Directorial Decisions Research Articles

Opera “Ruslan and Lyudmila” by M. Glinka: pages of history and modern times

The article, based on the works of musicologists, literary critics and music critics, examines the history of Glinka's fateful acquaintance with Pushkin, the birth of the opera Ruslan and Lyudmila, the reasons for the failure of its first production and modern directorial decisions of the play. The magical national poem-tale by A. Pushkin “Ruslan and Lyudmila”, despite the attacks of critics, enjoyed great success among contemporaries. Pushkin’s plot attracted Glinka because it opened up a wide scope for his melodic talent. Glinka listened to Pushkin's wishes and created a vivid performance with dance episodes, original stage solutions, lyrical line and emphasized originality of Russian images of Pushkin’s poem. At the same time, Glinka rejected Pushkin's irony, which permeates the poem, and composed a magical work dominated by music. We have a Pushkin plot in the absence of the Pushkin word. Ruslan and Lyudmila have been arguing about the opera for almost 200 years, there are several editions of the music.

Business Judgment Rule and Corporate Governance as the Strategic Imperative of Indonesian State-owned Enterprise

The business judgment rule in state-owned enterprises can serve as either a protective shield or a boomerang for those involved within the mechanism of corporate governance. As such, this study aims to explore the relationship between good corporate governance and the business judgment rule principle in the context of the integrity and sustainability of directorial decisions amidst the dynamically changing context of a company’s legal responsibilities. Through a juridical normative method employing a conceptual approach, this study finds that good corporate governance cannot determine the implementation of the business judgment rule principle. This means that even though good corporate governance is significant in creating a conducive work environment for a responsible decision-making process, it cannot directly influence the implementation of the business judgment rule in cases involving state-owned enterprises.

ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИЯ МЕХАНИЗМОВ ЖИЗНЕТВОРЧЕСТВА В ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННОМ ТЕАТРЕ XXI В.

The article critically analyzes a number of performances, the dramaturgical material for which is biographies, documentary texts presented in compilation with artistic, theoretical and philosophical works. The plays are conceptualized as stage interpretations of the life-creative programs of Vladimir Odoevsky, Leo Tolstoy and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. The author also asks the question about the application by contemporary theatre-makers of the tools of mystification, mythologization and demythologization in the projection of performative comprehension of the text of human life. It is shown that the director with the help of this toolkit and by means of theater not only popularizes, but also creates a new cultural myth or debunks archaic notions about a major historical figure, detecting the points of intersection with the contemporary culture of estrangement. In such directorial decisions the staged biopics begin to sound like a total spectacle about the tragedy of life creation and its Mephistophelean and creative principles.

Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman

Affective Atmosphere: A Non-Representational Method of Devising Film Performance and Fiction

Affective atmosphere is a new method of directing film performance and producing experimental fiction in the tradition of art cinema, which emerged from a wider practice research project entitled Affective Cinema, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. As an approach to filmmaking, affective atmosphere prioritises the becoming of an event over a narrative/production plan, and uses experimental production strategies to maximise the potential of spontaneous directorial decisions and the unpredictable flow of reality for generating alternative narrative/dramatic film structures. The method is rooted in practitioner know-how stimulated by reflection, but also informed by a synthesis of the key concepts of Deleuze and Guattari, and theoretical writings on atmosphere (Böhme, Griffero) and film performance (Benjamin, Del Río). In this way, the project meaningfully applies philosophical concerns to filmmaking, expanding, in the process, on theoretical understanding, while embedding this knowledge tacitly in artistic practice. Furthermore, the research leads to the development of a set of applicable film production methods, unified by a clear rationale and a creative purpose linked to demonstrable outcomes.

