Judith Buchanan

Sanguine Mirages, Cinematic Dreams: Things Seen and Things Imagined in the 1917 Fox Feature Film A Tale of Two Cities

In the June 1917 issue of the American movie fan magazine Photoplay, the reviewer of the Fox feature film A Tale of Two Cities declared that the film’s artistic qualities and impressive dimensions ‘came surprisingly as a shot from a dark doorway’.1 Knowledge of the film’s production stable (Fox), director (Scotsman Frank Lloyd) and cast (including the star William Farnum as both Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay) did not, that is, prepare its audiences for the visual appeal and emotional power of this particular film. The conjured image of the unanticipated eruption of deadly sniper fire from surprising quarters perfectly captures the impact the film makes on its spectators. In its performances, technical control, spectacular dimensions, eloquent editing and purposeful varying of perspectives, it is a film of ambitious reach and considerable subtlety. As an interpretive adaptation, moreover, it shows noteworthy courage in reading the novel against the sentimentalized grain of its interpretive moment.

“In Mute Despair”: Early Silent Films of The Tempest and their Theatrical Referents

This essay argues that silent Shakespeare films of the transitional era are marked de facto by inner conflict as they attempt to honour a set of divergent allegiances: to stage and screen, word and image, textual fidelity and filmic autonomy, inherited iconographies and vital performance, plot and spectacle, high culture and popular culture, heritage and topicality, “author” and market, acts of memorializing, and acts of making new. The 1908 one-reel film of The Tempest released by the English film production company Clarendon and directed by Percy Stow provides a particularly clear example of these divided allegiances. The film was not directly derived from a stage production but clearly trades upon some of the detail, and the driving political premises, of the Herbert Beerbohm Tree production of The Tempest that had been mounted at His Majestys Theatre four years previously. In the process of tracing the specific links between the film and the earlier stage production, this essay describes the oscillating presentational codes of this film that veer between the joyously and explosively cinematic and the conservatively inhibited and stagy. Even in its accommodation of contradictory influences and internal dislocations, however, the 1908 Tempest film is eloquent about the priorities and predispositions of the film industry of its moment, and about contemporary approaches to adapting Shakespeare for the silent screen.

Gospel narratives on silent film

In the silent era, the film industry reached early, eagerly, and repeatedly for literary sources of a more or less reputable character to feed its voracious hunger for narrative material. The authors enlisted to supply a good plot line and some associated cultural kudos included Dickens, Thackeray, Hugo, Pushkin, Racine, Goldsmith, Twain, Wilde and, most frequently of all, Shakespeare. Filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic gratefully embraced the respectability that adapting the “classics” could bring and were widely applauded for doing so. Impressive claims were made about what a Shakespeare picture, for example, might do both for a viewing public in need of cultural and moral edifying and for an industry in need of rescuing from its own worst impulses. Aligning itself with an established literary pedigree was an economical route towards artistic legitimacy and moral propriety for an industry keenly aware that, initially at least, it lacked both. If establishment respectability was what was required of a literary source, the Christian Bible did not just offer it, it was it. It is, therefore, no surprise that the film industry appropriated biblical material strikingly early in its own development. Making such films was not, however, a project without potential pitfalls. Adapting any known literary work for the screen is a delicate business. It runs the risk of irritating those most intensely invested in the particular character, history and perceived cultural value of the source. Nevertheless, adapting sections of the Bible has proved difficult to rival in the sphere of literary adaptation for the strength of the competing responses it can provoke.

“Orgies of Gesticulation”? Pedigree and Performance Codes in Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson's and Ruggero Ruggeri's Silent Films of Hamlet

This paper examines two silent feature films of Hamlet—one English, one Italian. Hepworth and Plumbs film starring Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson was made in 1913 for Gaumont. Rodolfis film starring Ruggero Ruggeri was made in 1917 for Rodolfi-Film. Both actors had already been celebrated for their stage Hamlets and the films are inscribed in markedly different ways with the legacy of those earlier stage productions. As part of considering this legacy, I examine the relationship of each actor to the Shakespearean words necessarily excised from the filmic performance and of each to a set of inherited pantomimic performance codes. The English film is more widely known, exhibited, and discussed than the Italian film. In this paper I suggest that its network of extra-textual associations (theatrical, English socially prestigious) may have proved as beguiling as its particular filmic attributes. I use a comparison of the divergent critical fates of these films as the spur to discussing the marketing, profile, and trends of critical reception for material that equivocates tellingly about its intended market and medium allegiances.

