Читать книгу Shakespeare the Illusionist - Neil Forsyth - Страница 12

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“STAY, ILLUSION”

THERE HAVE BEEN many ways for cineastes to cope with Shakespeare’s evident interest in the supernatural world. And many of those ways raise basic questions about the nature of film as an art (le septième art, as it is called in French) and as an industry. In the hundred years and more that Shakespeare films have been made, the technical possibilities have increased enormously, but arguably they may be traced back to some of the earliest kinds of tricks, especially those of Georges Méliès. Thus, in one of the earliest full-length Shakespeare films, the director Edwin Thanhouser opens his King Lear (1916) with a shot of the acclaimed Shakespeare actor Frederick B. Warde, “cigar smoke curling around him,”¹ reading a book. He is sitting in a wing-backed armchair in the privacy of his study. A close-up then shows the book to be King Lear, at which point, via a common camera trick, Warde dissolves into the white-bearded Lear “and the narrative proper begins.”² At the end, the ravaged king “falls out of the frame and out of the world,”³ to be replaced once again by the actor reading. The film was made in order to capitalize on the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, which was being widely commemorated that year (as was the quadricentenary in 2016).

Three years earlier, Baldassare Negroni’s Una tragedia alla corte di Sicilia had similarly begun with “Shakespeare” sitting at a table and reading A Winter’s Tale to the family and friends gathered about him. From there the film eases into a dramatization of the action being read.⁴ In both cases the film is introduced through a tribute to the power of Shakespeare’s words to conjure a sequence of pictures in the imagination. In both cases the text of the book is transformed from a verbal to a visual sequence. In both cases also the newly established film industry was borrowing from the older tradition of telling a story via a sequence of magic-lantern images but introducing transitions peculiar to film—a dissolve and a fade.⁵

Even earlier, Georges Méliès had used a similar idea but with a characteristic twist: in La Mort de Jules César (1907), also known as Le Rêve de Shakespeare, Shakespeare is played by Méliès himself. Suffering from writer’s block, he makes several attempts to write the assassination scene. Eventually he falls asleep and his characters appear to him in full Roman garb and setting. The screen shows both the writer and the scene at the same time by means of a double-exposure sequence. Shakespeare then wakes up, delighted to have solved his writing problem, and even stabs a loaf of bread, imitating what he has just seen in his dream.⁶ For the anglophone audience the film was labelled, appropriately enough, Shakespeare Writing Julius Caesar, and was so registered for U. S. copyright on October 25, 1907. But whereas in the Thanhouser and Negroni films an actor plays Shakespeare, here the director takes over the role of the writer and so further asserts the primacy of film over theatre. The writer’s imagination is shown to be fundamentally visual rather than verbal.

Earlier in the same year Méliès had produced a Hamlet, with himself in the title role (this film is presumed to have been lost). In Shakespeare on Silent Film, Robert Hamilton Ball reproduces a still from the film along with the entire shot-by-shot description in the Star Films catalogue.⁷ Ball argues that rather than merely filming scenes as they were performed onstage, Méliès for the first time used truly cinematic language for a Shakespeare play. Characteristically the film reorganized the plot and emphasized the apparitions of various shades as more suitable for film’s special effects.⁸ In Ball’s reproduction, Hamlet-Méliès cradles Yorick’s skull in his outstretched left hand. The shades that assail the prince include those of his father’s ghost enjoining him to vengeance and Ophelia beckoning him with offerings of flowers. The duel and denouement follow, and the source of the fatal apparitions—upon whom Hamlet gazes above and beyond the frame—must be their “author,” but that author, “Shakespeare,” must also be the Méliès who gives the apparitions their cues.⁹

There have been many films that imagine Shakespeare as author since Méliès’s. The most elaborate probably came in 1991 with Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books. The central conceit is that John Gielgud, playing the scholar-playwright, is writing himself into The Tempest. Greenaway borrows from Antonello da Messina’s Saint Jerome in His Study, a painting in the National Gallery in London, to represent Prospero/Shakespeare in his cell as a kind of Renaissance doge. The film is a meditation on the status of Shakespeare in an electronic age. In a much less exhausting and more popular form, Joseph Fiennes plays the writer in John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love (1998), which won seven Academy Awards, including one for best picture. Stricken with writer’s block, “Shakespeare” visits a sixteenth-century psychoanalyst but then is cured by meeting, and soon losing, the girl-boy of his dreams. She is Viola de Lesseps, disguised as Thomas Kent, and as him she plays Juliet. Thus the film has some fun with the genders of Elizabethan actors, and two of Shakespeare’s heroines overlap in the role, for which Gwyneth Paltrow won an Oscar for best actress. The film dramatizes the writing of Romeo and Juliet: in one key scene Fiennes signs his name repeatedly, each time with one of many spellings of “Shakespeare,” and then crumples the pieces of paper and throws them away. They land in each case next to a Shakespearean prop—a skull that will do famous duty in Hamlet or a chest that recalls The Merchant of Venice. So once again, and this time with the characteristic wit of Tom Stoppard, who worked over Marc Norman’s draft of the screenplay, writing is converted to a visual, filmic event.¹⁰

