Sebastian Novoa Gam

Adaptation: Shakespeare on screen

Mtra. Adriana Bellamy

The man on the throne: the cinematic mode as protest in Kozintsevs Hamlet

How to speak from the insides of a dictatorship? How can we conceive the power of art inside an

environment that encloses and forces it to pass through a filter in which censure is the norm?

These are the questions that some of the avant-garde movements of the first half of the 20th

century were trying to answer. With the death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet Union began a process

commonly known as the Thaw1. Although the period was set during Khrushchevs

administration, most of the Thaw cultural producers believed that they had abandoned Stalinist

cultural practices, their works continued to generate, in revised form, the major tropes of Stalinist

culture Although the cultural Thaw of the 1950s and 60s embraced new values, it merely

reworked Stalinist artistic practices (Prokhorov 4). It is inside this context where we find

Kozintsevs adaptation of Hamlet. It is thus the purpose of this work to explain how certain

mechanisms inside the cinematic language used by Kozintsev, open up a space for the

interweaving of a political comment and its power as a form of protest. Although we recognize

Kozintsevs film, its structure, as an adaptation that mainly focus on the political aspects of the

play, we chose the sequence of Hamlets The Mousetrap as a way of mirroring the political

environment towards art before and during the Thaw. A sequence, a feeling, a gesture. All of

these things build up the notion of this Hamlet as a political representation in which Kozintsev is

1
The term was first coined after the novel The Thaw by Ilya Ehrenburg.
trying to enunciate the sinister power of the state: its procedures, its silences, the way in which

power plotted to censure, capture and ultimately exterminate all of those who were not aligned to

its axis.

For the sake of our argument, it is necessary to establish some sort of cartography around

this notion of protest inside the film. According to Rancire, politics is: the configuration of a

specific space, the framing of a particular sphere of experience, of objects posited as common and

as pertaining to a common decision, of subjects recognized as capable of designating these

objects and putting forward arguments about them (qtd. in Fagundo 51). The notion of politics

presented by Rancire, locates us in a configured space where human beings gather to reflect on

the objects that conform what for subjects is the common. In this sense we can begin to configure

cinema as a place where politics is interwoven. If we take this into account, we need to relocate

the role of the spectator and its power to produce meaning along with the work of art: no

bastaba ya con explorar los procesos internos de produccin de significado, como lo haba

propuesto la semitica, sino que era importante rescatar la reflexin que incluyera el papel del

receptor (Tornero 79).This is not new:

Ya Walter Benjamin haba destacado la relevancia del cine, a partir de la variacin de

los procesos cognitivos de los espectadores, de la revaloracin del arte desde el punto de

vista social y de la inyeccin que la [segunda] tcnica2 dara a las masas con vistas a un

proceso revolucionario aparta[ndo] a los espectadores de la contemplacin que se

haba instalado entre la burguesa como la forma de consumir el arte (Tornero 79).

2
The reflection used by Benjamin at this point revolves around one of the techniques used by both Kozintsev and his
contemporaries: montage. Although we do not devalue the critical potential of montage as a technique of both
resistance to conventional forms of cinema and its repeated use within Kozintsev's adaptation, it is the purpose of
this work to develop the instances within the film where the protest is generated to denunciate the practices of the
regime.
 If we start from the relationship that establishes a link between author/adapter, work of art

and spectator, it is necessary to begin to talk about Reception Theory. For Wolfang Iser, one of

the first to develop this theory, one can start from the idea that the texto no es el que suministra

al lector y ste recibe pasivamente sus contenidos; se puede decir que el lector inicia la

transferencia [of meaning], pero sta se logra slo por los actos que reclaman aptitudes de la

conciencia (Iser qtd. in Tornero 81); the theory its interested in the series of actos que la

conciencia realiza al momento de confrontarse con el texto literario. Bearing this in mind, we

must start to display the cinematic architecture exhibit by Kozintsev in the beginning of The

Mousetrap. The scene of The Mousetrap is first introduced in 00:55:44 (Kozintsev) with the

entrance of Claudius through a long shot. His spatial relationship becomes heightened, as a

consequence of the depth of field, by the two great lions that appear on screen: he appears

magnificent as he walks along the hall followed by his court.

En el acto de ver, el perceptor tiene esquemas conjuntos de conocimientos

organizados que dirigen nuestra creacin de hiptesis que le permiten el

reconocimiento visual. En relacin a las estructuras narrativas de la pelcula, el autor

seala que el filme narrativo est hecho de tal forma que anima al espectador a realizar

actividades para construir una historia (Bordwell qtd. in Tornero 83).