Documentary li(v)es: writing falsehoods, righting wrongs in von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006)

At the heart of the 2006 film Das Leben der Anderen (hereafter The Lives of Others), written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, are two prominently displayed, and tonally distinct, writing implements: one a pen, the other a typewriter. These sit upon two equally cinematically conspicuous and starkly differentiated desks. The visual scheme of the film depends for much of its aesthetic energy upon the comparison between the writing styles and writing spaces of its two principal characters — spaces which are also, inevitably, invited to act as synecdochic signpost to the writers themselves, the written work they produce and the worlds they occupy.

Shakespeare and the magic lantern

In 1841/2, a magic lanternist calling himself ‘Timothy Toddle’ wrote down, for his own reference, the running order for his slides. Alongside each numbered and titled slide, he scripted an accompanying commentary. Toddle, it seems, wanted to ensure both the correct sequencing of his material and the fluency of his public patter. His show opened, as was customary, with an introductory ‘Welcome’ slide and closed with one reading ‘Good Night’ and another ‘God Save the Queen’. Between these end points, the show consisted of approximately 180 other slides, ranging significantly in theme and tone. The surviving running order reveals that in the midst of slide sequences such as ‘A very clever trick of clowns’, ‘Miss Lucy swinging from a Walnut tree’, ‘Punch and Judy’, ‘Mr Pickwick running after his hat’ and ‘Lord Byron – a poet of the first rate talent but of the most seductive & dangerous principles’, Toddle also dropped in slides illustrating two dramatic moments from Macbeth, each accompanied by a summarized narration of the relevant section of the drama and some select Shakespearian quotation.1 Subsequently, Toddle’s script passed to another lantern-lecturer who, in c.1870, made some modifications and additions to it in a discernibly different hand.2 This later lanternist’s additions included two further Shakespearean sequences, from Hamlet and Richard III respectively. As had been the case for the original Macbeth section, both additional Shakespearian sequences were accompanied by some scripted narration and gobbets of appropriate quotation. The Toddle document is, as far as I am aware, unique in the insight it offers into the flavour of a nineteenth-century magic lantern show in its totality.3 It tells of the variety of types of slide that could be included in a single show, the extent and tenor of the commentary that might accompany them and, through its passage down the century and subsequent modification, the adaptability of such shows according to the preferences of the lanternist, the prevailing cultural climate and the current availability and modishness of particular slides. Later in this article, in the context of a discussion of other uses

Celluloid Formaldehyde? The Body on Film

A body on screen is a mediated thing, ontologically distinguished from a body on the stage. The latter breathes the same air, occupies the same dimensions and is subject to the same laws of causation, circumstance and senescence as its audience. The former, by contrast, offers the trace memory of a person, but is not itself that person. By alluding implicitly to a prior time and another place — the place and moment of filming in which the flesh-and-blood body of the actor was physically present — the cinematic body renders conspicuous a corporeal absence from the specific space and moment of exhibition. As a testimony to personal absence, the body on screen is impervious to the presence (or otherwise) of an audience. Unlike the present-ness, substantiality and sensory responsiveness of the spectator’s body, therefore, the cinematic body is, in essence, nothing more than the two-dimensional projected play of light and shadow on a screen.

Virgin and Ape, Venetian and Infidel: Labellings of Otherness in Oliver Parker’s Othello

In February 1998, Kofi Anan, the Secretary General of the United Nations, arrived in Iraq to confront the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Of all the things that were crucially relevant to Anan’s high-profile embassy, colour was certainly not one of them. And yet, in the context of a world order which, in other respects, is anything but consistently equitable in its view of black and white, the symbolism of his ‘ride to the rescue’ of ‘the civilized world’ (as characterized in the Wall Street Journal) can carry a Shakespearean resonance: a black African was the commissioned representative of an organization, the majority of whose central power has traditionally lain in white communities, upholding its values against the dangerous infidel.1 Seen in this light, Anan’s mission to Iraq exposes the degrees of alterity that sometimes underpin cultural relations. In the face of a common foe explicitly defined in ‘the civilized world’ in terms of its absolute alterity, subsidiary categories of alien and insider — black and white, African and Euro-American — are pragmatically elided.