Page 17 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

6 / Shakespeare in the Movies

zen Kane, Welles adapted novels (The Magnificent Ambersons, The
Lady From Shanghai, and Kafka's Trial) to the screen. Never, though,
did he film a play—other than Shakespeare's. As Welles understood,
they aren't plays at all; rather, they are screenplays, written, ironi-
cally, three centuries before the birth of cinema.

An Unworthy Scaffold
Like Leonardo da Vinci attempting to invent the helicopter centuries
before its time, Shakespeare and his contemporaries reached into
what would eventually be called cinematic territory. A film script is
composed of some fifty to seventy-five brief scenes, with rapidly
changing locations, and that's how the Bard constructed his works.
Those five-act divisions, featured in every published volume, were
added after Shakespeare's death, beginning with the First Folio, to
faciliate reading. When Gentle Will sat down to write, his unit of
construction was the cinematic scene, not the theatrical act. Struc-
turally speaking, then, his plays seem suited to the screen; those of
more theatrically oriented artists often defy cinematic treatment.
"Old Will would have loved the movies," Welles gleefully
exclaimed, considering how difficult it was to portray convincingly
ancient Scotland or classical Rome on the humble boards. "You can't
put that on a stage," he added, "but you can film it!" Shakespeare
himself dismissed his theater as "an unworthy scaffold," apologizing
at the beginning of King Henry V for the lack of what we call theater
magic. "Let us," his Chorus implores, mere ". . . ciphers to this great
accompt [Britain's victory over France at Agincourt], On your imag-
inary forces work." He begged the audience to "Piece out our imper-
fections with your thoughts," since the minuscule costuming budget
necessitated that "your thoughts . . . now must deck our kings."
His theater, then, was an active rather than passive experience,
each viewer urged to collaborate in the creative process. The work
finally comes to life in the audience's mind, which is precisely how
the greatest filmmakers work. Alfred Hitchcock explained that in
Psycho's famed shower sequence he never showed a knife actually
touching Janet Leigh's body. What transformed that horrific moment
into anxiety-provoking art rather than exploitation was that the
deadly penetrations took place not on-screen but in the viewer's
mind. Similarly, film historian Roger Manvell noted, "The cinema
can, much better than the modern theater, match the fluidity of
action on the Shakespearean stage."