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For God's love, let me hear
In between checking on honeycakes, I have been watching Hamlet (1964) in Russian. Forty-five minutes in, it's phenomenal.
I think the text has been substantially cut and perhaps slightly rearranged, but in place of some speeches and dialogue have been substituted compositions of landscape and architecture and Shostakovich's music that sounds less like a film score than a tone poem of Hamlet; in certain scenes, it could almost be a silent. I don't know enough about Grigori Kozintsev, but he has the attention to the quality of light (and it is that white northern light like a winter morning) that I associate with Bergman and the same spare, striking feel for period detail, so that sixteenth-century Denmark does not feel like cluttered costume drama, but the way it must have been: history incarnate in archetype. There are court masques, there are the uncertain faces of peasants who hear askance the announcement of Claudius' marriage to his once-(in law)-sister, but say nothing, there are the massive stones of a fortress built and held by violence and the sea always pulling black and white over the rocks of Elsinore. And there is Innokenty Smoktunovsky's Hamlet, who doesn't blow Olivier away, he evaporates him. If he's melancholy, it's like Jacques le fataliste. He has a boyish face, but he's not young in the role; he wears his scholar's gown like a crow's cold shoulder to the court finery of Elsinore, so he looks less the king's son summoned back from school than an uprooted don; he's feverishly exalted and then terrified by his father's ghost, the armored specter spilling a cloak of black cloud (a banner without blazon, a mourning flag, a winding-sheet) across the nighttime sky. Dawn discovers him asleep in place among the stones, like a child exhausted after a nightmare. His madness looks at first like the hangover of a dream; white-headed, carelessly dressed, pointedly ignoring Polonius as he reads (here not a fool, but a canny old courtier thrown by his inability to find an angle on Hamlet; he is complacent with Ophelia, less and less confident with the distracted prince), he gives the increasing impression that he has not so much assumed an antic disposition as dropped one: the mask of manners that as Prince of Denmark he is obliged to keep up where anyone can see him, thus freeing him to snark at Polonius and yank Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's chain and hail the players that are come to perform at Elsinore with more familiar enthusiasm than royal command, except that he is not really freed: as much as his surroundings disgust him, his only alternative is to be left alone with his brain. Soliloquies come on him like migraines, delivered so far in voice-over as though he were constantly running commentary upon commentary in his head. He can shut out the world, but he can't shut himself up. And the whole combination of inarguable visual iconicism with the odd claustrophobia of Hamlet's viewpoint is like watching something which is at once rigorously realist and of capital-E expressionism and therefore not like any Shakespeare adaptation I have seen before. It's not Olivier's moody romanticism; it's not Taymor's Titus with golems and alternate Goths. I'm sure it's doing terrible things to a purist's vision of Hamlet, but it may just have gone on my books as the best straight Shakespeare I've seen on a screen. I am eager to watch the rest tomorrow, when it's not two in the morning.
My only real complaint so far is with the DVD—in an effort not to block out the very beautiful cinematography with giant hunks of subtitle, the translators seem to have opted to leave a third of the English off the screen on the assumption that audiences are conversant enough with the play to figure out the Russian for themselves. I don't have Hamlet committed to memory. I'm going to be watching tomorrow with my brick-thick Complete Shakespeare with Very Small Print in my lap. Further reports forthcoming. Criterion needs to be fixed up with this film.