Such films have made many people nowadays familiar with filmic representations of Shakespeare writing.¹¹ In both those films of the nineties, the writer’s words on the page are, in metacinematic comment, overwhelmed by rather than subsumed in the visual images they conjure up. Even in the Méliès film, we would find (if only the film had not been lost!) the first use of what came to be called “special effects”—in this case double exposure—to exploit the specific properties of the new art. Writing itself now seems outmoded because it has been visually surpassed. Although this was to be Méliès’s last effort to put Shakespeare on-screen, his inventions were to have an enormous impact. Many filmmakers return to them lovingly again and again.

In film history, and even more so in television, the shift toward realism has become more and more pronounced. That is the aspect of film tradition that, as the story is usually told, derives from the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, whose background in photography led them to attempt to reproduce what they saw. The inventive, imaginative, and unexpected dimension of what movies can do we owe to Méliès.¹² Shakespeare films can, I propose, be read according to how they exploit the informing doubleness of film, and in particular how they use the Méliès aspect of film, the magic and the trucage, to represent the Shakespearean supernatural—fiends, fairies, ghosts, and witches. Shakespeare’s interest in the topic is clear enough: he it was who made the fairies of Dream small, even tiny, and (mostly) benevolent. Robin Goodfellow he inherited but updated into the complex Puck, both the country prankster who misleads night wanderers, as described by the fairy in act 1, and the obedient servant of King Oberon.¹³ Similarly, in Shakespeare’s source story in Holinshed’s Chronicles, Richard III is said to have had a terrible dream of “images like terrible devils” on the night before the battle, but there is no mention of ghosts. The parade of the dead come back to life that haunts him, and encourages his enemy Richmond, is entirely Shakespeare’s creation.¹⁴ Plutarch tells in his Life of Brutus of a “spirit” that appears on the eve of the battle of Philippi, but in Shakespeare this becomes the stage direction “Enter the Ghost of Caesar,” the man whom Brutus has helped to kill.¹⁵

Thus, at least some of the film trickery develops what Shakespeare built into the plays. He shows himself in several plays to have been self-conscious about the relation of illusion and theatre.¹⁶ The potential parallel between Shakespeare’s theatre and Méliès’s films will be clear if we recall some of the Elizabethan discourse about the theatre. In The Discovery of Witchcraft,¹⁷ Reginald Scot’s important and skeptical 1584 treatise, there is a section titled “To cut off one’s head, and lay it in a platter, &c, which the jugglers call the decollation of John the Baptist.”¹⁸ Scot explains how the Elizabethan playhouses worked this conjuring trick by means of a stage device that looked like a pillory and showed one actor’s head as if it belonged to another body. Other contemporary documents describe similar illusions, which seem to have been common on the stage as well as on street corners. Opinion was divided about their value: Ben Jonson despised their vulgarity in the “Induction” to Bartholomew Fair; some denounced them as witchcraft; and others, like Samuel Rid in The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine, felt that “if these things be done for recreation and mirth, and not to the hurt of our neighbour, nor to the profaning and abusing of God’s holy name, then sure they are neither impious nor altogether unlawful, though herein or hereby a natural thing be made to seem supernatural.”¹⁹

Nevertheless one soon notices a certain unease about spectacle and illusion in the style of Shakespeare films and in the discussion of them. There are several reasons for this. One is no doubt the long-standing suspicion of theatre in Anglo-Saxon, Puritan-based culture, connected with suspicions about dressing up, pretending to be someone else, and sexual license, as well as, in its more extreme forms, the denunciation of theatre as a tool of the devil. In the case of the Shakespearean tradition, there is a further ingredient: the late Victorian and Edwardian theatres had fully developed the tendency that began in the Restoration theatres toward pictorial representation within the frame of grandiose West End proscenium arches, but the influential William Poel had begun a countertrend to get away from the splendid spectacles and to reconstruct a supposedly pure and unscenic theatre such as Shakespeare was imagined to have worked in.²⁰ Many modern Shakespeareans, influenced by Poel and what he stood for, would have wanted anything but a return to complex stage “devices” and the discredited elaboration of costume and spectacle, even in the new medium of film.²¹ This discomfort with pictorial illusion also has something to do with the fact that film art grew up with modernism, in which high and low art forms were fiercely separated, so that “special effects” are for children or certain subgenres, such as horror and sci-fi, not the serious mainstream.

