Schedule / Horaire
Friday 25 April 2014, 16h-18h.
Room: V106A.
Leaders / Organisatrices
Sarah Hatchuel, GRIC, University of Le Havre (France)
and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, IRCL, University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 (France)
Participants
- Delilah Bermudez Brataas, Sør-Trøndelag University College (Norway)
“Most Majestic” or “Baseless Fabric”: The Alternating Utopic (re)Visions of The Tempest - Victoria Bladen, The University of Queensland (Australia)
Screen Magic in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) and Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010) - Anne-Marie Cornède, Université Paris Descartes (France)
Prospero, Ariel, Caliban: Master and Servants or Power at Stake in Tempest on Screen - Sam Crowl, Ohio University (USA)
Transformation and Adaptation in Julie Taymor’s The Tempest - Jacek Fabiszak, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland)
Shakespeare’s romances on Polish television: from theatre in/on television to a television show, from bookish Bard to subversive Shakespeare - Kinga Földváry, Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Hungary)
Ghost Towns and Alien Planets: Variations on Prospero’s Island in Screen Versions of The Tempest - Gaëlle Ginestet, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, IRCL (France)
The Tempest in Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel (1970) by Marc Allégret: Shakespeare Grafted onto Radiguet - Russell Jackson, University of Birmingham (UK)
Home and Colonial: the Tempest films of Jarman, Taymor and Mazursky - Randy Laist, Goodwin College (USA)
Hyperreality and the Western Imagination in Prospero’s Books - Courtney Lehmann, University of the Pacific (USA)
A Fine Romance: Prospera and the Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction - Maddalena Pennacchia, Roma Tre University (Italy)
Puppetry on Screen: The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale in The Animated Tales from Shakespeare - Lindsay Reid, the National University of Ireland, Galway (Ireland)
“This Fierce Abridgement”: Thanhouser’s Two-Reel Cymbeline (1913) and the Question of Genre - Edel Semple, University College Cork (Ireland)
Looking at Good Daughters and Bad Mothers: Women in the BBC Shakespeare Series’ Pericles - Peter J. Smith, University of Nottingham Trent (UK)
“Something Rich and Strange”: Jarman and Greenaway and the defamiliarisation of The Tempest - Bob White, University of Western Australia (Australia)
Elijah Moshinsky’s Television Cymbeline - John Wyver, University of Westminster/Illuminations (UK)
Scenes from Cymbeline and the language of the early television studio
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Delilah Bermudez Brataas, Sør-Trøndelag University College (Norway)
“Most Majestic” or “Baseless Fabric”: The Alternating Utopic (re)Visions of The Tempest
In this essay, I consider several adaptations of The Tempest (1610) and its characters, focusing on Julie Taymor’s 2010 film. I demonstrate that the play’s unique engagement with utopia is what generates its malleable fluidity. Its repeated re-visioning has inspired a fragmentation that, paradoxically, binds the play’s characters to the island, its utopia, and each other; despite their migration, they always appear in relation to each other. Finally, that the The Tempest, its characters, and Shakespeare himself, appear in the graphic novels of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman offers insight into the potential Shakespeare realized through utopia in this play.
2. Victoria Bladen, The University of Queensland (Australia)
Screen Magic in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) and Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010)
In The Tempest, performing magic involves aspects of knowledge, control, language, illusion, spectacle, and metatheatricality. Exercising supernatural power also invokes a range of implications, moral, political, gendered, and postcolonial, providing rich scope for directors. This paper explores the screen magic of Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books and Julie Taymor’s The Tempest, considering the aesthetic depictions of magic and their ideological implications, including the way they harness early modern ideas, symbols and signs, and their metafilmic quality. Both adaptations are alert to the central paradox that a play intensely concerned with control is also ultimately about release and the relinquishing of control.
3. Anne-Marie Cornède, Université Paris Descartes (France)
Prospero, Ariel, Caliban: Master and Servants or Power at Stake in Tempest on Screen
Tempest successive screen adaptations show substantive interpretive variations as they handle law and order, power relations between Master and subjects, contractual with ‘servant’ Ariel, non-contractual with slave Caliban often denied duty of care. As Prospero is made either a mad tyrant (Wilcox, Jarman), a disillusioned New Yorker turned Greek (Mazursky), dignified magus (Greenaway) or “sorceress scientist”, Native Caliban a dark monster or picturesque local rebel illustrating “themes of colonization and usurpation” (Taymor), these prismatic visions effectively reflect political and ideological preoccupations of the period.
