JUNE 2006
Innokenty
Smoktunovsky as Hamlet in Grigori
Kozintsev's screen version of
the play (1966).
Grigori Kozintsev, his film of Hamlet
In Dublin at the moment there appears to be sport and
competition for the part of Hamlet among actors; vying
against one another at readings. So it was apt that one
of the most highly regarded films of that play was shown
however briefly (only two shows) at the Irish Film Centre
in May.
This huge play is rarely acted in its complete form and
so it must be noted that the translation was by Pasternak
and made especially for and in consultation with
Kozintsev. This is a tightly knit text and this old film
has surely become a vessel of refere nce for many actors
who study the part of Hamlet.
This play without losing any vitality conveys all the
intense cycles of meaning that the young can search for
within themselves. The relationship of a youth to his
father and the political references that must surge
within his mind. Hamlet can contrast the education that
he has just received at Wittenburg University - and this
focus is the major modification that Shakespeare made of
the old Danish story - as no such education was available
in this glimpse of history.
Kozintsev placed a certain
emphasis on a scene of this perspective, that he also
wrote about in his diaries - the conversation Hamlet has
with his old university friends who have unexpectedly
arrived. Already we have heard Claudius mutter to them
"The need we have to use you did provoke our hasty
sending..." and after admitting to Hamlet that
indeed he was correct to assume that they had been sent
for. Hamlet takes up the flute. "Look you
now, how unworthy a thing you make of me - you would play
upon me. Call me what instrument you will, though you can
fret me, you cannot play upon me" (for your own
advancement at Court).
Kozintsev acknowledges the short lived Renaissance within
Shakespeare's own times - "While the hot-heads
within the walls of Universities celebrated the greatness
of man, there came into power a social structure that
abased man and paralysed his finest aspirations."
Indeed freedom of thought began to lead to executions -
Europe ran with blood - of the Moors, and the Jews in
Spain, of the Waldenses in the Alps and Calabria and of
the Calvanists in the Netherlands. Thoughts and images,
Kozintsev points out, can be found in the works of many
writers of the period. Every country has its history of
the crimes of reaction, and from the mid-sixteenth
Century reaction gradually became triumphant everywhere.
Old forms of repression were replaced not by free
association of wise citizens but by an even crueller
slavery. Many Titans of the Renaissance had come to learn
how Wittenberg yielded to Elsinore.
For this reason, Kozintsev continues in his notes,
"when the man in black stretches his arms to the
unseen and states that love, loyalty, friendship and
humanity are not mere empty noises; we regard his words
as more than the beautiful sounds of ancient poetry.
The spiritual or mystic aspects of thought, the
appearance of the ghost of Hamlet's father is another
interesting feature for Kozintsev. He emphasises that
Shakespeare uses this ghostly apparition in speech in the
most ordinary verbal manner - no atmosphere of awe or
fear - as though the apertures in the mind which admit of
such terrors are not actually linked to mental reason but
only to sight. Hamlet's reasoning from this event
apprehends that if both the spiritual and human
responsibilities (his father spoke so lovingly of his
wife) are relinquished to decay, and forgotten - then all
that mankind has attained in his life is again destroyed
and can be witnessed in the cycles of generations in
history.And Shakespeare focuses on the fact that
education itself scarce regulates the inner soul of young
men and does not divert them from the temptations for
social advancement that ambition reveals to them. Hamlet,
in contrast, becomes Shakespeare's vehicle of ambivalence
and subsequently one of watchful curiousity that is then
driven by verbal action that threatens the King who must
presume that as he, so Hamlet, will be forced to take
physical action by the decisions within his mind.
The scenes with Ophelia are extraordinary - though
refuting her belief that Hamlet loves her, by seizing her
wrist and violently drawing her body toward his, he
betrays the strong sexual tension that he is under and
repressing.
Ophelia's appartment, on
the other hand emphasises and demonstrates the musical
qualities that Kozintsev displays throughout this film,
the surges of the sea, the wind in smoke and in apparel,
the subtle tones of the black and white era of film
caress the paintings on the walls and arches of natural
foliage that gleam in sprays of light reverberation -
they are searched again, these walls, after her suicide,
as they display the innocence and fragility of her part.
Kozintsev's Ophelia whose obedience to her father is
revealed as part and parcel of her concept of love then
becomes subject to Hamlet's realisation that such a
concept opens for both parent and lover a path for
manipulation of the mind. This fact is abhorrent to his
mind - the consequence of which is amply revealed in his
violent oaths and accusations over her father's dead
body.- whom he had stabbed, hidden behind the tapestry
arras, spying on his conversations with his mother. It is
this paternal invasion of what should be incorruptible
innocence that is a fearful revelation for Hamlet.
Human nature, absorbed only in itself, in all the many
many modes of egotism, ensures that Shakespeare's plays
are of perpetual interest for us. His plays reveal the
very substance and struggle that the individual must
undergo to understand our civilisation that is
perpetually corrupted by the mental dimensions that
construct a heirarchy and determines our fate. Hamlet is
the clearest evocation of that solitary struggle every
wise individual undertakes.
Jocelyn BraddellİMay2006
PS.There is a blog to be found at
http://strephon.blogspot.com for
discussing books and the arts
Innokenty Smoktunovsky
Smoktunovsky was born in a Siberian village and served in
the Red Armyduring theWWII. In 1946, he joined a theatre
in Krasnoyarsk, later moving to Moscow. In 1957, he was
invited by Georgi Tovstonogov
to join the Bolshoi Drama Theatre of Leningrad , where he
stunned the public with his dramatic interpretation of
Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. His
career in film was launched by Mikhail Romm's movie Nine
Days of One Year (1962). In 1964, he was cast in the
role of Hamlet in the celebrated Grigori Kozintsev's
screen version of Shakespeare's play, which won him a
praise from Laurence Olivier and the Lenin Prize.
"Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless
spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of
art is out of how deep a life does it spring? The
painting of Gustave Moreau is painting of ideas, the
deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our
mind into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's world
of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys
for schoolboys." James Joyce, Ulysses