engleski

Ghosts and mirrors: the gaze in film Hamlets

In this article I use the sense of rupture implicit in Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze to explore film adaptations of Hamlet. My discussion focuses on three well-known adaptations of the play: Olivier, Branagh and Almereyda. I particularly employ Slavoj Žižek’s conception of Lacan’s ‘anamorphic stain’, and Henry Krips’s reading of the points of rupture of the gaze to investigate the symbiotic relationship between the demands Shakespeare’s text makes on film-production, and filmmakers’ manipulation of libidinal-looking in conceiving diegetic space. My contention, that negotiation of concretized film space is the central issue to be confronted in the adaptation of Shakespeare to the genre codes of film, directs my attention to instances of what I term ‘liminal space’, sites of apparent filmic resistance to the concrete (visually defined, realistic, photographic, naturalistic) space of the film diegesis. Though psychoanalytic theory is central to my paper, I attempt to address the recent ‘post-Theory’ theses proposed by Bordwell et al., by grounding theory always in discussion of filmic style, directorial technique and the various signifiers that compose the screen image.

Shakespeare, Hamlet, gaze

nije evidentirano