Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996)

You're half way through Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. Many of you are reading the play for class. Some of you are performing the stage play later this week, a production we are all going to go see. These three experiences – Hamlet the text, Hamlet the theatrical production, and Hamlet the film – give us a perfect opportunity to examine the different natures of artistic form. So let’s do it.

For those of you reading the play, notice how the text makes itself available to all possible interpretations simultaneously. Hamlet can be a brooding adolescent, a middle-aged mama’s boy, or a heart-broken young man all at once. You can take a line like “the universe is out of joint; oh, cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right,” and see that as a metaphor for the shift from a theocentric world view to a more humanist one. Or you may chalk it up to a certain petulance on our hero’s part. Each choice means that you read the lines that follow and seen subsequent scenes in different ways, but you can hold all the possibilities in your mind and be participating in a variety of parallel explorations of meaning.

Certainly in your mind’s eye, you’re probably “seeing” the text’s characters and setting in a consistent way. Good readers, studies tell us, do this visualization. But it’s a free flowing experience, capable of shifting as the text shapes your experience from scene to scene. With Shakespeare, specifically, a highly visual writer, we are encouraged to visit this theater of the mind. Take Ophelia’s revelation to her father, Polonius, of her encounter with Hamlet in Act 2, scene 1:

As I was sewing in my closet,
Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced,
No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled,
Ungartered, and down-gyved to his ankle,
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,
And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors – he comes before me. (2.1.87-94)

You don’t need to have seen that to “see” it. So the text is a space of unlimited possibilities and dimensions, allowing us, as readers, to assemble our own coherent worlds and meanings.

On stage, Hamlet takes place in an imagined space. The action, for example, occurs in the castle of Elsinore. Look at the stage this weekend when your classmates are performing. What visual elements evoke Shakespeare’s setting? How do you place it in time? Where is it? What does the set suggest about the action and psychology of the characters? Choices have been made – how do they shape a single vision of the play? Whatever your answers to these sorts of questions, your responses will rely on imagination. You’re not really looking at Elsinore’s walls. You’re probably looking at painted Styrofoam, and the palace, with its bedrooms, antechambers, throne room, battlements, hallways, and library (however Mr. Severson or Mr. Dutton choose to represent these) will all be compressed into a space roughly 35’ x 16’. That you believe in the setting is a form of willing suspension of disbelief, but more importantly this imaginative interaction allows the play’s language (e.g. “Two nights together had these gentlemen, / Marcellus and Bernardo, on their watch, / In the dead waste and middle of the night, / Been thus encountered: a figure like your father, … / Appears before them.”) and its events (i.e. ghosts) to have meaning on two levels, one literal and one figurative. In short, theatrical drama takes place both on stage and in our minds.

Filmic Shakespeare takes place in a realistic space. That is, when Branagh wants you to see Elsinore, he gives us the stunning establishing shot of Blenheim Castle and then we cut away to an interior with black and white tiled floors, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and a crowd of courtiers, as well as other equally well-appointed rooms. In the place of imagination, we have the acceptance of vicarious experience. The emphasis of movies is on feeling the realness of a story, no matter how fantastical. As you watch the remaining portion of Branagh’s Hamlet, consider how this realness affects your perception of story, character, and ideas in ways that would be different if you were reading the text or watching the play on stage. One example: Branagh depicts, via flashback cutaway, an actual sexual relationship taking place between Ophelia and Hamlet, while Ophelia discusses Hamlet with her dad, Polonius. These flashbacks aren’t possible on stage and don’t appear in the text; they are a filmic trait. And their presence creates a specific reality out of something that in the text is ambiguous and on stage is created, if at all, subtextually.

In the end, seeing is believing. We simply want to stress that what you see – words, staging, or celluloid – makes all the difference.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996)

Whether you find the prospect of an evening of Shakespeare on film daunting or exciting, you’re in for a treat with Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. First, Branagh loves Hollywood. He likes movie stars, fabulous sets, intense drama, stunning costumes, and the broad sweep of life one can capture on 70mm film. His Hamlet is the Gone With the Wind of Shakespeare films.

So here, we want to talk about what happens when Shakespeare goes Hollywood. (Next week, we’ll look at more at the nature of Shakespeare on film.) Branagh knows as well as anyone that a movie needs to entertain. But we’re talking Hamlet here, perhaps the greatest work by the greatest writer in the English language. If you asked any group of, say, 50 people if they’d rather go see Hamlet or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, chances are good Megan Fox would beat out the Bard. So Branagh pulls out all the stops – resplendent costumes in red and gold and black, the opulent backdrop of Blenheim Castle, and notable A-list actors taking on even the small roles. Branagh reminds us that this play, while a tragedy, is great fun. It’s got ghosts, and murder, and thwarted love, and political intrigue, and sword fights, and poison, and grave humor, and Kate Winslet’s face pushed up against a two-way mirror.