Sloppy Bonnie: A Roadkill Musical for the Modern Chick

Sloppy Bonnie: A Roadkill Musical for the Modern Chick

Ecological Adaptation in Montana: Timon of Athens to Timon of Anaconda

In this article Gretchen E. Minton describes her adaptation of William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton’s 1606 play Timon of Athens. This adaptation, called Timon of Anaconda, focuses on the environmental legacy of Butte, Montana, a mining city that grew quickly, flourished, fell into recession, and then found itself labelled the largest Superfund clean-up site in the United States. Timon of Anaconda envisions Timon as a wealthy mining mogul whose loss of fortunes and friends echoes the boom-and-bust economy of Butte. The original play’s language about the poisoning of nature and the troubled relationship between the human and more-than-human worlds is amplified and adjusted in Timon of Anaconda in order to reflect upon ongoing environmental concerns in Montana. Minton explains the ecodramaturgical aims, site-specific locations, and directorial decisions of this adaptation’s performances, which took place in September 2019. Gretchen E. Minton is Professor of English at Montana State University, Bozeman. She has edited several early modern plays, including Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, and The Revenger’s Tragedy. She is the dramaturg for Montana Shakespeare in the Parks and Bozeman Actors Theatre, and her directorial projects include A Doll’s House (2019), Timon of Anaconda (2019–20), and Shakespeare’s Walking Story (2020).

Information Communication Technology (ICT) in Public Sector Banks: Bane or Boon?

ICT has occupied almost every single vertical of human endeavour. For the meticulous services in banks, it has well equipped with the ICT. It increases an efficacy and usefulness of services tendered to the customers, and boosts business procedures, directorial decisions, and joint ventures, which underpins their abilities rapidly of altering and emerging economies with the help of ICT. The present paper emphasises the sways and drifts of ICTs on the banking industry of in this ear of technology. Market structure, innovation, productivity, and value chain these are the four dynamics which used for touchstone in the banking industry. Case studies of computer platform exercised selected Indian banks were considered for a clear conversant implication

Modernization of the visual series as one of the means to preserve the relevance of the opera performance

The purpose of the article is to consuder the issue of the stagingprocess of the opera performance in the aspect of the evolution of thedirectorial thought of the last third of the XX – the beginning of the XXIcenturies, as well as to analyze of the involvement of moderntechnological possibilities of creation on the operatic stage of the visualseries and correspondence to the new demands of the audience of thetheater are considered. The question „What is an opera in our time – thehighest of theatrical arts, or the business industry?” is considered. Sincethe current opera house, as a phenomenon, began to lose interest of thepublic. The scientific novelty of the article is the urgency of the questionof modernization of the production of classical opera. The scope of operadirecting is the key in the article, because in it follows the intricaciesassociated with the development of technologies and visual means ofexpressiveness that have influenced the state of the most iconiccontemporary opera performances. The typization and classification ofdirecting concepts during the existence of the opera as a genre is followed.The article analyzed the tendencies of creating an opera performance inSoviet times and in modern times through the prism of visual aspects. Theperformances by P. Tchaikovsky's opera „Eugene Oneginˮ at theMetropolitan Opera in the USA and the Vienna State Opera are consideredand analyzed, it is a methods of investigation. The author of the articleoffers a comparative analysis of two directorial decisions of the productionof the opera to understand the possible options for the development ofdirecting creativity, since the theater of modernity in the context of theevolution of the genre depends on the time and preferences of the modernaudience. The conclusions indicate that this problem is being studied fromthe point of view of the correspondence of innovative directorial decisionswith the attraction of opportunities of modern opera theater to the author'soriginal source.

Режисерські інновації у використанні технічних засобів і технологій у сценічному мистецтві

The purpose of the study is to identify and analyze directorial innovations in the use of technical means and technologies in the staging of both new and traditional forms. The following methods have been used to achieve this goal: theoretical approach is for the scientific literature study; analytical and comparative are to determine the influence of the technological component on the directing of contemporary works of stage art; systematic is for the structuring of new genres of stage art, the emergence of which is due to the introduction of modern technical means, engineering and information technology; prognostic is to identify new trends in the directing of stage art works. The scientific novelty consists in an art-study analysis of the modernization of the stage space and the study of the innovative technical means role and technologies in the directing of stage art contemporary works. Conclusions. In the XXI century the evolution of theatrical mass sights is under the influence of the technology active development and the search for new ways of interactivity. A feature proper to modern directorial decisions is the synthesis of literary, musical, choreographic, and scenographic components, which are embodied in various stage venues, modernization of which is noticeable both in terms of materials used, functionality, mobility, and in relation to the introduction of the latest information computer and engineering technologies. The multimedia approach has become one of the leading creative and technological methods of creating a contemporary theatrical spectacle. The proliferation of immersion theaters and the introduction of audio descriptions methods have proved that contemporary directors use technology in a very versatile way, and creative forms of search enable the modern language to translate the super-task. Mobility, visibility, brightness, innovation, orientation to each of the spectators with the active participation of the latter in the action are the main areas of creative search for directors.

