Page 19 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

8 / Shakespeare in the Movies

audiences accept stars who sing and dance while inhabiting the every-
day world or actors who speak ordinary phrases while passing through
a fabricated fairy-tale setting.
The cinema is far richer in possibility than simple minds would
have it and is able to accommodate Shakespeare's heightened poetry
or operatic performance if only the filmmaker is up to the task.
Franco Zeffirelli, who has happily filmed Verdi and Shakespeare,
proved that decades ago.
Let us grant, then, that Shakespearean cinema has a right to exist;
how should any adapter rightly proceed? Of all people, traditionalist
Ottenhoff (who argued against even staging Shakespeare!) offered the
best suggestion, calling for "films that not only preserve the com-
plexity of the Bard's words but also present a distinctive cinematic
interpretation." That is, films boasting a faithfulness to Shakespeare's
essence, tempered by an understanding of cinema's resources.
Nonetheless, a tension between the Bard and the bijou will never
go away, at least not entirely. As critic Stanley Kauffmann noted in
the Saturday Review: "The besetting trouble of Shakespeare on film
[is] the conflict between a work that lives in its language and a
medium that tries to do without language as much as it can." The
glass, however, can be perceived as half full rather than half empty;
attempting to bridge that gap between verbal and visual has led to
highly appreciated bridges.

A Dagger of the Mind
The director of Shakespearean cinema is akin to an Arthurian knight
searching for the Holy Grail, on a quest to achieve the impossible
dream by reconciling Shakespeare's immortal poetry with cinema's
potent imagery. Even at its most successful, Kauffmann warned,
"the result is still a bastard form—a hybrid of two antagonistic arts."
Perhaps antagonistic is too strong a word; let's refer to poetry and
pictures as polar, diametrically apart but not necessarily mutually
exclusive.
For instance, when Macbeth spots the blade before him and won-
ders if it is but "a dagger of the mind," do we necessarily have to see
it? The movie medium, via special effects and postproduction, is
able to manage an apparition in some ways live theater cannot. Still,
showing us the dagger mitigates the significant notion that what
Macbeth sees is "of the mind" and therefore visible only to him. If
the filmmaker does choose to show the dagger, is it then his respon-