Much of the film takes place out of doors. Many of the exteriors were filmed at the fortress of Ivangorod, on the border of Russia and Estonia. And its external appearance, in the montage of the sequences filmed in a variety of places". The image will appear only in the unity of the sensations of Elsinore's various aspects. Of the castle itself, Kozintsev said: "The general view of the castle must not be filmed. The camera is continually mobile and extended shots (average length 24 seconds) enable the physical exploration of the spaces of the court and castle. The film also shows the presence of ordinary people in ragged clothes, who are like the grave digger: good-hearted and only wishing to live peacefully. The camera frequently looks through bars and grates, and one critic has suggested that the image of Ophelia in an iron farthingale symbolises the fate of the sensitive and intelligent in the film's tough political environment. The castle's role as a prison is emphasised. I will not yield a single point from this line." Where Olivier had narrow winding stairwells, Kozintsev has broad avenues, peopled with ambassadors and courtiers. Kozintsev observed of his predecessor: "Olivier cut the theme of government, which I find extremely interesting. Unlike Laurence Olivier's 1948 film, which removed most of the play's political dimension to focus on Hamlet's inner turmoil, Kozintsev's Hamlet is as political and public as it is personal. the opening scene in which Hamlet arrives at Elsinore to join the court's mourning, and the vigil awaiting the appearance of the ghost). Kozintsev seeks constantly to represent the content of the play in visual terms, and there are notable sequences which are constructed without the use of dialogue (e.g.
(Hamlet's final speech is reduced simply to "The rest is silence.") There is some resequencing of material in Act IV to illustrate the outwitting of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the voyage to England. The opening scene of the play is cut entirely, along with scenes 1 and 6 of Act IV, but other scenes are represented in sequence, even though some are drastically shortened. Kozintsev's film is faithful to the architecture of the play, but the text (based on Pasternak's translation) is heavily truncated, achieving a total running time of 2 hours 20 minutes (from a play which can last as long as four hours in full performance). In an appendix entitled "Ten Years with Hamlet", he includes extracts from his diaries dealing with his experiences of the 1954 stage production and his 1964 film.
Kozintsev also wrote extensively about Shakespeare and a major chapter in his book Shakespeare: Time and Conscience is devoted to his thoughts on Hamlet together with a historical survey of earlier interpretations. Then, in 1954 Kozintsev directed a stage production of Hamlet at the Pushkin Theatre in Leningrad, using Boris Pasternak's translation this was one of the first Soviet productions of the play in the post- Joseph Stalin era. However, he returned to the theatre in 1941 with a Leningrad production of King Lear. In 1923 he had been planning to perform Hamlet as a pantomime in the experimental manner of FEKS, but the plan was not put into effect, and Kozintsev's energies shifted into the cinema. Grigori Kozintsev had been a founder member of the Russian avant-garde artist group the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS), whose ideas were closely related to Dadaism and Futurism.
0 kommentar(er)
