British Shakespeare Association Biennial Conference 2005
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Programme : Panels - Seminars - Workshops
Panel - Shakespeare across Media and Cultures
Saturday 3rd September 2005, 9.30-11.00am,
Herschel Lecture Theatre 2
Participants
Daniel Gallimore, Japan Women’s University
‘Six parts romanticism to four parts naturalism’:
Shakespeare in 1920s Japan
Magdalena Cieslak, Lodz
Nudity, drag queen, and a bit with
a cat. Lukasz Barczyk’s Hamlet (2004): ‘pearl of the millennium’
for the new millennium audience
Agnieszka Rasmus, Lodz
“The sleeping and the dead /
Are but as pictures”: Master Shakespeare and Monster Cinema
Abstracts
‘Six parts romanticism to four parts naturalism’: Shakespeare in
1920s Japan
Daniel Gallimore, Japan Women’s University
Shakespeare’s plays have been read, translated and performed in Japan since the 1870s, passing through various stages of appropriation and innovation in their historical contexts, in particular the rise of imperialism in the early 20th century and economism after 1945. By non-Japanese scholars the meanings of Shakespeare in Japan have usually been glimpsed through the theatre, but within Japan the impetus to interpret Shakespeare often comes from academic traditions that stretching back to the founding of a system of higher education in the late 19th century.
Of seminal importance is the scholar and writer Tsubouchi Sh?y? (1859-1935), who in 1928 became the first person to translate the Complete Works into Japanese and also pioneered the stage production of Shakespeare in Japanese translation in the 1900s. This paper will survey Sh?y?’s varied responses to Shakespeare’s plays, ranging as they do from the sublime (Tempest) to the ridiculous (Henry VIII). By locating these responses in the context of the traditional and modern genres which were influencing Sh?y? (e.g. kabuki drama and the realist novel) and then setting them against contemporaneous reviews of his translations and their stage productions, we can acquire insights into how Shakespeare continues to be received in Japan today.
Nudity, drag queen, and a bit with a cat. Lukasz Barczyk’s Hamlet (2004):
‘pearl of the millennium’ for the new millennium audience
Magdalena Cieslak, Lodz
Lukasz Barczyk’s television production of Hamlet is the first of four
projects of an artistic enterprise entitled “Pears of the Millennium”.
Surprisingly or not, Polish public television chose Shakespeare’s best
known play as the first pearl to be produced. The director – Lukasz Barczyk,
30 – is one of the greatest cinematic discoveries of the new generation,
who won immediate acclaim for his stunning directorial debut (a 1999 feature
film I’m Looking at You, Mary).
Barczyk’s Hamlet is set in an undefined historical period which combines
post-punk leather jackets and swords. The spectacular interiors of an old salt
mine Wieliczka make Elsinor an eerie and monumental place. Yet, people who live
in this abstract space and the tragedy that befalls them are supposed to make
us feel like we can relate. Drastically fragmentary and selective composition
of the production stresses the importance of directorial choices and implies
that every element – be it Ophelia’s full nudity in the nunnery
scene or Fortinbras’ surprisingly young age – makes meaning.
In my paper I would like to argue that what the production attempts to do, for
better or worse, is build a bridge between the past and the new millennium,
and that the young director treating Hamlet as a universal playtext shapes it
to fit the new-forming cultural mindsets of the new era.
“The sleeping and the dead / Are but as pictures”: Master Shakespeare
and Monster Cinema
Agnieszka Rasmus, Lodz
The idea that photography could preserve and transmit the dead was naturally
taken up by cinema. If at the close of the nineteenth century photography represented
the so called “cult of death,” cinema, by contrast, was perceived
as producing an equivalent of a “cult of life,” which can be observed
in its initial fascination with everyday activities and with movement, epitomised
in synonyms for cinema, “motion pictures” or “moving pictures.”
Yet, for Maxim Gorky motion on the screen did not suffice to bring associations
with life. According to him, the subjects on the screen were condemned to silence
until they disappeared into a mysterious void beyond the frames of the screen.
His review may be the first that links cinema with death.
As expected, the notion seems more fitting for the horror genre. What, then,
is its place in Shakespeare films? The present analysis aims to examine the
links between cinema and death on the basis of silent Shakespeare movies and
more recent adaptations, showing that by making us forcibly aware of the medium
and its formal properties, these films help create a degree of intellectual
and emotional distance.
