Third Category Of Shakespeare Film example essay topic

Categories of Shakespeare When dealing with text of Jacobean writers such as Shakespeare, one has a great deal of freedom in interpreting it. His words are full of not only meaning, but entendre's, alliterations, and metaphors that allows a great deal of artistic freedom when actualizing it into performance. Perhaps that is why his plays have been a longtime favorite standard performance material, and more recently (the past 100 years), have become very popular to produce and present in the film medium. What allows for Shakespeare to be presented so easily on film, despite the fact they were written hundreds of years ago when the very idea of film was nonexistent, is the utter portability of his works. By portability I mean there is so much in his plays that can be transposed and realized so beautifully in the movies. The works give a lot of visual freedom to the director, as Shakespeare writes few stage directions.

The concept of visual also plays a huge part in any film, as Peter Holland recognizes in his article Two dimensional Shakespeare: King Lear on Film when he states that Film is primarily a visual medium, a form in which language accompanies sight but cannot dominate it (Davies and Wells, pg. 59). Therefore, film provides a landscape for the enactment of Shakespeare dramas and allow them to be realizes in greater proportions than the restrictions of stage allow. However, presenting Shakespeare on film, which is a medium other than which his works are originally intended, seems to warrant more debate and criticism than ordinary theatrical presentations. Additionally, because of the large amount of film versions of each play, it becomes quickly necessary for a means of categorizing the film of Shakespeare as an agency to compare, contrast, critique, and most importantly, understand not only the work itself, but the value of the work artistically, textually, and in its materialization as a work as a whole. To solve these dilemma, In 1977 Jack Jorgens offered three categories into which Shakespeare films can be usefully divided, categories which mark different and increasing distances from the forms of theater... He suggested three modes: theatrical, realist, cinematic (Davies and Wells, pg. 50).

These three modes are very useful at looking at Shakespeare films and there presentation on film. Theatrical mode of presentation most generally means a production that is presented in the same style as would an actual live theater performance of Shakespeare, and generally tend to be just that: a filmed performance of his work. This type of film is characterized by elements of theater, theatrical lighting, costuming, acting, and most specifically, tends to have more medium and long range shots than the realist and filmic modes. The second category Jorgens determined is the realist mode. The realist mode is an intermediate ground between the theatrical and filmic: that is, its intention is for film, but still desires to stay true to the intentions of Shakespeare, taking into consideration the time period the play is written in, and tries not to modify the text too much.

The realist mode is a way of taking a Shakespearean work and presenting it in an manner that is trying, mostly to merely represent the works of Shakespeare yet at the same time enhancing it by making use of the full range of established film techniques (Davies and Wells, pg. 53). Grigori Kozintsevs King Lear falls under this mode of presentation. The 1970 Russian translation of the work includes sprawling landscapes in black ad white, whose presence often seems to rival that of the actors, a danger Holland realizes when he says At times, of course, the background can take too much precedence over the foreground (Davies and Wells, pg. 53). The work also falls into another danger of cinematic realism and Shakespeare that Holland says is tightly bound up with a traditional liberal- humanist ideology. It makes assumptions about the essential truth of the humanism of a tragedy (Davies and Wells, pg. 55).

Kozintsevs King Lear is based upon his definition of reality being emptiness. He demonstrates this emptiness through his demonstration of the film in a Movement of the play from fiction into realism (Davies and Wells, pg. 55) and a process for Kozintsev that Holland describes as a stripping away of the social mask, the mask of power, to reveal the essential self beneath (Davies and Wells, pg. 55). In this, we can see how his production largely embodies the Marxism statement that Kozintsev was trying to make, a dangerous move in the corrupt and Communist Russia he was living in. Two versions of Macbeth, both Polanski's Macbeth and Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, also fall under this category of realism, and like Kozintsevs King Lear, largely incorporate the landscapes of the play, the background seems more balanced with the action of the play, and rather than competing with the action, they seem to actually reinforce the story. Contrary to theatrical presentations of Shakespeare, these bigger proportions allow the story to be presented in grander, yet more definitive terms that seems to give way to the more realistic style of filmed Shakespeare.

The third category of Shakespeare film is the filmic mode. The filmic mode is a method that Jorgen himself describes as that of the poet, whose works bear the same relation to the surfaces of reality that poems do to ordinary conversation (Davies and Wells, pg. 56). Thus the filmic is a highly visual presentation of Shakespeare, and with the very nature of film be a fulfillment of the directors vision, it allows the director to take more artistic liberty with a Shakespearean work than the other two modes. Peter Holland expands The filmic mode uses all the resources if the camera.

It makes conscious use of what the camera can do, rather than what can be built on the studio sound stage or found on location. It places emphasis on montage and demands that we observe what it is doing, what is theatrically impossible and indeed, in some cases, film ically unusual (Davies and Wells, pg. 57). Orson Wellness 1951 version of Othello is the perfect example of the capabilities that a filmic mode enables to define it against the theatrical presentation. Holland gives an example of a specific scene to illustrate: Wells filmed Othello in the senate scene of Act I against different background from the other characters in the same scene so that the two worlds never quite match up and the audience cannot quite see Othello being in the same room as the Venetian senate; the effect is to demonstrate the complete separation of Othello from the world of Venice (Davies and Wells, pg. 57). Obviously, the filmic mode allows the director to use methods (whether blatant or subtly sub- conscious) to give the audience the greatest and more interactive experience in sympathizing with the story. A fourth mode of Shakespeare that Holland proposed was that of deconstruction.

This method is one that is based around work (s) of Shakespeare, yet edits the material drastically, either by taking away or adding to it (or a combination of both) to make a commentary on the nature of the work itself as Shakespeare intended it. While this category is much harder to define than the other three, it is important to note that this category nonetheless incorporates the original text as the films main basis. There also a second group of categories that Jorgens offers as defining three ways of treating a Shakespeare play, three degrees of distance from the original: presentation, interpretation, and adaptation (Davies and Wells, pg. 57). The second category varies from the first because the first category of four modes main purpose is to chart different distances of the film from theater (Davies and Wells, pg. 57). I think that all of the aforementioned categories are very useful and thorough tools in viewing not only a play by Shakespeare that has been adapted to film but are essential when making and / or viewing any work whose original text is meant for the stage.

These categories instigate a line of rational questioning that is necessary in maintaining the artistic integrity of a work. Tennessee Williams plays are another favorite of filmmakers to carry over into the film medium, and they are only one of many examples of the multitudes of work that is frequently taken from the stage to the big screen. However, perhaps because of the large cannon of work that Shakespeare has written or perhaps because of his brilliant psychological insight of character that allows for easy demonstration of both the inner and outer worlds of the character, Shakespeare still reigns supreme as the playwright whose works are not only most commonly cited but also commonly enacted, whether in film or theater, and Jorgens and Hollands categories give us the viewer and critic an methodical approach at understanding the artistic and technical accomplishments of a presentation of the Great Bards work. Davies and Wells, Shakespeare and the Moving Image: the Plays on Film and Television; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1994.