Laurence Olivier

Abstract

Laurence Olivier Jennifer Barnes Henry V. 1944. Dir. Laurence Olivier. United Kingdom. Two Cities Films; Hamlet. 1948. Dir. Laurence Olivier. United Kingdom. Two Cities Films; Richard III. 1955. Dir. Laurence Olivier. United Kingdom. London Film Productions. In 1948 Laurence Olivier claimed that he could make a Shakespeare film “just as Shakespeare himself, were he living now, might make it” (Foreword 3). This statement refers specifically to the 1948 Hamlet but the connection between Olivier and Shakespeare is frequently evoked, too, in relation to Olivier’s other cinematic adaptations: Henry V (1944), Richard III (1955), and the unmade Macbeth. In this statement, Olivier asks us to read his own stylistic signature as constituting the equivalent of Shakespeare’s should the author be transmogrified into what would be later designated the cinematic auteur. Yet, appearing in the context of a foreword justifying the supposed liberties taken with Shakespeare’s play-text, it also stresses difference. In negotiating difference through sameness, Olivier’s justification of his “interpretation” of Hamlet ultimately asserts that Olivier’s visual stamp on the film is both analogous to Shakespeare’s imagined cinematic signature and specific to Olivier himself. In opening up a space for negotiation between the author and the director, Olivier anticipates Francois Truffaut’s attempts to reconcile les politiques des auteurs with the “problem of adaptation” (“Literary” n. pag.). For Truffaut, in the context of cinematic adaptation, fidelity to an original text cannot be made coherent through attempts at “invention without betrayal,” a method primarily associated with the detested cinéma du papa (“Tendency” 226). Instead, it is to be found in difference: in a privileging of the cinema and a “betrayal of the letter” where a dialogue takes place between the “spirit” of the original text/author and its adaptor, the auteur, as precisely “a man of the cinema” (229). Truffaut’s position is echoed in [End Page 487] 1962 by Andrew Sarris’s reincarnation of les politiques des auteurs as auteur theory. Here, Sarris understands interior meaning as emerging from a direct tension between a director’s personality and his material, what he dubs “an élan of the soul” (64). Like Olivier’s statement, then, both the European and the American traditions in which auteur theory develops foreground a kind of dialogue of spirit between the author/auteur as intrinsic to identifying an auteur adaptation. The suggested dialogue of spirit between, in this case, Olivier and Shakespeare is one that speaks directly to Olivier’s Shakespearean oeuvre and to his established place in a pantheon of great Shakespearean directors. It is reflected thematically and stylistically across all of his adaptations—where he functioned as writer, producer, director and principle actor—and it is consolidated by the fact that Olivier’s Shakespeare films are without exception intensely personal, exemplary of the subjective vision of the “man of the cinema” that Truffaut marries to the concept of the auteur. In short, approaching Olivier’s film adaptations through an awareness of his frequently cited “spiritual dialogue” with Shakespeare means focusing our attention on a wider relationship between the thematic and the personal that impacts the visual aesthetic of all three completed film texts. Indeed, it is in the uncovering of the complex relationship between the thematic, the stylistic, and the personal that the concept of “auteur Shakespeare” can be most productively applied to Olivier’s oeuvre. The central thematic preoccupation that underpins all of Olivier’s adaptations is the foregrounding within the film text of Olivier himself, not simply as actor and director but, emphatically, as “Shakespeare’s interpreter” (Olivier, On Acting 197). The thematic impetus to showcase Olivier in this way impacts meaningfully the visual aesthetic of all three films and also, as the screenplays attest, of the unmade Macbeth. Indeed, all of Olivier’s adaptations are characterized by a consistent mapping of theatrical space onto the cinematic mise-en-scène, a stylistic strategy that enables Olivier to activate early modern dramatic practices embedded in the play-text. By cinematically quoting the space of the early modern playhouse, Olivier takes advantage of the presentational nature of the play text in order to stress the significance of his extra-textual persona (and the authority of his...