MTA 104 ("Understanding Theatre")

Instructor: Walter Metz

Lecture: "Hamlet and the Cinema"

The Pedigree of "Traditional" Hamlet Adaptations

Laurence Olivier (1948), the "industry standard."  A psychological Hamlet that focuses on Hamlet as a Renaissance individual, a "particular man" who "could not make up his mind."

CLIP #1: Hamlet (Laurence Olivier, 1948): Opening (Olivier’s voice-over: "so oft it chances in particular men...")

The integrity of Shakespeare’s text is preserved through voice-over and supertitles.

In the wake of the success of Olivier’s film (it won the Best Actor and Best Picture Oscars in 1948), anyone making a Hamlet film had to construct an aggressive alternative interpretation of the play.

50 Years of Cinematic Responses to Olivier's Standard

1. John Gielgud (1964): Gielgud’s response to Olivier is to not "open up" the play into a film, but instead to produce "filmed theatre." He costumes the actors in rehearsal clothes in order to get us to focus on the acting itself. This production is much praised for its acting, particularly by Richard Burton as Hamlet, and was a phenomenal success on Broadway. I admire the film for its capturing not so much of the acting, but of the minimalist set design and aggressive lighting.

CLIP #2: Hamlet (John Gielgud, 1964): The ghost as a gigantic shadow on the wall

2. Grigori Kozintsev (1964): Kozintsev’s response is to emphasize the political aspects of Shakespeare’s play, instead of the psychological ones that Olivier explored. Kozintsev’s film is Marxist in orientation, examining how the corrupt religious underpinnings of feudal society drive good-hearted people like Hamlet to their deaths. Kozintsev’s film explores Hamlet’s paranoid state as he discovers that the castle at Elsinore is a den of spies and surveillance, no small updating for dealing with the apex of the Cold War (remember that 1964 was the year in which Khrushchev was ousted from power for his "loss of face" in the Cuban Missile Crisis). Kozintsev figures the dread of authoritarian power through a ghost who is 30 feet tall and stalks the countryside.

CLIP #3: Hamlet (Grigori Kozintsev, 1964): The Ghost

An Introduction to Kozintsev’s Hamlet

Released in 1964, the year of Nikita Khrushchev’s ouster and eleven years after the death of Josef Stalin, Grigori Kozintsev’s film version of Hamlet highlights the political dimensions of Shakespeare’s play in ways usually avoided in Hamlet films, the most notable of which is Laurence Olivier’s Oscar-winning 1948 psychological adaptation.

From the start, Kozintsev gives us not a personally-tormented Hamlet, but one whose dilemma is profoundly social in nature. We first see the bleak castle at Elsinore as it actively hovers over the common people, whose lives of abject poverty are driven by forces outside of their control. In this way, Kozintsev, a Soviet Marxist, reconfigures Hamlet into a meditation on the feudal Russian life under the Czars, a social order which purportedly was toppled by Lenin’s revolution. In his book of Shakespeare criticism, Shakespeare: Time and Conscience (available in a 1966 English translation), Kozintsev writes eloquently about the Marxist dimensions which can be extracted out of Hamlet: "This tragedy portrays a man who does not find himself between life and death, but between one era and another. The conflict between Renaissance ideals and the reality of the epoch of primary accumulation of capital was evident enough. This is the germ that sickened those who had the misfortune to realize the depth of the rift."

However, Kozintsev, like any great artist, is no sychophant for the dominant ideology of his era, in this case Stalinism. His Hamlet is as critical of the totalitarian Kremlin’s pollution of the ideals of the Revolution as it is of Czarist feudalism. The film reveals Elsinore as a nightmare of political surveillance. As Kozintsev describes his film’s visual design, "There are doors the better to eavesdrop behind, windows the better to spy from. Every sound gives birth to echoes, repercussions, whispers, rustling."

The film’s dominant critique of Stalinism, however, comes with Kozintsev’s decision to represent the Ghost as a thirty-foot-tall monster. Whereas Olivier’s film chooses to see the ghost of Hamlet’s father as a psychological projection of Hamlet’s Oedipal guilt, Kozintsev leaves no doubt as to the Ghost’s corporeal presence. His Ghost is gigantic, dressed in forbidding iron armor, and suspiciously looks like Stalin. However, the duality of Shakespeare’s ghost–both hard critic of Hamlet’s inability to avenge his murder and a betrayed man suffering in Purgatory–is maintained in Kozintsev’s portrait. Just enough of his suffering eyes can be glimpsed behind that iron mask to realize that this is an allegory for a world derailed by totalitarians.

And because this political betrayal is the focus of the film, it is as bleak a Hamlet as one could imagine. The film employs an elemental visual design, contrasting the inhumanity of the characters with the immovable sky, earth, stone, and the cruel sea. Iron, the stuff of weapons and war, becomes a crucial elemental component of the film’s visual design. In the "get thee to a nunnery" scene, wherein Hamlet desperately pleads with Ophelia to remove herself from the moral cesspool that is Elsinore, Kozintsev shoots the conversation as if the characters were speaking through cast iron prison bars. When Ophelia is finally driven to madness by Hamlet’s seeming indifference, Claudius has her fitted for a dehumanizing iron corset.