The introduction to this scene provided by Kozintsev is not gratuitous; following the proposal by

Bordwell, it is the schematized perspective3 what allows the viewer to begin to update the

meaning of what it is being presented to him through the direct allusions to what is known in his

historical context, that is, the image of the usurping power of Claudius, refers to the image of

3
Negaciones y Negatividad en la esttica de la recepcin. Anglica Tornero. My translation. Although Tornero
calls schematized perspective on the aforementioned text, the same function can be applied for the proper
functioning of this argument.
Stalin himself4. This idea becomes crystalized in 00:58:25 (just before The Mousetrap is about to

begin), where the composition of the scene reflects several characteristics of this particular

adaptation of Hamlet. Aligning with the aesthetic frame of the epic film, Kozintsev reinforces the

image of Claudius as a tyrant by a placing him and the queen in a panoptic view circumscribed

within the logic of a long shot and an exuberant amount of extras inside the frame.

The schematized perspectives, no son hechos, como se podra aducir en el discurso sobre

la realidad, pero se manifiestan como si se refirieran a un hecho que no est dado y que debe ser

producido (Tornero 84), they function in order to develop what Tornero calls: horizonte de

sentido (84). This can be explained within the end of The Mousetrap. Following the idea that a

political film should be capable of showing the sinister power of the state, it is in the power of

gesture where we locate our horizon of meaning. Introducing the final realization of the

awareness of his crime, Kozintsev places Claudius within a medium shot and, just as the murder

of the king in The Mousetrap is taking place, slowly makes him rise; in the midst of uncertainty,

the whole court rises too just to see the expressionless grin of Claudius turn into a fake smile: the

gesture of a villain that claps just before killing his opponents (Kozintsev 01:03:24). En el

transcurso de la construccin de la historia, el espectador usa esquemas y claves para hacer

asunciones y extraer inferencias sobre los acontecimientos de la historia en cuestin, y ensaya

hiptesis sobre los acontecimientos pasados y venideros (Tornero 85). The abrupt departure of

Claudius in 01:03:32, is what expands the horizon of meaning to finally materialize a feeling with

which Kozintsev was very much familiarized: the silence before the killing5. It is in the terror that

4
This is not the first of the schematized perspectives on the film. From the beginning, Kozintsev presents us the
leitmotiv of the corruption of the state reflected on the image of an Elsinore as a prison state (Kozintsev 00:03:14);
this is reinforced with another leitmotiv: people are always spying on each other just as in Satalins process of the
Great Purge.
5
We must remember that one of Kozintsevs mentors and friend, the theatre director and theorist Vsevolod
Meyerhold, was arrested, tortured and executed for supposed anti-Soviet sentiments in his work. Back in the terror
springs after the departure of Claudius, which activates Turner's assumption where the spectator,

based on his horizon of meaning, his schemes and codes, begins his reflection on past and present

events. It updates the meaning of what is being presented. This is the power of cinema as a

protest: being able to materialize a feeling from silences, losses, to activate memory and thus

update what we see with our own logics. This is what Kozintsev reflects in his Hamlet, a political

commentary on the terror of a regime that did not murder on the spot, but took his time to plan

the perfect silent murder: through exile, censure or the extermination of life itself.

This is why it is necessary to understand Kozintsev's Hamlet, as a structural challenge that

seeks to denounce the mechanisms that power uses to exercise dominion over the different

instances where it seeks to position its interference. Either on individuals or societies, their

perceptions, bodies, territories and memories, the trail of domination that captures our daily lives

plunging them into boredom and terror is almost inescapable. These challenges, such as those

that present this kind of cinema, are what allows us to envision a kind of resistance within the

procedures of making art before the voracious advance of the logics that the power has set upon

us. Creation as resistance. Resisting in memory, by remembering. Feeling everything as a form of

resistance. To look again, to continue looking, until that which we look does not go unnoticed. To

look again and to finally see what we have chosen to obviate. These are the challenges that

Kozintsev propose to us in one of his last films.

Bibliography

of Staalins days, the dictator put a ban on any production of Hamlet, precisely to avoid any comparisons between
him and Claudius. Meyerhold died still wanting that his epitaph read: Here lies a man who never played or directed
Hamlet. Soviet Shakespeare The Film-Maker, The Dictator, and The Two Great Plays. Martin Keady.
http://theshakespearestandard.com/soviet-shakespeare-film-maker-dictator-two-great-plays-bard-multimedia/
Fagundo, Nicholas A., "The Violence of Aesthetics: Benjamin, Kane, Bolao" (2013). Electronic

Thesis and Dissertation Repository. Paper 1561.

Kozintsev, Grigory Mijailovitch, dir. Hamlet. Perf. Innokenty Smoktunovsky. Lenfilm.1964.

Prokhorov, Alexander. Inherited Discourse: Stalinist tropes in Thaw culture. Pittsburgh:

University of Pittsburgh. 2002.

Tornero, Anglica. Enfoques de la recepcin en estudios de cine y literatura. Inventio, la

gnesis de la cultura universitaria en Morelos, N. 14, 2011, pgs. 78-85