Page 15 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

4 I Shakespeare in the Movies

Orson Welles and Peter Hall, however, are another matter. Both
dedicated their lives to bringing the words from the page to the
stage—and screen. Hall's line of argument derives from an under-
standing of the essential difference between live theater and motion
pictures as storytelling forms. Film professor Louis Giannetti once
claimed that a blind man at a play would miss 25 percent of what
was significant, the same amount lost on a deaf person watching a
film. Since the advent of the movies, in nonmusical plays the word
is primary; in film, however, image dominates. Or, as Hall put it,
Shakespeare "is a verbal dramatist, relying on the associative and
metaphorical power of words. Action is secondary. What is meant is
said." However right for live theater, "this is bad screen writing. A
good film script relies on contrasting visual images. What is spoken
is of secondary importance."
To a degree, Hall is right, particularly when he speaks of "con-
trasting visual images." Legendary director and film theorist V. I.
Pudovkin asserted back in 1925 that "editing is the basis of all film
art." What Peter Hall fails to take into account is that Shakespeare
purposefully overwrote. Set design, costuming, special effects, and
the like were not always well-represented in low-budget Elizabethan
theater, which made it sometimes necessary for the writer to com-
pensate for lack of production values by vividly describing every-
thing.

Shakespeare Without Tears
Charlton Heston, Shakespearean stage actor as well as Hollywood
superstar, made this point vividly clear (as well as the need for a
nonreverential attitude, what Margaret Webster tagged "Shakespeare
Without Tears") in his published journals. Heston writes, "Not every
line has gold in it. If [a line] has no [poetic] treasure and doesn't
advance the plot or character, it should be cut. This is sacrilege to
people who read and write about Shakespeare. People who do Shake-
speare, [however,] cut him. I'd bet my soul that Shakespeare cut
Shakespeare." It's a bet he would win: References in the texts men-
tion "two hours running time," implying that the complete script, as
we know it today, was but a game plan for shortened, energetic per-
formances.
Shakespeare's approach resembles that of a moviemaker who
shoots three times as much film as he could ever use. Today's
auteurs speak of "discovering" the movie in the editing room; when