Learning on ScreenShakespeare and World Cinema
Souli/Othello (Makena Diop) confronts Yann/Iago (Aurélien Recoing) in Souli (dir. Alexander Abela, 2004), a Madagascar-set adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello. Courtesy of Alexander Abela.
Such connections as there are between Shakespeare scholars and technology at present, however, insist upon a rather more sombre picture, and we have not yet arrived at a place of free exchange and instant cinematic gratification. The filmography to Shakespeare and World Cinema includes some titles that are commercially available, but the fact remains that many of the examples discussed could not be located via conventional means. Other ways of acquiring hard-to-find titles had to be explored. Beginning with the film festivals, and tracing a moment of appearance, was one method. Another was going back to source: I have tried saying ‘Good Morning’ in Malayalam, ‘Many apologies for bothering you’ in French, and ‘Thank you very much’ in Brazilian Portugese. Chasing an item, and wishing to pin down a particular director, I resorted to the old-fashioned telephone. I had pleasant chats with proud and some less proud mothers-in-law. I got to know some grandfathers. I interrupted daily routines, dinner-tables and more than one baby being put to bed, generally making a complete nuisance of myself. Eager to secure one elusive DVD, I asked a visiting student – now a friend – to act as go-between in Hyderabad. In an extraordinary concatenation of coincidences, my friend realized that he and the son of the director I sought were both to feature in a local radio station broadcast; from this brief encounter a further meeting was set up and a time and place, for the handover of the film, agreed. This was only one of the many moments when, in the writing of the book, I became acutely self-conscious about the accidents of what is written about and what is not and about the implications of participation in the global traffic of cinema.
In several instances, the ‘how’ of acquisition, and the subscription to personal contact, fortuitously led to a face-to-face interview, and it will be apparent from the book that one its attendant methodologies is the inclusion of the director’s voice as a route to analysis. But, in those exchanges between myself and the director, English was not always the default position; translators and mediators were used, and I am aware, for all I cited ‘original’ perspectives and aspirations, other elements – filters and interpreters – were part of the conversation. As part of an effort to circumvent what was lost – and gained – through translation, I watched a number of the films discussed in Shakespeare and World Cinema with native speakers. Certainly, I tried to treat the traversed texts of Shakespeare with a due regard to their entanglements. In the same way that some of my examples highlight issues of voice and authority, so was I enjoined to recognize the parts we academics play in the increasingly diversified – yet still insufficiently global – world of Shakespearean studies.
Mark Thornton Burnett
Footnotes:
[1] Richard Burt, ed., Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture, 2 vols (Westport and London: Greenwood, 2007).
[2] See ‘International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio’, http://bufvc.ac.uk/shakespeare (accessed 4 November [2012]). For an illuminating reference work, see Olwen Terris, Eve-Marie Oesterlen and Luke McKernan, eds, Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio: The Researcher’s Guide (London: BUFVC, 2009).
[3] See ‘Global Shakespeares’, http://globalshakespeares/org (accessed 4 November [2012]).