Modern opera house as a subject of musicologist studies: musical, historical and interpretation aspects

The aim of the article is to identify the fundamental principles, artistic parameters and value-semantic guidelines of the modern opera house, considered in a wide musicological discursive field. To study the socio-aesthetic role of artistic value, theoretical parameters for considering the relationship and mutual influence of the phenomena of theater and opera are formed. The methodology of the work is determined by a system of historical and theoretical approaches, each of which is represented by a complex of methods based on the combination of such methodological approaches as musical and historical, interpretive, opera study, theater studies, textological and semiological. The scientific novelty is in the substantiation and systematization of approaches to the study of the phenomenon of modern opera house, within the framework of which the repertoire factography of modern European and Chinese opera houses is created. New interpretative possibilities and directorial decisions are revealed, due to the expansion of artistic and creative boundaries of the opera house as one of the leading sociocommunicative mechanisms of the modern musical and cultural space. Conclusions. Based on this, we can conclude that the modern opera house, as a phenomenon derived from musical theater, basically contains reliance on the relatedness of the musical and theatrical components of the action, since in this type of theater they are an indissoluble unity; direct connection with the historical past, with the cultural and historical traditions that nourished it, together with possible cultural influences from outside; the concentration of theatrical action around the protagonist with an in-depth description of his inner world, psycho-emotional states around which the main event outline of the composition unfolds. The opera house occupies an important place in the musical and historical process and acquires the significance of one of the most powerful socio-cultural institutional mechanisms of culture, exerting a significant impact on the formation of the value-semantic dominants of culture and the personal consciousness of a person.

Барвисті емоції на сцені «Сірого театру»

The purpose of the article is to consider the peculiarities of a realistic and metaphorical filming in a scenic environment which is built on cinematic principles. The article deals with the scenery of the Kyiv Gray Theater of Sensual Psychoanalysis, which is based on the transfer of complex emotional and psychological components of human actions. The attention of the audience is presented anesthetized sensually-saturated performances, which introduce the principles of film installation on the theater scene. The research methods combine observational and analytical reviews of the principles of the formation of a scenography environment, providing a study of the scenography metaphor against the background of illustrative material. Also, a comparative method has been used, which is conditioned by the need for a comprehensive analysis of scenography techniques and directorial decisions. The scientific novelty consists in the study of the plays that have not yet become the subject of prehistoric art studies. The relatively new theater, founded in 2013, does not have many reviews, comments and professional art critics’ recommendations and theater critics. His productions are in sharp contrasts with traditional ideas about the filming of theatrical scenes, while they show a peculiar, author's vision and directorial, and scenography decision. The composition of the stage environment is similar to the movie frames and the corresponding transitions between the staging highlight the productions of Gray theater among others. Conclusions. The Kyiv Gray Theater of Sensual Psychoanalysis is one of the most interesting phenomena in the contemporary theatrical life of Kyiv, because its productions reveal dramatic problems from the unexpected psycho-psychological side with the help of the principles of cinema installation. The author's interpretation of well-known films and even elements of computer game on the stage demonstrates the ability to comprehensively comprehend contemporary media art and adapt it to the theatrical viewer.

