrical and filmic realms and which enlists an ideal of the Renaissance culled as much from Shakespeare’s sources as from the play itself. However, the total impression is more nuanced, not least since, as Jack J. Jorgens notes, this fantastical quality is rooted in a ‘central stylistic device … the heaping on of detail’ (1977, 71). Hence, when, in the opening, Lucentio (Michael York) and Tranio (Alfred Lynch) ride towards the camera – the former declares his ‘great desire … To see fair Padua’ (1.1.1–2) – they process against a refulgent painted backdrop but amongst mud, driving rain, and a medley of staring farmers and animals. Similarly, at the point where the pair enters the city, what is encountered is not just a picturesque Renaissance location but an active, crowded and noisy working environment. Space is dominated by extras – costume designer Danilo Donati spared no expense on extravagantly conceived faux sixteenth- and seventeenth-century apparel – who are represented engaged in bodily, manual work. Activities and properties such as market stalls, overly stocked shops, sculptors plying their trade and even a criminal in a cage bearing a sign marked ‘DRUNKARD’ not only, as Kenneth S. Rothwell states, make manifest a ‘wry reminder of the Christopher Sly’ (2004, 124) framing device but also evoke the schema and logic of an operatic set; here, as elsewhere, Zeffirelli brings to his mediation of the Renaissance an expressive sense of business and detail. Vital is the mix between realism and the investment in a fantasy situation (that is, between an aestheticized romanticism and a materially inflected ‘authenticity’). The combination of the two operates in such a way as to surrogate for the Induction; an audience, in being exposed to a doubled method of representation, experiences something akin to the alienating effect of the play’s Christopher Sly scenes. David L. Kranz argues that Zeffirelli’s soundtrack – a resounding meshing of a lushly romantic classical score (composed by Nino Rota) and diegetic noise (crashing rain and the din of the street) – functions in a comparable fashion: ‘diegetic and non-diegetic sound effects and music … provide a mix of realism and artifice that raises the question of artistic and human illusion, moving viewers to about the same comic distance at which Shakespeare’s Induction … metatheatrically places stage audiences’ (2008, 95), he remarks. The kinds of disjunction an audience is sensitized to visually are similarly realized in the film’s acoustic interstices. An early sequence in which Lucentio is represented entering a cathedral service at the city’s university demonstrates that distinctive bringing together

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of visuals and music. Numerous undergraduates are in attendance, symptomatic, as Graham Holderness notes, of Zeffirelli’s ‘particular emphasis on the young, both as participants and spectators’ (1989, 55). Choral music, books, religious paraphernalia and the black garb of the all-male gathering establish sobriety and reverence as the prevailing characteristics. Yet, at the sound of a cannon firing, everything is transformed. Propriety and obeisance are superseded by inversion and revolt as the students tear off their dun attire to reveal bright, carnivalesque clothing beneath. Such an abrupt change (from cathedral to carnival) is signalled diegetically – choral chants give way to music emanating from early modern instruments (recorders and lute, for example) in the jubilant mass, suggesting an unrestrained celebratory impulse. As one critic notes, the orgasmic liberation hinges on its saturnalian dimension: ‘Zeffirelli … tapped the resources of his own national history to produce … a … detailed dramatization of those medieval festivals of misrule conjecturally derived from the … rituals of Rome’ (Holderness, 1989, 57–8). Without doubt, masks, colour and movement energize the occasion, with the ‘corpse’ that is borne aloft and the skeleton figures enacting a mockery both of the ecclesiastical service and a stultifying Catholicism (this mode of parody Catholicism was later imitated in Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet [1996]). Here, in the whirling swell of the crowd, do Lucentio and Bianca (Natasha Pyne) first glimpse each other, and the music and the pace slow accordingly. The moment stands as a first run for the equivalent scene in Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet where the young lovers lock eyes over the diegetic Capulet party music; in the later film, the encounter sets the tragic narrative in motion. In The Taming of the Shrew, however, all is subsumed within the frame of what Jack J. Jorgens labels a ‘festive comedy’ akin to a ‘holiday’ (1977, 73), and we are not encouraged to judge it with any degree of seriousness. Overall rambunctiousness in The Taming of the Shrew is instrumental in underscoring its comedic imprint. Critics have identified ‘New Comedy’ as the film’s closest generic relative, the classical drama dealing with stock citizen types such as overbearing fathers and thwarted lovers that found its way into the Italian commedia dell’arte (Jorgens, 1977, 73–4). More broadly, it is farce that provides the action with its animus, particularly in scenes in which the raucous and rowdy motions of bodies are privileged. As Graham Holderness notes, farce is primarily a ‘visual genre, depending on movement, incongruous juxtaposition, interruption, rapid reversal; and Zeffirelli makes full use of farce’s principal structural motif, the chase’ (1989, 63). First, Zeffirelli exploits to the full the cues to action



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inscribed in the play; his film thus yields an abundance of moving and/ or damaged objects, such as a ripped dress, a snapped whip, a jettisoned stool and a smashed balustrade, all of which illustrate an atmosphere of incipient upset and destruction. Violence is of a slapstick kind, as when Katharina lures Petruchio to bed with a shy smile, only to assault him with a warming-pan; here, a comic effect is generated from the shock of a bathetic dismantlement of expectation. In many senses, of course, the mayhem engendered has been prepared for by the opening sequence, and in the excesses of the saturnalia we see adumbrated the collisions and conflicts of a ‘madcap ruffian’ (2.1.280) suitor and the ‘curst … gentlewoman’ (1.2.83, 123) he aims at subduing. Integral to the physicality of The Taming of the Shrew are the performances of Taylor and Burton, for both excel in the knockabout comedy demanded of their roles. In what is already an action-reliant narrative, the protagonists are represented as physically intrepid and courageous, and this is reinforced in the culmination of one of the film’s several chases. ‘Thou canst not look askance, / Nor bite the lip, as angry wenches will’ (2.1.240–1), Petruchio threatens, only to follow Katharina out onto a rooftop where she has sought sanctuary. The precipitous conditions suggest a common daring and verve, and, when they fall through the tiles, the implication is that Katharina has met her match in Petruchio and vice versa. As the couple wrestles on the huge pile of wool that breaks their fall, the film’s multiple sensory registers are made fully apparent. As Robert Hapgood notes, the immediacy of The Taming of the Shrew is ‘heightened by … appeals, not only to seeing and hearing but, vicariously, to all the other senses’ (1997, 86). At this point, the softness of the wool (the outhouse in which the couple find themselves is conceived as a gigantic bed) and the crash of the collapsing rooftop point up the mutual passions that characterize Petruchio and Katharina’s tempestuous relation. Notwithstanding its brute force, the courtship betrays an underlying sexual attraction. To a greater extent, this dynamic can be traced to the strategic casting of the central couple. As their biographers comment, the Burton-Taylor ‘thirteen-year saga was the most notorious, publicized, celebrated and vilified love affair of its day … their ten-year marriage, followed by a divorce, remarriage, and a final divorce, was often called “the marriage of the century” in the press’ (Kashner and Schoenberger, 2010, vii). As in the later Hamlet, where Zeffirelli was to adopt a similar strategy (drawing upon the popularity of the leads, Mel Gibson and Glenn Close), casting dramatically inflects the film product. Intertextually summoning the Taylor-Burton marriage, Katharina and Petruchio appear not so much irreconcilably

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opposed as destined to come together. Inevitably, the subplot suffers by comparison and is radically reduced. The resulting concentration on Petruchio and Katharina is communicated via the camera’s cultivation of their ‘look’. For Zeffirelli, throughout his oeuvre, the look of his actors is arguably of greater import than matters of performance. The method is obvious here in longing, lingering shots of Taylor as Katharina. Close-ups of her jewellery, elaborate head-pieces and coiffure work to underscore her striking beauty, while extravagant décolleté costumes, designed around the tiny waist and generous cleavage, are clearly envisaged as enjoying an upstaging effect. Distinctive are the yellow and green dress marked with vertical stripes to suggest height and elevation, the opulent blue and white wedding dress accompanied by a flowing train, the return-toPadua dress, purple and with puffed sleeves, and the final appearance scarlet dress, which is complemented by a golden tiara. Together, these ‘set-piece’ costumes announce Taylor’s singularity – her ownership of a separate aesthetic sphere. All of the costume changes are revealed through grandiloquent entrances which are filmed so as to play up Taylor/ Katharina’s impact on the onlookers. As the in-film audience greets these appearances with choric, admiring gasps, we, too, are invited to participate in the appreciation. In an unmistakably operatic fashion, the spectacular dressed body eclipses all else in the frame. Similarly, Burton/Petruchio’s outfits make a bold statement; Biondello’s description of his master’s ‘old jerkin’ and ‘old breeches thrice-turned’ (3.2.41–2) is recast in the arrival of the groom wearing a hodge-podge costume comprised of a ridiculously wide-brimmed hat, torn over-garments, and garish, uncoordinated accoutrements. Where Katharina’s dresses conjure exquisite beauty, lavishness and wealth, Petruchio’s outlandish garb intimates purposeful impoverishment offset by a grotesque masculinity. As is later the case with Mel Gibson as Hamlet, Burton as Petruchio cuts a highly masculinized figure. Our first glimpse of him shows Petruchio astride a horse – shot from below, lit from the side (so as to cast a deep shadow) and announced with a neigh of his steed, he appears a gargantuan type. Such ‘larger-than-life’, hyperbolic statements are accentuated by a trick Zeffirelli will deploy again in Romeo and Juliet: Katharina and Petruchio are colour-coded, their bright colours implying a latent rapport. And because Lucentio and Bianca appear in more muted beiges or light blues, and are in costumes that are buttoned-up to the neck (by contrast, what Katharina and Petruchio wear exposes breast and chest respectively), they occupy a less prioritized position in the mise-en-scène. During the making of the film, arguments over costume were a blot on otherwise smooth producer-director



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relations. Burton’s diaries record ‘Crisis after crisis with [Zeffirelli] … over the costumes’ (Burton, 2012, 107), while Zeffirelli’s equivalent entry in his autobiography instances costume as ‘our sole major area of difficulty’ (Zeffirelli, 1986, 215).5 The mutual acknowledgement demonstrates the extent to which costuming and casting went hand-in-hand and the fact that, in Zeffirelli’s imaginative conception of Shakespeare’s play, appearances were a core component. Petruchio’s overt masculinity throws into stark relief the obvious shortcomings of a range of other male characters. These include Hortensio (Victor Spinetti), seen as inordinately effeminate and nervous, Gremio (Alan Webb), discovered as an elderly fop, and the haberdasher and the tailor, who are so cowed by Petruchio’s aggressive rejection of their wares that they faint before him. Even Baptista (Michael Hordern) is portrayed as a flawed and ineffectual patriarch incapable of dealing with his daughters; his line, ‘I am resolved’ (1.1.90), is given an appropriately querulous and stuttering delivery. Any hint of menace is thus removed from the paternal role, not least because all of the characters appear terrified in Katharina’s presence. For a contemporary audience, of course, there is nothing unattractive in the realization of Katharina’s shrewishness – quite, the opposite, in fact. (In Zeffirelli’s film, the only counterpart to Katharina’s earthy honesty is a manipulative Bianca, who plays up to her father and is represented as modulating fierceness into mildness when Lucentio appears on the scene.) This is despite the fact that Zeffirelli greatly exaggerates Katharina’s anger and fieriness. As Burton notes in his diaries, several scenes required reshooting on the grounds that ‘E was fine but … She should appear violently like a snarling beast’ (2012, 108). Clearly, for Zeffirelli, as for spectators at the time, Katharina’s volatility of speech and behaviour constituted part of the character’s appeal. Our first glimpse of Katharina is via an extreme close-up of her dilated eyes (this references the uniqueness of Taylor’s most famous feature – her double-lashed violet eyes). More generally, the attention given to Katharina’s vision, particularly as the close-up features within a sequence in which characters look up to or out of windows, suggests that the woman’s perspective is essential. As William Van Watson writes, ‘the camera repeatedly watches Katharina watch others … as in an effort to control her own destiny’ (1992, 314–15). Yet, given that, in this film, any act of looking is accompanied by an attendant difficulty, the simultaneous suggestion is that Katharina’s efforts at visual emancipation are socially constricted. For example, after the marriage is announced, Katharina is discovered struggling to see through a tiny stained-glass porthole above a door, and the fact

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that she is forced to climb up to locate it, and the jumble of colours that the window casts on her face, point to a form of domestic imprisonment. Similarly, at the moment where Katharina is obliged to peer through a small keyhole, a sense of limited opportunity is highlighted. The Taming of the Shrew both hints at moves towards agency and establishes the barriers that frustrate its expression. As well as contemplating Katharina looking, the camera foregrounds her point of view. To cite one critical formulation, ‘Katharina retains her status as preferred bearer to the gaze throughout’ (Van Watson, 1992, 314). Nowhere is this more emphatic than at the wedding where close-up shots pick out shades of fury and disappointment on Katharina’s countenance and, subsequently, a dawning recognition (she spots the chest of gold which is Petruchio’s reward for marrying her) that she has been bartered for in a commercially driven transaction. Intimations of sensibility are paralleled in corresponding representations of Petruchio; as David L. Kranz states, Zeffirelli suggests chinks in the armour of the ‘mad-brain rudesby’ (3.2.10) through inserting ‘patterns of loud and long laughter clearly identified as a public, male mask of bravado’ (2008, 96). If The Taming of the Shrew intimates an underlying sexual attraction between Petruchio and Katharina, then it also constructs them as possessed of a shared vulnerability. Most intriguingly, it is through Katharina’s point of view that Zeffirelli’s camera appraises the montage of gifts at the wedding reception, the food laid out at the banquet, and the luxurious clothing the haberdasher and tailor present for inspection. Notably, Katharina gasps in excited anticipation at donning the ‘ruffling treasure’ (4.3.60), reinforcing the ways in which, throughout, she is associated with an appetite for consumption. In a series of intertextual allusions, the mise-en-scène mediates Taylor and Burton’s own penchant for extravagance – their connection with spending, shopping and gifts (including inordinately priced jewellery). As Graham Holderness states, the ‘massively over-exposed public personalities of the two stars inevitably coloured their participation in the film’ (1989, 68). Hence, by the same token, Burton’s drunken Petruchio persona (throughout the wedding, he stumbles and slurs in an inebriated manner) brings to mind the actor’s own legendary drinking bouts. Nor are such elisions entirely projection. As Burton confides in his diary, during one period of filming, he was drinking ‘steadily all day long … not that it affected my performance …anyway Petruchio in this version is supposed to be semi-sloshed all the time’ (2012, 111). In any appreciation of The Taming of the Shrew, then, the lines that separate out the on-screen protagonists and their off-screen antics are fragile.



