Abstracts
Abstracts
Shakespeare on Screen: Threshold Aesthetics in Oliver Parker's Othello
Patricia Dorval, Université Paul Valéry
Courtney Lehmann, University of the Pacific, with Lisa S. Starks, University of South Florida
Leading the Gaze: From Showing to Telling in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V and Hamlet.
Sarah Hatchuel, University of Paris IV Sorbonne
Shakespeare on Screen: Threshold Aesthetics in Oliver Parker's Othello
Patricia Dorval, Université Paul Valéry
This paper considers the theme of liminality and threshold in Shakespeare's Othello from the perspective of film adaptation. The text establishes a most fascinating relation between Iago and Janus, the Roman double-faced god of doorways and thresholds, and patron of beginnings. As such Iago presides over all sortsof beginnings, initiating the perception -- visual as much as verbal -- only to repress it immediately, conducting Othello to the threshold of the visible and keeping him there. Oliver Parker's 1995 film adaptation of the play teems with images of gates and doorways of all sorts invested mostly by the villainous ensign of stealthy step. Iago is found many times dangling in a doorway between inside and outside, or leaving any room (or place) he is in last, and lingering behind the other characters. On several occasions, the camera moves sidewise, and reveals Iago standing by a character, suggesting that there is a beginning before the beginning, and opening the gates of the cinematographic limbo, over which Iago seems to have full control. Alternately Iago, who is stationed in the background, comes progressively into focus, while the character in the foreground blurs and fades out of focus, producing a reversal backward / forward. Meanwhile Othello is confined on the threshold, and beholds his wife's adultery from outside the bedchamber through some peephole or something transparent like an opaque veil. On several occasions in Parker's film the Moor watches Desdemona through the opaline bedcurtains, suggesting a screened vision. Iago is also hinged between the spectator, whom he addresses in his many monologues or asides, stepping out of the dramatic universe, and most of the play in its metadramatic dimension. Like the double-faced god, Iago is facing two opposite directions, within (towards the intra-dramatic universe) and without (towards the spectator -- the extra-dramatic universe). At another key moment in the film, Iago grasps a red hot brand, and spreads some soot over his hands, before placing one blackened hand over the camera lens, with the effect of a black-out. Iago appears as absolute master of the gaze, showing and hiding things at will.
Making Mother Matter: Repression, Revision, and the Stakes of 'Reading Psychoanalysis Into' Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet
Courtney Lehmann, University of the Pacific, with Lisa S. Starks, University of South Florida
Hamlet's peculiar bond with his mother has been the focus of numerous productions of Shakespeare's play on stage and screen. Influenced by psychoanalysis, filmed versions of Hamlet in particular have emphasized the desire between sons and mothers and, in so doing, have uncannily reproduced the play's own Oedipalized attachment to the maternal. Following Franco Zeffirelli's mother-centered film (1990), Kenneth Branagh attempts to break with this tradition in his self-proclaimed "non-Oedipal" Hamlet (1996). Actively positioned against psychoanalysis, Branagh's Hamlet avoids any representations of non-normative sexual desire, repressing the sexualized maternal body with a vengeance and displacing Hamlet's desire onto his surrogate father, who offers "metal more attractive" for this Hamlet and, as we shall see, for Branagh himself. In so doing, Branagh's adaptation actually becomes the most "symptomatic" Hamlet film ever made, for it uses this performance as a screen both for projecting -- and for curing--what's the matter with Branagh, namely, his Irish motherland, and his compromised Shakespearean credentials as a postcolonial subject.
Leading the Gaze: From Showing to Telling in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V and Hamlet.
Sarah Hatchuel, University of Paris IV Sorbonne
Film studies have reached the conclusion that cinema merges the acts of showing and telling. This essay applies these theories to two of Kenneth Branagh's screen adaptations Henry V (1989) and Hamlet (1996). Cinematic editing can shape space at will, create different levels of realities, and reorganize the succession of events in time. The moves and effects of the camera, by progressively revealing the people, the set or the action, add a time dimension to space. Cinematic narration defines an itinerary of the gaze, imposing a trajectory inside Shakespeare's plays, until the plots seem to prevail over discourse.
© 1999-, Lisa
Hopkins (Editor, EMLS).