Collective paper

SHAKESPEARE ON FILM: EVOLUTION & ANALYSIS

Introduction

In some sectors of the academic field there seems to be a quite extended prejudice against films that are adapted in some way or another from a literary piece of work. It gets much worse if we are talking about adaptations that are apparently unfaithful. Many scholars seem to consider that any revision or update of a classic text tears out part of its originality. Shakespeare is probably the classic author with more works adapted to the screen and that prejudice I mentioned before can be applied to his plays.

A quick search on the Internet about this issue offers us some strong opinions against Shakespearean film adaptations and intense (and also interesting) arguments. A good example of this can be found in Shaksper, an online mailing list for academic discussions on Shakespeare and his plays. We can find there the article “Towards a New Dunciad”, where Charles Weinstein wonders about the legitimacy of what he calls a “pseudo-discipline” in four different points. Weinstein himself summarizes his harsh article in just two sentences: “The plays are masterpieces; the films are not” therefore “these movies aren't good enough or important enough to be the subject of an academic discipline”. Of course, Weinstein is forgetting that plays are meant to be performed, which means that each performance is a revision of the original text in itself… just like films.

Maybe it is true that not all of Shakespeare’s plays adaptations are worthy of being analysed (porn adaptations such as A Midsummer Night’s Cream, Taming of the Screw or As You Lick It are probably not), but the important question is if these cinema versions are able to transmit Shakespeare’s works (his plots, his themes, the richness of his characters, his humour…) to the audiences of the historical moment in which they are produced. Faithful “word by word” adaptations may be well-regarded by literary critics, but they would be a complete failure if they cannot be understood (or enjoyed) by the majority of the public. Our purpose is to answer that question through the study of the development of cinema in the last century and, at the same time, the constant evolution of Shakespearean adaptations to meet with the expectations of different audiences. The first part of this paper will deal mainly with those parallel evolutions.

For the second part, as we did in our previous paper, we have chosen several film versions of plays by Shakespeare to analyse them. However, this time we are going to focus on their cinematographic qualities (use of the camera, lighting, special effects, sound effects, music, the casting of actors…) to link with our description of the history and development of cinema.

Evolution of cinema and Shakespearean adaptations

- Silent films

Although there were earlier experiments concerning the movement of images and optical effects, there is an unspoken agreement to establish the beginning of cinema in the late 1890s, with the invention of the Cinématographe by the Lumière brothers. The first films only showed a single and short scene and most of them were records of real life events. Little by little, the scenes began to grow and to be divided into several actions and some fiction stories and performances were recorded. The figure of the French film director Georges Méliès is one of the most important in the history of early film-making. He founded one of the first film studios and created more than five hundred films in which he applied innovative techniques.

According to Michael LoMonico, the first example of a film adapted from a play by Shakespeare would be a short scene recorded from a theatrical performance of King John playing in 1899 at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. In his article “Shakespeare on Films”, LoMonico states: “Shakespeare was a favorite of the early filmmakers. While Englishmen regarded the whole phenomenon as blasphemous, American, French, German, and Italian filmmakers knew that their audiences would be familiar with the plots and started cranking their cameras […].” This connects with what we said in the introduction about those who reject Shakespeare’s adaptations. It seems that this line of thought started really early. In A History of Shakespeare on Screen, Kenneth S. Rothwell also tells us about King John’s 1899 film adaptation and the following development of cinema.

The second appearance of a Shakespearean film starred the actress Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet in Le Duel d’Hamlet (1900), a short scene that showed the famous duel between Hamlet and Laertes in the final act of the play. The film was first played in the Exposition Universelle of Paris and it was not really a silent movie because it had dubbed dialogues and even sound effects. In fact, it is probably the first film that had a synchronized soundtrack. We have to keep in mind that these early examples of films based on Shakespeare were just recordings of theatrical performances. There was a single and static camera, recording what happened on stage, nothing else.

From that point onwards, film directors (especially French and Italian) created many different film versions of Shakespeare’s works. During the first three decades of the 20th century, around 150.000 silent movies were produced and Rothwell states that about 500 of them were based on Shakespeare’s works in one way or another. These were also the years in which the United States started to surpass old Europe in terms of economy and, as a consequence, culture. American Vitagraph Studios, founded by Blackton and Smith in Manhattan in 1897, were responsible of the first overseas adaptations of Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Anthony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Merchant of Venice, Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, and Twelfth Night), all of them produced between 1908 and 1912. These films started to offer a different view on Shakespearean film. They were no longer a recorded theatrical performance, that is, there were shots taken from different points and distances, especially in their version of Romeo and Juliet. They also included different real locations to record some outdoor scenes, like the duel between Romeo and Tybalt, filmed in Central Park.

In the late 1920s, the silent films were at its summit. Every aspect of silent film-making and acting had been polished and refined, but then the sound era started and changed drastically the history of cinema. Silent movies became obsolete in less than two years.