I think the text has been substantially cut and perhaps slightly rearranged, but in place of some speeches and dialogue have been substituted compositions of landscape and architecture and Shostakovich's music that sounds less like a film score than a tone poem of Hamlet; in certain scenes, it could almost be a silent. I don't know enough about Grigori Kozintsev, but he has the attention to the quality of light (and it is that white northern light like a winter morning) that I associate with Bergman and the same spare, striking feel for period detail, so that sixteenth-century Denmark does not feel like cluttered costume drama, but the way it must have been: history incarnate in archetype. There are court masques, there are the uncertain faces of peasants who hear askance the announcement of Claudius' marriage to his once-(in law)-sister, but say nothing, there are the massive stones of a fortress built and held by violence and the sea always pulling black and white over the rocks of Elsinore. And there is Innokenty Smoktunovsky's Hamlet, who doesn't blow Olivier away, he evaporates him. If he's melancholy, it's like Jacques le fataliste. He has a boyish face, but he's not young in the role; he wears his scholar's gown like a crow's cold shoulder to the court finery of Elsinore, so he looks less the king's son summoned back from school than an uprooted don; he's feverishly exalted and then terrified by his father's ghost, the armored specter spilling a cloak of black cloud (a banner without blazon, a mourning flag, a winding-sheet) across the nighttime sky. Dawn discovers him asleep in place among the stones, like a child exhausted after a nightmare. His madness looks at first like the hangover of a dream; white-headed, carelessly dressed, pointedly ignoring Polonius as he reads (here not a fool, but a canny old courtier thrown by his inability to find an angle on Hamlet; he is complacent with Ophelia, less and less confident with the distracted prince), he gives the increasing impression that he has not so much assumed an antic disposition as dropped one: the mask of manners that as Prince of Denmark he is obliged to keep up where anyone can see him, thus freeing him to snark at Polonius and yank Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's chain and hail the players that are come to perform at Elsinore with more familiar enthusiasm than royal command, except that he is not really freed: as much as his surroundings disgust him, his only alternative is to be left alone with his brain. Soliloquies come on him like migraines, delivered so far in voice-over as though he were constantly running commentary upon commentary in his head. He can shut out the world, but he can't shut himself up. And the whole combination of inarguable visual iconicism with the odd claustrophobia of Hamlet's viewpoint is like watching something which is at once rigorously realist and of capital-E expressionism and therefore not like any Shakespeare adaptation I have seen before. It's not Olivier's moody romanticism; it's not Taymor's Titus with golems and alternate Goths. I'm sure it's doing terrible things to a purist's vision of Hamlet, but it may just have gone on my books as the best straight Shakespeare I've seen on a screen. I am eager to watch the rest tomorrow, when it's not two in the morning.
My only real complaint so far is with the DVD—in an effort not to block out the very beautiful cinematography with giant hunks of subtitle, the translators seem to have opted to leave a third of the English off the screen on the assumption that audiences are conversant enough with the play to figure out the Russian for themselves. I don't have Hamlet committed to memory. I'm going to be watching tomorrow with my brick-thick Complete Shakespeare with Very Small Print in my lap. Further reports forthcoming. Criterion needs to be fixed up with this film.
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I cannot promise that you will like Hamlet, but I can tell you that it's not glum and it has a tremendous sense of place. And that I would be very surprised if it collapsed in the last half, since it's been extraordinary so far. And that Gielgud seems to have preferred Smoktunovsky to Olivier.
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So noted!
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I can see that it would stay with you.
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Honeycakes? Got a recipie?
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It's a Netflix DVD; I'll hang onto it and we'll watch it! Are you perhaps free next week?
Honeycakes? Got a recipie?
Yes; I'll e-mail it to you when I get home tonight.
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soliloquies come on him like migraines
Wow, this was as good as a poem to read--and it really, really makes me want to see it. I like the play Hamlet as a gory adventure drama, have never actually seen a screen or stage performance of it, though. The stills of Olivier in the role never appealed to me, and I've never seen any other. *This* sounds great. Loved what you said about the peasants, too.
So.... where'd you get the DVD?
I'll have to look on Netflix, but I'm not sanguine...Just saw your response up above. Netflix, here I come!no subject
It is great. I am watching it in small blocks at a time (constrained by my mother's schedule, since she is watching it with me), but every few moments there is a piece of eyes or language that simply makes me smile. "To be or not to be" is set at the sea-wall, where the tide runs in among the boulders. It is not naturalistic, because it is in voice-over, and yet there the stones and the sea and the sunlight are, and Hamlet with his tow hair like a flaw in the film, too much in black, like his own shadow cast over the rocks. I'm waiting now to see how they will handle Ophelia, because he looks far more the one in danger of drowning: like Robinson Jeffers, he would weather back to bones of the unhuman world.
Just saw your response up above. Netflix, here I come!
Just watch with a copy of the actual play to hand! Aforementioned caveat about subtitles, unless you speak Russian.
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like a flaw in the film
too much in black,
like his own shadow cast over the rocks.
* * *
He is far more the one in danger of drowning
he would weather back to bones of the unhuman world.
*love*
My bricklike Complete Works lives at my parents' house, but we're heading out that direction this weekend,so maybe I can pick it up--I don't speak Russian either.
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Well, there is now a poem derived from it. It's the latest entry; filtered as usual.
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Thanks for that.
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Cool! Thank you; that sounds awesome. I feel as though I should respond by mentioning that Jacques Brel did his own translation of Man of La Mancha and he makes the most authentic Don Quixote I have ever heard.