‘All a matter of scale’? – Shakespearean acting and the cinema’s eyes and ears

The paper discusses the acting of Shakespeare’s plays for the screen, in the light of the conventional wisdom that a film actor should simply “do less.” Starting from V. I. Pudovkin’s influential work on Film Technique and Film Acting, it addresses the question of “incongruity” as a source of a sens...

पूर्ण विवरण

में बचाया:
ग्रंथसूची विवरण
में प्रकाशित:URI:https://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare,
मुख्य लेखक: Jackson, Russell
स्वरूप: Article ou chapitre numérique
प्रकाशित: Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 2021
विषय:
ऑनलाइन पहुंच:Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM
Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM
विवरण
सारांश:The paper discusses the acting of Shakespeare’s plays for the screen, in the light of the conventional wisdom that a film actor should simply “do less.” Starting from V. I. Pudovkin’s influential work on Film Technique and Film Acting, it addresses the question of “incongruity” as a source of a sense of “staginess” in film performances. It is suggested that a degree of “incongruity” is created by the physical as well as vocal demands on the actor of speaking the Shakespearean dialogue, and by the potential unfamiliarity for audiences of dialogue that is more copious than that of most mainstream films and at the same time is in an unfamiliar idiom. Films are cited from the silent era to the present century, and the paper concludes with examples from Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 Hamlet, for which the author was text adviser.