Cinematic Hamlet

The Films of Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda

Patrick J. Cook

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780821443651
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Hamlet has inspired four outstanding film adaptations that continue to delight a wide and varied audience and to offer provocative new interpretations of Shakespeare's most popular play. Cinematic Hamlet contains the first scene-by-scene analysis of the methods used by Laurence Olivier, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Michael Almereyda to translate Hamlet into highly distinctive and remarkably effective films.

Applying recent developments in neuroscience and psychology, Patrick J. Cook argues that film is a medium deploying an abundance of devices whose task it is to direct attention away from the film's viewing processes and toward the object represented. Through careful analysis of each film's devices, he explores the ways in which four brilliant directors rework the play into a radically different medium, engaging the viewer through powerful instinctive drives and creating audiovisual vehicles that support and complement Shakespeare's words and story.

Cinematic Hamlet will prove to be indispensable for anyone wishing to understand how these films rework Shakespeare into the powerful medium of film.

Notes

Introduction

1. I am especially indebted to the many students who have studied with me over the years in a freshman dean’s seminar devoted to Hamlet on film at The George Washington University. As later notes will suggest, the seminars were at times an invaluable laboratory for testing what is perceived by audiences on conscious and unconscious levels.

2. Alan Dent, “Text-Editing Shakespeare with Particular Reference to Hamlet,” in Hamlet: The Film and the Play, ed. Alan Dent (London: World Film Publishers, 1948), 25.

3. Michael Almereyda, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Screenplay Adaptation (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), vii.

4. Thomas M. Leitch, “Twice-Told Tales: Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the Remake,” in Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice, ed. Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 45. Leitch uses the examples of Olivier, Richardson, and Zeffirelli Hamlets to describe not his highest classification, “true remakes,” but his lowest: “[T]he remake ignores or treats as inconsequential” earlier cinematic adaptations. He is right enough about Richardson but not, as shown later in this volume, about Zeffirelli.

5. John A. Mills, Hamlet on Stage: The Great Tradition (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 198.

6. Olivier recalls the visit in his On Acting (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), 79.

7. Peter S. Donaldson, Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 35.

8. Terry Coleman, Olivier (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 58.

9. Ibid., 80.

10. In his 1982 Arden edition note to the line, Harold Jenkins reviews the history of the emendation, which was popularized by John Dover Wilson. Mills, in Hamlet on Stage, 233–37, collects the available information on the Guthrie stage production. Because the latest Arden edition (2006, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor) is likely to prove the standard for scholars, quotations from Hamlet throughout this book cite this edition.

11. Coleman, Olivier, 84.

12. Jan Herman, A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood’s Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1995), 197.

13. Coleman, Olivier, 147.

14. Olivier’s film won four Academy Awards, including best picture. For the most comprehensive treatment of Hamlet’s film lineage, see Bernice Kliman, Hamlet: Film, Television, and Audio Performance (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988). Mention must be made of Grigory Kozintsev’s Gamlet (1964), which is an inspired work of cinema. A self-conscious response to Olivier’s psychological Hamlet, it restores the play’s political dimension, but as a Russian-language work it is beyond the scope of this book and plays only a minor role in the evolving tradition that it traces, although both Almereyda and Branagh have commented on it admiringly. Oddly, Zeffirelli fails to mention Kozintsev in any of his writings and interviews.

15. Franco Zeffirelli, Zeffirelli: The Autobiography (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), 15.

16. Franco Zeffirelli, Zeffirelli: Autobiografia (Milan: Mondadori, 2006), 89.

17. Zeffirelli, Autobiography, 201.

18. Ibid., 69.

19. Ibid., 200.

20. John C.Tibbetts, “Breaking the Classical Barrier: Franco Zeffirelli Interviewed by John Tibbetts,” Literature/Film Quarterly 22 (1994): 139.

21. Zeffirelli, Autobiografia, 378, 387.

22. Kenneth Branagh, Beginning (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 16–17.

23. Mark White, Kenneth Branagh (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 137.

24. Kenneth Branagh, Hamlet by William Shakespeare: Screenplay, Introduction and Film Diary (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996), v.