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It has been suggested that the fact that so much of the action is apprehended via Katharina facilitates a subversion of ‘the misogynist agenda of Shakespeare’s play’ (Van Watson, 1992, 315). The alternative reading, however, is that it is precisely because of the film’s casting – the way in which it draws capital from the ‘real lives’ of its central protagonists – that Shakespeare’s notoriously anti-feminist message can be sidestepped, lending ballast to Deborah Cartmell’s notion that ‘the play’s sexual politics are far too complex and problematic for a cinema audience at the end of the twentieth century’ (2007, 218). Ultimately, the sexualpolitical element is rendered irrelevant through an intertextual interface that prompts audiences to regard Petruchio and Katharina as a natural couple – through their Shakespearean counterparts, Burton and Taylor are enabled to perform their own marriage. Most particularly, the fraught fights and violent clashes that mark the Petruchio-Katharina relationship can be judged a parody of the ‘real-life’ arguments and conflicts of the Taylor-Burton marriage; it was not for nothing that the pair went by the tabloid nickname of the ‘Battling Burtons’. ‘The Burtons’, notes Graham Holderness, ‘were in the habit of presenting to the media an image of domestic life not altogether unlike [that] … of the Shrew’ (1989, 67). Because of its inbuilt referentiality, the narrative involving Katharina and Petruchio is elaborated as one that showcases the romance of a mature couple who play with social constructions so as the better to arrive at a mutually satisfying emotional arrangement. Central to that construction is the fact that each spousal action has a counterpart. Ace G. Pilkington remarks that the initial wooing of Katharina in the film is conducted via a ‘chase scene through Baptista’s house … Kate in her turn becomes the pursuer after the wedding, tracking her new husband over rough country’ (1994, 170). In fact, a comparable pattern is executed throughout. Hence, the scene where Petruchio watches Katharina sleep tenderly, only to wake her brusquely, is mirrored in the moment that Katharina allows Petruchio to kiss her on the neck, only to hit him over the head with her warmingpan. Both protagonists are envisioned as participating in similar games, the effect of which is to emphasize the to-and-fro of the relationship, the conflicted rhythms through which they are constituted. But there is also in such patterned reciprocity the sense of a growing accord, and, here, the score comes into its own. As David L. Kranz observes, Zeffirelli and Rota engineer ‘musical motifs, greatly varying their volume, rhythm, and tone, to advance the … view that Kate … overcomes her … defensive shrewishness … eventually working with her husband to achieve a marriage of mutual love and equality of wit’ (2008, 95). Hence, shortly before the departure

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for Padua, a high-pitched oboe and plucked strings sound the refrain that has become synonymous with Petruchio and Katharina in a more wistful vein and at a slower pace, suggesting a lessening of hostility and the onset of an agreed dispensation. Crucially, such a development unfolds during the scenes at Petruchio’s castle, which have often been overlooked by commentators who, as Barbara Hodgdon notes, ‘invariably understand Shrew through its ending’ (1998, 1). Whereas before Petruchio was characterized as money-oriented (Zeffirelli includes almost all of the play’s references to the familial ‘wealth’ [1.2.82] and ‘dowry’ [2.1.262] in the screenplay), now, at his castle, a rationale for being so is provided; the married man requires an injection of cash to maintain his crumbling household and retinue of endearing but hopeless staff. It is appropriate, then, that Petruchio is pictured throwing coins at his servants on his return since it is for such necessary bounty that he had come ‘to wive it wealthily in Padua’ (1.2.73). Money not only affirms Petruchio’s masculinity; it also binds him anew to his dependents. Once again, in this process, Katharina is represented as Petruchio’s counterpart. As Ann C. Christensen notes, Zeffirelli’s film exaggerates ‘the dirt and/or disorder’ of Petruchio’s castle; he inhabits ‘a dusty, cluttered, and dilapidated hell-hole’ (1997, 32). When Petruchio awakes after the wedding night, he finds his wife fixing up the castle with a towel wrapped around her head and sporting an apron – by any standards, the most glamorous charlady in the world. (Even where Taylor/Katharina is reduced to appearing in working clothes, suggesting social reversal and topoi of humiliation, emphasis is still placed on her luminous form and appearance.) As a result of Katharina’s ministrations, the chandelier is repaired, the fires are relit, and the menservants are freshly schooled in virtue. What Petruchio had inaugurated, Katharina completes. The ‘tamed’ scenes (‘I say it is the moon’ [4.6.16] states Petruchio, to which Katharina replies, ‘I know it is the moon’ [4.6.17]) ensue, but even here a precise balance is struck between the former’s vulnerability and the latter’s compromise. This balance finds its most succinct statement in the business surrounding the delivery of the ‘My hand is ready, may it do him ease’ (5.2.183) encomium on wifely obedience; revealingly, the camera shows that Petruchio enters the wager hesitantly, as if uncertain of its outcome. At this point, Katharina is seen gazing adoringly at a group of children and then tenderly at her husband. Not only does the exchange of glances recall, once again, the longing inscribed in the woman’s gaze; it also, as Barbara Hodgdon comments, introduces the ‘spectacle of fortunate issue’ as a motivation for the ‘obedience speech’, so pushing the ending ‘toward



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familial myth’ (1998, 18). Certainly, when Katharina enters dragging beside her the two recalcitrant wives, Petruchio registers amazement (famously, it was Taylor’s decision to play the speech unambiguously), and the couple enjoys their first romantic kiss (in contrast to the forced kiss at the wedding that consigns Katharina to silence). And then she is gone. As throughout, Petruchio is discovered still chasing after Katharina at the close in a continuation of what we must now understand is a motor for the ways in which their relationship operates. But, as the earlier scene of castle domesticity suggests, and as Katharina’s yearning look towards the children implies, an alternative, and more settled, scenario may yet obtain. In the subsequent credits, which pause nostalgically on freezeframes of the protagonists in moments of happiness and high drama, we are reminded that, despite The Taming of the Shrew being a box-office hit and simultaneous critical success (it was nominated for numerous awards), the Taylor-Burton partnership would never enjoy an equivalent cinematic success thereafter. Instead, as 1967 ended, the couple’s bandwagon rolled on into divorce, alcoholism and an attendant cycle of film and theatre that pivoted around their relationship status. Zeffirelli knew better than to try to repeat the formula – his next film would be very different, and it would star unknowns.

Romeo and Juliet (1968) In his autobiography, Zeffirelli mentions, in the section on The Taming of the Shrew, discussing with Burton and Taylor the possibility of making a film of Romeo and Juliet. ‘It seemed to all of us to be the only logical thing for me to do next’, he notes, ‘We were agreed that the youthful production at the Old Vic had somehow to be translated on to film for the vast international audience we felt sure would flock to see it’ (1986, 223). The youthful production referred to here was Zeffirelli’s immensely successful 1960 Old Vic production of the play which was to serve, in no small measure, as stimulus for the cinematic adaptation. Like the film, the theatrical precursor placed a focus on youthful performers (Judi Dench and John Stride in their first major theatrical roles), made a virtue out of a period setting, highlighted an Italian ambience and positioned characters against a stony architectural background. Perhaps, most importantly, Romeo and Juliet in its theatrical iteration was naturalistic in tone and marked a notable departure from a more hidebound staging style. Zeffirelli’s autobiography relates his vision as set out for the two leads:

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I told them I didn’t want make-up, no gilded columns, no balconies with dangling wisteria. This was to be a real story in a plausible medieval city … no wigs, they would have to grow their hair long … when [the boys] started to act they saw the point – instead of the posing that a wig brings with it they acted freely, moving their heads like lions tossing their manes. (1986, 163) Arresting is a sense of realism that extends to audience and actors alike and a particular look, with a definitive stress on coiffure. Hair and the sixties are, of course, in many ways synonymous, and Zeffirelli was to find that his interpretative decision had a prophetic import. By the end of the production’s run, he relates, ‘the fashion for long hair was in full swing … our curious cast came to seem more and more in tune with the youngsters who packed the gallery’ (Zeffirelli, 1986, 164). Thus it was that this ‘Romeo and Juliet slotted neatly into the world of the Beatles, of flower-power and peace-and-love’ (Zeffirelli, 1986, 164). Crucially, hair was just one of the means whereby the production caught the zeitgeist, sealing its commercial impact, appealing to a new generation and garnering, via a subsequent tour, widespread international attention. Reflecting on the Old Vic Romeo and Juliet, Zeffirelli recalls an opening scene realized as ‘a misty dawn breaking over the town square’ (1986, 164). A comparable conceit begins the filmic treatment: the crane-shot leisurely surveys a Veronese cityscape dimly perceived beneath heavy fog. This inauguration takes its cue from a similar camera trajectory at the start of Henry V (dir. Laurence Olivier, 1944); this, and the overlaid voice of Olivier (uncredited) delivering the prologue (‘Two households, both alike in dignity’ [Prologue, 1]), situates Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, as Deborah Cartmell states, ‘firmly … within a … Shakespeare on film … tradition’ (2007, 219).6 Visually, there is, as Jack J. Jorgens points out, a ‘formal rightness’ (1977, 81) in the image of the mists and fog, not least because a central motif of the film uses diaphanous fabric, from the muslin drapes concealing Juliet’s bed and the gauze through which we witness her imbibing the fatal sleeping potion to the veils which cover the characters and the shrouds which grimly adorn corpses in the crypt. Such hazy appreciations of Verona suggest not only the barriers that prevent contact but also devices of prolepsis (that is, there is a fatal freight attached to a mist that looks forward to a funeral sheet). The crane-shot completed, the camera zooms upwards to an orange sun (as if inexorably drawn to the flaming orb) before dropping downwards to the town square as the music ends. (The acoustic contrast between Nino Rota’s stately fugue-like score,



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characterized by solemn strings and woodwind, and the noisy, diegetic bustle of the town’s market at once establishes the urban contexts within which the tragic narrative plays itself out.) As a synecdoche for passion, the sun both ‘captures the underlying unity of emotions which comes together … at the end of the play’ (Jorgens, 1977, 82) and conjures a dialectic comprised of love and hate, the film’s deadly opposites. And images of the sun – often filtered through the semi-transparencies of clothing, curtains and hangings – reappear throughout, embracing the dawn that awakens Romeo (Leonard Whiting) and the circular red and orange stained glass window before which Juliet (Olivia Hussey) protests against her parents’ plan for an enforced marriage. A by-product of the film’s reliance upon sunlight-saturated shooting is a stress on misty heat rising from the ground; it is a nice example of how the film’s constituent natural properties join in felicitous conjunctions throughout. The Italian settings of The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet are often aligned, but to concentrate on affinities of mood, suggestion and style is to mask significant differences. Unlike the studio-set The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet was filmed in Tuscania, Pienza, Gubbio and Artena, ‘actual’ Italian locations. If the former is ‘dreamlike’, the latter, primarily because of the move to Italian Renaissance environs, appears absolutely realistic. Language is given a naturalistic inflection, with the cast delivering lines as if they were everyday speech, while the excision of orotund constructions and some rhyming couplets reinforces a sense of discursive ordinariness. Hand-held camera work makes for an authenticity of action and movement; similarly, the dependency upon natural light (including torches and candlelight) enhances an effort at verisimilitude. Typically, the lovers (separately and together) are back-lit from natural light sources; the glow and intensity that are generated stress purity while remaining entirely at home in a studio-eschewed film world. Exemplary of the film’s realism is the opening sequence which makes potent use of the town’s central square. In its architectural arrangement, the square closes in the participants, suggesting a broader psychic stasis, while the presence of fortifications (walled battlements taking up one entire side) hints at a siege mentality. As in The Taming of the Shrew, an animated mise-en-scène assists in the elaboration of a lively street milieu; this is a story which is indivisible from its vital social landscape. Viewers are aided in group identifications through a dominant colourscheme; hence, blue and yellow denote the Capulets, while blue and green indicate the Montagues, luxuriant hues on the costumes (again designed by Danilo Donati) enhancing the brilliant palette of the scene. Young

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men – servants of the respective ‘households’ (Prologue, 1) – are clad in tights and codpieces; such adornments both index a stereotypical idea of Renaissance masculinity and make visual, as Kenneth S. Rothwell notes, the ‘lewd puns which permeate Shakespeare’s bawdiest play’ (2004, 129). Adding to the general frisson of sexuality is the roving camera which begins at the servants’ feet and pauses just below the waist, suggesting that the subsequent violence possesses a phallic point of origin. When the fight breaks out, it is played in a manner akin to the realization of the later duel and killing of Tybalt (Michael York) – as a spectacular set-piece. Thus, the giddy, delirious camera work illuminates the idea of a maddened conflict, while shots of sobbing citizens (Zeffirelli made maximum use of his extras’ propensities for distraught expression) and glimpses of frightened women cradling babies remind us that this is an ‘ancient grudge’ (Prologue, 3) which affects the whole citizenry. The use of an overhead, upper-angle shot framing the combatants establishes the horrific extent of the ‘mutiny’ (Prologue, 3), with accompanying images of fruit and vegetables being used as missiles confirming the deleterious economic effects of the action. As Sarah M. Deats notes, ‘Shakespeare’s brawl becomes Zeffirelli’s riot’ (1986, 65). A spectacle of waste and destruction is testified to in a lingering dissolve on the rising dust and falling stones that litter the square. Adjoining the square is a church (San Pietro in Tuscania) upon which, during the brawl, the camera continually alights as if in search of spiritual guidance. (It is on the church’s stone steps that the warring parties will gather thrice over the course of the film, lending the Prince’s [Robert Stephens] pronouncements a distinctly religious flavour.) Little critical mention is made of the place of the ecclesiastical in Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (it is, of course, precisely such an undergirding conceit that Baz Luhrmann was to update and apply so successfully in his 1996 cinematic adaptation). In Zeffirelli’s film, bells periodically interrupt the acoustic matrix, making the presence of the church unmistakable, while religious art (as in the cross worn by Juliet and the triptych hanging in her room) populates the mise-en-scène. Such dressing of the action is also illustrated in an enthusiastic deployment of church interiors. Hence, when the Nurse (Pat Heywood) seeks out Romeo – ‘Pray you, sir, a word’ (2.3.145) – the two converse in a gorgeous cathedral-like space with a tessellated floor and shimmering frescoes. Their praying gestures connote reverence, but this is quickly upset at the point where the Nurse, refusing Romeo’s coins and seeing that he moves to leave them in an offering box, deftly short-circuits his intention and pockets the money for herself. This, as well as the kiss that Romeo blows in the direction of the altar, are comically debunking in



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their reverberations. As in Luhrmann’s later film, Catholicism is marshalled primarily as trope and style. Identical directorial decisions demonstrate the extent of Zeffirelli’s influence in this regard. For example, both directors show the Friar Lawrence figure looking towards a portrait of Christ for guidance regarding whether to marry the lovers, and both directors use a diegetic boys’ choir as a rousing ratification of the subsequent affirmative decision. Placing 2.3 in a church is entirely in keeping with the ways in which, in Romeo and Juliet, movement is maximized. Dollies and tracking shots consistently concentrate on mobile characters, often in flight or pursuit, injecting the narrative with frenetic urgency. The balcony scene – where the cracked stone monuments and broken columns that litter the tangled ‘orchard’ (2.1.105) are grimly prophetic of the similarly wild and sepulchreencrusted environs of the ‘churchyard’ (5.3.5) – is exemplary. Traditionally conceived of as an essentially static sequence that showcases the expression of Shakespeare’s poetry, Zeffirelli chooses to understand it in terms of athletic activity; Juliet rushes to and fro across the extended upper space, and Romeo is represented climbing trees and swinging through the foliage. The possibility for action emerges from Zeffirelli’s radical conception of the ‘window’ (2.1.44) aloft. In contrast to a neat ledge or veranda, this balcony (at the Palazzo Borghese in Artena) appears more akin to ramparts or battlements, and, significantly, it is structured on different levels, necessitating Romeo’s jumps. Both the balcony scene and the church conference episode typify the film’s ready facility with alternating between interiors and exteriors. Throughout, door-frames are filmed without doors and windows without glass, allowing for easy passages of movement and light. Accentuating openness in this way, Zeffirelli’s cinematography consistently spotlights the stunning Italian locations that lie just beyond a particular architectural feature. The effort to include ‘real’ locations goes hand-in-hand with a version of Shakespearean fidelity which extends to casting. Zeffirelli’s autobiography muses on the fact that ‘Shakespeare used a fourteen year old boy to play Juliet and even in his day such boys can hardly have been much good at verse speaking – to the author, youth was more important than enunciation’ (1986, 162). Honouring the ‘original’, and its cues for character construction and place, was integral to Zeffirelli’s aspirations towards authenticity. This meant placing inexperienced actors in key parts, a strategy to which Zeffirelli would return at several points in his career.7 Eschewing big-name stars was, as the director reflects, ‘insanely risky’, so much so that Paramount, his backers, responded by limiting the budget to

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the ‘derisory sum’ of $800,000 (Zeffirelli, 1986, 225). (Romeo and Juliet was to go on to take $50 million at the box office; Zeffirelli’s convictions had yielded an extraordinary profit.) From the search for ‘principals [who] would have to be extra beautiful and exceptionally talented’ (Zeffirelli, 1986, 225), in that order, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey emerged. Whiting, described by the director as ‘the most exquisitely beautiful male adolescent I’ve ever met’ (Zeffirelli, 1986, 228), was found fairly quickly, leaving locating Juliet as the ‘major headache’ (1986, 226). At first, Zeffirelli rejected Olivia Hussey as ‘overweight [and] clumsy-looking’ (1986, 225), but, when his first choice for the role cropped her long hair, he recalled Hussey to discover that ‘she had lost weight … Her magnificent bone structure was … apparent, with those wide expressive eyes … She was now the real Juliet, a gawky colt of a girl waiting for life to begin’ (1986, 226). It hardly needs pointing out that casting of this kind played well with the youth market, Zeffirelli’s target audience. As Kenneth S. Rothwell states, reflecting on the film’s orientation, ‘Zeffirelli’s admiration of Leonard Bernstein’s Broadway musical, West Side Story (1961), shows up in his resolve to make the movie palatable to rebellious university students of the late sixties, who never doubted for a moment that the guilt was all on the parents’ (2004, 128).8 Several critics have suggested that Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet parallels Mike Nichols’ film, The Graduate (1967), ‘in so far as it appeals to [the] period’s obsessive interest in the generation gap’ (Cartmell, 2007, 218). Accordingly, our first glimpse of Romeo is of him clutching a flower, estranged from his spectating parents and visibly lost in his own thoughts and dreams. As Peter S. Donaldson observes, the flower, especially ‘in the context of late 1960s’ antiwar sentiment’, connotes ‘nonaggressive pacific masculinity’ (1990, 156). The distinctive musical motif associated with Romeo here is later linked acoustically to the ‘What is a Youth’ song (with lyrics by Eugene Walter rather than Shakespeare) and points up the lover’s tender years. Similarly, when Juliet first appears, perfectly framed by a window, her fresh, cosmetics-free countenance and scraped-back hair (Hussey seems younger than her fifteen years as a result) contrast markedly with the artifice of her mother (Natasha Parry), who, in the previous scene, is discovered being elaborately made up by her retinue. Performance styles further underline the protagonists’ youthful credentials. Thus, when ordered to marry Paris, Juliet angrily spits out the line, ‘He shall not make me a joyful bride’ (3.5.117), while Romeo, responding to the decree of banishment, lies down on the ground, his back to the camera, and sobs, ‘There is no world without Verona walls’ (3.3.17). Neither lover is portrayed as at ease with