The opera of Petr Tchaikovsky “Mazepa” in the scenic decision by Dmytro Hnatyuk

The article recreates the important page of the creative biography of Dmytro Hnatyuk – his directorial activity. In the contradiction of complex socio-political and ideological changes of time, the essence of the artist is crystallized, due to the fierce thirst for national traditions, to the revival of Ukrainian nature in all dimensions of the cultural and artistic space, and in the operatic genre, above all. D. Hnatyuk’s appeal to the operatic classics, to the essence of the national tradition traced in her historical heritage, stimulates the formation of a new aesthetic understanding of the creativity of many composers, performers, and artists. D. Hnatyuk is a person who not only accumulates powerful energy potential, but also generalizes the super-performing experience with compelling and rationally-weighted directorial decisions. Perfectly mastering the mechanisms of solving scenic problems, the laws of development of the drama of the work, the director deliberately forms a qualitatively new level of dialogical unity of all components of the operatic genre: he localizes the personal factor as an irreplaceable component that structures the essence of acting, destroys the stereotypes of the development of the drama of the work, rooted convention. It was through the efforts of D. M. Hnatyuk that the opera of P. I. Tchaikovsky continued in the complex realities of the Ukrainian operatic tradition of the twentieth century, revealing a new dimension of its existence.The purpose of the article is to consider the little-known pages of the creative biography of D. Hnatyuk, his ascent to the Olympus of artistic recognition. By fixing the problem in the coordinates of the director’s practice of the artist and focusing on the production of P. I. Tchaikovsky’s opera “Mazepa”, we have the opportunity to reveal the dynamics of the resuscitation of the Ukrainian theatrical space in the context of the operatic genre.The methodology of the research involves the use of historical, comparative, art criticism and cultural methods, which makes it possible to analyze the opera of P. Tchaikovsky’s “Mazepa” in a new dimension, opening unexcited pages of the creative biography of the artist.The scientific novelty of the work is due to the fact that it uses a considerable amount of archival materials, reviews, and an epistolary heritage, which enables to fill the gaps of the cultural and artistic space of Ukraine at the end of the twentieth century, and, by focusing on the phenomenon of the artist’s creative biography, to reveal his essence in the context. socio-cultural tendencies of this period.Conclusion. The scientific thought of the present stimulates a permanent rethinking of the established and already canonized methods and mechanisms of studying creative biography as a cultural phenomenon, laying the unshakable basis for the development of humanitarianism in the space of modern attitudes and discourses. Investigating the creative biography of D. Gnatyuk, we fill significant gaps in the national cultural and artistic heritage, form orientations for the opera and theatrical performances of the future and introduce the methods of operatic scenography into the practice of educational activities of the Academy.

O trabalho que se faz: a atividade diretorial nos Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale (1929-1938)

Este artigo toma por objeto os expedientes de trabalho adotados por Marc Bloch e Lucien Febvre na administração da Revista dos Annales entre 1929 e 1938. Interpretadas a partir das cartas trocadas entre ambos, as formas de trabalho diretorial são mobilizadas como possíveis meios de apreensão de constrições às quais a revista e seus diretores estavam submetidos, bem como das tomadas de posição de Bloch e Febvre diante dessas constrições. Objetiva-se, dessa forma, demonstrar o potencial das fontes e dos problemas abordados para trazer à luz dimensões menos visíveis, mas não secundárias, do funcionamento da revista em seus primeiros anos e das condições objetivas inscritas nesse funcionamento. Avança-se, nessa chave, a hipótese de que a instabilidade à qual os Annales estão submetidos no período é um elemento central para a compreensão de escolhas editoriais tomadas pelos diretores, que imprimem à revista um tipo de coesão particular, possivelmente relacionada à posterior elevação do periódico à condição de “mito disciplinar”

Introduction

This Introduction contextualises the SBT/A 29.2 (2017) special issue on Staging Beckett at the Margins. The Beckett community of scholars and theatre practitioners is a truly global one: for decades, Beckett’s plays have been produced across the world in major metropolitan centres from New York to Tokyo and in regional theatres from Birmingham to Bengal. Individual accounts of those productions have been published in journals1 and edited volumes, and The International Reception of Samuel Beckett (2009) edited by Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman includes reception histories of Beckett’s theatre in particular cultural contexts, though it has a broader focus on Beckett’s work in general and its shifting cultural and academic reception. Beckett’s own directorial decisions or his collaborations with directors such as Roger Blin or Alan Schneider in Paris, New York, Berlin or London have been documented and analysed.2 This volume turns its attention both to the margins of some of those capital centres, and to lesser known production contexts, such as Romania, Turkey and Korea, for example, which have not been addressed in any detail in Beckett criticism.

Truths, lies and telling silences in Gutiérrez Alea’s The Last Supper and Pontecorvo’s Burn!

Abstract This article explores the special challenges inherent in filmic depictions of New World slavery, and examines how directors Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Gillo Pontecorvo address these obstacles respectively. Through explicit and implicit recourse to narrative and factual falsehoods, The Last Supper and Burn! both attempt to correct the partial text of history by situating their enslaved characters at the centre of the action and providing them a space in which to express resistance through voice, gesture and determined silence. While each author works from an anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist political stance characteristic of revolutionary film-making in the 1960s and 1970s, significant differences in production environments and directorial decisions regarding the historical record affected each film’s ability to convey the ‘truth’ of Caribbean slavery. Despite the relative successes and failures of each film, I argue that both remain useful tools for fleshing out a textual history in which the enslaved are rarely portrayed as the principal actors of historical events.

