Cinematic Hamlet: The Films of Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda

Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet: Modernizing Medievalism

65 Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet ModernizingMedievalism Franco Zeffirelli began his sixth feature film, which was also his third Shakespeare adaptation, confident that he knew how to reshape Hamlet into a powerful and popular film. In The Taming of the Shrew, he demonstrated an ability to adjust the play’s emphases to the abilities and personalities of his stars, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. In his starless Romeo and Juliet, he demonstrated an ability to apply Olivier’s essayistic method of streamlining the play’s significations and replacing lost text-generated interest with cinematic interest.Both abilities are evident in his star-studded and streamlined Hamlet, although Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet 66 his casting of action star Mel Gibson and his textual adjustments provoked predictable complaints. The complaints about Gibson seem to have faded, but chagrin over the cutting and transposition of Shakespeare’s text persists. James Welsh and Richard Vela, for example, find that “Gibson’s acting deserves to be taken seriously,” but they lament that Zeffirelli“restructured the play without regard to the consequences” and deleted so much that“the film might be incoherent to those who have not read and studied Shakespeare.”1 In my view, Zeffirelli carries Olivier’s essayistic approach to a new level of accomplishment , very effectively coordinating the shortened text necessary in a film just over two hours long with cinema’s distinctive storytelling resources and the requirements of mass-marketed film. Like Olivier, Zeffirelli sacrifices a considerable amount of Shakespearean poetry and polysemy, but he compensates for this necessary sacrifice with his characteristic combination of engaging visual artistry and creative segmentation. The First Movement Beginning a plot that focuses more closely and quickly on the central character , Zeffirelli begins distinguishing his Hamlet from Olivier’s by eliminating , already in the shooting script (cowritten with Christopher DeVore), the first appearance of the ghost.2 This deletion begins the process of shortening the film to a more standard feature length and segmentation. Like Olivier, he eliminates the Fortinbras material entirely. Unlike Olivier, he also shortens every long speech and every section of dialogue in act 1. Cutting more than half of Shakespeare’s words reduces the first movement to thirty-four minutes, very much in line with feature films of the late twentieth century. The reduction also makes room for several wordless stretches of remarkable visual communication that immediately focus the first movement on the oedipal triangle. The first such stretch, occurring during the credits, is an exemplary piece of question-and-answer filmmaking. As orchestral music covering an establishing shot of Elsinore castle gives way to the tones of an organ, mysteriously hinting at something liturgical, the camera tilts downward to reveal darkly clad women clustered on the castle steps, then a line of mounted soldiers in full armor, with pikes raised. The camera tracks slowly down the vast courtyard to reveal additional ranks of men: infantrymen, courtiers, and clergy.The dark dress and solemn demeanor of this varied medieval community lends gravity to this large public event, whatever its nature might be.We seem to be Modernizing Medievalism 67 witnessing a large procession that has come to an expectant halt,an impressive effect without a known cause. The nature of the event is revealed following a dissolve to the dark interior of a crypt when we hear a woman sobbing and see an armored body lying in an open coffin. Like Olivier’s film, this Hamlet opens with a royal funeral. Before a word is spoken, we learn a great deal. A new, younger king has replaced the deceased old man. The widowed queen’s consuming grief reveals that the former king was much beloved. She displays at this point no interest in the new king, eliminating Shakespeare’s ambiguity about the nature of Gertrude’s relationship with Claudius before old Hamlet’s death. Claudius, however, takes great interest in her, as three cutaway shots to his watchful visage reveal, the first accompanied by the introduction of violins into a masterful Ennio Morricone score that has played continuously from the opening credits. In a subtle musical“usurpation,”a cut back to the queen hovering tearfully over the body as the strings continue links Claudius’s romantic interest in her with her love for the dead king. A hand in close-up ritually sprinkles soil on the corpse. The previous cutaway shot implies that the king is performing this ritual, but that...