New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (review)

This study by Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe distinguishes itself from a spate of "Shakespeare on Screen" books by concentrating not upon the merely recent but instead upon the innovative in adapting the plays for film and video. The authors strategically invoke the concept of la nouvelle vague of the 1950s and 1960s and that movement's resistance to Hollywood-style cinema, conferring the term "New Wave" upon screen works that both demonstrate and encourage alertness to the resonance of the encounter between film and play. Although reluctant to make any "formal claim for the superiority" (5-6) of the films analyzed here, they suggest that screen productions characterized by self-reflexiveness can best engage with Shakespearean metatheatricality.

The first chapter clarifies why several mainstream attempts at adaptation have usually failed to connect with this aspect of the playtexts' original energies-and have also failed to inspire deep reflection on the development of a Shakespeare film canon. Along the way, Cartelli and Rowe offer alternatives to what could be termed Kenolatry, the critical attempt to champion all of Kenneth Branagh's film versions of Shakespeare-corollary symptoms of which also include the overestimation of Michael Hoffman's William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1999). The "counter-mainstream," by contrast, partly initiated by vexing, provocative landmarks such as Derek Jarman's William Shakespeare's "The Tempest" (1980) and Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear (1987), provides opportunities "to map the diverging faultlines of both Shakespeare on film production and scholarly accounts of it" (22).

Building effectively on the work of theorists ranging from Joseph Grigely and Jerome McGann to Robert Stam and W. B. Worthen, the second chapter considers how adapting Shakespeare to the screen is a cultural process involving far more than mere translations between media. The authors draw a useful distinction between "recyclers" and "revivers": the former deploy classic materials as a means of "restoring some past reality" (35) amid familiar filmic conventions and codes; the latter seek out modern correlatives for the social dynamics explored in the plays. It should be noted, of course, that many films reflect both impulses-and that neither impulse readily lends itself to success, commercial or otherwise. But it should also be noted that revivers are less interested in relevance (and its supposed appeal) than in immediacy of effect. Cartelli and Rowe are primarily interested in how updated-or drastically re-dated-versions of Shakespeare work: that is, in how they function and in how they impact audiences. Revivers' strategies have included alternate character functions, such as Young Lucius in Julie Taymor's Titus (1999); grandly free plot renderings, such as Eric Rohmer's Conte d'hiver (1992); and immersions both in a play's originary culture and in latter-day technology, such as Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (1991).

Cartelli and Rowe employ their own form of immersion in the third chapter, which traces connections between recent experiments in cinema and early modern arts of memory. They apply Michel Serres's revisionist model of technological development as recuperative or polychronic to seventeenth-century memory manuals, to the memory-obsessed Hamlet (both play and character), and to the most technologically daring of Shakespeare's recent film adapters: Baz Luhrmann (in his 1996 William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet), Julie Taymor, and (especially in this context) Michael Almereyda. The latter's version of Hamlet (2000) has sometimes misleadingly been termed a "corporate" update, but Cartelli and Rowe rightly understand the film as a "media allegory" focused on "technologies of memory" and on "the trade-offs between different expressive tools" (59); in other words, the multimedia are the multimessages.

The following chapters similarly concentrate on a few significant experiments in adaptation. Taymor's Titus is explored as Ovidian cinema, reaching through the Shakespearean play text to its literary source, the Metamorphoses, and its anti-imperial stances (84). Taymor's film highlights the "virtues and limitations of different representational practices" (81), as exemplified by its...