Shakespeare the Illusionist. Neil Forsyth

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