Hamlet on Film: The Screen History of the Man Who Could Not Make Up His Mind

• Thesis title in English: Hamlet on Film: The Screen History of the Man Who Could Not Make Up His Mind
• Key words: Hamlet, Shakespeare, film, filmové adaptace, Branagh, Kozintsev, Olivier
• English key words: Hamlet, Shakespeare, film, Shakespeare on Film, Branagh, Kozintsev, Olivier
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2014/2015
• Thesis type: Bachelor's thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: PhDr. Soňa Nováková, CSc.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 15.07.2015
• Date of assignment: 15.07.2015
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 30.07.2015
• Date and time of defence: 12.09.2016 08:30
• Date of electronic submission: 15.08.2016
• Date of proceeded defence: 12.09.2016
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: PhDr. Zdeněk Beran, Ph.D.

Guidelines

　
Hamlet on Film: The Screen History of the Man Who Could Not Make Up His Mind
The thesis deals with the film adaptations of William Shakespeare's

Hamlet - a multi-layered and deeply ambiguous play. Its innate ambiguity pushes directors to take widely differing stances. The thesis looks at different approaches and contrasts their effectiveness. The aspects of the play different directors chose to highlight and with what result will also be taken into consideration.
Hamlet


has invited experimentation from the time it encountered the medium of film as exemplified by the gender-bending silent version from 1920's Germany. The thesis will however be limited to the English language adaptations with one exception: Grigori Kozintsev's 1964 version based upon Boris Pasternak's translation into Russian.
The thesis will discuss the general issues connected with adapting play-texts into the medium of a film. It will also focus on instances within the particular adaptations that demonstrate the shift between the two means of convening a story. One of the prominent disparities is the film's tendency to shy away from telling towards showing. Marjorie Graber coined the term “unscene” for a narrative description of an action that is not seen. An example of an unscene in

Hamlet would be Ophelia's drowning. How do the directors react to such an occurrence? Would they be prepared to also narrate or will they feel drawn to show the action? Another choice has to be made when presenting the ghost. A part of its ambiguity has to be taken away. Do we see it in the closet scene together with Hamlet or do we share the queen's confusion and suspect Hamlet's madness? The soliloquies are tricky in adapting as well. Is voice-over in place or are they spoken?
Laurence Olivier's influential 1948 version was the first one to use the voice-over technique for the soliloquies and the thesis will take this version into account as it influenced later adaptations. The main emphasis will however lay on Kozintsev's and Branagh's,
possibly Zeffirelli's, films. Grigori Kozintsev's 1964 film is a commentary on the Soviet regime and the effect of a totalitarian state on its people. The focus shifts from Hamlet as an individual to a man whose fate is moulded by a deeply damaged society. The imagery and symbolism of natural elements will also be discussed.
Kenneth Branagh set himself a challenge of doing something that had not been done before and often had been deemed impossible; namely to adapt Shakespeare's longest play without making any cuts to the text whatsoever. This has resulted in a lavishly decorated four hour film which test Branagh's limits as a filmmaker. He endeavors to hold the audience's attention by offering a great variety of shots and often changing the rhythm of the film's narration. The sense of opulence is mediated both through the costumes and settings but also through the technical specifications; the film is very wide (2,2:1 ration) and is shot in ultrahigh definition. Despite all of this, it wasn't a financial success. Branagh had to postpone the production of the film at first as Zeffirelli had made plans to film

Hamlet at roughly the same time and as he cast Mel Gibson as a lead, he won the funding he needed. His version, though Mel Gibson was a rather problematic choice, has been successful in the financial sense.
Two recent adaptions deserve at least a brief notice – Almereyda's 2000 low-budget version and Doran's 2009 film based on the Royal Shakespeare Company stage production. The thesis will take both of them into account and might use them in contrast to the other films.

References

Bibliography
Brode, Douglas.
Shakespeare In The Movies. New York: Berkley Boulevard Books, 2001.
Cartmell, Deborah.
Interpreting Shakespeare On Screen. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.
Cook, Patrick J.
Cinematic Hamlet. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011. Print.
Dawson, Anthony B.,
Shakespeare in Performance: Hamlet. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.
Donaldson, Peter Samuel.
Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990.
Hutcheon, Linda.
A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Taylor&Francis Group, 2006
Jackson, Russell.
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000
Kozintsev, Grigori, ‘
Hamlet and King Lear: Stage and Film’, Clifford Leech and J. M. R. Margeson (eds.), Shakespeare 1971: Proceedings. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1972, 190-99.
Moore, T. A. C.,
Kozintsev’s Shakespeare Films: Russian Political Protest in Hamlet and King Lear. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012