Development of the Film

No class this week, but I am moved to write anyway. Sunday night I watched the Royal Shakespeare Company's latest Hamlet¸ which was part of their 2008 season, and subsequently recreated for PBS in 2009. It's on DVD now, and is also being streamed on pbs.org. For my fellow sci-fi geeks out there, this is the production that stars David Tennant and Patrick Stewart.


So, why write in a film blog about is likely the most iconic and well-known play in the English language? Sure, Hamlet has been captured on film many times, and on occasion, quite successfully. But it is undoubtedly a play, one written at a time when no one had even conceived of moving pictures. Shakespeare wrote for the stage, a very particular and distinctive stage at that: the Elizabethan theatre. So a filmed Hamlet, no matter how well done, is still a play on film, a translation of the language of theater to the language of film.

And yet, and yet. The director, Gregory Doran, of both the play and the video production took that challenge head on and quite consciously made use of the fact that there were cameras on "the stage," as it were. Of course, he has at his disposal all the ordinary elements of film language that distinguish a film from a play: camera moves, close-ups and the like. And Doran deliberately uses this language, when it suits his purpose. During the first soliloquy, the camera starts from a distance, as Hamlet, alone, weeps for his father and for his own misery, but slowly circles and moves closer, encouraging Hamlet, as Doran says in the commentary, “to open up” to the audience. In the second soliloquy, as Hamlet reveals his plan to act mad, there is a single startling jump cut, a dislocation on the screen that suggests that Hamlet’s madness might not be pure play-acting. Jump-cuts are impossible on the stage, they are a purely film technique, so this is a good example of how Doran uses the language of film to tell the story of the play.

The audience becomes the camera as Hamlet breaks the fourth wall to speak directly to those watching by gazing directly into the camera. The soliloquies of this play are famous, of course. Even those who know nothing of Shakespeare know the phrase “to be or not to be,” the most famous lines in English literature. This speech is the anguished musing of a desperate young man who can’t decide which is worse, to live or to die. On the stage, the audience is necessarily separated from the actor, somewhat disengaged from his pain. But film allows for a closer interaction, and indeed, in the RSC production, this scene is filmed entirely in the tightest close-up shot of the entire production, as the actor, David Tennant, looks directly at the viewers, or rather, directly at EACH viewer, including him or her in the consideration of suicide.

But what I find so interesting is that Doran and his team don’t simply use cameras to film their play, or even just to translate their play into a film. Instead, they considered the meaning that we modern folks place on cameras and use that significance to bring new interpretations to the play. The theme of spying is well-developed in the play as Shakespeare wrote it, as various characters try to discover each other’s secrets. So the director makes that theme explicit in his filmed version of the play. Elsinore Castle is equipped with security cameras which impassively record the drama and suggest that someone is always watching the action, even during the most intimate soliloquies. And of course, someone always is: the audience. The security cameras emphasize the role of the audience as unseen watcher of the action. These cameras were a part of the stage design as well, but in the filmed version, their point of view is actually incorporated into the audience’s view. Black and white security footage is simply spliced into the rest of the film, making it perfectly obvious that the audience and camera are one.

Hamlet, too, carries a camera and turns the “play-in-a-play” in act three into a “film-in-a-film.” He records the action of the actors and the reaction of his uncle to “catch the conscience of a king.” Again, the audience becomes the camera, seeing what Hamlet sees, and by extension, knowing just what Hamlet thinks is important, without a word. And we know that we, as the audience, are the camera, NOT the character, because later on, Hamlet uses the same camera to record some of his own thoughts, which we see through the camera’s lens, as he points it at his own face. Hamlet as video blogger. Now THERE’S an interpretation that couldn’t be imagined even a couple years ago!

Movie cameras and Shakespeare have been paired since at least 1899, so the development of film and the portrayal of Shakespeare ON film have progressed together for as long as movies have existed. While Shakespeare himself could never have conceived of how his ideas and words could be translated into film, I, for one, am grateful that his creativity and insight can not only be transferred to film, but even, in the hands of the right people, enhanced by it.