Schedule / Horaire
Wednesday 23 April 2014, 11h-13h.
Room: V106A.
Leaders / Organisateurs
Melissa Croteau, California Baptist University (USA) and Douglas Lanier, University of New Hampshire (USA)
Participants
- Mário Vítor Bastos, University of Lisbon (Portugal)
Shakespeare and the Poetics of French Film in the early 1960s: Ophélia by Claude Chabrol - Stephen M. Buhler, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (USA)
“You may go so far”: Branagh, Depardieu, Reynaldo - Maurizio Calbi, University of Salerno (Italy)
Exilic / Idyllic Shakespeare: Reiterating Pericles in Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient - Melissa Croteau, California Baptist University (USA)
“I am not what I am”: Othello and Role-playing in Le Enfants du Paradis - Patricia Dorval, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier III (France)
Macbeth in André Barsacq’s Crimson Curtain (1952): Mise en Abyme and Transgression - Anthony Guneratne, Florida Atlantic University (USA)
A Certain Tendence in Post-New Wave Shakespearean Cinema: From Early Truffaut to Late Godard via Orson Welles - Douglas Lanier, University of New Hampshire (USA)
The Real and the Fake: Shakespeare, Cinema, Authenticity, and Post-War Europe in André Cayatte’s Les Amants de Vérone
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Mário Vítor Bastos, University of Lisbon (Portugal)
Shakespeare and the Poetics of French Film in the early 1960s: Ophélia by Claude Chabrol
Claude Chabrol was known for the inclusion of literary, dramatic and filmic texts in the fabric of his films. Released in 1962, Ophélia has a filmic black and white discourse which illustrates that interplay. It also shows cinematic and historical depth, underlining the Nouvelle Vague perspective with a poetics of its own. Within Ophélia’s frame Shakespeare’s Hamlet appears as the main inter-textual source for a productive relation of art and meaning, illuminating aspects of how the dynamic presence of the Bard in contemporary culture works.
2. Stephen M. Buhler, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (USA)
“You may go so far”: Branagh, Depardieu, Reynaldo
Gerard Depardieu’s appearance as Reynaldo in Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Hamlet continues the director’s ongoing emulation of the “International Epic” style of mid-20th-century film makers like David Lean. Although the name Reynaldo is Iberian, not Gallic, Depardieu endows the character with a local man’s expertise in Paris. As with many aspects of Hamlet, Reynaldo’s cultural identity was explored in in an earlier engagement with the play, In the Bleak Midwinter. For Midwinter, Nicholas Farrell (Horatio in Hamlet) plays Tom Newman, who adopts forms of accented English to distinguish the many characters assigned to him. For Reynaldo, Tom focuses on the name’s associations with the French folk figure Renart.
3. Maurizio Calbi, University of Salerno (Italy)
Exilic / Idyllic Shakespeare: Reiterating Pericles in Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient
Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient (1961) is about a literature student, Anne Goupil, who becomes involved with a group of bohemians centering around the absent figure of Spanish musician Juan. The film incorporates theatre director Gérard Lenz’s attempt to stage the play, even though this play is an ensemble of “shreds and patches,” and “unplayable.” The paper explores the significance of this incorporation, and shows how this relates to the aesthetics of Rivette as nouvelle vague director. It argues that the film simultaneously insists on an exilic, serial, self-erasing “Shakespeare” that “belongs to no one” and an idyllic, transcendent “Shakespeare.”
4. Melissa Croteau, California Baptist University (USA)
“I am not what I am”: Othello and Role-playing in Le Enfants du Paradis
Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) brilliantly explores the ever permeable and mercurial boundaries between theatrical art and life, a theme Shakespeare contemplates throughout his oeuvre. Jacques Prévert, writer of Les Enfants’ screenplay, makes Shakespeare’s Othello a consistent focus throughout the film, which shares with the play many of its central themes: obsessive love, corrosive envy, deceit, the drive for power, the importance of social roles and role-playing. Prévert’s self-reflexive use of Shakespeare during the German Occupation conveys that the French people often had to adopt roles that required masking; roles their very lives depended upon.
5. Patricia Dorval, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier III (France)
Macbeth in André Barsacq’s Crimson Curtain (1952): Mise en Abyme and Transgression
Released in 1952, André Barsacq’s Crimson Curtain revolves around a theatre company and its staging of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In the course of the rehearsals and performances, the dark minds of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth start oozing through those of the lead actors and lovers (Ludovic and Aurélia), fostering their deep grudges against the stage director, Aurélia’s twisted husband, whom they end up shooting. The film explores the multiple potentialities of mise en abyme as framing and framed fictions constantly interlace. I shall here focus on devices of transgression and permeability of the threshold between stage and backstage.
6. Anthony Guneratne, Florida Atlantic University (USA)
A Certain Tendence in Post-New Wave Shakespearean Cinema: From Early Truffaut to Late Godard via Orson Welles
Drawing from recently rediscovered materials pertaining to Welles’s “lost” Shakespearean oeuvre, and delving retrospectively into French critical reactions to Welles’s allegorical recasting of Shakespeare as auto/biography and contemporary history, this presentation proposes to show that French auteurs thematized Welles’s “break with Hollywood” as an inspiration for distinctive, individual departures from the trenchant “anti-literary classic” New Wave position articulated in Truffaut’s 1954 Cahiers du cinéma manifesto. Recapitulating Welles’s peripatetic interstitiality (from fiascos at the Venice Film Festival to triumphs at Cannes), post-New Wave citations serve as meta-commentaries on their own aesthetic impulses and historical underpinnings by insistently adapting Shakespeare through Welles.
7. Douglas Lanier, University of New Hampshire (USA)
The Real and the Fake: Shakespeare, Cinema, Authenticity, and Post-War Europe in André Cayatte’s Les Amants de Vérone
Les Amants de Vérone (1949, dir. André Cayatte) is an underappreciated meditation on the place of Shakespeare in post-war European culture. A doomed romance across classes played out against the backdrop of a film of Romeo and Juliet, Les Amants focuses on questions of cultural, romantic, and cinematic authenticity in which Shakespeare’s play serves as a touchstone of truth, albeit a qualified one. The film bears comparison with the other major Romeo and Juliet film of the period, Renato Castellani’s Romeo and Juliet, but also with Les Enfants du Paradis, like Les Amants authored by Jacques Prévert.