4. Sam Crowl, Ohio University (USA)
Transformation and Adaptation in Julie Taymor’s The Tempest
Shakespeare’s transvestite theater was absorbed into the European model with both male and female actors. From Sarah Bernhardt (Hamlet) to Harriet Walter (Brutus) female actors have taken the measure of some of Shakespeare’s most powerful male characters. In these instances the script was not reimagined to change the gender of the character. In a remarkable recent film, Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010), the central character is not only played by a female but reimagined to be a female as well. Taymor transforms Prospero and in the process expands the notion of adaptation from a cinematic into a Darwinian context.
5. Jacek Fabiszak, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland)
Shakespeare’s romances on Polish television: from theatre in/on television to a television show, from bookish Bard to subversive Shakespeare
The paper addresses two issues: 1. how technological development of television has affected the way(s) of televising Shakespeare in Poland, illustrating it with romances which were aired from the 1960s to the 1990s within Television Theatre (the romances pose a serious technological challenge for both the stage and the screen). 2. how the productions under scrutiny illustrate the treatment of Shakespeare’s works in a medium that addressed the widest audience possible and one which was supposed to advocate ‘family’ and morally acceptable values particularly in the times of communism in Poland when mass media were strictly controlled by the regime.
6. Kinga Földváry, Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Hungary)
Ghost Towns and Alien Planets: Variations on Prospero’s Island in Screen Versions of The Tempest
In my paper I argue that the various cinematic depictions of the island in The Tempest, while they do not offer much information concerning the films’ textual fidelity to the Shakespearean original, are intricately linked to the films’ cinematic genres, which in turn are tell-tale signs of the socio-cultural issues the films and their creators are trying to address, from post-war financial and social troubles through psychological uncertainties and international political threats. The films used to illustrate my point include Yellow Sky (1948), Forbidden Planet (1956), Age of Consent (1969), and Tempest, directed by Paul Mazursky (1982).
7. Gaëlle Ginestet, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, IRCL (France)
The Tempest in Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel (1970) by Marc Allégret: Shakespeare Grafted onto Radiguet
In Allégret’s adaptation of Radiguet’s novel, the three main protagonists rehearse a scene from The Tempest. Why was this second literary text grafted onto the first one in its cinematic adaptation? Allégret intended The Tempest as a mise en abyme of the novel’s plot. The trigger for the graft was probably the characterization of Count d’Orgel, in the novel, as a magician. In the film, Orgel becomes an avatar of Prospero who will throw his wife Mahé (Miranda) into the arms of their friend François (Ferdinand). The Tempest scenes help
characters and audience open “the fringed curtains of th[eir] eyes”.
8. Russell Jackson, University of Birmingham (UK)
Home and Colonial: the Tempest films of Jarman, Taymor and Mazursky
The agendas of the three film-makers differ markedly in respect of their treatment of the play’s (post)colonial dimensions, and the ways in which they characterize the island itself. Both Taymor and Mazursky set up their version of ‘Milan’ – Mazursky’s case, New York – as a contrast with the island. But Mazursky’s film is the only one to return its colonialists to their home territory, albeit with a degree of equivocation. The paper examines the varieties of ‘otherness,’ cultural, sexual and political, articulated in the three films.
9. Randy Laist, Goodwin College (USA)
Hyperreality and the Western Imagination in Prospero’s Books
As pervasive as the theme of ambiguous ontology is throughout the works of Shakespeare, it is in The Tempest that this motif receives its fullest and most complex treatment. Throughout the drama, characters continually doubt their senses, question whether they are awake or dreaming, and wonder whether the people they encounter are real or phantasmal. Peter Greenaway’s adaptation Prospero’s Books (1991) prioritizes the conceptual rather than the narrative structure of Shakespeare’s play, representing The Tempest as a study in what Baudrillard and Eco famously dubbed hyperreality, a condition of vertiginous indeterminacy between representation and reality.