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words, gestures often surrogating for speech, but both are passionate in ardour, kissing with teenage enthusiasm. Teenage vulnerability may be apprehended by the viewer, but certainly not by the plethora of filmic parents and guardians. As glances and counter-glances indicate, Juliet’s parents are prevented from caring for their daughter by marital frictions and an Oedipal entanglement with Tybalt (Michael York); by the same token, the parents of Romeo appear incapable of engaging their son in conversation. Indeed, as a whole, Romeo and Juliet indicts a failing older adult constituency for acts of dissimulation or treachery. ‘From your heart?’ (an approximation of 3.5.226), a distraught Juliet asks her Nurse, reading her suggestion that she should agree to marry Paris as a betrayal. Even Friar Lawrence (Milo O’Shea) similarly abandons his youthful charges. At the crypt, his line, ‘I dare no longer stay’ (5.3.159), is muttered fearfully and guiltily; he dreads the coming of the watch and, significantly, departs. An older generation, then, is elaborated as inherently untrustworthy. Interestingly, the appearance of Paris (Roberto Bisacco) – he wears an inordinately sized hat, pale blue and gold shades, and a showy medallion – connects him with parental characters who are comparably bedecked. By contrast, Juliet’s costumes signal her increasing alienation from kin and the Capulet clan. At the party, her gold braiding and red velvet dress tie her to the clothes worn by other family members, while subordination to Capulet will is implied in the tight cap and plait that keep her lustrous hair in order. Yet, from this point onwards, Juliet is discovered as ceasing to dress in the Capulet palette; hence, on the balcony, she appears in underclothes only, and her hair is flowing and loose. Wedding clothes are not only purple; they are also informal. And, at the moment where Juliet remonstrates with her father (Paul Hardwick), she is attired in green, indicating nature, youth and a growing apart. How characters are dressed in Romeo and Juliet enacts cultures of constriction and impulses of emancipation. Given that Whiting and Hussey were selected for their appearance, it is unsurprising that Zeffirelli takes every opportunity to accentuate their beautiful features. Extreme close-ups, and an emphasis on facial expression, mean that, for extended sequences, exchanges of glance and gaze replace the poetic nuances of Shakespeare’s verse. Pertinent here is the lovers’ first meeting; blocking is consistent with Romeo and Juliet becoming enraptured with each other, while a combination of wide shots and extreme focus shots points to mutually developing desires. Similarly, a use of subjective point of view perspectives suggests a need to see, with eye-line matches establishing a rush of passionate feeling. All of this is

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accomplished without words, for the look and looks of the protagonists are more than sufficient to enact the central dynamic. Faces and bodies are integral to the filmic method. As Robert Hapgood notes, commenting on differences between The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet, the ‘eroticism’ of the latter film ‘is much more direct … Romeo and Juliet hug and kiss, even in the balcony scene, and are shown partly nude after their wedding night’ (1997, 86). Much has been made of the fact that, where nudity is concerned, it is Romeo’s body, rather than Juliet’s, that is granted visual emphasis. In the post-coital act of awakening, a slow camera pan moves suggestively over a naked Romeo stretched out on the bed-sheets, pausing purposefully on his bottom; as he rises to stand by the window, our gaze is directed, once more, to his trim behind. By contrast, and although her breasts are briefly glimpsed, Juliet appears covered by the sheets; the camerawork, like the character, is more retiring and bashful. ‘An exercise of voyeuristic power especially distinguishes the work of [Zeffirelli] … with relatively young, unknown actors’, states William Van Watson (1992, 312), and, certainly, in images of male bodies, as well as in approximations of Renaissance young men’s dress, there is a studied homoerotic dimension. Commenting on Romeo and Juliet, the play, Jonathan Goldberg notes a preoccupation with ‘love … between men’, figures of male rivalry and what he terms ‘deformations of desire’ (1994, 225, 230). The scenes involving Mercutio in the film are relevant here, not least because, taking place at night and unfolding in deserted streets, they possess a distinctively dissident edge and ‘counter-cultural’ feel. Properties such as torches (thrown aloft) and masks (of a skull-like kind), alongside the raucous sounds of tabors and pipes, suggest a carnival run amok, and this is underlined in the image of Mercutio dropping to his knees and blessing the crowd like a parodic ecclesiastic. Enhancing the sense of unnerving revelry are filmed-frombelow shots that prioritize the mocking Mercutio walking on an upper level – a fringe player on a subversive stage. As Courtney Lehmann has argued, ‘John McEnery’s deeply nuanced portrayal … has forever changed the way that this role is interpreted’, with the lunatic rendition of the Queen Mab speech, in particular, shaping ‘subsequent renderings that suggest Mercutio’s homoerotic attachment to Romeo’ (2010, 145). During the Queen Mab address, in a sequence of shots that mirrors the first kiss of the lovers, Mercutio is visibly traumatized, with the lack of diegetic music inviting an audience to attend carefully to his distressed pronouncements. Male-on-male relations are hinted at in the camera’s focus on Mercutio’s forlorn face and a hand (Romeo’s) that sneaks into the frame to rest upon his shoulder in a concerned gesture (the choreography recalls the lovers’



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encounter at the Capulet party). A series of two-shots then places the two young men together; the implication, as their heads rest side by side, is that a kiss is about to take place. But the moment of intimacy is broken when, in the excitement of the festive occasion, Romeo and Mercutio are pulled apart, and, as longing looks are exchanged, the charged nature of the encounter is definitively underscored. The centrality of Mercutio to Romeo and Juliet is foregrounded when, subsequent to the ‘Intermission’, he is again granted performative pre-eminence. Occurring in the afterglow of the marriage, this pause in the action is announced via paired images of a tile of the sun (upon which ‘Intermission’ is emblazoned in faux sixteenth-century lettering) and an out-of-focus shot of Mercutio approaching the camera with a white handkerchief covering his head. The combination brings the opening images of the sun and the fog again into juxtaposition, with the additional suggestion being that Mercutio’s shroud-like appearance betokens his imminent mortality. Playing with the resonances of Benvolio’s remark that, in ‘these hot days’, the ‘mad blood [is] stirring’ (3.1.4), the scene derives its emotive impact from the stony representation of the sun (bringing crypts to mind) and the insane spectacle of Mercutio (he stumbles up the square’s steps like a walking corpse). At once mist, at once funereal voile, the handkerchief is envisioned as a powerful filmic property. Thus, when he sets out to find a dangerously explosive Tybalt, Romeo cradles Mercutio’s (now bloody) handkerchief in his hand, reminding us that it is rage and grief that propels him to action. In keeping with the decision to remove the exchange with the apothecary and to cut the fatal duel with Paris, the fight between Tybalt and Mercutio is so engineered as to leave Romeo with the better part of audience empathy. Illuminating here is Tybalt’s line, ‘Here comes my man’ (3.1.51), which is delivered with an eye-line match to Romeo, indicating that the Capulet nephew is the aggressor. Clearly, Romeo at this point emerges as peace-maker, even going so far as to shake hands with his assailant (Tybalt’s subsequent theatrical washing of his hand implies an insulting contamination). The balance of sympathy is maintained into the chase; Tybalt is the first to brandish his sword, and Romeo is so unprepared that he has to be handed one to protect himself.9 Hesitation serves to excuse Romeo’s involvement, and a similar strategy underpins the death of Tybalt himself. Launching himself at a clearly losing Romeo, Tybalt accidentally falls upon the former’s sword. Not only do the interlocked bodies intimate a grotesquely homoerotic embrace, they also demonstrate the extent to which Romeo is envisaged as an innocent party caught in a deadly ‘bandying’ (3.1.83) not of his making.

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If critics have recognized that the fight is so realized as to exonerate Romeo, they have neglected its kinship with the stereotype of the highschool brawl. Teenage angst and competitiveness animate the escalation towards violence, as suggested in baying cries of encouragement. A sense of unbalanced bravado runs through the extended episode, and the underlying idea is of actions gone awry, of unintended injuries. Harking back to an earlier generation of ‘social problem’ films such as Blackboard Jungle (dir. Richard Brooks, 1955) and High School Confidential (dir. Jack Arnold, 1958), Zeffirelli deploys such generic tropes as anguished reactions to catastrophe (‘I am fortune’s fool!’ [3.1.131], laments Romeo over Tybalt’s body) and youthful follies (Tybalt cuts off a lock of Mercutio’s hair, prompting merriment among his onlookers). At the point where Tybalt and his men flee, and their actions are deemed an admission of defeat, the amused company lifts the ‘peppered’ (3.1.94) Mercutio aloft, assuming that his fatal staggering is a form of play-acting. Even in death, it seems, Mercutio is inseparable from a theatricalization of self. Yet an audience (sensitized to the mortal wound thanks to a blurred point-ofview shot from Mercutio’s perspective that concatenates, to uncomfortable effect, the images of shroud, veil and mist) knows otherwise. This is the context in which we are invited to read his dying vision of Romeo’s laughing face. The whole rises to a high point at the moment where Mercutio ascends the steps to ‘perform’ his embittered malediction (‘A plague o’ both your houses!’ [3.1.95]), only to fall, dead, as if he has teetered off the brink of a stage. In the mistaken gaiety that surrounds Mercutio’s death is an example of the ways in which, in the second half of the film, Zeffirelli injects the narrative with pathos. Other instances include the scene where Romeo’s boy, Balthasar (Keith Skinner), witnesses Juliet’s funeral (in a fleshing-out of the line, ‘I saw her laid low in her kindred’s vault’ [5.1.20]), registering a profound sadness which an audience is urged to recognize as tragically misplaced. Comparably emotive is the series of inter-cuts between Romeo and Balthasar, who ride furiously in one direction, and Friar John, who travels in the other with the ‘letter’ (5.2.13); indeed, the various parties cross paths with each other in a visual representation of a calamity that might have been averted. The heightened sentimental mode accords with Jack J. Jorgens’ view that, in the wake of Mercutio’s demise, ‘the style of the film changes radically … it is drained of its busy look and festive colours’ (1977, 89). Less critically noted is the scenic paralleling which accompanies this shift in mood. Tableaux in the first half of the film are replayed and recast in the second, and the effect is to suggest a tragic version of a prior



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happening. Structural symmetry of this kind is congruent with the ways in which circles and circular shapes are everywhere apparent – from the dizzying circles of the ‘Morisco’ dance at the Capulet party, to the circles of supporters who surround the young duellists, to the tessellated circles of tiles decorating a church floor. Within such movements the impossibility of ever going beyond the ambit of the ‘ancient grudge’ (Prologue, 3) is intimated, for actions are limited by the tragic circuit within which they unfold. In particular, the film’s circular dynamic is demonstrated in the parallels drawn between the opening and closing stages. At the crypt, for instance, the sight of Juliet wearing a formally cut heavy dress with beaded sleeves and a cap that controls her hair evokes her similar appearance at the party; the idea is that she has been returned to the possession of her family. Other connections illuminate the repetitive qualities of Romeo’s situation. Hence, when he arrives at the churchyard, Romeo hesitates before entering the crypt, mirroring the earlier hesitation to join in the Capulet festivities; on both occasions, he is uninvited. As a point-of-view shot from Romeo’s perspective shows a line of corpses stretching before him in the ‘monument’ (5.2.23), we remember an equivalent moment – the young lover’s surveying gaze over the guests who throng to the celebrations of his ‘great enemy’ (1.5.134). Both scenes are linked by Romeo’s search for Juliet; at the party, he looks among oblivious guests for his love, whereas at the crypt he explores between the (by definition) indifferent cadavers whose supine forms populate the cold, funereal slabs. Filmic properties augment the sense that the narrative is circling back upon itself. For example, in the repeated image of the columns (Juliet looks around columns in both sequences) are reminders of the vertical structures that are both barriers to, and enablers of, courtship. Kenneth S. Rothwell notes Zeffirelli’s predilection for shots of ‘hands in tight framings’ (2004, 129), and there is a particular sensuousness and tactility attached to the ways in which hand images in the film look forwards and backwards. At the party, to accompany Romeo’s injunction, ‘O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do’ (1.5.100), the lovers place their palms together in a premonition of a kiss; the comparable episode takes place in the crypt at the point where Friar Lawrence clutches at Romeo’s outstretched hand on the vault floor (seeking confirmation of his death), only then to grasp Juliet’s flexing fingers (knowing that she lives). The contrast between sets of hands – still and moving – stresses the space of devastation that separates two spheres of experience. And, in the waking Juliet’s feeling of her face with her fingers, it is as if she recollects the touch of that earlier embrace.

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Of course, during the Capulet party sequence, the spectre of death is explicitly conjured in the diegetic song, ‘What is a Youth’, that operates as the lovers’ leitmotif. Notably, the lyrics – ‘A rose will bloom, it then will fade, / So does a youth, so does the fairest maid’ – are, as Courtney Lehmann remarks, ‘inescapably morbid’ (2010, 150), concerned, as they are, with fleeting freshness and a carpe diem emphasis on responding to love’s impulses. But the refrain introduced here is arguably more important in terms of its proleptic and retrospective resonances. Not only does the recurrence of the music during the scene at the crypt link the inception of Romeo and Juliet’s love with its tragic climax, it also suggests an equation between sex and death, twin ciphers of the Renaissance erotic poetic tradition. Having come to a climax at the moment of Juliet’s expiry, the vaulting minor intervals of the score abruptly cease, to be replaced in the next scene by a tolling bell whose sound serves only to accentuate the human costs of the Capulet-Montague feud. The closing sequence – Romeo and Juliet are brought into the town square on their biers – rephrases a previous one in which the bodies of Tybalt and Mercutio are set before the Prince; here, as before, the consequences and casualties of Verona’s ‘strife’ (Prologue, 8) are presented for inspection and judgment. But the passage of tragedy has made for significant acoustic and visual differences. Whereas earlier bodies and crowds were noisily segregated, at this point the people move as one and a deadly hush reigns. Blocking accords with the idea of a common understanding (a divide is beginning to be bridged), and this is indicated in a change in costume. Now, the corpses of Romeo and Juliet appear in their wedding clothes, suggesting a posthumous acceptance of their marriage and an honouring of their agency. The Prince’s pronouncement – ‘All are punishèd’ (5.3.294) – is repeated and, at the second enunciation, it is shouted out, a camera pan over the guilty faces of the assembled throng matching the sentiment that condemnation must be universal. (Interestingly, Luhrmann was to repeat this doubled delivery in his film adaptation.) Weather dovetails with mood, as testified to by shots of billowing, blowing black veils and agitated white coverings; even objects are seen to be emotionally responsive. In the very final shot, as both sides involved in the conflict process into the church together, the hint of a thaw is returned to; the patriarchs acknowledge each other, and others embrace or mutually comfort, the doubled movement of the Capulet-Montague formation hinting at the possibility of accord. Although the camera fades to black, and the image with which we are left is that of the town’s fortifications, there are still signs of another dispensation; crucially, Olivier’s choric



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voiceover is heard again, now intoning the Prince’s statement that ‘A glooming peace this morning with it brings’ (5.3.304), suggesting that this is a new morning, that the circle may yet be broken, that there is another beginning inscribed in the communication of Shakespearean authority. Extratextually, there was another beginning in the offing. For Zeffirelli, Romeo and Juliet had a ‘stunning’ effect; in his words, the film ‘elevated me … to someone who was famous internationally … I had crossed over from one state to another … in ways I could not yet foresee I would now operate on a different plane’ (1986, 229–30). Certainly, the commercial combination of The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet was a winning one and enabled the director to devote himself to pursuing particular passions (film versions of his favourite operas and cinematic and televisual works embracing religious and romantic themes) with a degree of relative independence. Such was the enlivening context within which Zeffirelli also turned his thoughts again to a screen adaptation of Hamlet, although it was to be twenty-two years before its successful execution.

