Welcome
Welcome to my blog devoted to Filming Shakespeare.
Shakespeare and cinema go a long way. His plays have been performed on stage for more than 400 years now and their centenary existence on screen was celebrated in 1999. Shakespeare films can be considered to be simultaneously part of a two-fold tradition: “Shakespeare on screen” legacy as many directors make references to the existing body of Shakespeare adaptations by an extensive use of hommages, whether direct or hidden, and simultaneously long-present cinematic movements, from Hollywood to counter-cinema.
My book Filming Shakespeare shows that filming Shakespeare has had both a liberating and confining effect on artistic expression. One fact remains unquestioned, however: films based on Shakespearean material are still primarily films and should be treated as such. This book proposes that rather than focus on the issue of literary fidelity, we should examine them in terms of fidelity to the medium of expression: cinema, with its many different faces and phases.
Nowhere better than in silent Shakespeare films can we observe the cinema’s growing aspiration for acceptance as an new artistic medium. Later, when film was slowly getting established as a new form of expression, we see many directors’ attempts to mediate between the theatrical and cinematic, between the word and image, between Shakespeare as a literary icon and Hollywood’s wish to crossover to mass audiences. Shakespeare movies reflect the cinematic conventions of their times, but it is also in Shakespeare films that directors discover a wanted freedom to break away from the rules and push the medium in new directions, preventing it in effect from stagnating. This is where Shakespeare and metacinema meet. To find out more, check out:
Filming Shakespeare, from Metatheatre to Metacinema
Agnieszka Rasmus
