Page 77 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

66 / Shakespeare in the Movies

royal-wedding audience, breaking down barriers between theater and
actuality. When the play is filmed, such theater magic evaporates.

Antique Fables and Fairy Toys
Sen Nod Svatojanske
Ceskoslovensky Film, 1959; Jiri Trnka

That problem was faced and solved in 1959 by Jiri Trnka. In his
seventy-four-minute animated version, the Czechoslovakian puppet
maker added a sequence that justifies the presence of the play within
the play in a film. Scuttling the stage tradition that presents Pyra-
mus and Thisby as an exaggerated comedy, its sole purpose to enter-
tain the double audience, Trnka transformed the rude mechanicals's
show in mid-performance. Bottom, up to that point a dreadful actor,
is dynamic rather than static; here, for the first time, events of the
previous night have changed him as a person, widening his scope
and view. Undertandably, then, Bottom is altered as an artist as well.
His initial overacting gradually gives way to a more restrained per-
formance; initial laughter from gathered nobles likewise dies down.
For Trnka, like Shakespeare, Bottom was far from mere comic
relief. He served as the author's self-deprecatingly humorous auto-
biographical figure. Shakespeare and Trnka shared the dubious status
of being country bumpkins who had the audacity to try to become
ambitious artists; since both rose to the heights of their respective
crafts, it made sense that Bottom, who was their on-screen repre-
sentative, would as well.
Puck, clearly Shakespeare's other favorite among the characters,
likewise stirred Trnka's imagination. Though portrayed by a doll,
Trnka's Puck is complex: delightfully devilish, yet charmingly inno-
cent. This Puck is less a fantasy figure than real-life boy endowed
with superpowers, his childish psyche running out of control as he
indulgingly exercises unrestrained power that he isn't mature
enough to deal with.
Trnka spent two years on the project, adapting the miniature art
of his homeland to the wide-screen process, thereby making the film
viable in the American market. This necessitated deserting his
beloved Agfacolor, which lent a warm, fairy-tale glow to such pre-
vious endeavors as The Emperor's Nightingale. Instead, he shot with