Hamlet (1990) The seeds for a Hamlet on film were sown in the early 1960s when Zeffirelli was directing for the stage. His 1963 Hamlet at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome (it played at the Old Vic the following year), starring Giorgio Albertazzi and Anna Proclemer, highlighted as a central dynamic the Hamlet-Gertrude relationship in an emphasis that was assisted by a minimalist design (in a gesture to Peter Brook’s theatrical philosophy, lighting was used to accentuate the claustrophobic atmosphere). Instead of grandeur and spectacle, Zeffirelli opted for a personality-driven approach, wishing for ‘a Hamlet young audiences could identify with, as if viewing themselves in the mirror’ (Gurewitsch, 2010, 15); not coincidentally, therefore, Shakespeare’s Dane appeared as a youthful scholar or student. Engagement was encouraged via moments of high drama, including Hamlet’s wielding of his sword as a cross and his emergence from a cavernous hole in the middle of the playing area. This much suggests an aesthetic and interpretative kinship with the film, but there were important differences too. For example, no doubt indicative of the ways in which Zeffirelli’s thinking was to shift, it was uniquely in the theatre production that the Ghost was presented as an expression of Hamlet’s troubled imagination. Over the ensuing years, a further theatrical production was planned. In the ideas for a 1979 Hamlet in Los Angeles – the ‘bare’ stage was to have been dominated by ‘steel sets

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… highlighting the tragedy of the young protagonist’ (Napoleone, 2010, 40) – one can detect the development of the earlier conceit, while in the projected casting (Richard Gere as Hamlet) is an example of Zeffirelli’s predilection for attracting Hollywood names to Shakespearean parts. In the same way that the director was hugely disappointed when the production was cancelled, so was he later vexed by the reluctance of the studios to invest in his film adaptation: ‘I don’t know why they were nervous’, he lamented, continuing, ‘No matter, they just decided that Shakespeare doesn’t work’ (Tibbets, 1994, 137). When, after protracted discussion, Zeffirelli was able to bring on board three different companies – Nelson, Carolco and Sovereign Pictures – this was due in no small measure to the casting coup of Mel Gibson in the lead role; doubters notwithstanding, the securing of the Hollywood star was ‘vital’ (Tibbets, 1994, 137) for funding support. With backers and cast in place, Zeffirelli was in a position finally to bring stage experience and screen dream together. As with previous Shakespearean outings, Zeffirelli in Hamlet honours setting, placing the action in a vaguely thirteenth-century Denmark. Although the mise-en-scène is awash with medieval markers, the whole conjures a mélange of medieval and Renaissance referents; this is a culture on the cusp of a fundamental transition. The protagonist comes to stand, in the director’s words, as a figure who bridges eras – ‘he was born to be the “new man”, with all his doubts, uncertainties, hopes and dreams’ (2010, 472) – in a reading that takes as a central premise the Hamletian conceit, ‘The time is out of joint’ (1.5.189). In interview, Zeffirelli describes Gibson, with a fitting Italian Renaissance allusion, as ‘a young Michelangelo’ (Tibbets, 1994, 138) and, throughout, close-ups, intimate framings and pauses of the camera underline the actor’s physical attractions. As Barbara Hodgdon notes, ‘no small part of the pleasures [the] … film puts on offer has to do with the body of Mel Gibson, on which and through which Hamlet gets played out’ (1994, 282). The ‘look’ is, in fact, crucial, for, in one fell swoop of casting, Zeffirelli reverses centuries-old traditions of interpreting Hamlet in particular and Shakespearean heroes more generally. As a result, the film becomes a showcase for an alternative prince, one characterized not so much as an ethereal philosopher whose significance is that of the interiorized intellectual, as an outwardly informed figure apprehended in terms of athleticism and visual appeal. This Hamlet’s appearance is primal and perspiring, while his wardrobe (leather trousers and boots) is perfectly of a piece with a rugged and raw mien and manner. The break with tradition finds a rationale in the intertextual associations that gather about Gibson himself. In particular, the high-octane ‘action film’ genre



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parts that the actor undertook previously (in, for example, Lethal Weapon [dir. Richard Donner, 1987] and Mad Max [dir. Guy Hamilton, 1979]) are teased through into the Hamlet realization: suicidal, vengeful and quintessentially masculine types create a basis for the distinctive initiative of Shakespearean reinvention. As Linda Charnes notes, Mel Gibson ‘has built a career playing characters who [have] been made mad by marriages … By the time [he] makes it into … Hamlet, he is used to playing characters who curse spite for bearing him to set things right’ (2006, 35). Congruent with the type, too, is the teasing nature of the performance. Wry one-liners, jokes (as when he pretends to trip during the duel) and a wink to his mother mark Hamlet as an attenuation of the generic ‘action hero’ figure who japes in the face of crisis and uses black humour in the midst of psychic catastrophe. With the weight of history on his shoulders, it is unsurprising, then, that this Hamlet should inhabit a particularly muted film landscape. By contrast with The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet, colours in Hamlet are sombre: dark greys, dun browns and smoky whites predominate, affording an impression of a joyless, melancholic world. Aiding in the provision of that palette is the combined studio and location shooting: the various ‘real-life’ medieval castles in England and Scotland (Blackness, Dunnottar and Dover) that constitute Elsinore both fill the screen with mottled grey and yellow hues and point up changes in the director’s cinematographic style. Notably, in contradistinction to Olivier’s film noir and expressionistic understanding of Hamlet, Zeffirelli espouses a realist mode, prioritizing archetypal ‘heritage’-style images and playing down the romanticism to which his Italian settings and locations have been tied. Exemplary is the series of establishing shots that discover an isolated castle perched on a bluff in a composition that recalls the ‘dreadful summit of the cliff / That beetles o’er his base into the sea’ (1.4.51–2); seagulls cackle and crook, and the waves boom, indicating a raw and elemental backdrop to the psychic story. This stony architectural mass, with its northerly resonances, is a world away from Verona or Padua; in addition, the castle’s precipitous situation points to a more general condition of endangerment, while its looming walls that hem and enclose connote a prevailing claustrophobia. Also unlike Olivier’s symbolic Elsinore, Zeffirelli’s castle is a functioning entity: a portcullis rises and falls, domestic activities root the action materially, and a diegetic noise of barking dogs and workers’ hubbub points up the importance of a wider public sphere. Typically, the interiors are characterized by a multiplicity of objects – chests, lush wall hangings, manuscripts, suits of armour and astronomical devices – whose presence hints at histories in the

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making. Perhaps most significantly, books feature as charged possessions, whether glimpsed in Hamlet’s study or in the castle’s cavernous library. Echoing his earlier theatrical production, Zeffirelli discovers Hamlet as a scholar; he is shot reading, amassing and even tearing pages from his volumes, as when he removes the leaves from a weighty folio (perhaps a reference to the director’s own textual cuts). This Hamlet’s intellectualism complements Gibson’s own intertextual freight as an ‘action hero’ while, at the same time, suggesting that here is a protagonist who confronts the flux of history through the pursuit of knowledge and an embrace of new technologies. Overall, the ‘look’ of Hamlet is defined by a use of natural light or sunshine. (Only during Ophelia’s [Helena Bonham-Carter] mad scenes is a dispiriting drizzle, indicative of the adversity of her situation, allowed to fall.) For Anthony B. Dawson, the ‘brilliant sunshine’ is ‘strangely inappropriate’ (1995, 199) but, in fact, it operates as a striking counterpoint to the generally understated and tenebrous tones of the film’s inner spaces. Most distinctively, sunlight constantly illuminates the interstices of Elsinore, streaming through the mullioned windows and open doors and even brightening the crypt; this is a drama of high contrast in which, in the midst of what is hidden and obscured, the promise of a revelation is kept continually to the fore. The play of light and shade is seen nowhere more obviously than in the scene where, in his study, as a shutter is opened and the blinding sunshine enters, Hamlet is provided with the perfect opportunity for his punning riposte, ‘Not so, my lord, I am too much i’th’ sun’ (1.2.67). Here, as elsewhere, the dialogue is lent a literalizing twist, with description being fleshed out and actualized. Similarly, during the investiture/wedding celebrations, when Hamlet is represented peering down from an upper gallery and looking though a grille or skylight, he witnesses the ‘heavyheaded revel’ (1.4.18.1) which an audience similarly experiences; it is this that prompts him into an abbreviated version of the ‘vicious mole of nature’ (1.4.18.8) address, affording a connection between character and audience perspectives. Another example occurs when, following on from the Ghost’s (Paul Scofield) disclosures, Hamlet sees Claudius (Alan Bates) and Gertrude (Glenn Close) lustily embracing; the accompanying designation – ‘O most pernicious woman! / O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!’ (1.5.105–6) – appears all too apt. At these points and throughout, the film furnishes an audience with evidence for Hamlet’s commentaries. We apprehend directly the object of his complaints, with the effect that the Shakespearean speech is given a greater accessibility and words are disambiguated. This piecing-out method is evidenced with a particular invention



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in the realization of the ‘To be, or not to be’ (3.1.58) soliloquy; in the crypt, the gaze that Hamlet surveys over the stony forms and skeletal remains is inseparable from his disquisition on mortality. As his eyes light upon the sleeping effigies of the departed, so is Hamlet prompted into reflection on ‘that sleep of death’ and ‘what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this … so long life’ (3.1.68–9, 71). As Patrick J. Cook notes, judged in the context of his ‘identification with his father’, the episode suggests that Hamlet is ‘continuing [a] ghostly conversation’ (2011, 81). In the same way that the historical framing of the film insists upon Hamlet’s centrality, so does the approach to dialogue make the protagonist a sustained point of reference. Only twice is the sense of claustrophobia induced by a concentration on dark interiors lifted. On the first occasion, Hamlet encounters Rosencrantz (Michael Maloney) and Guildenstern (Sean Murray) outside the castle’s precincts; on the second occasion, Ophelia flees from the castle confines, plunges to her watery death and is buried. Allying the two episodes are shots of the sheer faces of the walls of Elsinore rising vertiginously in the background, suggesting the ubiquity and hold of its influence and operations. At these points, the elements of the Western genre that have been identified in the film, including ‘distinctive … formations towering in the distance’, ‘horses grazing in the foreground’, a ‘campfire’ and a ‘building’ that resembles a ‘saloon’ (Howlett, 2000, 28–31), are at their most pronounced. As Kathy M. Howlett states, ‘Zeffirelli engages his audience in Hamlet’s revenge tragedy through associations with the American gunslinger and myths of the American West’ (2000, 21). Certainly, an illusion of emancipation and unburdening obtains in this scene; for example, Hamlet is discovered riding his horse swiftly along a beach (the camera follows his progress) and speaking centre frame, the expanse of sky around him hinting at a larger order. These are the conditions in which he is enabled to ponder ‘this brave o’erhanging, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire’ (2.2.291–2) in a briefly affirmative interlude. Similarly, it is only when she finds herself in the meadows and streams adjoining Elsinore that Ophelia is granted the freedom to die; her skipping and running throw into relief the circular motions that mark her mad scenes and intimate an agency that is articulated only to be tragically cut short. Physical movement finds its counterpart in the actions of the eye. In Anthony B. Dawson’s estimation, ‘the gesture that [defines] … Zeffirelli’s vision of the play is the glance … Glances are continually being exchanged [and] … the camera is always on the alert for looks’ (1995, 197). In particular, key to the relations between the characters is a recurrent

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triangulated gaze; following the lead of Olivier, Zeffirelli disposes of the Fortinbras subplot and a sense of political context so as to focus on the familial and the domestic. The opening scene eloquently illustrates the shift in emphasis. Instead of the Ghost, Zeffirelli commences with Old Hamlet’s funeral, overlaying sonorous, deep strings in what is, appropriately enough, a musical approximation of the liturgy. An extended tracking shot, which perhaps evokes Olivier’s comparable fondness for a mobile camera, dissolves from the courtyard to probe the interior of the castle itself and, notably, the crypt, pausing at a weeping Gertrude, prostrate over an open sarcophagus. This is the location, it is made clear, for which the camera has been searching. Interlinked close-up shots, reaction shots and eye-line matches register fully the triangulated nexus in which Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius participate. Hence, at the point where Gertrude throws herself on the now-closed tomb, she lifts her head to regard Claudius; instead of a reaction shot, however, the cut is to a close-up of Hamlet and an eye-line match that establishes that he appraises her and judges her adversely. Complicating the patterning is the presence of Claudius; he is frontally filmed, with a slight upward tilt that suggests authority and stresses a proprietorial hold over, and desire for, Gertrude. Thus does Zeffirelli evoke the animating impulses and revulsions on which the film will concentrate. In a film in which there are borrowings from other directors, the ‘debts’ to ‘Olivier’s Hamlet film’ are, as Robert Hapgood notes, perhaps the most ‘numerous’ (1997, 88).10 Nowhere are these more obvious than in the foregrounding of an Oedipal subtext. As many critics have remarked, the casting of Glenn Close as Gertrude brings to the part both star lustre and expectations of a disturbed sexuality (echoes of the aberrant personalities she played in Fatal Attraction [dir. Adrian Lyne, 1987] and Dangerous Liaisons [dir. Stephen Frears, 1988] shape audience reception of her role). The assumption, then, is that the combination of Close and Gibson, who, at the time, was indissoluble from his ‘action hero’ persona, would be an explosive one that would overshadow all other relationships. Such a reading is borne out in the film both through the proximity in age of Close and Gibson (the former’s fresh-faced appearance and girlish manner are also pertinent) and via the sexual sidelining of Claudius and Ophelia (traditional bedfellows for the Hamlet and Gertrude characters). Indicative is Alan Bates’ Claudius, heavy-robed, grizzled and slow-footed; besides the skittish and lively Gertrude, he appears an ill match. Similarly, Ophelia is displaced as an object of sexual interest from the beginning; her youthful looks, as well as early intimations of psychic disturbance, establish



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for her a fated trajectory. Typical of his radical rearranging of the text, advancing and delaying key speeches, Zeffirelli extracts the ‘Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s day’ (4.5.47) song from Act 4, repositioning it to accompany one of Ophelia’s early appearances (she hums the refrain) in an underlining of her significance as a rejected lover. Similarly, at the cacophonous close of the play-within-the-play, Hamlet delivers to Ophelia the line, ‘To a nunnery, go, and quickly too’ (3.1.139–40), a transposition from Act 3 that plays up her chastity (and imminent withdrawal from the narrative). Unlike Gertrude, who generally occupies male-oriented spaces such as the open state hall, Hamlet’s study and the library, where men congregate, Ophelia is connected with female-identified spaces (the shrill voices we hear at her first entrance belong to women) and pursuits (such as weaving and embroidery) which emphasize a more limited social world as well as her maidenly status. Costuming is indicative of the contrast, too; as Carol Chillington Rutter notes, Ophelia’s ‘rough wool smock, topped by a linen tabard like a school pinafore, her white … bonnet tied under her chin … all infantilize’ (2001, 33). In contradistinction, Gertrude is dressed in varied colours – yellows, golds, blues and purples – and in a range of costumes that show body, form and a changing hairstyle, all of which are enhanced by high-point lighting and upper-angle camerawork. In the film’s axis of womanhood, it is towards Gertrude, it is implied, that Hamlet must gravitate. The Oedipal theme comes to a head in the closet scene, which, as a number of critics have noted, represents in many ways the climax to the film as a whole. Oedipal undercurrents are here translated into an overly expressed sexuality, as testified to not only in the luxuriantly appointed bedroom (boasting decadent drapes, thick furs and a centrepiece of a vast bed) but also in Gertrude’s preparations for the encounter (she wears a different dress from the previous scene and brushes her hair as if about to meet a lover). In the wake of the stabbing of Polonius (Ian Holm), Hamlet pushes Gertrude onto the bed, pulling her about by means of the locket suspended from her neck. In this violent development, the lockets (showing, respectively, Claudius and Old Hamlet) worn by Gertrude and Hamlet become dreadfully facilitative, for, as they are compared, mother and son are forced together, their heads touching in an incestuous embrace: masochism and strangulation now complicate the potent mixture. Subsequent rapidly cut medium shots and close-ups discover Hamlet climbing on top of Gertrude, furiously miming the thrusts of brutal love-making and receiving her passionate kiss; it is at this point that the Ghost appears, not so much, it is suggested, to ‘chide’ the ‘tardy son’