Albee in Performance (review)

Reviewed by: Albee in Performance Billy Middleton Albee in Performance. By Rakesh H. Solomon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010; pp. 304. According to Edward Albee, playwriting is "an affliction you're born with," but directing is "a craft which can be learned" (qtd. on 7). Rakesh Solomon's new book Albee in Performanceexamines Albee's career as a director, a role overshadowed by his fame as a playwright. Solomon points out that performance analyses have been omitted from Albee criticism, and his access to Albee during rehearsals and stagings of key works, along with interviews with the director and frequent collaborators, allows him to fill this gap. Solomon uses performance analysis, theatre history, and textual criticism to examine how Albee transforms his own works into dynamic stage performances. As Solomon relates, Albee's impetus for directing his own plays was sparked by dissatisfaction with what he considered inaccurate representations of his authorial intent. Solomon uses the term "double author" to refer to Albee's dual roles as playwright and director, suggesting that, in his capacity as director, Albee continues to author his texts by refining and clarifying his original intent. This notion of the double author provides a critical framework for Solomon's interpretation of Albee's directorial work throughout the book's eleven chapters. The first two chapters provide an overview of Albee's place in American drama, both as playwright and director. Of particular interest is the second chapter, which focuses on Albee's role in casting. Solomon describes Albee as a playwright who appreciates "a performer's acting skill and intelligence more . . . than his personality traits or physical attributes" (14). He points out that Albee's insistence on having the final word in directorial decisions like casting, even in productions of his work directed by others, often led to conflict with his former frequent collaborator Alan Schneider. While Schneider and others have characterized Albee's involvement as bordering on dictatorial, Solomon suggests that it testifies to Albee's vision of the playwright as the creator of a work that must be realized in production. Chapters 3 through 9 consist of Solomon's performance analyses, including rehearsal notes, for productions of The American Dream, The Zoo Story, Fam and Yam, The Sandbox, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Marriage Play, and Three Tall Women, and Albee's forays into experimental dramaturgy with Boxand Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. The playwright's notes and revisions serve as valuable tools to correct erroneous interpretations by other [End Page 142]directors and Albee scholars. In her analysis of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for example, critic Anita Stenz has read George's repeated warnings to Martha not to mention their child as attempts to goad her into revealing their secret, suggesting that Martha has made a habit of mentioning their child in the past. But in a 1990 restaging, Albee deleted eight of these warnings, thus ensuring, according to Solomon, that George's act of violence in narrating their son's death is in response to the events of that evening rather than a reaction to Martha's supposed "cumulative breaches or her attempted infidelity" (195). Although Albee has espoused a disinterest in scholarly criticism surrounding his works, Solomon suggests that he seeks to correct critical misinterpretations through such textual changes. Chapter 10 focuses on Albee as double author. Solomon begins this chapter with a quote by British dramatist John Arden, who declares that an author who allows others to direct his work is "merely a playwriter," but a playwrightis "capable of presenting a complete artistic vision upon the stage" (qtd. on 191). Solomon argues that Albee shares an "identical conception" to Arden's, and his intent here is to draw a more explicit connection between Albee's roles as writer and director. Solomon's focus is primarily on directorial choices. References to revisions made during later productions deal largely with staging over script, and these changes are made in response to previous productions, rather than being critical interpretations of the scripts themselves. The final chapter is a compilation of Solomon's interviews with Albee and his collaborators over the decades spent researching this book...

