DVD Chronicle

Abstract

DVD Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) Hamlet, directed by Kenneth Branagh (Two-Disc Special Edition, Warner Home Video, 2007) Throne of Blood, directed by Akira Kurosawa (Criterion, 2003) Kwaidan, directed by Masaki Kobayashi (Criterion, 2000) The Devil's Backbone, directed by Guillermo del Toro (Sony, 2004) The Orphanage, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona (Blu-Ray edition, New Line Home Video, 2008) The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise (Warner Home Video, 2003) The Innocents, directed by Jack Clayton (Twentieth-Century Fox, 2005) Cries and Whispers, directed by Ingmar Bergman (Criterion, 2001) If I gave these DVD Chronicles titles, this one would be called "Should We See Them?," the "Them" would refer to ghosts, and the question mark at the end would be real, not rhetorical. To me, it's an unsettled question whether a film's maximum aesthetic and emotional effect is achieved when spirits appear onscreen, or rather when their presence has to be inferred from objects moving inexplicably about, from enigmatic clangings on the sound track, from stares of terror-stricken characters. And indeed if ghosts do appear, what should they look like? Sheeted figures, raw head and bloody bones, ectoplasmic vagueness, the "majesty of buried Denmark" as Hamlet has it? The question was apparently unsettled for Shakespeare, too. His play calls for the ghost of Hamlet's father to be visible to all on the Elsinore ramparts, but then in the boudoir scene with the queen, visible to the prince alone. Failing to see the specter, Gertrude concludes that her son is mad, more forthrightly than any of the critics of the play have ever been able to do. In the filmed versions of Hamlet, this inconsistency in perceiving the ghost has generally been respected. Kenneth Branagh, Franco Zeffirelli, and Rodney Bennett all make the directorial choice to show Hamlet's father on the battlements and in the bedroom, but in the latter scene only to Hamlet; Zeffirelli goes so far as to edit in a p.o.v. shot for Gertrude depicting nothing but vacancy, Shakespeare's "incorporal air." Michael Almereyda's screen version, updated to a world of ruthless CEOs and corporate maneuvering, with a film-within-a-film substituted for Shakespeare's play-within-a-play, also gives Gertrude a p.o.v. shot, but this one shows the ghost, which she then, for unexplained reasons, denies seeing. Perhaps the two most interesting treatments come from more psychologically minded directors, Tony Richardson and Laurence Olivier. In the former's Hamlet, the ghost is never visible to viewers, [End Page 267] except as a bright glare reflected on the prince's face, a sound effect, and a few words in voice-over. Perhaps Richardson's ghost is "really" there, perhaps not, being rather an artifact of Hamlet's perturbed imagination. As for Olivier's ghost, it is visible on the battlements if diaphanously so, out-of-focus, surrounded by clouds of Denham Studio smoke, whispering huskily. By the time the ghost manifests itself in Gertrude's bedroom, however, it has become completely invisible, its photographable form replaced by a beating drum—Hamlet's beating heart, we are no doubt meant to think; the prince almost swoons away. Meanwhile the ghost's lines about the tardy son and the need to whet his almost blunted purpose are rendered in voice-over. Somewhat startlingly, if not indeed comically, Olivier gives the ghost a p.o.v shot, with the camera panning slowly as the unseen figure turns its spectral attention ("look, amazement on thy mother sits") to Gertrude. To argue for the general, not just apparition-depicting, superiority of any one of these screen Hamlets would use up this entire Chronicle, and rather than do that, I will say merely that the version I prefer is Branagh's, largely because of his star performance at the center of the film, but also because of his daringness in overall conception, not to mention his daringness in casting opposite himself actors of such commanding strength as Derek Jacobi (Claudius) and Michael Maloney (Laertes). Maloney, incidentally, appears as a much put-upon actor-director in Branagh's backstage comedy In the Bleak Midwinter, about a production of Hamlet staged in a drafty...