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(3.4.97) as to forestall an incipient act of sexual transgression. Crucially, contrasting point-of-view shots indicate that where, for Hamlet, the Ghost is a palpable presence, for Gertrude there is no more than ‘vacancy’ (3.4.108). At this juncture, the Ghost exists as a projection only; at the same time, the spectral entrance of the ‘gracious figure’ (3.4.95) of Hamlet’s father spins the dynamic of the closet scene in an alternative direction. If, with Hamlet, anger and desire recede, with Gertrude a sense of longing remains, as indicated in a yearning look cast towards the departing prince. Such are the deflated gestures of the Oedipal aftermath. In fact, the intimacies of the closet scene have been prepared for much earlier in the film’s purposeful elaboration of private space via scenic segmentation. Many speeches are separated out, cut into shorter units and distributed among several locales to suit Zeffirelli’s particular shooting style. As Patrick J. Cook notes, Act 1 scene 2 ‘divides into four discrete film scenes’ (2011, 69). Thus, after Claudius’ speech to the whole court, the scene shifts to the library (Laertes’ request to return to France), modulates to a brief exchange between king and queen in the state hall, and winds up in Hamlet’s study where he is packing his books to go back to university. The effect is both to accelerate pace and to insist upon the vital role of the domestic arena. Or, as Linda Charnes observes, the action ‘will portend’ not so much instability in the state as ‘strange eruptions in the family’ (2006, 36). The Ghost is treated in a similar manner. In contrast to Olivier’s and Kozintsev’s distant silver-black phantoms, cloaked and armoured, Zeffirelli’s Ghost is subdued, plain-clothed and direct – seated, he is presented as engaging his son in a one-on-one conversation, an interpretative slant that Michael Almereyda, in his 2000 adaptation of Hamlet, was to imitate. Only the blue-grey filter on the camera’s lens lends a spectral patina to the proceedings. Striking is the fact that the Ghost and Hamlet, bar once, never appear in a two-shot together, suggesting that, even in the intimacy of their exchange, a distance – or a differentiation of orders – obtains. This is underlined in the ways in which distinctions of colour are deployed; where the Ghost appears pale and slightly shimmering, for example, Hamlet is presented in earthier reds and browns. It is a distance that the Ghost is also represented as attempting to bridge, as when it reaches out its hands – glimpsed only in silhouette – to a despairing Hamlet, who places his own hands over his face as if in a defensive gesture. This is the closest the two come to an embrace across the divide between the physical and metaphysical worlds. Hands are continually returned to in Hamlet, as in Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, and are invariably apprehended in expressive close-up. Our



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introduction to Hamlet, for example, is via a shot of his clenched hand trailing dirt across the armoured front of his father’s corpse in the crypt. The camera then pans upwards to reveal a protagonist whose downwardlooking, red-rimmed and aesthetically arresting blue eyes capture the pain of loss. But there is menace in seeking, with ‘vailèd lids’, a ‘noble father in the dust’ (1.2.70–1), for to refuse to meet the gaze of Claudius, as here, is to suggest a threatening undercurrent. Accordingly, when Hamlet warns the mourners at Ophelia’s funeral, ‘I have something in me dangerous’ (5.1.247), he vocalizes a feature that, because of a recurrent emphasis on his eyes, has been evident from the start. Indeed, Gibson’s performance as Hamlet is animated by its tightly coiled angry energy, as when, having witnessed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern betray him to Claudius, he erupts with violence on the stairwell; the actions, which prompt the question, ‘Why, what an ass am I?’ (2.2.560), suggest barely controlled fury as a prevailing condition. The second occasion on which a manic repressed force finds release is in the closet scene; here, the combination of slap and threat (‘Nay, then, I’ll set those to you that can speak’ [3.4.17], exclaims Gertrude) elicits from Hamlet a huge guttural cry (Patrick J. Cook describes this as ‘Mel Gibson’s trademark roar’ [2011, 89)]) that expresses far more about his troubled state of mind than any number of Shakespearean lines. Via a repeated patterning, Zeffirelli suggests the tense relationship between Hamlet’s visual experience and the explosive expressions of his inner life. Central to the representation of a Hamlet whose violence bubbles constantly beneath the surface is his use of the sword. When he feels thwarted, Hamlet is quick to draw his blade (‘By heav’n, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me’ [1.4.62], he threatens); similarly, when following the Ghost, he holds his sword at shoulder height, bringing to mind a gun-toting protagonist who, around corners, anticipates a deadly ambush. The sharp-edged instrument even serves Hamlet as a pen in the scene where he attempts to write, on the battlements, that Claudius may ‘smile and smile and be a villain’ (1.5.109); the sparks that fly from the stones during this vain effort offer a telling approximation of the king’s imputed infernal status. Laying ‘hands … upon [the] sword’ (1.5.160) is a stage requirement for the oath, but more distinctive is the way in which Hamlet’s weapon is deployed as a cross throughout, as if in a hedging of bets over the question of whether the Ghost constitutes ‘a spirit of health or goblin damned’ (1.4.21). Typically of the film, Hamlet’s progress to encounter the Ghost is an exacting one; he runs up two flights of stairs, checks nooks and crannies, and traverses corridors and platforms, all indicative of urgency as well as physical prowess. And, more generally, Hamlet is represented

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as moving constantly; as befits the film’s conceit, Hamlet rarely stands still (unless his darting eyes are, instead, taking in the details of a particular locale). The castle’s intricately layered architecture allows for movement, but so, too, does the retention of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, a filmic decision that provides ample opportunity for further demonstrations of fitness; the fawning courtiers have to run to keep up with their quicker and more nimble prey. Cues in the play’s language for action are artfully exploited, with matters of report being translated into physically oriented insets that underline qualities of heroic invention. Thus, on the ship bound for England, Hamlet is seen replacing the death warrant, having planned ahead by furnishing himself with substitutes, an act of resourcefulness that leads to the (again interpolated) next scene of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s execution. As Hamlet makes the sign of the cross over the sleeping flatterers, it is implied that, lacking his own sword, he has dexterously orchestrated the fatal use of another blade. Emerging from the substitution of the letters episode is a Hamlet very much in command of his own actions, and this is intimated in Zeffirelli’s extensions to the play’s spying and surveillance themes. For example, the protagonist is realized as either overhearing or suspecting much of the plotting directed against him, as when he darts about on an upper gallery to catch traces of the ‘Be somewhat scanter of your maiden presence’ (1.3.121) conversation between Polonius and Ophelia and, given lines from Q2 often cut in performance, whispers to Gertrude about the trip to England and the deadly contents of the ‘letters sealed’ (3.4.185.1). The authority he exercises over the castle spaces, then, belongs with Hamlet’s vitality but also hints at the extent of his knowledge. At times, Hamlet even appears to ridicule the predictability of his own awareness of things, nowhere more graphically illustrated than in the scene where he jumps up on a table to exclaim, ironically, ‘For England?’ (4.3.45). The effect is far-reaching, for, as Robert Hapgood notes, ‘Unlike Shakespeare’s hero, who must make intuitive leaps in order to understand the forces against him, Zeffirelli’s Hamlet, thanks to extensive eavesdropping, is never taken by surprise’ (1997, 88). Hamlet’s general dominance over the world in which he lives is multiply refracted. It is seen in his aggressive and public enunciation of what are ostensibly private sentiments at the play-withinthe-play (‘For look you how cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died within ’s two hours’ [3.2.114–15]), and it is reflected in his violent treatment of Ophelia, a feature not present in the ‘script, suggesting Mel Gibson’s casting or input during shooting moved the character in this direction’ (Cook, 2011, 79). Violence achieves its fullest summation during



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the duel where, once Laertes’ (Nathaniel Parker) mean-spirited trickery has been detected, Hamlet punches him to the ground; the abandonment of the sword at this point, and the reversion to fists, incarnate the ‘action hero’ persona. In death, the preoccupation with movement, and a time between times, is returned to; as Hamlet’s body jerks in grim ecstasy, the fraught narrative of the relation with Gertrude is recalled, underscoring the continuing reverberations of that dynamic. And, as the camera cranes slowly upwards away from the slaughter of the floor (highlighting another viewing perspective), an approximation of Hamlet’s spiritual departure, and the ‘flights of angels’ (5.2.303) that accompany him, is suggested. The protagonist’s energies, now in the form of a soul rather than a body, take a leisurely progress to their final resting-place. In life, an audience only sees Hamlet relaxed twice. The second occasion follows the emergence of Yorick’s skull from the dust, for, at this moment, the Dane’s eyes lose their habitual menace. The conversation on the grass with the reminder of the former king’s jester is conducted with some intimacy; Hamlet’s smiling countenance is positioned directly beside the skull, and the exchange, via close-up and a sideways shooting style, is privileged as a set-piece that reflects the charge attached to this key theatrical property. It is no accident that the first occasion on which Hamlet appears more easeful – and taking a greater pleasure in his surroundings – has complementary theatrical associations. This is with the players in a sequence that, because presented as one continuous action from arrival to departure, furnishes these ‘abstracts and brief chronicles of the time’ (2.2.504) with a particular importance. Crucially, as Kathy M. Howlett observes, the ‘actors are at the other end of the spectrum from Olivier’s classically trained, all-male troupe’ (2000, 33); that is, they constitute a gypsy band in a travelling wagon that, including women and children, is imagined as an extended family. The players are headed by a harried-looking Pete Postlethwaite whose own extra-filmic biography establishes for the in-film character a set of alternative social credentials. In contrast to Bates, Holm and Scofield, whose names and backgrounds are associated more with the south of England and RADA, Postlethwaite, who hails from the north, is often seen, because of the roles he has played, as an ‘honorary Irishman’; certainly, in his political activism and working-class roots, he represents a less refined or traditional Shakespearean brand. Interestingly, in the 1963 Hamlet theatrical production, the First Player role was taken by actor Franco Castellani, who, as Masolino D’Amico states, ‘in real life managed his own troupe of aspiring performers’ (2010, 86). In the casting of Postlethwaite we

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find an echo, if not a purposefully demotic reminder, of that earlier Shakespearean imagining. Among the players, Hamlet’s behaviour is unshackled and joyful. He is discovered riding one of the troupe’s horses in motley and blowing a horn, his fool’s costume anticipating the critical folly of the play-within-the-play. The merry band is led by Hamlet into the castle’s precincts in a large-scale interlude, with drums and pipes providing crashing, discordant musical accompaniment. Here, in this recollection of Petruchio’s mocking entrance at the wedding in The Taming of the Shrew and the carnival scenes in Romeo and Juliet, Zeffirelli circles back to his previous screen realizations of Shakespeare while, in the same moment, paying homage to Italian performance traditions. Notably, the players in Hamlet are impoverished amateurs; the clothes are on the tatty side, and the characteristic activities, including juggling with fire, acrobatics and tumbling, mark out the entertainment as vernacular. Because the palette of the film is a generally dark one, colours, when they do appear, are singled out, The Mousetrap sequence being no exception. The costumes of the players, therefore, brightly adorned in red, gold and green hues, establish their owners as ‘other’, and this is reflected, too, in the play-within-the-play, which is rendered as a grotesque and irreverent satirical comedy. Crucially, the performance is represented as revealing, to the whole court, ‘the conscience of the King’ (2.2.582); it is the particular complexion of plebeian theatricals that unambiguously exposes his guilt. And, as he had been before, Hamlet is allied with the players throughout the ‘show’ (3.2.126). His red jerkin pushes him into proximity with the costumes and action on stage, underscoring Hamlet’s own predilection for theatricality and the fact that, in Zeffirelli’s envisioning of the protagonist, the ‘antic disposition’ (1.5.173) is purposefully and self-consciously adopted. In a broader context, the players connect with Zeffirelli himself. In an interview on the making of Hamlet, the director describes an experience of the ‘real Italy’ via childhood experiences of watching ‘travelling troupes of performers … They told stories and acted them out with shouts and blows and gestures … these players were the true descendants of the world of Boccaccio’ (Tibbets, 1994, 140). In this moment of retrospection is writ large Zeffirelli’s break with an English Shakespeare and embrace of a Eurocentric and admittedly populist Bard. The statement discloses, as does his rendition of the play-within-the-play in Hamlet, the director’s continuing investment in mapping theatrical terrains onto cinematic experience. Harking back to one of his many points of origin, Zeffirelli



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testifies to an abiding interest in acknowledging the performative bases of Shakespeare, positing Hamlet as, in many ways, a revealing summation of his journey.

Influence and Legacy In a recent assessment of the ‘revival of Shakespeare on screen’, Samuel Crowl notes of Romeo and Juliet that, in ‘a wonderful twist of cultural irony, Franco Zeffirelli’s film … once attacked for its heady excess when released in 1968 … came to be regarded, in the face of Luhrmann’s end-of-thecentury dynamic assault, as the “classic” or “real” version of the play’ (2003, 119–20). The same irony might be more widely extended with regards to Zeffirelli’s Shakespeare-on-film oeuvre as a whole. All of Zeffirelli’s films possess, and are complemented by, postmodern Shakespearean equivalents, and it is difficult to imagine the existence of these later cinematic undertakings were it not for the director’s formative example. In the case of The Taming of the Shrew, for instance, Zeffirelli’s film remains a standard of comparison and a definitive point of departure. The idea is illustrated in the 2005 BBC ‘Shakespea(Re)-Told’ television adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, in which the Petruchio character (Rufus Sewell) is possessed of a similar rough glamour and masculinity (a larger-than-life figure) and in which a vein of hyperbolic knockabout comedy drives the narrative momentum. Everything in the adaptation is exaggerated (bright colours and camera angles intimate that Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew provided a model), while other borrowings are conjured in the montage of freeze-framed images at the close and the more general move to diffuse the gender politics of the play via a concentration on the unique chemistry that obtains between the central couple. Alongside Ten Things I Hate About You (dir. Gil Junger, 1999), which is prompted by the ‘original’ drama, such new imaginings of the play have thrown into relief the reputation of Zeffirelli’s work. Or, to put the point another way, the criticism formerly directed at Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew has been transferred to the cinematic ‘spin-off’: if the former appeared outré, it has since acquired associations of conservatism. The career fortunes of the later films exemplify the shift in judgement more forcefully. For James N. Loehlin, so invested is Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) in the reproduction of Zeffirelli’s film that, in addition to imitating the conception of the young lovers as ‘rebellious adolescents’, it copies the technical and textual decisions of its

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predecessor, as revealed in comparable cuts and ‘shot for shot … simple replications’ of particular scenes (2000, 122, 127). Certainly, as previous parts of this discussion have demonstrated, Luhrmann found in Zeffirelli’s representation of Shakespeare’s ‘story of … woe’ (5.3.308) a range of pointers to interpretation, from large to small (including the use of music, the placing of objects, and the organization of interiors), the result of which is a ratification of the 1968 film’s authority. As a production such as the recent Romeo and Juliet (dir. Carlo Carlei, 2013) reveals, the will to produce what has been termed a ‘more traditional adaptation’ still obtains, for this ‘remake’ (Duckworth, 2013, 87) returns Shakespeare’s play to Italian locations (Mantova and Verona), reinvests in the allure of Renaissancestyle costuming and aims to create a sense of historical authenticity. The inspiration to do so comes clearly from Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, with the concomitant effect that his vision for Shakespeare is enshrined even more affirmatively in the canon of Shakespeare on film. Although of more recent vintage, Zeffirelli’s Hamlet can also be said to have set the tone for how the Dane, in his screen incarnation, might be subsequently imagined. If Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000) has been frequently linked in criticism to Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, its closer cousin is, in fact, Zeffirelli’s adaptation of the tragedy, not least in the discovery of a domesticated Ghost, a protagonist who cultivates weaponry (Ethan Hawke wields a gun rather than a sword) and a generally swift-paced approach to the narrative continuum. Judged against Almereyda’s Hamlet, Zeffirelli’s assumes additional Shakespearean significances. The former’s stress on a contemporary, millennial moment places the latter’s transitional/ Renaissance period in the spotlight (making Zeffirelli appear to belong to a more established trajectory of film-making in the process). Similarly, in the light of Almereyda’s cuts to the Shakespearean text, Zeffirelli’s seem not as extreme as critics in the early 1990s maintained, so much so that, with the passing of time, and in the wake of a proliferation of continuing Shakespearean adaptations, the Italian director’s output takes on richer shades of legitimacy. One film-maker, in particular, has run with the examples Zeffirelli provided into the next generation. Almost at the same time that Zeffirelli was withdrawing from Shakespeare on screen, Kenneth Branagh was beginning a preoccupation with the Bard and cinema, commencing with his Henry V (1989), to the extent that the 1990s and beyond have been dubbed, by some, the ‘Kenneth Branagh’ era. Robert Hapgood notes that ‘Branagh is as bold as Zeffirelli in seeking rapport with the audience … [and] Neither is shy about laying claim to compelling reasons for … identification with