Usually, to get all this and pages of awesome language in, directors need to cut the words down. Branagh himself is one of the more aggressive Shakespeare text cutters when he’s filming. His production of Love’s Labor’s Lost (2000) reportedly removed 75% of Shakespeare’s lines (replacing some of them with music by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern). He did much the same with As You Like It (2006), set in Japan. But with Hamlet, you get a “complete” text, all the lines associated with the play. (We’re being a bit coy about that because there are different versions of Hamlet, and a definitive text is a bit of a misnomer.)

One justification for cutting the language is that Shakespeare wrote for a stage that had little in the way of decoration. His characters tend to paint pictures with their words (think of Macbeth’s “is this a dagger I see before me” speech, how clear the images are even though they reside primarily in Macbeth’s imagination). As you watch this first part of Hamlet, listen for the kinds of speeches that other directors would have cut because they could show what was being described.

One thing to ask yourself is whether all of Branagh’s scenery ends up being redundant? When the soldiers explain about the ghost they’ve seen walking the battlements, and Branagh gives you his version of the ghost, do the images simply reiterate the lines? We tend to think that Branagh deftly avoids this trap, and we’ll leave it up to you to consider how the language complements or competes with the filming.

Hollywood also likes stars. When we go to a film like Mission: Impossible to watch a character name Ethan Hunt, we’re never able to disassociate ourselves from the fact that it’s Tom Cruise who plays him. Branagh trusts Shakespeare’s characters to hold their own even when they’re played by famous faces like Julie Christie, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, and Jack Lemmon. (It doesn’t always work; and yes, we’re looking at you Alicia Silverstone.) Part of this acceptance of star power as a force behind the Shakespearean actor is that Branagh considers himself sort of a movie star. He frequently succeeds in his roles as Benedict, Henry V, and Hamlet in making you forget you’re watching a Shakespearean actor and not just another Hollywood leading man. His shaping of the lines is so effortless, it’s easy to watch him act.

In fact, not since Lawrence Olivier has one man handled both the directing and primary acting of so many quality Shakespearean films. We hope that while you watch the first part of Hamlet tonight, that you’ll enjoy it as much as a movie as an addition to the ranks of great Hamlet productions.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen (1991)

Delicatessen, a zany little film directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet that’s startling and clever, blew me away with its sheer originality and liveliness. This 1991 film encourages the viewer to connect with the characters on a complex level, developing both disdain and fondness for the decisions that each of them makes. The film begins in a rural apartment building in a post-apocalyptic France. A shortage of food forcing grain to be used as currency has forced out the older social structure as the struggle to regain balance and unity between the characters takes priority.

It sounds dark and dramatic, but directors Jeunet and Caro demonstrate an impressively confident feel of comic timing. Thriving on quirks, the film’s most distinctive aspect is its careful use of musical sequences, accented by uncomfortable uneasiness and using quick cuts reveal rhythms and even melodies played out in a light-hearted natured. For example, they set up goony little nonsense symphonies, such as everybody in the building simultaneously bowing cellos, Dominique Pinon painting the roof while springing off his tied braces, two brothers testing their animal noise toys, all in choreographed symphony to Jean-Claude Dreyfus and Karin Viard’s love-making. Or like Dominique Pinon and Karin Viard’s little dance while bouncing on a bed to test loose springs, the two of them keeping time to a song playing on the TV.

Jeunet and Caro’s keen sense of black humor is ever-present, particularly in Sylvie Laguna’s bizarre attempts to commit suicide with Rube Goldberg-type setups such as connecting her doorbell to a sewing machine that sews through a piece of cloth that will pull a lamp into the bath (which fails when the power goes off). Particularly, her climactic attempt to use a combination of pills, gas, shotgun, Molotov cocktail and hanging, which all farcically fail at once, portrays this serious subject in a lighter less emotionally draining way for the viewer. At the foundations of the film is the romance between monkey-faced Dominique Pinon and innocently lovely Marie-Louise Dougnac, which plays with a genuine sweetness in the middle of the film’s off-kilter tone.

The characters of Louison (Dominique Pinon) and Mademoiselle Plusse (Karin Viard) caught my attention in particular because of their idiosyncrasies and the relationships they take on with other characters they run into. Louison (Dominique Pinon) answers an ad to work as a handyman doing odd jobs for a butcher. Unbeknownst to Louison, the butcher (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) has hatched a plot to turn the unsuspecting worker into the next choice cut for the tenants in his dilapidated building. The real story comes when Louison, who is not without skills and charm, becomes a gear in the clockwork of the butcher’s gruesome scheming. He soon falls in love with Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac) as the story deepens as she is the painfully shy daughter of the Butcher.

Incredibly inventive, both in storytelling and set and character designs, Delicatessen uses its quirky tone to combine a surprisingly visual film with the bleakest of social satires. Literally one of the many movies that must be watched to truly understand its genius, Delicatessen marks another collaboration of genius directing team Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet and is one of the sharpest of all futuristic foreign films.

Billy Lutz
Film Club Co-President