Learning on ScreenShakespeare and World Cinema
The fateful banquet scene from Macbeth (dir. Bo Landin and Alex Scherpf, 2004), a Sámi language adaptation of Shakespeare’s play set in the Arctic Circle. Courtesy of Bo Landin, Alex Scherpf and Scandinature Films.
Other films showcased unexpected locations for the work of Shakespearean reinvention. It was a revelation to realize that Mexico has a venerable Shakespearean lineage, as reflected in Huapango (dir. Iván Lipkies, 2004), an adaptation of Othello that, making a virtue of the folklore of the Huasteca region, takes a colourful dance competition as its dominant conceit. No less suggestive here is the southern Indian film, Kannaki (dir. Jayaraaj Rajasekharan Nair, 2002), an adaptation of Antony and Cleopatra that challenges ‘Bollywood’ via saturated landscape shots of Kerala’s picturesque paddy fields and waterways. In these and related kinds of interpretation, a localized mise-en-scène is a key to understanding. Hence, in Makibefo (1999) and Souli (2004), adaptations of Macbeth and Othello respectively, French director Alexander Abela finds in the traditional symbols of Madagascan tribal culture – charms, an ox and an ocean-going pirogue – apt ciphers for Shakespearean metaphor. All in all, I learned about more than seventy recent non-Anglophone Shakespeare films, with almost as many points of origin, in an experience that allowed me to appreciate the role that Shakespeare continues to play in the international marketplace.
How does an interested party acquaint himself or herself with such works? Richard Burt’s magisterial Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture is a fine place to start for researchers, although not always as full in its provision of detail as one might like.[1] This work has been superseded by the splendid online database – an ‘International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio’ – hosted by the British Universities Film and Video Council, which, as well as being user-friendly, is denser and far more sustained in furnishing information.[2] Then there are the other, more serendipitous, means – the word-of-mouth, the friendly tip-offs and the idle surfing of a search engine which, in haphazard and unpredictable ways, can yield precious quarry. But how does one engineer a viewing of an individual filmic example once it has been identified? Online environments offer one possibility. A resource such as ‘Global Shakespeares’, hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is tremendously exciting in bringing before audiences extracts from theatrical performances of Shakespeare and, to a lesser extent, Shakespeare films from around the world.[3] The concept of a library of Alexandria is suggested in the utopian ideal of a digital age that allows all Shakespeare films to be more readily obtainable. In this way, objections to a refiguring of the field, which take the form of instancing ‘availability’ or ‘obscurity’ as barriers to change, may be reduced in ubiquity, as we enter a phase where such cultural-national and temporal markers have been absorbed within, and questioned by, the conversations of cyber space.
