Shakespeare on Film in the New Millennium

Wray, Ramona

doi:10.1080/17450910701461211

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…In an essay from 1982, the Shakespearean critic Graham Holderness posited that a decade of criticism scrutinising the Shakespeare adaptations of Peter Brook, Peter Hall, Grigori Kozintsev, Akira Kurosawa, Laurence Olivier, Roman Polanski and Orson Welles had served to canonise these works as a ‘Great Tradition of Shakespeare on Film’ (64). Identifying a concomitant bias at work within Shakespeare studies, others, such as Ramona Wray, have noted that critical and pedagogical attention has largely been monopolised by English‐language and large‐scale adaptations at the expense of non‐Anglophone and smaller‐scale productions; in her synopsis of post‐millennial Shakespeare‐on‐film criticism, Wray thus laments the ‘paucity of global conversation’ which, she claims, has frustrated international scholarly collaboration and more general forms of knowledge exchange (279). Clearly, distribution problems and lack of linguistic expertise are at least partially to blame for these biases.…”

Section: World Cinema Shakespearesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shakespeare and World Cinema: A Critical Overview

Murray

2013

Literature Compass

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This essay traces the history of the idea of world cinema, cataloguing its key meanings within film studies before going on to provide an overview of its uses within the critical discipline of Shakespeare on film. The innocuousness of the term ‘world cinema’ belies the plethora of potential meanings which it has accrued; such is the term’s fluidity, in fact, that it has courted allegations of being, at best, indistinct or simplistic, and, at worst, specious and neo‐colonial. Arguing against assumptions that the term is too indistinct to be of value, or that it is, in a post‐national age, obsolete, various critics have shown that world cinema is a concept whose very malleability renders it indispensable in contemplating how the films of various international directors can be seen, to lesser or greater degrees, to relate to Shakespeare, to the industrial, political and cultural specificities of nation or region (and the cinematic traditions therein) and to global networks of demographic exchange, cinematic intertextuality and monetary and/or aesthetic collaboration. Surveying the key ideas currently provoking debate within film studies and Shakespeare on screen criticism, this article endeavours to reveal how theoretical templates of world cinema have been deployed to consider how a globally circulating Shakespeareanism interacts with the representational practices of diverse localities. The article’s conclusion tentatively suggests some new paths yet to be explored within the field.

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Section: World Cinema Shakespearesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shakespeare and World Cinema: A Critical Overview

Murray

2013

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“…As Ramona Wray states, now is surely the time in the discipline to welcome the possibility of 'enfolding, integration or polysemy' and to enter a 'global conversation' that enables 'knowledge transfer'. 12 Older examples from, for example, Egypt and India are coming to be granted an overdue appraisal; newer instances from Latin America, Madagascar and elsewhere allow for fresh assessments of the powers attached to Bardic commerce. 13 In their scope and imagination, these works constitute a revealing and distinctive corpus of material, a corpus that requires us to take greater account of the circuit that defines and determines reception and to question the unidirectional 'cultural flow' that invariably travels 'from the ''west'' to the ''rest'''.…”

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Screen Shakespeares: knowledge and practice

Burnett¹

2010

Critical Quarterly

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For too long, a genuinely international sense of Shakespeare's plays on film has been missing from the critical record, with attention tending to fall on Anglophone rather than non-Anglophone productions. Michael Anderegg, writing in 2004, notes that 'a Shakespeare film should include Shakespeare's words spoken in English' and straitjackets his examples accordingly, while Michael Greer and Toby Widdicombe, commenting in 2010, observe that their study 'does not include . . . films in languages other than English' before adding, rather dismissively, 'If you are looking for . . . foreign films, we recommend searching the Internet Movie Database'. 1 The positions outlined are also reflected in a related tendency, which is to cite a limited number of 'foreign' Shakespearean filmic instances in surveys of the field as representative. Whatever strategy is adopted, it is clear that, as we enter a period in which the Bard is expanding and diversifying as a global icon, a more nuanced and ambitious sense of the multifarious ways in which Shakespeare is screened inside and across nations and cultures is called for. In this way, established knowledge can usefully be challenged, and the practices utilised to address the topic of Shakespeare on screen might effectively be interrogated.Such a project, which might be seen within the circumference of 'Shakespeare and World Cinema', brings in its train questions of definition and application. Film critics contend that the category of 'world cinema' is not to be conceptualised in a unitary fashion: the 'regional interaction' of productions needs to be addressed, the dialogic complexion of films must be attended to, and questions of hybridity and transnationalism should be placed at the core of any interpretive engagement. 2 These arguments are also relevant to Shakespeare and to the need for a comparative discussion of his plays on screen that takes full account of cross-fertilisation and exchange. To encourage this development, what is required is a two-part process: a recovery of a genre that lies beyond the UK/US axis followed by an incorporation of that genre within existing understandings. Accompanying such a process is a scrutiny of methodology that insists upon the marshalling of interdisciplinary expertise. Only then might we be able to arrive at

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Shakespeare and World Cinema

Burnett

2012

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Shakespeare and World Cinema radically re-imagines the field of Shakespeare on film, drawing on a wealth of examples from Africa, the Arctic, Brazil, China, France, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, Tibet, Venezuela, Yemen and elsewhere. Mark Thornton Burnett explores the contemporary significance of Shakespeare cinema outside the Hollywood mainstream for the first time, arguing that these adaptations are an essential part of the story of Shakespearean performance and reception. The book reveals in unique detail the scope, inventiveness and vitality of over seventy films that have undeservedly slipped beneath the radar of critical attention and also discusses regional Shakespeare cinema in Latin America and Asia. Utilising original interviews with filmmakers throughout, it introduces new auteurs, analyses multiple adaptations of plays such as Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet and pioneers fresh methodologies for understanding the role that Shakespeare continues to play in the international marketplace.

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Shakespeare on Film in the New Millennium

Cited by 6 publications

References 10 publications

Shakespeare and World Cinema: A Critical Overview

Shakespeare and World Cinema: A Critical Overview

Screen Shakespeares: knowledge and practice

Shakespeare and World Cinema

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