“In States Unborn and Accents Yet Unknown”: Spectral Shakespeare in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die).

This article focuses on Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die), an Italian adaptation of Julius Caesar directed by octogenarian sibling auteurs Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. The film, which was awarded the prestigious Golden Bear at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival and various prizes in Italy, including the 2012 David di Donatello, is set inside the maximum-security wing of Rebibbia, a prison on the outskirts of Rome with a population of mostly Southern Italian offenders.¹ The cast is a group of inmates (convicted of crimes ranging from drug dealing to murder) who had some previous experience as theatre actors as a result of prison productions directed by Fabio Cavalli, most notably Cosimo Rega (Cassius), Manuele Arcuri (Julius Caesar), and Stefano Frasca (Mark Antony). It also includes a former convict, Salvatore Striano (Brutus), who made his cinematic debut in Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah (2008), based on Roberto Saviano’s trenchant book about crime syndicates in the south of Italy, and had a role in Stefano Innocenti’s Gorbaciof (2010), a film about a prison clerk.² Cesare deve morire is a film that defies easy categorization. It is partly a documentary about convicts-turned-actors rehearsing and performing sections of Julius Caesar, mostly in their local dialects, in the cells, corridors, and exercise courtyard of the prison, a process that supposedly culminates in the staging of the play—shot in colour, unlike the rest of the film—before an audience of non-convicts, mostly friends and relatives. It can also be seen as some kind of “docufiction” (a term the Taviani brothers utterly dislike),³ in which the actors interpret Shakespearean roles but also play themselves, often stepping out of these roles, in a quasi-Brechtian fashion, to offer comments on the Shakespearean text—sometimes with pungent irony⁴—and/or explore the extent to which their real-life experiences of violence, ambition, and betrayal interface with the life and vicissitudes of the Shakespearean characters. Additionally, it can be interpreted as an austere, stylized, “anti-naturalistic” version of Julius Caesar that uses stark, high-contrast black-and-white to great effect to draw attention to its own status as a cinematic artifact: the Taviani brothers claim that colour is “realistic,” inextricably bound with what they see as forms of deleterious “televisual realism” of evasion; black-and-white, by contrast, is “unreal,” “a sort of violence against naturalism,” (Pipolo 44) and thus, one may surmise, more likely to embody political and ethical meanings and/or to be charged with the intensity of affect.⁵ Running for only 76 minutes, Cesare deve morire is thus a short but complex film: it continually plays with a number of boundaries, including the boundaries between theater and cinema, rehearsal and performance, documentary and “fictional” film, life and art, colour and black-and-white, death and survival, freedom and constraint.

In a press interview, the Taviani brothers maintain that they have gone “beyond ‘Shakespeare,’ deconstructing and rewriting it,” while “keeping its spirit unaltered” (Sesti). This article explores some of the ways in which this process works, and makes some remarks about that most elusive of notions, the “spirit” of “Shakespeare” (see Lehmann 74–75). It also suggests that the “Shakespeare” of Cesare deve morire is both poison and cure, and thus far removed from the incontrovertibly salvific “Shakespeare” as catalyst of spiritual growth, reformation and redemption that emerges from previous “prison Shakespeare” films such as Hank Rogerson’s Shakespeare Behind Bars (2006), based on Curt Tofteland’s work with inmates at Kentucky’s Luther Luckett prison.⁶

The film begins and ends with colour footage of fragments of the final phases of the staging of Julius Caesar, enthusiastically applauded by the audience, to whom the actors on stage respond with unconventional behaviour, shouting, jumping around, and beating drums. These heavily pared-down versions of the final moments of Julius Caesar are both followed by three short sequences in which the actors interpreting Caesar (Giovanni Arcuri), Brutus (Salvatore Striano), and Cassius (Cosimo Rega) are each escorted back to their individual cells...