10. Courtney Lehmann, University of the Pacific (USA)
A Fine Romance: Prospera and the Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction
In the age of biocybernetic reproduction, “individuality,” as Donna Haraway contends, “is a strategic defense problem.” Lacking the a priori authority of her male counterpart, “Prospera,” I argue, opts to pursue biocybernetic alliances that reproduce her as a montage effect in Julie Taymor’s 2010 film—born of the competing imperatives of her imagined progentitors, Prospero and Sycorax, and their protégés, Ariel and Caliban. Ultimately, I will demonstrate that despite Taymor’s claim that The Tempest “is not a feminist tract,” the film repeatedly contests this premise.
11. Maddalena Pennacchia, Roma Tre University (Italy)
Puppetry on Screen: The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale in The Animated Tales from Shakespeare
This paper will focus on two 30-minutes screen adaptations of The Tempest (1992) and The Winter’s Tale (1994) in the TV series The Animated Tales from Shakespeare, a S4C production in collaboration with the Russian Soyuzmultfims addressing children or adults not yet acquainted with Shakespeare. Both adaptations are performed by sophisticated puppets belonging to the Russian tradition. These appear to move thanks to an extremely refined stop-motion animation technique that recalls both the magic power of Prospero and the art of Paulina.
12. Lindsay Reid, the National University of Ireland, Galway (Ireland)
“This Fierce Abridgement”: Thanhouser’s Two-Reel Cymbeline (1913) and the Question of Genre
Entitled ‘The Tragedy of Cymbeline’ in the First Folio, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline could—as it has been widely observed—just as easily have been classed as a comedy or history. Known variously in academic parlance as a ‘tragicomedy’, a ‘late play’, or a ‘romance’, this work is notoriously difficult to categorise. This paper focuses on the cuts, expository glosses, and narrative streamlining of the Thanhouser Film Corporation’s silent, two-reel adaptation of Cymbeline (1913). More particularly, it considers how alterations to the play’s plot—along with the technological and conventional constraints of the cinema—impact upon the resultant film’s genre.
13. Edel Semple, University College Cork (Ireland)
Looking at Good Daughters and Bad Mothers: Women in the BBC Shakespeare Series’ Pericles
I examine the BBC Shakespeare TV Series Pericles (1984), the only screen production of the play to date, and explore how it offers fresh and striking insights into the play’s female figures. Throughout, I analyse the representation of women’s roles, the construction of gender and sexuality, the hierarchy of objectification and the ideological power of the gaze on the small screen. Taking women’s looking as a key focus, I argue for the significance of the film’s portrayal of the female gaze which acts variously as a vehicle and an expression of agency, desire, dependence, and authority.
14. Peter J. Smith, University of Nottingham Trent (UK)
“Something Rich and Strange”: Jarman and Greenaway and the defamiliarisation of The Tempest
The Tempest is set on a desert island governed over by a magician whose servants include a fairy and a monster but the strangeness of the dramatis personae barely masks the fact that nothing much happens. Protracted spectacle stands in for intricacies of plot. The inexplicable nature of the events within the play is something that the characters continually remark upon. The word that resonates throughout is strange. Jarman’s The Tempest confronts and exploits this strangeness. Jarman’s punk aesthetic is fuelled by the play’s deep pecularities and so this version is more imperative than ‘naturalistic’ versions such as Taymor’s.
15. Bob White, University of Western Australia (Australia)
Elijah Moshinsky’s Television Cymbeline
Moshinsky’s production of Cymbeline with Helen Mirren and Claire Bloom was one of the more interesting presentations in the otherwise rather tedious and unimaginative BBC/Time Life series in the early 1980s. The director promises a sombre, ‘dark’ production dealing with evil, ‘nightmare realism’ as he described it. I am interested in how this production handles the voyeuristic eroticism in the bedroom scene, and the long ending of the play, to explore what it might reveal about the Shakespeare’s interest in his revival of stage romance.
16. John Wyver, University of Westminster/Illuminations (UK)
Scenes from Cymbeline and the language of the early television studio
Broadcasts of scenes from Cymbeline in 1937 and 1956 were among the earliest British television productions of Shakespeare. Transmitted with multiple electronic cameras from a studio, the excerpts on both occasions from Act I Scene 6 and Act II Scene 2 were taken from contemporary theatrical productions. Neither broadcast was recorded, but for both the BBC archives preserve detailed camera scripts. Grounded in a close reading of these scripts, this paper offers a detailed analysis of the development of the language of television studio drama as applied to Cymbeline.