Shakespeare on Film

"This is a great book about one of the liveliest art forms that has been stimulated by Shakespeare, which is film. Judith Buchanan is an expert on silent Shakespeare film, which is a brilliant paradox. One of the things she shows is how the new technology of film—which was somewhat associated with peep shows or slightly sensationalist, saucy material—tries to lift itself up by engaging with classics and particularly with Shakespeare. It’s an interesting observation because it helps you see that just about all new technologies have a go at using Shakespeare to raise the cultural credentials of what they do. We’ve seen that with apps and various kinds of modern technologies. She isn’t just talking about silent Shakespeare in this book, she’s talking about film, right up into the 21st century. She talks about some classic films like Orson Welles’s Macbeth and Othello and more recent films like Julie Taymor’s Titus (it’s on the cover). “Reception can’t really tell us anything about what Shakespeare intended” In the book, Buchanan moves us away from a language that we used to have, which was, ‘How close is this to the text? How faithful an adaptation is it?’ Instead, she comes at it more from a film background to ask, ‘How successful is this film at translating or transforming a 16th-century play into a 20th-century film?’ That means cutting a huge amount of dialogue and using the visual, not just to tell the story, but to carry the metaphorical content of the language. She writes about how Orson Welles’s film of Othello has all these images, like shadows cast in a cage or net pattern. Although it doesn’t always have the language that Shakespeare uses, nevertheless it’s got the same metaphors as the language has. She’s really brilliant at showing how films translate into cinematic language some of the complexity of what Shakespeare is doing. Yes, it is. The book looks at films from different backgrounds. It’s not just about arthouse films. There’s more about Hollywood films towards the end of the book."