25. White, Kenneth Branagh, 58–59.

26. Samuel Crowl, The Films of Kenneth Branagh (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 129.

27. Mario Falsetto, Personal Visions: Conversations with Contemporary Film Directors (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2000), 3–6.

28. Almereyda, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, viii.

29. Agee lost his father at age seven. Schiele and Mayakovsky lost theirs at fifteen. Biographers note the shaping trauma of these deaths. Dean lost his mother and was callously abandoned by his father at age nine. The fullest discussion of the “Almereyda affair” is in the opening chapter of P. E. Salles Gomes, Jean Vigo (London: Faber and Faber, 1998). Vigo’s father invented the name as a scatological anagram, from “y a (de) la merde.” Michael Almereyda’s sister is the actress Spencer Kayden, whose surname is probably of Irish origin. If Almereyda’s family background is Irish, the repressed returns very insistently in his films: in the Kansas comedy Twister, the family has lost its Irish mother; in the vampire film Nadja, the character Renfield is from Ireland, a lost paradise referred to nostalgically as “land of music” and “no snakes”; the family of The Eternal returns to the mother’s ancestral home in Ireland and confronts a resurrected druid priestess drawn from Irish mythology; a large map of Ireland hangs in Hamlet’s bedroom. Mark Thornton Burnett, in Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 54–62, makes interesting observations about the uses of Ireland in Almereyda’s Hamlet.

30. David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 898.

31. Salles Gomes, Jean Vigo.

32. Falsetto, Personal Visions, 8.

33. Ibid., 27.

34. Ethan Hawke, introduction to Almereyda, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, xiii–xiv.

35. Teun A. Van Dijk and Walter Kintsch, Strategies of Discourse Comprehension (New York: Academic Press, 1983), 348.

36. Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London: Routledge, 1992), 15.

37. Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact (New York: Vintage, 2005), 39.

38. Stefan Sharff, The Elements of Cinema: Toward a Theory of Cinesthetic Impact (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1.

39. George Barbarow, “Hamlet through a Telescope,” Hudson Review 2 (1949): 103.

40. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 157.

41. Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 78–80.

42. Jean Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema, trans. Christopher King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 89–168.

43. Pavlov’s notion of an orienting reflex reacting to novelty was extensively developed by the Russian “psychophysiologist” Evgeny Sokolov in the 1980s.The series of articles by Lang and her colleagues report for the most part on experiments testing responses to television segments, relying largely on measuring heart rate. The concept was popularized through articles on “television addiction” and by Al Gore’s best-selling The Assault on Reason (New York: Penguin, 2007).

44. Sharff, Elements of Cinema, 157–66.

45. Annie Lang, “The Limited Capacity Model of Mediated Message Processing,” Journal of Communication 50, no. 1 (2000): 46–70.

46. Lang’s conclusions and those produced by researchers of cinematic transitions relying on other empirical methods are not entirely congruent. Lang’s early research concluded that “memory was better for information presented after related cuts than it was for information presented after unrelated cuts” (i.e., within-scene vs. between-scene cuts); see Annie Lang, Seth Geiger, Melody Strickwerda, and Janine Sumner, “The Effects of Related and Unrelated Cuts on Television Viewers’ Attention, Processing Capacity, and Memory,” Communication Research 20 (1993): 4–29. In “Temporal Accent Structure and the Remembering of Filmed Narratives,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 18 (1992): 37–55, M. Boltz found that postviewing memory was better for items at “event boundaries” (scene changes) than for those between event boundaries. Also relevant are Christopher Kurby and Jeffrey Zacks, “Segmentation in the Perception and Memory of Events,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12, no. 2 (2007): 72–79; and Joseph P. Magliano, J. Miller, and R. Zwaan, “Indexing Space and Time in Film Understanding,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 15 (2001): 533–45. The inescapable constant within the research conclusions is that between-scene transitions affect memory differently from within-scene transitions.

47. For a popular account of mirror neurons, see Marco Iacobini, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). For a more technical account, see Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, trans. Frances Anderson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). An important consideration of faces in films, without reference to mirror neurons, is Carl Plantinga, “The Scene of Empathy and the Hum...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet: The Triumph of the Cinesthetic
• Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet: Modernizing Medievalism
• Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet: The Challenges of the Full-Text Screenplay
• Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet: Uncanny Imagination
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index