- Sound era

As everybody knows, The Jazz Singer (1927) is considered the first sound film ever. There were previous experiments with sounds, as we mentioned when talking about Le Duel d’Hamlet, but The Jazz Singer was the first film to include completely synchronized dialogues and singing. Two years after that, silent films had disappeared in the United States. According to Michael LoMonico, that swift transition from silent movies to sound movies can be seen in The Taming of the Shrew 1929’s version, played by Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. This adaptation was filmed as a silent movie, and dialogues had to be added later. The tagline of the film is pretty significant: “All Talking! All Laughing!”

These first years of sound cinema represented a step back in terms of creativity and professionalism. Actors and directors from the silent film era had a rough time trying to adapt to the new format and the same happened to technicians. Theatre directors and actors began to work for the film studios, as both of them had more experience in stories that included dialogues.

The next two decades, from 1930 to 1950 approximately, are considered the Golden Age of Hollywood. Many genres started to develop, and others were born during these years (musical films, for instance), colour film was gradually introduced in the industry, and what is more important: the first real film stars appeared and with them, Hollywood’s glamour. Several Shakespearean films were recorded both in the United States and England, but according to Jackson they were not an economic success:

"None of the first wave of Shakespearean sound films was a financial success. The 1935 Warner Brothers’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream was announced as inaugurating a series to be made with its distinguished co-director, Max Reinhardt, but after its failure at the box-office nothing came of these plans. The opulent Romeo and Juliet directed by George Cukor and produced by Irving Thalberg at MGM was an expensive showcase for Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer. Paul Czinner’s British production of As You Like It […] was no more of a success, for all its lavish production values" (The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film).

Something was wrong with these film adaptations. They were not able to catch the public’s attention or interest. Jackson states that we had to wait until the late 60s, with Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew (1966) and Romeo and Juliet (1968) to have another Shakespearean play successfully adapted to the big screen both artistically and financially. Jackson surprisingly omits the musical West Side Story (1961), that is clearly inspired in Romeo and Juliet and that won ten Oscar awards. In any case, Zeffirelli’s films managed to connect with their contemporary audiences offering less classic versions of the original texts and emphasizing those aspects and themes that are traditionally popular such as love or humour. Robert Hapgood, in his article “Popularizing Shakespeare: The Artistry of Franco Zeffirelli” (v. Bibliography) explains the success of Zeffirelli’s Shakespearean films (the two mentioned before plus 1990’s Hamlet) with a self-explanatory quotation of the Italian director: “I have always felt sure I could break the myth that Shakespeare on stage and screen is only an exercise for the intellectual. I want his plays to be enjoyed by ordinary people.” This declaration of intention probably holds the key as to why Zeffirelli’s films were successful and those before him weren’t. Zeffirelli, just like Shakespeare four centuries ago, made artistic products that could be enjoyed by everybody, perhaps other directors were not aware of who their real audience was.

- Latest years

In the years of the videotapes and the blockbusters, Kenneth Branagh is probably the most important figure of Shakespearean films. He started his career as a director with Henry V (1989), wisely combining cinematographic techniques (such as flashbacks) and theatrical ones (the classical chorus). Russell Jackson states that the humble budget of the film and its great success “appears to have inaugurated a new wave of confidence in Shakespearean projects”. Branagh himself directed Much Ado About Nothing in 1993 (a film that we are going to analyse in this paper) which was also well-considered by the critics.

His next project, however, could be considered a little failure in financial terms. In 1996 he adapted Hamlet word by word, filming a 238 minutes product that made it to the cinemas in a quite shortened version. The reviews were really good. The adaptation respected the original text and, at the same time, updated some of its elements; the action was set in the 20th century and the luminosity of the locations contrasted with the black clothes of the prince of Denmark; important figures of cinema and theatre such as Charlton Heston, Jack Lemmon, Derek Jacobi, Julie Christie or Judi Dench appeared in the credits. Perhaps the only mistake was to make a film only for those who admire the original text. In Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000) the Belfast director tried to innovate again and this time he used the musical genre to retell Shakespeare’s light-hearted story. Branagh’s latest approach to Shakespeare is the adaptation of As You Like It, not yet released in Spain.

In the last years most of Shakespearean film adaptations have followed the same tendency: updating the stories to a contemporary setting and adding current themes. Almost at the same time that Branagh’s Hamlet was premiered, we got another adaptation of a Shakespearean play: Romeo and Juliet. Baz Luhrmann took the action to the streets of Verona Beach, in Los Angeles, where a Romeo played by teen star Leonardo DiCaprio tried to get Juliet’s (Claire Danes) love. The film was fast-paced, just like a musical video clip and offered a shocking modern aesthetic that some disliked, but the truth is that it was really successful. Both Luhrmann and DiCaprio were awarded at the Berlin International Film Festival, and Claire Danes got several prizes such as the Actress of the Year at the London Critics Circle Film Awards. Luhrmann succeeded in addressing a particular audience (teenagers and young people mainly) and creating a film just for them, using narrative codes that they could understand and at the same time respecting the core of the story: love and tragedy.

