Bafici
Program
Venues and Tickets
Why does cinema insists on tampering with Shakespeare? Many people think this is the result of a guilty conscience, caused by its commercial and massive nature: adapting great classics would provide an aura, or at least a varnish of culture and seriousness to a form of entertainment whose artistic condition will never be completely free of suspicion. But if that is the goal, why not adapting Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, or Milton with the same delight? A first answer could be to simply state that if William Shakespeare were alive, he would be a scriptwriter instead of a playwright. In fact, you can safely say that Shakespeare invented cinema –or, if we prefer to be less gimmicky and more precise, let’s say he invented the film language and spectacle– three hundred years before the moving picture and celluloid made it technically possible. He invented the show (and therefore, the business), because his theater was –like no theater before him– a popular and everyday entertainment for all classes and not limited to religious festivities or official
celebrations –exactly what cinema has been ever since it was created. He invented the language, with his oftenunstoppable alternation of action moments with intimate and reflexive scenes (his wide and close-up shots, let’s say), his variety of locations –from intimate bedrooms to battlefields–, his non-continuing use of time, the amount and diversity of his characters, and, above all, his way of telling the story in brief scenes that were often cuts and inserts rather than long continuous acts like the theater that came later. Elizabethan theater was perhaps the first, prophetic cry of the modern mass culture industry, and Shakespeare the first one to hear it. CG
