To Be or Not To Be

My Shakespeare On Screen module has required me to watch some interesting adaptations (maybe appropriations) of Shakespeare's Hamlet and King Lear. The first week our required viewing was Festen by Thomas Vinterberg, and The King is Alive by Kristian Levring, both films made under the Dogme95, and the second week was Korol Lir, an interesting Russion adaptation of Lear and Ran, an even more interesting Japanese version of the same play. Here's my responses to all four:

Festen (Thomas Vinterberg 1998)

Festen is a manic-comic-tragedy tale about deceit, revenge, guilt, loyalty and family tradition. Over the course of one night this Danish family is torn apart by son Christian, determined to seek revenge for his sister’s suicide-drowning herself in a bath much as Ophelia drowns herself in Hamlet. Christian’s sister ‘sends a message from the grave’ much as Hamlet’s father does, here in the shape of a letter, confirming all of Christian’s accusations and ultimately leading to the downfall of her implicitly-murderous father. Aside from these quite specific allusions, Festen embraces the themes within Shakespeare’s play like insanity, sexuality, parental-disloyalty- in the shape of Christian's mother, brother and sister relationships- in particular the dysfunctional relationship between Christian and Michael, guilt and redemption, and father-son relationships, something which features heavily in many of Shakespeare's plays.

The King Is Alive (Kristian Levring 2000)
The King Is Alive is very much, as character Henry states, “good old Lear again”. A story of survival and loyalty, weaknesses and strengths, and most importantly a story of language and mis-communication. With references to plays and musicals dotted throughout and an emphasis on the raw elements of theatre the film, this ‘play within a play’ storyline serves as a narrative structure for the isolation and entrapment experienced by the characters lost in the African desert. Henry acts as a leader in their desolate surroundings and gradually encourages the others to engage in the Shakespearian tragedy, which he writes out on individual scrolls- which are the backs of Hollywood scripts. This back-to-basics approach to the play echoes the way in which Jacobian theatre would have been rehearsed, and the juxtaposition of the Hollywood scripts against Shakespeare’s verse echoes a filmic approach to Shakespeare seen in Baz Lurhman’s Romeo + Juliet (1996). It also emphasizes the fact that Shakespeare’s verse has more impact and a better means of expression, indeed a favored means of expression and communication, than a modern Hollywood script may have. In acting out a play, the characters are able to become someone else, a notion which is found in many Shakespearian plays, the most obvious being Twelfth Night.

Ran (1985) and Korol Lir (1970)
Both Ran and Korol Lir are incredibly cinematic re-imaginings of Shakespeare’s tragic tale of King Lear for opposite reasons. Korol Lir focuses on the use of sound effects and a moving score in order to emphasise the intensity and despair carried through Lear’s kingdom and his journey, and this in turn intensifies elemental semiotics like fire and water by drawing the audience’s attention in with fierce crackling fires and soothing running water. On the other hand, Ran focuses heavily on visual symbolism and use of intense colour- the Eastern setting serving as a vast dramatic backdrop for Kurosawa’s scenes of vivid spectacle as we follow King Hidetora through his betrayal and his madness.

Korol Lir is visually enjoyable, the black and white shots serving well to create an eerie feeling of doom from the opening shots of the peasants gathering around Lear’s castle walls. However, watching the film with subtitles (which are a direct translation of Shakespeare’s text) disengages the audience from the action and creates a distance that Ran manages to avoid, despite being a subtitled film as well. Kozintsev’s transformation of the narrative into a thoroughly road-movie film works well as we follow Lear on his journey through madness and into redemption. Kozintsev employs various techniques of emphasising his ‘journey’ motif, such as extended shots of peasants journeying along barren roads, shots of roads which continue into the distance and off-screen, Cordelia’s marriage taking place not in a church but literally on the roadside, and the characters almost always moving in some way while maintaining conversations. Rarely in the film (exceptions being moments in the first scene) are characters still for extended periods of time. Other than this difference from the source text however, Korol Lir presents itself – at least on the surface- as a realist transposition of King Lear, with little mediation from the language, themes and narrative in the original.

Ran on the other hand moves the story to Japan, and inverts the narrative so that Hidetora is the father of three sons as opposed to daughters, allowing the film to explore in depth the samurai traditions and the implications of this specific culture in terms of family, relationships, loyalty and hierarchy. Every scene contains great attention to detail, utilising the bold spectrum of colours associated with 17th centure Japanese culture to juxtapose positions of power and lifestyles of luxury with scenes of death and war which are shot in such dark monochrome they could almost be in black and white were it not for the pronounced blood red symbols in the warriors’ shields and uniforms. Kurosawa’s use of choreographed scenery and symmetrical images is striking, and creates not just a filmic commentary of Shakespeare’s text but also a deeply moving analogy in which Hidetora’s madness and his insignificance within his own kingdom is emphasised and dramatised by the vast landscapes and barren outdoors in which the action takes place.

Charley
"Walking around on those, what are they called? Feet" - The Little Mermaid, Disney, 1989