Kozintsev’s Hamlet is also of interest because it offers us a glimpse at the Soviet cinema during a period, the 1960s, that is little understood in the United States. With the exception of the international art film director Andrei Tarkovsky, we know few Soviet films from this period. In film history courses, we learn much about the idealistic silent cinema of the 1920s. During the liberationist glasnost period of the 1980s, we began to see films about Russian life in American art film houses. One of the revelations of Kozintsev’s film is its testament that masterful cinema continued in the Soviet Union, even after Stalin’s authoritarian installation of an artistically crippling "socialist realism" in the early 1930s.

Kozintsev’s film from 1964 shares features from both of these other, more artistically appreciated periods of Soviet film history. Like the 1920s films of Sergei Eisenstein, Hamlet is constructed out of dialectical juxtapositions. In his book, Shakespeare on Film, critic Jack Jorgens gives us an example of this when he analyzes the film’s opening shot as a conflict between the remembrance of Hamlet (through the sound of a tolling bell) and his relegation to oblivion (with the rhythmic sounds of the crashing waves). And, like the 1980s films of peristroika, Kozintsev’s film is brutally suspicious of the totalitarianism of the Kremlin.

Finally, Kozintsev’s film is worth attending to because it is the result of an astonishing array of talent. Dmitri Shostakovich provides a provocative musical score–similar in tone to his anti-Stalinist 10^th Symphony--to accompany Boris Pasternak’s Russian translation of Shakespeare’s text. Pasternak’s lines are in turn delivered by the great Russian film actor Innokenti Smoktunovski (perhaps familiar to art house fans for his role in 1979's Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears), who plays Hamlet with a delicate gentleness, outdone in its tenderness perhaps only by Asta Nielsen’s performance from the days of silent cinema.

3. Tony Richardson (1969): Richardson uses the techniques of literary adaptation that he had mastered in Tom Jones (1963) in order to construct a Hamlet who is driven mad by the scatalogical grotesquery of his Uncle Claudius (deliciously played by that lover of fava beans and chianti, Anthony Hopkins). The film’s most aggressive device features the ghost as a maddeningly loud bell, illustrating the severe forces weighing on Hamlet’s mind. Whereas Olivier’s film sees Hamlet’s "taking on of an antic disposition" as a ruse, Richardson’s takes the alternative stance, that Hamlet really has sunk into madness under the stress of living in the house of the beast Claudius. As Nicol Williamson plays Hamlet, with a sneer at Claudius’ repulsiveness, we feel palpably that this is a man who cannot possibly overcome the cesspool that Denmark has become under the leadership of the corrupt Claudius.

CLIP #4: Hamlet (Tony Richardson, 1969): Claudius and Gertrude "consume mass quantities" in bed while instructing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

4. Celestino Coronado (1977): In the infamous "Naked Hamlet," so dubbed because most of the actors have little clothing on as they deliver their lines, the major assault on Olivier’s interpretation centers on director Coronado’s refusal to see Hamlet as a coherent decision-making individual. Instead, Coronado uses modern psychology to understand Hamlet, seeing him as a schizophrenic. To accomplish this, Hamlet is portrayed by two twins, Anthony and David Meyer. This technique is particularly effective in "the get thee to a nunn’ry" scene, in which Hamlet’s response to Ophelia is particularly conflicted in Shakespeare’s text.

CLIP #5: Hamlet (Celestino Coronado, 1977): The two Hamlets deliver the "Get thee to a nunn’ry" speech

5. Franco Zeffirelli (1990): The "Mel Gibson" Hamlet is notable for its aggressive continuation of the Oedipal interpretation offered by Olivier’s film. In particular, the scene in which Gibson-as-Hamlet assaults his mother Gertrude, played by Glenn Close with her typical sensuality, suggests the "damned incest" may not be exclusively the domain of Claudius. The film also features a bizarre ending in which, during the swordfight, Gibson begins channeling Riggs, his character from Lethal Weapon, a man who pretends to be crazy in order to petrify his opponents.

6. Kenneth Branagh (1996): Branagh’s full-text Hamlet has a vision that it can overcome Olivier by offering up the scenes that Olivier cut out as more interesting than we might have at first thought. In particular, Branagh’s casting is inspired: he uses the most famous actors in the least well-known parts: Gerard Depardieu plays Polonius’ servant Reynaldo, Jack Lemmon plays palace guard Marcellus (famous only for his line, "there is something rotten in the state of Denmark), Billy Crystal plays the First Clown, Charlton Heston plays the First Player. In addition, Branagh uses aggressive film style, in an otherwise stylistically flat film set in the 19^th Century, to emphasize soliloquoys cut out by Olivier. The most interesting of these is the "How all occasions do inform against me" scene, which Branagh shoots on a bare soundstage using a very slow zoom out.

The Future of Hamlet and the Cinema?

The most interesting trend recently has been films which see Hamlet’s interrogation of feudal monarchy as a metaphor useful for understanding corporate capitalism. First there was Hamlet Goes Business, Aki Kaurismaki’s 1987 Finnish film, and now Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, starring Ethan Hawke, and set among the corporate raiders in contemporary Manhattan, a film that you can see at BFF’s Rialto presentations October 2 through October 5.

CLIP #6: Hamlet (Michael Almereyda, 2000): Hamlet as Blockbuster Patron

CLIP #7: The Wild and the Dirty (Enzo Castellari, 1969): Johnny and Horace comically fight Ros and Guil

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This page was last updated on June 6, 2002

Questions or Comments? Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send an e-mail to:  metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman