Shakespeare Film

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This “Shakespeare and Film” course focuses on five critical questions about the relation between film and the Shakespearian stage: 1) Is Shakespeare on the stage narratively and technically distinct from Shakespeare on the screen? (For instance, does the directorial control of the cinematic gaze change everything?) 2) How have Shakespearian films evolved from the filmed stage productions to the cinematic presentations and back again to the currently popular “theater live” productions? 3) What is the difference between a Shakespearian performance on film and a Shakespearian adaptation on film? 4) In what ways does the audience’s experience change from the theater to the cinema? And 5) How do film productions, like theatrical productions, reflect (and participate in) the cultural moments and places in which they were made? This class is necessarily based on a painfully short reading list that would certainly include Macbeth, the play most frequently produced and adapted for film (from Polanski’s horror-filled 1971 version, to Scotland, PA (2001), to the more recent production with Michael Fassbender (2015); The Merchant of Venice, whose production on the screen (or stage) must inevitably wrestle with the specter of anti-Semitism; and Henry IV pt. 1—Henry V, whose radical re-contextualization has included the well-regarded Chimes at Midnight (1965) and the adaptation, My Private Idaho (1991). We may also read (and look at) Much Ado About Nothing, for the sake of a comedy, or Hamlet, in order to include Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haidar (2014), an adaptation set in 1990s Kashmir.