All this suspicion makes the filmmaker’s task especially difficult when what is being presented cannot but be supernatural, like the ghost of Hamlet senior. In Tony Richardson’s 1969 film of Hamlet, for example, Nicol Williamson has a strong light shining in his face whenever the Ghost is “present.” But we see nothing. The voice we hear is actually also Williamson’s, and so the film comes close to implying that the Ghost is a hallucination. Olivier, who in his 1948 Hamlet managed well the midnight darkness for the battlement scenes that the afternoon Globe could not aspire to, was famously dissatisfied with his misty, dry-ice ghost, to the point that he dubbed in the voice himself (though it is slightly slowed). The voice is amplified, a technique he learned about from the editor of the film, Helga Cranston (who had seen it done in Paris), yet the figure is shadowy. We experience the power of the Ghost mostly by seeing how its appearance knocks Hamlet out, both on the battlements and in Gertrude’s closet. And he makes much of Horatio’s rational skepticism. As the Ghost leaves at the sudden cockcrow, we cut back to the watching soldiers in a long shot and way below, as if the camera is now where the Ghost was, looking back down as it floats off up into the cloud. Then Horatio guarantees the truth of the experience by calling it “the sensible and true avouch / Of mine own eyes”²²—a line that in this context refers to the cinematic experience, to the magical vision. The motif of the skeptic convinced guarantees not simply the reality of the Ghost but the authenticity of what might otherwise seem to the audience, and certainly to Olivier, like a hokey ghostie film, not high classic art. Franco Zeffirelli (1990) has his own kind of trouble with the ghost: when Paul Scofield as Claudius, an anxious father in a classy suit, comes back to try to heal the ruined family, he interrupts a passionate and almost desperate kiss between Gertrude (Glenn Close) and Hamlet (Mel Gibson) and seems not to grasp the import of what he sees.²³ Or perhaps he simply refuses to understand.

When we read Shakespeare films according to how they exploit the various illusions they depend on, we discover that each reveals a good deal about its context and the underlying intentions of its directors and producers. If the filming of ghosts in Hamlet can be seen to reveal a general uneasiness about spectacle and illusion in a Puritan-based, highbrow culture, Kozintsev’s film makes deliberate use of the magical tradition, and for other purposes than simply to “amaze.” In Kozintsev’s view, “the aural has to be made visual. The poetic texture itself has to be transformed into visual poetry, into the dynamic organization of film imagery.”²⁴ In films of Macbeth, by contrast, the ghost of Banquo is often fully integrated and frequently marvelously horrifying: both Orson Welles and Roman Polanski borrowed directly from horror genres, while Kurosawa had his own perfectly adapted cultural tradition for the forest spirit who replaces those Western witches. Even in the 1908 Macbeth, the first of a run of Shakespeare films produced by the American Vitagraph Company, the film lays claim to being an autonomous work of cinema rather then a respectful record of a stage production. It contains specifically cinematic scenes, including double exposure for the airy “dagger I see before me” and for Banquo’s ghost.²⁵ The film was a success, and the company soon followed it up with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, also containing magical conjurations using trick photography; A Midsummer Night’s Dream was released for the Christmas market on December 25, 1909.²⁶

The success of many Macbeth films is due partly to the ambivalence of the supernatural visitations, built into the play itself, and partly to the different roles they play from the apparitions of the ghost of Hamlet senior. As Nicholas Brooke argues in his excellent Oxford edition, Macbeth is all about illusion of various kinds, and so the transfer to screen from stage illusion can simply heighten what ought to be the focus of the play-as-film. Welles was the one to most fully exploit the tradition of magic for his witches, adding the voodoo doll from his original stage production (in a theatre given over to Haitian representations), and at one point allowing the camera to stand in the place of Banquo’s ghost to look back at Macbeth, a powerful reminder that film is itself merely a ghost, light passing through a strip of celluloid and projected onto our present from some distant past when the shooting took place.

The actor is present before us on the theatre stage, but in films the actors are ghosts, merely celluloid images of what once was. Indeed, film-as-ghost is occasionally used in stage productions. The opening scene of one Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet (1997), for example, had Alex Jennings silently scattering his father’s ashes to the backdrop of a flickering home-movie showing father and small son playing in the snow. Colorful staging set off and framed this quiet and old-fashioned black-and-white film-as-ghost. The film of Hamlet’s past in fact was the ghost.

Shakespeare’s fascination with stage devices in the later plays, especially the romances written for the indoor artificially lighted Blackfriars Theatre, as well as the popularity of magic of various kinds in his own time,²⁷ whether for stage conjuring or for more Faustian concerns, suggests that Shakespeare might have been happy to learn from the tradition of horror movies, even from melodrama, just as Orson Welles was to do.