Shakespeare
and Film, a Norton Guide Samuel Crowl. Norton, 2008.
Read in May and June 2014.
It
seems I can never get enough of reading about Shakespeare and film. I have in
fact bought and read every book I have found. I’m sure there are more but I’m
trying not to look for them.
This
isn’t so different from the others. It
focuses on the major directors – Olivier, Welles, Branagh, Kurosawa, Kozintsev
and Zeffirelli. Taymor is mentioned several times but she doesn’t get her own
chapter.
One
chapter is on Shakespeare films on television, another on the 90’s which
brought us, Crowl points out, at least twenty Shakespeare films, most notably,
perhaps, Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet.
The book
presents several avant-garde productions, for example two I have been looking
for for a long time with no success: Christine Edzard’s As You Like It and The Children’s
Midsummer Night’s Dream. If anyone knows where these might be available,
please contact me!
It also deals
with camera work, modern technology, opening and closing shots, actors’
interpretations and a myriad of other cinematic aspects of Shakespeare on film.
It’s well worth
reading.
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