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their leading characters’ (1997, 92); in this sense, Branagh might stand as the rightful inheritor of many of Zeffirelli’s popularizing instincts. But the consanguinity goes deeper. Like Zeffirelli in his international ambitions for Shakespeare, Branagh has been clear that his interpretative decisions refract a desire for a global Bard. To cite from the screenplay for Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993), ‘an excitement borne out of complementary styles and approaches would produce a Shakespeare film that belonged to the world’ (Branagh, 1993, x). More specifically, casting internationally recognized names, and crossing the boundary that has sometimes obtained between British and American Shakespearean performers, are strategies that Branagh and Zeffirelli commonly share. Even collaborative mechanisms invite comparison. By his own admission, Zeffirelli has consistently worked with the same team of costume designers, producers and crew (‘All rather incestuous’, he comments [1986, 227]); likewise, Branagh has continually drawn upon the expertise of a similar set of textual advisors, designers and camera operators, as if recognizing that it is through the deployment of such a collaborative model of filmmaking that Shakespeare can be made accessible. Of course, it is mainly in the use of location that the two directors resemble each other. Most obviously, Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing is conceived according to the template of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet in that it relies for its sensual effect upon ‘real’ Italian environs, exterior shooting, natural light and number of sun-drenched set-pieces. Mark Thornton Burnett argues that a film such as William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (dir. Michael Hoffman, 1999), with its investment in aesthetically arresting shots of Italian palazzos and villages, represents a ‘sequel’ (2012, 28–46) to Much Ado About Nothing, but, if bloodline there is, surely it must lead back to Zeffirelli’s Italian-set comedies. Even in the act of their own dissemination and provocation to further Shakespearean adaptation, Branagh’s films make visible the prior practices that shaped their imaginative possibility. In view of such far-reaching points of contact, the influence of Zeffirelli on the whole of Shakespearean film culture is difficult to overestimate. In British and American films, the concept of a sexualized Shakespearean hero can be said to have commenced with Zeffirelli, as his distinctive gloss on male characters such as Hamlet, Petruchio and Romeo suggests. That the modern protagonist of a Shakespeare play and even of a Renaissance-set adaptation needs to represent an instance of modern manhood has become a given, and one thinks here of James McAvoy as bare-chested Macbeth in the 2005 BBC ‘Shakespea(Re)-Told’ television adaptation and even of that other ‘slimline, twenty-something object of desire’, the ‘beautiful body’ of

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Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII in the HBO series, The Tudors (Wray, 2010, 25–6). Both of these personalities have their origins in the medium of television as opposed to cinema, an index of how far the type has travelled. In these kinds of production, eroticization is inseparable from a distinctive shooting style, and here, too, Zeffirelli has been formative. The editorially stripped-down version of Shakespeare (invariably informed by a vigour of pace and execution) that he has promulgated is, if the last two decades of Shakespeare on film are an eloquent witness, now a standard and familiar one. Too, Zeffirelli’s application of signature and lyrical musical leitmotifs that have passed into popular culture is a feature that no more recent Shakespearean film-maker can do without; Romeo and Juliet, it might be suggested, set the seal on similarly conceived cinematic adaptations, including Lurhmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and Almereyda’s Hamlet, in which the soundtrack is a crucial market-driven dimension of the filmic content. These are among the ways in which Zeffirelli’s influence has spread and may yet be detected. For, even while current Shakespearean film-makers are advancing away from a previous phase of the Bard’s plays on screen, they still have recourse to Zeffirelli’s popularizing methods, vision and ruptures with convention; they and we remain in his debt.

Notes

Chapter 4 Zeffirelli’s will to create a Shakespeare for the masses is invariably cited. Typical is his suggestion that he wishes to ‘break the myth that Shakespeare on stage and screen is only an exercise for the intellectual’ (Hapgood, 1997, 80). 2 Zeffirelli has stated in his defence that ‘Movies can tell so much in one shot that sometimes even Shakespeare’s words become redundant’ (Zeffirelli, 2010, 468). 3 The second edition of Zeffirelli’s autobiography was published in 2006. 4 The British television production of Much Ado About Nothing (dir. Alan Cooke, 1967), based on the Old Vic production, starring much of the original cast and believed lost until its discovery in the Library of Congress in 2010, takes the militaristic ethos of the stage version as its point of departure, embellishing it with body-hugging costumes, grandiloquent gestures, anatomical posturings and elaborate accoutrements in an effervescent and enlightened interpretation situated in a vaguely Victorian setting. Appalled at how the theatre production had been treated, Zeffirelli was quick to disassociate himself. Clips from the production are viewable at http://www.screenonline.org.uk (accessed 3 July 2012). 5 The compromise finally reached was that Irene Sharaff would design Taylor’s costumes while Danilo Donati would design Burton’s and those of the rest of the cast. At the height of the dispute, Burton, if his diaries are to be believed, issued an ultimatum (‘If there were any more hold-ups … due to costume problems somebody, I said straight in his eyes, would have to go. We had invested $2,000,000 in this venture and I didn’t want another Cleopatra’ [2012, 98]), only to record how the warring parties made up and how much he was looking forward to seeing Zeffirelli on the latter’s return from New York: ‘How one changes!’, he notes (2012, 122). 6 ‘Olivier … had been my hero since I was a boy’ (1986, 201), Zeffirelli notes in his autobiography. 7 Zeffirelli cast relatively unknown actors in other contexts, such as Graham Faulkner (who played St Francis in Brother Sun, Sister Moon [1972]). 8 As Samuel Crowl writes, the film ‘captured the spirit of the 60s’. ‘In 1968 the young had taken to the streets in Selma, Alabama, Chicago, Paris, and Prague to protest denied civil rights, meaningless wars, and repressive governments’, he states, continuing, ‘The generational battle lines had been drawn’ (2008, 55–6). 1

186 Notes Tellingly, Romeo’s own earlier provocative injunction to ‘Draw’ (3.1.80) is omitted. 10 Hapgood also notes scenes that recall equivalent moments (1997, 88) in King Lear (dir. Peter Brook, 1971) and Hamlet (dir. Tony Richardson, 1969). 9

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Note: we have placed an asterisk next to those titles that have proved particularly useful to us in the writing of the chapters as a guide to further reading.

Unpublished Sources Box 1: Correspondence (1937–42), Orson Welles MSS. Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana. Box 5: Macbeth Scripts/Photos, Orson Welles MSS. Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana. Box 14: Heart of Darkness scripts, Orson Welles MSS. Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana. Landin, Bo and Alex Scherpf (2012), Interview with Mark Thornton Burnett, 31 January 2012. McClay Library, Queen’s University, Belfast. Newstok, Scott L. (2011), ‘Welles, Othello, Verdi’. Unpublished Lecture.

Print Sources Aboudoma, Mahmoud (2006), Nūstāljiyā: Hikāyāt Kharīfiyya. Cairo: Dār Sharqiyyāt. Almereyda, Michael (2000), William Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ Adapted by Michael Almereyda. London and New York: Faber. Anderegg, Michael (2004), Cinematic Shakespeare. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. *Anderegg, Michael (1999), Orson Welles, Shakespeare and Popular Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Anzai, Tetsuo (1999), ‘A Century of Shakespeare in Japan: A Brief Historical Survey’. Shakespeare Yearbook, 9, 3–12. Ashizu, Kaori (1995), ‘Kurosawa’s Hamlet?’. Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Society of Japan, 33, 71–99. Baecque, Antoine de and Serge Toubiana (2000), Truffaut: A Biography, trans. Catherine Temerson. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Balázs, Béla (1992), ‘Theory of the Film’, in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, 4th edn. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 260–7.

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Ball, Robert Hamilton (1953), Review of ‘Put Money in Thy Purse: The Diary of the Film of Othello by Micheál MacLiammóir’. Shakespeare Quarterly, 4, (4), 479–81. Benamou, Catherine (2007), It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Beumers, Birgit (2009), A History of Russian Cinema. Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers. Bowers, Faubion (1952), Japanese Theatre. New York: Hermitage House. Bradshaw, Graham and Kaori Ashizu (1998), ‘Reading Hamlet in Japan’, in Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson and Dieter Mehl (eds), Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 350–63. Branagh, Kenneth (1993), ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ by William Shakespeare: Screenplay, Introduction and Notes. New York and London: Norton. Brandon, James R. (2001), ‘Shakespeare in Kabuki’, in Minami Ryuta, Ian Carruthers and John Gillies (eds), Performing Shakespeare in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 33–53. *Buchanan, Judith (2005), Shakespeare on Film. Harlow: Pearson. *Buhler, Stephen M. (2002), Shakespeare in the Cinema: Ocular Proof. Albany: State University of New York Press. Burnett, Mark Thornton (2011), ‘Shakespeare and Contemporary Latin American Cinema’. Shakespeare Quarterly, 62, (3), 396–419. *Burnett, Mark Thornton (2012), Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace, 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Burnett, Mark Thornton (2013), Shakespeare and World Cinema. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burton, Richard (2012), The Richard Burton Diaries, ed. Chris Williams. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Callow, Simon (2006), Orson Welles: Hello Americans. New York: Viking. *Cardullo, Bert, (ed.) (2008), Akira Kurosawa: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. *Cartmell, Deborah (2007), ‘Franco Zeffirelli and Shakespeare’, in Russell Jackson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 216–25. Catania, Saviour (2005), ‘The Haiku Macbeth: Shakespearean antithetical minimalism in Kurosawa’s Kumonosu-jô’, in Sonia Massai (ed.), World-Wide Shakespeares: Local appropriations in film and performance. London and New York: Routledge, 149–56. Charnes, Linda (2006), Hamlet’s Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium. London and New York: Routledge. Christensen, Ann C. (1997), ‘Petruchio’s House in Postwar Suburbia: Reinventing the Domestic Woman (Again)’. Post Script, 17, (1), 28–42. Citron, Marcia J. (1994), ‘A Night at the Cinema: Zeffirelli’s Otello and the Genre of Film-Opera’. The Musical Quarterly, 78, (4), 700–41. Cobos, Juan and Miguel Rubio (1966), ‘Welles and Falstaff’. Sight and Sound, 35, (4), 158–63. *Cook, Patrick J. (2011), Cinematic ‘Hamlet’: The Films of Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda. Athens: Ohio University Press. Collick, John (1989), Shakespeare, Cinema and Society. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.



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Crowl, Samuel (1994), ‘The Bow is Bent and Drawn: Kurosawa’s Ran and the Shakespearean Arrow of Desire’. Literature/Film Quarterly, 22, (2), 109–16. *Crowl, Samuel (2008), Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide. New York and London: W. W. Norton. *Crowl, Samuel (2003), Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era. Athens: Ohio University Press. Crowther, Bosley (1955), ‘Screen: Orson Welles revises Othello’. New York Times, 13 September, L27. Daileader, Celia (2010), ‘Weird brothers: What Thomas Middleton’s The Witch can tell us about race, sex, and gender in Macbeth’, in Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson (eds), Weyward ‘Macbeth’: Intersections of Race and Performance. New York: Palgrave, 11–20. D’Amico, Masolino (2010), ‘Zeffirelli and the Theatre’, in Caterina Napoleone (ed.), Franco Zeffirelli Complete Works: Theatre/Opera/Film. London: Thames and Hudson, 82–9. *Davies, Anthony (1988), Filming Shakespeare’s Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. *Dawson, Anthony B. (1995), Shakespeare in Performance: ‘Hamlet’. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Dawson, Anthony B. (2006), ‘Reading Kurosawa Reading Shakespeare’, in Diana E. Henderson (ed.), A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen. Oxford: Blackwell, 155–75. Deats, Sarah M. (1986), ‘Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet: Shakespeare for the Sixties’. Studies in Popular Culture, 9, 84–94. *Donaldson, Peter S. (1990), Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Dovzhenko, Alexander (1973), The Poet as Filmmaker. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. Duckworth, Jo (2013), ‘Remaking Romeo and Juliet’. Grazia, 4 January, 87. ‘La fin des années vingt’ (1971). Cahiers du Cinema, 230, (July), 4–14. Freiberg, Freda (2000), ‘Japanese Cinema’, in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds), World Cinema: Critical Approaches. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 178–84. Galbraith, Stuart, Alexander Jacoby and Tony Rayns (2010), ‘Kurosawa: The Last Emperor’, Sight and Sound, 20, (7), 32–42. Gavazzeni, Giovanni (2010), ‘A Love of the Opera’, in Caterina Napoleone (ed.), Franco Zeffirelli Complete Works: Theatre/Opera/Film. London: Thames and Hudson, 202–11. Gazetas, Aristides (2008), An Introduction to World Cinema, 2nd edn. Jefferson and London: McFarland. Gillies, John, Minami Ryuta, Ruru Li and Poonam Trivedi (2002), ‘Shakespeare on the Stages of Asia’, in Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 259–83. Goldberg, Jonathan (1994), ‘Romeo and Juliet’s Open Rs’, in Jonathan Goldberg (ed.), Queering the Renaissance. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 218–35. Graves, Robert, introd. (1962), Larouse Encyclopedia of Mythology. London: Hamlyn.

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Guneratne, Anthony R. (2008), Shakespeare, Film Studies, and the Visual Cultures of Modernity. New York: Palgrave. Guntner, J. Lawrence (2000), ‘Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear on Film’, in Russell Jackson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 117–34. Gurewitsch, Matthew (2010), ‘Zeffirelliana’, in Caterina Napoleone (ed.), Franco Zeffirelli Complete Works: Theatre/Opera/Film. London: Thames and Hudson, 8–17. Hapgood, Robert (1987), ‘Chimes at Midnight from Stage to Screen: The Art of Adaptation’. Shakespeare Survey, 39, 39–52. *Hapgood, Robert (1994), ‘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: Cambridge University Press, 234–49. *Hapgood, Robert (1997), ‘Popularizing Shakespeare: The Artistry of Franco Zeffirelli’, in Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt (eds), Shakespeare, the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video. London and New York: Routledge, 80–94. Hodgdon, Barbara (1994), ‘The Critic, the Poor Player, Prince Hamlet, and the Lady in the Dark’, in Russ McDonald (ed.), Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, pp. 259–93. *Hodgdon, Barbara (1998), The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Holderness, Graham (1989), Shakespeare in Performance: ‘The Taming of the Shrew’. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Howard, Tony (2008), ‘Do the gods weep?’. Around the Globe, 39, (Summer), 42–3. *Howlett, Kathy M. (2000), Framing Shakespeare on Film. Athens: Ohio University Press. Huang, Alexander C. Y. (2010), ‘Asian-American Theatre Reimagined: Shogun Macbeth’, in Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson (eds), Weyward ‘Macbeth’: Intersections of Race and Performance. New York: Palgrave, 121–5. Hutchinson, Rachael (2006), ‘Orientalism or Occidentalism? Dynamics of Appropriation in Akira Kurosawa’, in Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (eds), Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film. London and New York: Wallflower, 173–87. Johansen, Ib (1994), ‘Visible Darkness: Shakespeare’s King Lear and Kurosawa’s Ran’. The Dolphin, 24, 64–86. Johnson, Randall and Robert Stam, (eds) (1995), Brazilian Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. Jones, Nicholas (2005), ‘A bogus hero: Welles’s Othello and the construction of race’. Shakespeare Bulletin, 23, (1), 9–28. *Jorgens, Jack J. (1977), Shakespeare on Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kadono, Izumi (1999), ‘The Kabuki Version of Hamlet: Hamlet Yamoto No Nishikie’. Shakespeare Yearbook, 9, 105–21. Kane, Julie (1997), ‘From the Baroque to Wabi: Translating Animal Imagery from Shakespeare’s King Lear to Kurosawa’s Ran’. Literature/Film Quarterly, 25, (2), 146–51.



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Kashner, Sam and Nancy Schoenberger (2010), Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor/ Richard Burton, the Marriage of the Century. London: JR Books. *Kishi, Tetsuo and Graham Bradshaw (2005), Shakespeare in Japan. London and New York: Continuum. Komatsu, Hiroshi (1996), ‘Akira Kurosawa’, in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed.), The Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 716. Kozintsev, Grigori (1959), ‘Deep Screen’. Sight and Sound, 28, (3), 156–60. *Kozintsev, Grigori (1966), Shakespeare: Time and Conscience, trans. Joyce Vining. New York: Hill and Wang. Kozintsev, Grigori (1973), ‘A Child of the Revolution’, in Luda and Jean Schnitzer and Marcel Martin (eds), Cinema in Revolution: The Heroic Era of the Soviet Film. New York: De Capo Press, 90–108. *Kozintsev, Grigori (1977), King Lear: The Space of Tragedy, trans. Mary Mackintosh. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Kozintsev, Grigori (1984), Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, (ed.) Iakov Butovskii and Valentina Kozintseva, 5 vols. Leningrad: Iskusstvo. Kozintsev, Grigori (1996), Vash Grigorii Kozintsev, (ed.) Iakov Butovkskii and Valentina Kozintseva. Moskva: Artist, Rezhisser, Teatr. Kranz, David L. (2008), ‘Tracking the Sounds of Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew’. Literature/Film Quarterly, 36, (2), 94–112. Kurosawa, Akira (1992), ‘Seven Samurai’ and Other Screenplays. London: Faber. Kurosawa, Akira (1983), Something Like an Autobiography, trans. Audie E. Bock. New York: Vintage Books. Kurosawa, Akira, Hideo Oguni and Ide Masato (1986), Ran, trans. Tadashi Shishido. Boston and London: Shambhala. *Leaming, Barbara (1980), Grigori Kozintsev. Boston: Twayne Publishers. *Leaming, Barbara (1985), Orson Welles. New York: Viking. Lehmann, Courtney (2010), Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’: The Relationship between Text and Film. London: A & C Black. Litvin, Margaret (2007), ‘Vanishing Intertexts in the Arab Hamlet Tradition’. Critical Survey, 19, (3), 74–94. Loehlin, James N. (2000), ‘“These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends”: Baz Luhrmann’s Millennial Shakespeare’, in Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (eds), Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 121–36. *Lyons, Bridget Gellert (ed.) (1988), Chimes at Midnight. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. MacLiammóir, Micheál (1952), Put Money in Thy Purse: The Diary of the Film of Othello. London: Methuen. *McBride, Joseph (1972), Orson Welles. New York: Viking. McBride, Joseph (2006), Whatever Happened to Orson Welles? Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. McClean, James L. (2002), Japan: A Modern History. New York and London: Norton. McKain, Aaron (2005), ‘Not necessarily not the news: Gatekeeping, remediation, and The Daily Show’. The Journal of American Culture, 28, (4), 415–30. Manvell, Roger (1971), Shakespeare and the Film. London: Dent. Matisoff, Susan (1979), ‘Images of Exile and Pilgrimage: Zeami’s Kintōsho’. Monumenta Nipponica, 34, (4), 449–65.