In a similar way, the last version of Hamlet (2000), directed by Michael Almereyda takes the tragedy of the prince of Denmark (played by Ethan Hawke) to nowadays’ New York. Another example would be O (2001), known in Spain as Laberinto envenenado, which is a revision of Othello’s story set in an American Boarding School where a black student (Mekhi Phifer), the star of the basketball team, falls in love with a white girl (Julia Stiles) and is fooled by one of his team-mates’ treachery (Josh Hartnett).

- Non-western cultures

We cannot forget the adaptations of Shakespeare’s works created in non-western cultures. Ran (1985) and Throne of Blood (1957) by Akira Kurosawa are probably the best-known, but film adaptations of Shakespearean plays have been very common in Bombay’s Bollywood: Omkara (2006) and Maqbool (2003) by Vishal Bharadwaj, based on Othello and Macbeth, are good examples.

Probably the best explanation of this phenomenon is the one offered by the Indian director himself: “Shakespeare is universal because he deals with ordinary human emotions: jealousy, anger, love, envy. His story can be adapted across any language, country or culture. The backdrop is redundant.”

Four examples of Shakespearean adaptations

Conclusion

We started this paper wondering about the way in which Shakespeare’s works have been adapted to cinema in the last century, from the Cinématograph to contemporary films, and also wondering about the success of those adaptations in their effort to transmit Shakespeare’s essence to today’s audiences. Through this paper we have collected evidence and opinions from scholars and experts trying to answer both questions.

The first one, the evolution of Shakespearean films, is answered in our analysis of history of films. We have witnessed that development from silent, black and white, one-scene adaptations like Le Duel d’Hamlet to 1996’s full colour, four-hour-long Hamlet, and also in the four different film adaptations that we have used as an example. Kenneth S. Rothwell summarizes (v.Bibliography) in a simple way this effort of transferring Shakespeare to the cinema:

"The history of Shakespeare in the movies has, after all, been the search for the best available means to replace the verbal with the visual imagination, an inevitable development deplored by some but interpreted by others as not so much a limitation on, as an extension of, Shakespeare’s genius into uncharted seas" (A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television).

The second one can be easily inferred: if there are versions of Shakespearean plays through all of the history of cinema, it is because at least some of them were able to transmit the same ideas, themes and feelings of the original texts. Successful movies (both artistically and financially) like West Side Story or Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet are a consistent proof. In fact, many of these films are used by teachers around the world as substitutes to talk about Shakespeare’s plays (Michael LoMonico tells us about this matter in detail) given the impossibility of assisting to theatrical performances of all the plays. So it really seems that these adaptations are worthy of being studied, therefore contradicting the vehement article by Charles Weinstein we mentioned in the introduction, and not only that, many of these film versions are really enjoyable, even if they are not masterpieces. There is no doubt that some of these films manage to offer new and old audiences more than a glimpse of Shakespeare’s plots and characters.

Of course, as we have said through this paper, there are others who failed in this purpose, but the abstract and ethereal concept of “Shakespearean adaptation” is not to blame for those bad results. A Shakespearean plot (or just loosely inspired in one of the plays written by the Bard) is not a guarantee of a good film, that depends on the director and his idea about the film, on the actors and their performances, on the professionalism of the technicians… just as in a theatrical performance. Theatre and cinema are only two media (with many things in common) in which to perform a certain plot. Considering that one of them is superior to the other “per se” is only the result of an elitist view of culture.

Bibliography and resources

- Shaksper: The Global Electronic Shakespeare Conference. Hardy M. Cook. 16 December 2006
< http://www.shaksper.net/ >

- Weinstein, Charles. “Towards a New Dunciad”. Shaksper: The Global Electronic Shakespeare Conference (28 March 2002) 16 December 2006 < http://www.shaksper.net/archives/2002/0831.html >

- Hearts, Andrew. “The Pound of flesh”. Panopticist (September 2001) 16 December 2006
< http://www.panopticist.com/articles/shakespeare.html >

- EarlyCinema.com. 14 December 2006 < http://www.earlycinema.com/timeline/index.html >

-“Méliès, Georges,” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 14 December 2006
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Melies >

- LoMonico, Michael. “Shakespeare on Films”. In Search of Shakespeare 14 December 2006
< http://www.pbs.org/shakespeare/educators/film/indepth.html >

- Rothwell, Kenneth S. A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004 (Second edition). - A preview of the book in pdf format can be found here: < http://assets.cambridge.org/052183/5372/excerpt/0521835372_excerpt.pdf >

- “Bernhardt, Sarah,” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 15 December 2006
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Bernhardt >

- Jackson, Russell. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000 - A preview of the book in pdf format can be found in the free service Google Books
(http://books.google.com) searching for Jackson, Russell.

- Hapgood, Robert. “Popularizing Shakespeare: The Artistry of Franco Zeffirelli” Shakespeare The Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video. Ed. Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt. London: Routledge, 1997. 80-94.

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