From Oscar-winning British classics to Hollywood musicals and
Westerns, from Soviet epics to Bollywood thrillers, Shakespeare has
inspired an almost infinite variety of films. Directors as diverse
as Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth
Branagh, Baz Luhrmann and Julie Taymor have transferred
Shakespeare's plays from stage to screen with unforgettable
results. Spanning a century of cinema, from a silent short of "The
Tempest" (1907) to Kenneth Branagh's "As You Like It" (2006),
Daniel Rosenthal's up-to-date selection takes in the most
important, inventive and unusual Shakespeare films ever made. Half
are British and American productions that retain Shakespeare's
language, including key works such as Olivier's "Henry V" and
"Hamlet", Welles' "Othello" and "Chimes at Midnight", Branagh's
"Henry V" and "Hamlet", Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet" and Taymor's
"Titus". Alongside these original-text films are more than 30 genre
adaptations: titles that aim for a wider audience by using
modernized dialogue and settings and customizing Shakespeare's
plots and characters, transforming "Macbeth" into a pistol-packing
gangster ("Joe Macbeth" and "Maqbool") or reimagining "Othello" as
a jazz musician ("All Night Long"). There are Shakesepeare-based
Westerns ("Broken Lance", "King of Texas"), musicals ("West Side
Story", "Kiss Me Kate"), high-school comedies ("10 Things I Hate
About You", "She's the Man"), even a sci-fi adventure ("Forbidden
Planet"). There are also films dominated by the performance of a
Shakespearean play ("In the Bleak Midwinter", "Shakespeare in
Love"). Rosenthal emphasises the global nature of Shakespearean
cinema, with entries on more than 20 foreign-language titles,
including Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood and Ran", Grigori Kozintsev's
"Russian Hamlet" and "King Lear", and little-known features from as
far afield as "Madagascar" and "Venezuela", some never released in
Britain or the US. He considers the films' production and
box-office history and examines the film-makers' key interpretive
decisions in comparison to their Shakespearean sources, focusing on
cinematography, landscape, music, performance, production design,
textual alterations and omissions. As cinema plays an increasingly
important role in the study of Shakespeare at schools and
universities, this is a wide-ranging, entertaining and accessible
guide for Shakespeare teachers, students and enthusiasts.
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