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Mereghetti, Paolo (2011), Masters of Cinema: Orson Welles. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma. *Napoleone, Caterina (2010), ‘A Passion for Art and for Life: In Conversation with Franco Zeffirelli’, in Caterina Napoleone (ed.), Franco Zeffirelli Complete Works: Theatre/Opera/Film. London: Thames and Hudson, 18–79. Naremore, James (1989), The Magic World of Orson Welles. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press. Newstok, Scott L. (2010), ‘After Welles: Re-do voodoo Macbeths’, in Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson (eds), Weyward ‘Macbeth’: Intersections of Race and Performance. New York: Palgrave, 91–100. Newstok, Scott L. (2005), ‘Touch of Shakespeare: Welles unmoors Othello’. Shakespeare Bulletin, 23, (1), 29–86. Osborne, Laurie (1995), ‘Filming Shakespeare in a Cultural Thaw: Soviet Appropriations of Shakespearean Tragedies 1955–6’. Textual Practice, 9, (2), 325–47. Parker, Brian (1997), ‘Nature and Society in Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood’. University of Toronto Quarterly, 66, (3), 508–25. *Pilkington, Ace G. (1994), ‘Zeffirelli’s Shakespeare’, in Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells (eds), Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 163–79. Pearlman, Elihu (1986), ‘Macbeth on Film: Politics’. Shakespeare Survey, 39, 67–74. Perret, Marion D. (1990), ‘Kurosawa’s Hamlet: Samurai in Business Dress’. Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, 15, (1), 6. Prince, Stephen (1999), The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Prokhurov, Alexander (2001), ‘The Unknown New Wave: Soviet Cinema of the 1960s’, in Alexander Prokhurov (ed.), Springtime for Soviet Cinema: Re/Viewing the 1960s. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Russian Film Symposium, 7–28. Rees, Jasper (2010), ‘Interview: Franco Zeffirelli’. The Sunday Times Magazine, 24 October, 56–65. *Richie, Donald (1998), The Films of Akira Kurosawa, 3rd edn. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Richie, Donald (1971), Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1971. *Rippy, Marguerite (2009), Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective. Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press. Rosenbaum, Jonathan (2007), Discovering Orson Welles. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. *Rothwell, Kenneth S. (2004), A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rothwell, Kenneth S. (1995), ‘Akira Kurosawa and the Shakespearean Vision: The Bad Sleep Well as a “Mirror up to Nature”’. Shakespeare Worldwide: Translation and Adaptation, 14–15, 169–85. Rubython, Tom (2011), And God Created Burton. London: Myrtle Press. Rutter, Carol Chillington (2001), Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage. London and New York: Routledge. Ryuta, Minami, Ian Carruthers and John Gillies (2001), ‘Introduction’, in Minami Ryuta, Ian Carruthers and John Gillies (eds), Performing Shakespeare in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–14.



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Said, Edward (1979), Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Senda, Akihiko (1998), ‘The rebirth of Shakespeare in Japan: From the 1960s to the 1990s’, in Takashi Sasayama, J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (eds), Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 15–37. Sheplock, Sarah (2011), ‘“Contending with fretful elements”: Shakespeare, Kurosawa and the Benshi’. Anglistica, 15, (2), 1–14. Sokolyansky, Mark (2007), ‘Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet and King Lear’, in Russell Jackson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 203–15. Stankovic, Peter (2012), ‘A small cinema from the other side of the Alps: A historical overview of Slovenian films’. Film History, 24, (1), 35–55. Suzuki, Erin (2006), ‘Lost in Translation: Reconsidering Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood’. Literature/Film Quarterly, 34, (2), 93–103. Tessier, Max (1985), ‘Propos d’Akira Kurosawa’. La Revue du Cinéma, 408, (September), 67–70. *Thompson, Ann and John O. Thompson (2006), ‘Pertinent Likenesses: Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well as a Version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet’. Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Society of Japan, 44, 17–27. Thompson, Ayanna (2010), ‘What is a ‘Weyward’ Macbeth?’, in Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson (eds), Weyward ‘Macbeth’: Intersections of Race and Performance. New York: Palgrave, 3–10. Tibbets, John C. (1994), ‘Breaking the Classical Barrier: Franco Zeffirelli Interviewed by John Tibbets’. Literature/Film Quarterly, 22, (2), 136–40. *Troncale, Joseph (1992), ‘The War and Kozintsev’s Films’, in Anna Lawton (ed.), The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 193–210. Van Watson, William (1992), ‘Shakespeare, Zeffirelli, and the Homosexual Gaze’. Literature/Film Quarterly, 20, (4), 308–25. Wray, Ramona (2010), ‘Henry’s Desperate Housewives: The Tudors, the Politics of Historiography, and the Beautiful Body of Jonathan Rhys Meyers’, in Greg Colón Semenza (ed.), The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time. New York: Palgrave, 25–42. Wray, Ramona and Mark Thornton Burnett (2000), ‘From the Horse’s Mouth: Branagh on the Bard’, in Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (eds), Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 165–78. Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro (2000), Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press. Zambrano, Ana Laura (1974), ‘Throne of Blood: Kurosawa’s Macbeth’. Literature/Film Quarterly, 2, (3), 262–74. *Zeffirelli, Franco (1986), The Autobiography of Franco Zeffirelli. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. *Zeffirelli, Franco (2010), ‘Preface’, in Caterina Napoleone (ed.), Franco Zeffirelli Complete Works: Theatre/Opera/Film. London: Thames and Hudson, 6–7. Zeffirelli, Franco (2010), ‘Hamlet’, in Caterina Napoleone (ed.), Franco Zeffirelli Complete Works: Theatre/Opera/Film. London: Thames and Hudson, 468–73.

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Web Sources Bergan, Ronald (2012), ‘Isuzu Yamada Obituary’. The Guardian, 11 July, http:// www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jul/11/izuzu-yamada (accessed 21 August 2012). Crowther, Bosley (1967), ‘Orson Welles’s FALSTAFF: One of the greatest movies ever made’. New York Times, 20 March, http://wellesnet.com (accessed 30 July 2012). ‘Much Ado About Nothing (1967)’, http://www.screenonline.org.uk (accessed 3 July 2012). Rosenbaum, Jonathan (2006), ‘King Lear: A proposed film by Orson Welles’, 25 May, http://wellesnet.com (accessed 30 July 2012). Welles, Orson (1978), ‘Filming Othello: A complete transcription’, http://wellesnet. com (accessed 30 July 2012).

Index

Aboudoma, Mahmoud 136, 137–9 ‘act of looking’ 153–4 action film genre 170–1 action hero 171, 172, 179 Adventures of Octyabrina, The (1924) 95 agitki (agitational) genre 94, 103, 133, 139 Aida (La Scala Production, 2006) 141 Almereyda, Michael 89, 176, 182 Alone (1931) 97 Antony and Cleopatra (Samuel Barber opera, 1966) 144 Atsumori (Noh play) 82 authenticity 58, 143, 161–2, 182 Bad Sleep Well, The (1960) 54–5, 57, 68–78 aural landscape 75–6 conflict between old and new 72 corporate corruption 69–71, 73–4 doom-laden relationship 75 ghosts 76, 77 Hamlet adaptations in 74–5 Hamlet and 69–78 hidden realities 74 hopelessness 77 madness 74 mise-en-scène 70, 75 Nishi’s death 76–7 obedience and protectorship 71 obfuscation 70, 74, 75 political and corporate themes 78 political discontent 71–2 secretive behaviours 73 sense of duty 71 sleeping 78 suicide 69, 71, 75

surveillance 75 Tokyo setting 71 urban blight 72 volcano scene 72 Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru (Japanese title) 78 wedding scene 72–4 Banquet, The (2006) 89 Banquo (character) 20–1 bardolatry 145 Batman (comic) 109 Bazin, André 50–1 benshi (all-purpose narrator) 73–4, 77 Bergman, Ingmar 117 Beware of the Car (1966) 136 biomechanics 94, 111 Bitka na Neretvi (Battle of Neretva) (1969) 53 black and white cinematography 35, 37, 46, 66, 119 blackface 26–7 Bogdanovich, Peter 50, 51 Branagh, Kenneth 89, 182–3 Brook, Peter 117, 169 and Kozinstev 134–6 Lear 135–6 television King Lear (1953) 12, 14, 41, 43–7 Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972) 143 Burton, Richard 147–8, 151, 152–3, 154 Burton-Taylor relationship 147–8, 151–2, 154–5, 157 camera work 52–3, 61 angle 17, 23, 24, 27, 38, 181 extreme 12, 52, 103 foreshortened 67

196 Index multiple 54 wide 60 as audience’s gaze 13 as disorientation 22 hand-held 159 horizontal wipes 60 as sense of self 22 shots close-up 146, 152, 153, 174, 176–7 crane-shot 158 deep focus 12 extreme close-up 163 eye-line matches 174 length of 12, 23, 61, 104 reaction 174 static 60, 61 tracking 54, 161, 174 visual rhetoric 120 wide-angle 60 Castellani, Franco 179 casting 151, 153, 174, 179–80, 183 Hollywood stars 147, 148, 170 inexperienced actors 161–2 Castle of Flames (1960) 88–9 ‘chain of tricks, the’ 96 Chimes at Midnight/Campanadas a Medianoche/Falstaff (1966) 8, 9–10, 15, 34–41 Battle of Shrewsbury sequence 37–8 black and white 35, 37 burden of kingship 40–1 friendship betrayed 34 graphic violence 38–9 several versions 34–5 sound 39–40 speeches instead of asides 40–1 Chimes at Midnight (play in Belfast, 1960) 34 circus aesthetics 93, 111 Citizen Kane (1941) 12, 23, 50 Claudius (character) 110, 174 Close, Glenn 174 collage 25, 52 colour-blind casting 8–9, 52 colours 176, 180, 181 colour-coding 84, 152, 159 muted 171

comedy 28–29, 40 farce 150–1 jokes 171 slapstick comedy 151, 181 and tragedy 38 costumes Hamlet 170, 175, 180 Romeo and Juliet 159–60, 163 The Taming of the Shrew 149, 152–3 Cordelia (character) 122, 131, 132 Crowther, Bosley 32, 36 cutting text 16–17, 27, 40, 52, 57, 126, 182 pared-down dialogue 64 radical rearrangement of the text 175, 176 severe cuts 12 Dal, Oleg 123 Dance of the Scorpions (play, 1989) 136, 138 Deep, The (1967–9) 14 Devil’s Wheel, The (1926) 95–6 Don Quixote (1957) 102–3 Donati, Danilo 149, 159 drums as theme 18, 21, 60 Drunken Angel (1948) 55–6 dubbed dialogue 120–1 editing 17, 20, 24, 27–8 Edwards, Hilton 8 Eisenstein, Sergei 22, 23, 29, 96, 97, 139 Epistle on Verse Composition (book, 1748) 99 Everybody’s Shakespeare (re-titled the Mercury Shakespeare) 7, 8 ‘Evolution of Film Language, The’, Bazin (essay) 51 expressionism 15, 22, 27, 52 Exter, Alexandra 93 F for Fake (1973) 14, 15 Fabrika Ekstesentricheskogo Aktëra 93–4 Factory of the Eccentric Actor, The (FEKS) 93–4, 96, 98, 108, 111, 123, 124–5

Index Falstaff (character) 8, 9–10, 16, 35, 37 and Henry 34–5, 37, 39 as England betrayed 36 Falstaff (Verdi opera, 1956) 144 Federal Theatre Project 8–9 film noir 14, 26–7, 30, 32–3 Filming Othello (1978) 8, 15, 25, 26, 41, 48–50, 52 boundaries of documentary 14 conversation 48–9 pseudo-documentary 49, 51 sound quality 28 ‘tail-eating snake’ 29 First Person Singular: Mercury Theatre on the Air (radio) 10 Five Kings (play, Mercury Theatre, 1939) 9, 34–5, 36 Fool, The (character) 122–4, 132–3, 139–40 Ford, John 12, 39 Franco Zeffirelli Complete Works: Theatre/ Opera/Film (book) 141–2, 146 Frid, Yan 101 Gamlet (1964) 103–16, 137–9 all but Hamlet as scenery 107 castle 103 deus-ex-machina 105–6 direct address to audience 113 dismemberment 110 mise-en-scène 96, 104 never shown on US television 134 ‘Oblomov’ 103, 107, 111 prisons 106, 115 shadows 103 Special Jury Prize at Venice Film Festival 134 gaze 163–4, 173–4 triangulated 174 woman’s 156 gendai-mono (modern/contemporary) genre 55–6, 68 Gerdt, Zinovi 121 Ghost (character in Hamlet) 76, 77 as disunification 108–10, 175–6, 177 as Hamlet’s imagination 169 Gibson, Mel 170–1, 172, 174, 177, 178

197

Gloucester (character) 45–6, 82, 117–18, 125, 127 Godard, Jean-Luc 14, 52 Graver, Gary 14 Graduate, The (1967) 162 ‘great speeches’ 25, 26 Gunasundari Katha (Telegu language King Lear film, 1949) 90 Hamlet (character) and commoners 111 as conscientious objector 106–7 death 116 and Don Quixote 102–3 at ease 179–80 and Gertrude 169 and his course of action 114 madness 112–13 as messianic figure 112 moving constantly 177–8 and Ophelia 114–15 as Perseus 113 as scholar 172 violence of 177, 178–9 Hamlet (play) banned in Russia 100 closet scene 175–6 death 76–7 Denmark as prison 113 Elsinore castle 112, 171–2 Mousetrap, The, sequence 180 Oedipal subtext 174, 175–6 Old Hamlet’s funeral 174 play-within-a-play 70, 73 ‘Priam’s slaughter’ 112 sword 177–8 ‘To be, or not to be’ 113, 173 travelling players scene 111–12, 179–81 Yorrick’s skull 179 Hamlet (play in Russian, 1828) 100 Hamlet (play adaptation, 1886) 57 Hamlet (play, Teatro Eliseo, Rome, 1963) 144, 169, 179 Hamlet (1964) 102, 133 Hamlet (play planned Los Angeles, 1979) 169–70

198 Index Hamlet (1990) 143–4, 145, 169–81, 182 books 172 dialogue actualized 172–3 female-identified spaces and pursuits 175 hands 176–7 heritage-style images 171 high contrast 172 high drama moments 169 period setting, 170 personality driven 169 radical rearrangement of the text 175, 176 sets 169–70, 171 sheer walls 173 sun 172 surveillance 178 sword 177–8 Hamlet (2000) 89, 182, 184 Hamlet (play, 2007) 88 Hamlet Yamoto No Nishikie (Kabuki style play, 1992, 1997) 87 ‘Hamletism’ 100, 102–3, 104, 114 hanging bodies as theme 22, 24, 30, 38–9 Hara, Masatoshi 57 Harry Lime (radio series) 14 Heart of Darkness (proposed film adaptation) 13, 22–3, 35 Henry IV (character) 35, 40 Henry V (1989) 182 Herança, A (Brazilian Hamlet, 1971) 90 Hill, Roger 8 Hiroshima 118–19, 127 Historia Regum Britanniae (book) 132 Holinshed’s Chronicles (book) 37, 38–9 Holy Father (character) 18–21, 24 horror film genre 121 Houseman, John 8–9, 10 Hussey, Olivia 162, 163 Iago (character) 28–9, 31 Idiot, The (1951) 56 Ikiru (1952) 56 intertexuality 41, 50, 67, 70, 82–3 Intikam Meleği/Kadin Hamlet (Turkish, 1976) 90

