Page 20 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

Introduction I 9

sibility to do so in such a way that we grasp that we're sharing Mac-
beth's subjective reality rather than gazing on something that is
truly there? Then again, who's to say, for sure, whether the dagger is
there or not? Macbeth questions, but does not deny, its existence.
If the director does show the dagger, perhaps it ought to be
blurred, cinematically suggesting that mental state Macbeth
describes. Finally, there is the possibility that the line Shakespeare
assigns Macbeth ought to be excised entirely, if the viewer is to be
treated to an image, to avoid redundancy. We need to see or hear, but
not both.
As early as 1936, author and critic Mark Van Doren wrote, in the
Nation, that the key question "is not whether the text as such is
sacred. For movie purposes it certainly is not. The question is
whether the whole of Shakespeare's effect in a given play can some-
how be preserved on the screen." It's more important to be true to
the spirit than the letter.
How, then, should a producer proceed? Hire a genius like Welles,
a true auteur whose unique style perfectly conveys a personal
vision? Such a director imposes his own perception of life on works
by the Bard, resulting in remarkable films that may thematically
contradict what Shakespeare intended. Or should the producer hire
a skillful technician, say British director Stuart Burge, who will
mount respectable adaptations? Shakespeare's text will be presented
by a filmmaking approach best described as a recording device rather
than film, in early theorist Rudolf Arnheim's words, as an original
art form.

Auteur! Auteur!
What, in other words, is primary here? Is the play the thing or the
cinema itself? Who is the auteur? Is the dominant artist Shakespeare
or his latest screen adapter? The question is easy to raise, but any
answer is frustratingly elusive. Every film version of a Shakespearean
play, then, is much more than just another movie, something even
more than another movie derived from a work by the world's great-
est poet. It is, whether or not the filmmakers are aware of the fact, a
fighting document—a unique, singular, debatable, and more often
than not, temporary interpretation. "Temporary" became an increas-
ingly more significant issue during the second half of the twentieth
century. In his tome Future Shock, Alvin Toffler defined modernism
as changes occurring so quickly that we barely adjust to one before