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Macbeth flexes cinematic muscles deliberately and emphatically, while using theatrical settings and effects. “Quotation” and “hemming in” do not aptly describe what cinema does with theater in the film, which offers nimble, inventive solutions that allow film and theater to coexist harmoniously. This “filmed theater” puts its theatrical source in “quotation marks.” “Both Shakespeare and the theater,” Bazin writes, “ prisoners, hemmed in on all sides by cinema.”Ĭoen’s Macbeth veers widely from this style. For Bazin, this choice makes the final product not a straight adaptation, but rather, a representation of an Elizabethan theatrical performance. He praised Olivier’s Henry V for its framing device, in which an Elizabethan audience arrives in a theater to watch the play onstage. Cinema is the “liberty of action in space,” while theater is the artificially constrained perspective of the “stage picture.” Cinema is an ephemeral image projected on a screen, while theater relies on the presence of the actor’s live body.Īll this meant that, in Bazin’s view of adaptation, cinema must dominate over theater. Cinema is image-based, while theater is text-based.

#BANQUO MACBETH SERIES#

Despite the long history of entanglement between theater and film, Bazin, like many before and after him, reduced the relationship between the media into a series of dichotomies. Bazin was an evangelist for cinema’s photographic realism in opposition to theater’s artificiality. One of the greatest proponents of this view was film critic and theorist André Bazin, who founded the influential journal Cahiers du Cinéma. The conviction that these particular films are the gold standards of silver-screen Shakespeare stems from the idea that plays turned into films must be, in some way, subsumed into cinema. As a result, the film ultimately expands our idea of what makes a good stage-to-screen adaptation.Ĭritical responses to The Tragedy of Macbeth have focused on its visual homages to German Expressionist cinema (a movement which itself borrowed greatly from theater), as well as to Orson Welles’s Macbeth (1948) and Laurence Oliver’s Henry V (1944). It’s a delicate dynamic, evolving and transmogrifying, showing that film and cinema are not so diametrically opposed as we might imagine. Tensions between “there” and “not there” play out in interactions between these aesthetics.

And how will “there-ness” or “not-thereness” be conveyed? Absence and presence are central to realizing the text, the idiosyncrasy of each interpretation resting upon how each influences or causes one another.Ĭoen’s Macbeth tackles these questions in particular and surprising ways, stemming from its shifting dialogue between theatrical and cinematic styles. Every director and production team must decide, when staging or filming “the Scottish play,” which of the seemingly otherworldly apparitions - Macbeth’s dagger, the “weird sisters” who prophesize that he will be king, Banquo’s ghost, Lady Macbeth’s “damned spots” - are actually there.

This feeling that things are both “there” and “not there” is central to Shakespeare’s play and its questions about the relationship between supernatural powers and human agency.

Other things stick in the mind for their illusionistic ethereality: the simple, transparent silhouettes of the tents in Duncan’s encampment or the steady drizzle of artificial leaves in Birnam wood. The walls and arches of Stefan Dechant’s sets feel solid and oppressive, as “palpable” as the vision of a dagger that tempts Macbeth (Denzel Washington) to murder. In its close interactions with the performers, it emphasizes the heavily embodied process of delivering Shakespearean dialogue, often in tight close-ups that draw attention to bodies and breath. The film leaves strong, varied impressions. JOEL COEN’S The Tragedy of Macbeth feels both near and far.

Banquo macbeth