It’s All True (1942) 14, 15, 31, 33, 53 Izumi, Noriko 87 Jane Eyre (1996) 143 Japan cultural forms 55 film industry 56–7 post-war Japan 55, 59, 70–1, 121 Shakespeare 57, 87 theatrical elements 59–60 US-Japan Security Treaty 72 values 58 Jesus of Nazareth (TV series, 1977) 143 jidai-geki (period) genre 55–6, 59, 78, 88–9 Julius Caesar (play) banned in Russia 100 translated and adapted to Russian (1787) 99–100 Julius Caesar (translation, 1884) 57 Julius Caesar (‘fascist’, 1937) 11, 52 Julius Caesar (‘fascist’ on radio, 1938) 10, 11 Julius Caesar (1953) 52 Kabuki theatre in Moscow 117 Kagemusha (1980) 55 Karamzin, Nickolai 99–100 Khrushchev, Nikita 101–2, 104–5 King Lear (character) and Cordelia 127–31 and Gloucester 125–6 and madness 124 and mask of power 122 King Lear (play) as tragedy of old age and decline 45–7 ugliness of Goneril and Regan 122 King Lear (Mercury Summer Theatre radio, 1946) 11, 12, 42, 43, 45, 47–8 King Lear (play, New York City centre, 1956) 42 King Lear (unfinished Welles film, 1980s) 8, 14, 42–8 black and white 46 lack of sound 42 shipwreck 45, 47

Index Kodar, Oja 14, 42, 46–7 Korol Lir (1971) 116–34 black and white 119 cuts to text 126 director and composer 128–9 dubbing 120–1 eyes 120 humans and animals 123–4 ‘humour of cruelty’ 118 hunt in montage 123–4 inversion 124–5 language barrier 120–1 ‘Lear of the nuclear age’ 119 ‘martial’ love 130 mise-en-scène 117 off-screen noise 123 outcasts in relation to nobility 121–2 scarecrow 126–7 seagull 131 sound 131 ‘the space of tragedy’ 119 use of natural materials 119 visual rhetoric 120 Kozintsev, Grigori 90, 92, 93, 133 ‘agit trains’ 93, 112 director and composer 128–9 in Egypt 137–8 in Japan 117–18, 135 and Khrushchev 133–4 and Kurosawa 134–5 and Lear 117 legacy and influence 134–40 in Leningrad 93 and Ophelia 108 and Pasternak 126 Shakespeare films on DVD 134 and Stalin 133 Zen gardens 118, 121, 127 Kuchelbeckler, Wilhelm 100 Kurita, Yosihiro 88 Kurosawa, Akira 54, 55–9, 62, 117, 126 as auteur 54, 89, 90 cutting text 57 dynamic and affective film style 54 expressive and gestural aesthetic 54 Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival 55

199

in Hollywood 56 influence and legacy 87–91 and Kozintsev 134–5 literary adaptation 56 and Macbeth 59 mise-en-scène 89 Photo Chemical Laboratories (PCL) 55 reinvention 56, 57 as representative of non-Anglophone Shakespeare 90 Kurosawa Productions 57 Kurozuka (Noh play) 62 Lady from Shanghai, The (1947–8) 14, 19, 30 Lady Macbeth (character) 21–2, 23, 63–4 Landin, Bo 89 Lenin, Vladimir and cinema 94–5, 97 Lenfilm 119 Lenin Theatre 93 lighting 148–9, 159, 169 chiaroscuro 22 film noir 26–7 high-contrast 12 natural 159, 172, 183 ‘Little Theatre’ 58 location filming 24–5, 26, 119–20 Crimea 113 England and Scotland 171 exterior shots 33, 35 imagined locations 147 Italian 157, 159, 182, 183 real locations 161 ‘look’ of actors 152, 153, 170 Looking for Richard (1996) 52 Lower Depths, The (1957) 56 Lucia di Lammermoor (opera ROH, Covent Garden, 1959) 143 Luhrmann, Baz 150, 160–1, 168, 181–2 Macbeth (Haitian, Voodoo play, WPA Negro Theatre, 1936) 8–9, 17–18, 21, 52

200 Index Macbeth (play, Salt Lake City, 1947) 18 Macbeth (1948) 8, 9, 11, 13, 17–24 asides 20 brutality 21–2 castle exterior 18 Celtic crosses 22, 23 chiaroscuro lighting 22 Christian/primitive landscape 19, 24, 25 decapitation 21–2, 24 execution 19, 21–2 imagery of evil 23–4 individual and society 16 moral decline 17, 20–1, 24, 25 moral struggle 19, 20, 23 sense of vertigo 29 sticks as symbols of witches 22, 24 supernatural 17–18 Macbeth (play, 1980) 88 Macbeth (Sámi language film, 2004) 89 Macbeth (Noh drama, 2006) 87–8 McEnery, John 164 MacLiammóir, Micheál 8, 25, 28–9, 30, 44, 50 Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942) 13 Mankiewicz, Herman 12, 52 Maqbool (2004) 89 masculinity as theme 152–3, 160, 181 mask-like acting 59–60, 64 masks 112–13 Merchant of Venice, The (Kabuki-style drama, 1885) 57 Mercury Theatre group 7, 8, 9–10, 11 Mercutio (character) 164–6 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 94, 97–8, 111, 139 microphysiognomy 98, 112, 113 Mr Arkadin (1955) 14 Mizoguchi, Kenji 58–9 Monmouth, Geoffrey of 132 monologue 15, 16, 23, 40, 107 montage 22, 67, 68, 128–9, 154, 181 ‘collision montage’ 96, 97, 98 ‘rhythmic montage’ 22 western-style 56 Mori, Môtonari 78–87 Much Ado About Nothing (play, Old Vic, London, 1965) 144, 147

Much Ado About Nothing (1993) 183 music 43, 52, 60–1, 146, 155–6, 158–9, 184 Napoleone, Caterina 141 New Babylon, The (1929) 96 ‘New Comedy’ 150 Ninagawa, Yukio 87, 88 Noh acting conventions 84 musical elements 60 theatre 59–60, 68, 82, 109–10, 117, 122 warrior 109 ‘warrior ghost plays’ 63 Olivier, Laurence 10, 17, 25, 174 cuts text 145 Hamlet (1948) 31, 75, 104, 106, 107, 171, 174, 179 Henry V (1944) 158 as Henry V 36, 37 Othello (1965) 26 remarked Kozintsev’s Lir was best Shakespeare adaptation ever made 134 voiceover to Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet 158, 168–9 and Welles 26–7, 28 Ong, Ken Sen 87, 88 Ophelia (character) 107–8, 115, 174–5 ostranenie (making strange) 94 Othello (character) 29–30, 32, 33 Othello (1952) 8, 11, 14, 24–34 cages 31 Cannes version (1952) 8, 25 chessboards 30, 31 Christian/primitive landscape 19, 24, 25 civilisation in decline 30–1 dog 29 dubbed dialogue 28, 33 epileptic fit 30 funeral 30–1, 32 images of moral decline 29–30, 32–3 individual and landscape 31

Index labyrinths 31, 33 light and dark 30, 32–3 mirrors 31 publicity photo 32 race through performance 26–7, 32 sense of vertigo 29 several versions 25 sound 33–4, 38 stick-like crosses 30–1 Othello (play, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford, 1961) 144 Otello (Verdi opera, 1972) 144 Other Side of the Wind, The (unfinished film, 1974) 14, 51 Orson Welles: The One Man Band (documentary, 1995) 42 Ozu, Yasujiro 58 Pasternak, Boris 100, 121 pastiche 9, 16, 17, 28 point of view 22, 153–4, 163 Polonius (character) 110–11 Poor Tom (character) 44, 82 popularism 144, 146, 183, 184 Postlethwaite, Pete 179–80 Psycho (1960) 29 Pushkin, Alexander 100 Put Money in Thy Purse (1952) 25 Ran (1985) 54–5, 57, 58, 78–87, 135 Amida Buddha 82, 86–7 animals 83–4 Azura Castle 85–6 backstory to character 81–3 birds 83 birth order 79 broken bonds 79 chaos 79–80, 85 clouds 80 crumbling authority 80–1, 85 diegesis 85 gender role 80–2 hell 84–5, 86 horses 83 hybrid narrative 78–87 identity 76–7 sound 85

201

natural and psychic elements 80 published screenplay 86 role of Kaede 80–2 spectacle 84 suicide 87 Third Castle sequence 84, 86 wretchedness 86 Rashomon (1950) 55, 88 realism 158, 159, 171 and fantasy 149 Renaissance art 146, 148–9, 170, 182 Rhapsody in August (1991) 56 Riazanov, El’dar 136–7 Richardson, Ralph 37, 38–9 Roderigo (character) 28–9 Romani Kris: Cigánytörvény/Gypsy Lore (Hungarian film of King Lear, 1997) 90 Romeo and Juliet (play, Old Vic, London, 1960) 144, 157, 158 Romeo and Juliet (1968) 143, 145, 150, 157–69, 181, 183 Academy Award nomination 143 balcony scene 161 bells 160 blocking 163, 168 budget 161–2 Catholicism 161 church 160–1, 168 circles 167, 169 diegetic noise and music 159 eroticism 164–5 faces and bodies 164 fight as high-school brawl 166 hair 158, 163 handkerchief 165 hands 167 movement maximised 161 obfuscation 158–9, 165 parents and children 162 scene paralleling 166–8 spectacular set-piece 160 setting 157 structural symmetry 167–8 sun 158–9, 165 teenagers 162–3, 166 Romeo and Juliet (2013) 182

202 Index Romeo I Dzhulyetta (Bolshoi performance, 1954) 101 Rota, Nina 147, 149, 155–6, 158–9 Rubython, Tom 148 Russian Constructivism 93–4, 97, 105 film industry 94–5 Formalism 94, 97 political history 92–140 Ryutopia Noh Theatre 88 samurai 59, 61, 63 Sansho the Bailiff (1954) 58 Sartre, Jean-Paul 50 Scherpf, Alex 89 Semimaru (Noh play) 82 Senso (1954) 142 Seven Samurai (1954) 55 Seventh Seal, The (1956) 117, 127 sexuality 21, 160, 175–6, 183 Shakespeare, William as showman 25 global Bard 183 studies in 1970s and 1980s 145 Shakespeare Behind Bars (documentary, 2005) 52 Shakespea(Re)-Told (BBC TV, 2005) 181, 183 Shendrikova, Valentina 117 Shostakovich, Dmitri 96, 103–4, 107–8, 128–9, 137 Silberman, Serge 57 Silovic, Vassili 42 Simple People (Plain People) (1945) 99, 102, 133 Smoktunovskii, Innokentii 105, 107, 113, 137 soliloquies 107 cut 114 silent 98 ‘To be, or not to be’ 113, 173 sound and image 37, 54, 97, 98, 131 but no speech 38 diegetic noise and music 149 dissonance 33–4 lack of 42, 85

off-screen noise 123 real and simulated 60 soundtrack 66, 68, 103–4, 128–9, 149, 184 Soviet cinema agitki (agitational) genre 94, 103, 133, 139 anti-capitalist propaganda 95 anti-Tsarist 100 Brezhnev, Leonid 134 cinefication of the countryside 94–5 ‘de-Stalinization’ 101 film-makers 53 foreign films banned in Russia 97 ‘frozen Revolution’ 98 as propaganda 94–5, 96 ‘Secret Speech’ 1956 101, 104–5 Thaw, the 101–3, 104–5, 108, 109, 133–4 Stagecoach (1939) 39 Stalin, Joseph 101, 103, 118–19 and the cinema 96–8 ‘de-Stalinization’ 101 hatred of Hamlet 103 Socialist Realism 92, 97–8, 99 Stray Dog (1949) 56 subplot 10, 12, 152 Edgar/Edmund subplot cut 42, 43–4, 45–6, 47 Sumarokov, Alexander 99 Tai, Kato 88–9 Takemitsu, Tôru 85 Tale of the Heike, The (Japanese story) 66 Tale of Two Cities (radio, 1938) 35 Taming of the Shrew, The (1967) 143, 145, 147–57, 181 carnival atmosphere 147, 150 children 156–7 Christopher Sly Induction 148, 149 diegetic noise and music 149 money as theme 156 and Much Ado About Nothing 147 operatic set 149 ‘painterly look’ 148 Petruchio’s castle 156 physicality 151

Index to-and-fro of relationship 155 woman’s perspective 153–4 Tate, Nahum 132 Taylor, Elizabeth 147–8, 151, 152, 156 Taylor-Burton relationship 147–8, 151–2, 154–5, 157 Taymor, Julie 123 Tea with Mussolini (1999) 142 television 11, 56, 184 Tellini, Alfani 142 Tempest, The (play, 1987) 88 Ten Things I Hate About You (1999) 181 Third Man, The (1949) 14 Thomson, Virgil 43 Throne of Blood (1957) 17, 54–5, 57, 58, 59–68, 82, 135 animals 66–7 ‘based on Macbeth’ 64–5 black and white 66 bloodstains 65 bold contrasts 60 boundaries, artificial and fragile 62 Cobweb Castle 61–2, 67, 68 Cobweb Forest 60–2, 64, 65 death of Washizu 67 disorder 59 disorientation 61 endings 67–8 exposure of illusion 67 forbidden room 64–5 horses 65–6, 67 images of stillness 63 Kumonosu-jô (Japanese title) 62 labyrinths 61 light and dark 60 mise-en-scène 62 nature 61, 66–7 no victory speech 67–8 pared-down dialogue 64 real and simulated sound 60 ruination and destruction 59 stage aesthetic 60 supernatural 62–3 wheels 62–3 Thulin, Ingrid 117 Titus (1999) 123 Toho film studio 57

203

Tokyo Globe Theatre 87 Tokyo Story (1953) 58 Tosca (opera ROH, Covent Garden, 1964) 143 Touch of Evil (1958) 14, 30 Trauberg, Leonid 93, 95–6, 97, 98–9 Trial, The (1962) 14, 30 Truffaut, François 12, 14, 41, 50, 53 Tudors, The (HBO TV series) 184 Turgenev, Ivan 100, 102 Twelfth Night (Dvenadtsataia Noch) (1955) 101 ‘Underground’ movement 58 Visconti, Luchino 142–3 War of the Worlds (radio, 1938) 10, 15 Welles, Orson 117, 126 as actor 7, 26, 27, 47 as actor, documentarian and critic 15, 41–50 and adaptation 11, 43 as auteur 7, 36, 52, 53 autobiographical 46 avant-garde artist 36 awards 16 biography and background 7, 8–16 box office 9, 12–13, 53 as brand 11, 15, 50, 51 Campbell’s Soup as sponsor 10 ‘charcoal drawing’ 17, 18 as collaborative artist 8, 17 contemporary themes 17 critics 16–17, 23, 36, 43 duality 35 experimentation 7–8, 13, 17, 25–6, 52–3 film as ongoing project 17, 25 finished films 16–41 focus on central character 10, 12 and Hollywood 11, 14, 48 I Love Lucy 15 independent style of cinema 49–50, 51 influence and legacy 14–15, 41, 48, 51, 50–3

204 Index intimacy with audience 10, 12, 20, 46 Las Vegas nightclub acts 15, 51 and Lear 42–8 and magic 7, 8, 18 mise-en-scène 17, 23, 28, 32 musical influences 48–9 narrative 10, 11, 49 perception and reality 10, 15, 25, 37, 52 as political activist 7, 13–14 post-production artistry 27–8 profligate reputation 19 as protagonist 10, 35–6, 42, 46–7, 52 as radio entertainer 7, 10 RKO 11–12, 13, 51 self-construction 14, 16, 39 and sound 24, 27, 37 television comedies 51 theatre as influence 10 Todd School for Boys 8, 36 unfinished projects 15, 41–8, 50 voiceover 20, 37, 38–9 West Side Story (Broadway, 1961) 162 Western genre 39, 61, 173 ‘What is a Youth’ (song from Romeo and Juliet) 162, 168 Whiting, Leonard 162, 163 Wild Strawberries (1957) 117 William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999) 183 William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) 181–2, 184 Wilson, Richard 19 ‘winged realism’ 115–16 Witches (characters) 18–20, 21, 62, 63

World War II 13–14, 59, 99, 142 Hitler 112, 118–19 Holocaust 127 Third Reich 121 Yamada, Isuzu 60 Yamamoto, Kajiro 55 Yarvet, Yuri 120, 124, 125, 128, 129–30, 131 Yellamma (Telangana language Macbeth, 1999) 90 Yojimbo (1961) 55 youth market 162, 169 Youth of Maxim, The (1935) 98 Yutkevitch, Sergei 93, 101, 107 Zeffirelli, Franco 117, 142 as auteur 146–7 autobiography 146, 157–8 in Britain 143 Catholicism 150 collaborative team 146, 183 critics 144–6 financial success of Shakespeare films 144 and Florentine art scene 142 influence and legacy 146, 181–4 Metropolitan Opera, New York 143 nominated for awards 157 ‘populariser in chief’ 144 revisionist approach 143 ‘ruthless cutter’ 144–5, 182 set design 146, 147 and travelling players 180–1 in US 143 and women 146