Twelfth Night (review)

Reviewed by: Twelfth Night R. H. McKeown Twelfth Night Presented by the Stratford Festival at the Festival Theatre, Stratford, Ontario. July 30–October 28, 2006. Directed by Leon Rubin. Designed by John Pennoyer. Lighting by Robert Thomson. Music by Michael Vieira. Sound by Jim Neil. Fights by John Stead. Choreography by Nicola Pantin. With Sanjay Talwar (Orsino), Dana Green (Viola), Thom Marriott (Sir Toby Belch), Diane D'Aquila (Maria), Don Carrier (Sir Andrew Aguecheek), Andrew Massingham (Feste), Seana McKenna (Olivia), Brian Bedford (Malvolio), Roy Lewis (Antonio), Shaun McComb (Sebastian), Robert King (Fabian), and others. Stratford's production of Twelfth Night was a good example of the fact that, while color-blindness can work in casting, myopia can be a dangerous thing. Leon Rubin elected to set his production in colonial India, a setting rich with possibilities left largely unexplored. "It was a deliberate choice to set Twelfth Night somewhere other than the traditional Western European setting used for the works of Shakespeare," states Rubin in the program notes. "We're trying to widen perspective." In recent years, he has used innovative settings for cogent reasons, and to good effect: "A Midsummer Night's Dream was set in the Amazonian rainforest. In Shakespeare's time, woods were huge and frightening, while now they're small and domestic. Setting the play in the rainforest was a way of re-imagining the fantastic view people had of the woods." Significantly, though, he never elaborates on just what that new perspective is in his setting for Twelfth Night. The colonial Indian setting gave designer John Pennoyer a chance to go all out with color, as swathes of fabric were hung from the upper stage, and changed to indicate changes of scene. The overall effect was one of explicitly Oriental luxury, a fact underlined by the long dance sequence opening the play. The motif was also expressed in Seana McKenna's costume changes throughout the performance. As Olivia opened up to the erotic possibilities of first Cesario then Sebastian, her dresses moved from restrictive Victorian corsets and bustles in mourning colors, through the same clothes in bright silks, to a sari in the closing scenes. Her sexual awakening, visually, was represented as going native. The production did not adhere to a strict dichotomy of sensuous Indians contrasted with repressed colonials, though. Diane D'Aquila's Maria was a woman very much aware of her sexuality, and not afraid to exploit it to repel Sir Andrew and attract Sir Toby. The setting and casting, however, caused more than one uncomfortable moment. The dynamic of an Indian Orsino pursuing, and being rejected by, an English woman edged uneasily around the racial implications. The audience gasped audibly when Cesario told Orsino that he loved a woman of "your complexion," and was told in no uncertain terms "She is not worth thee then." But Rubin did not seem to be interested in using the setting to explore issues of race. In the final scene, Orsino's threatening of Viola had just enough time to take on a racialized dimension—highlighted by Orsino's comparison of himself to an "Egyptian thief"—before breathlessly moving on with the business of the romantic comedy. This was the production's strength. Any production of Twelfth Night has to work to make the final pairings come across as believable. Dana Green [End Page 105] played a self-possessed and engaging Viola whose acceptance of Orsino was so heartfelt that their marriage almost seemed to resolve the racial tensions. Helping matters considerably was McKenna's Olivia, whose response to seeing two Cesarios was a greedily sensuous "Most wonderful!" that almost brought the house down. As a result, the play was just able to skirt the questions it raised but did not answer. It left a slightly disconcerting aftertaste, though, as Rubin exploited its Orientalist staging for its "exotic" visuals, and never fully explored the tensions of the setting. Other directorial decisions and design elements were more successful, if underused. The birdcages at Olivia's house were appropriate enough emblems for her repression, and played a surprising role in the final scene of the play. Brian Bedford's Malvolio was a thoroughly grotesque characterization, a monster...

The Substance of Cinema

shapes directly onto filmstrips, paradigmatically is. Currie judges that purely abstract film stands in the same relation to cinema as setting afire a canvas prepared for painting stands to painting.5 Such pyro-painting might have some artistic merit but it is not painting per se. Likewise, nonpictorial movies created entirely by nonphotographic techniques are not so much movies as they are multifarious things you can do with the cinematic apparatus.6 Cinematic art, on Currie's thesis, diverges from painting in that it is necessarily imagistic and ontologically precludes genuine abstraction, construed along the lines of nondepiction combined with lack of reference. This seems more a metaphysical assumption than a description. His thesis also implies that depictive but nonphotographic animation techniques-from manually scratching pictures into the film's emulsion to digital animation-are uncinematic for all their pyrotechnics. I wonder if he has not expelled too much art from cinema, and cinema from art. I suspect, as does Carroll, that Cur i takes the etiology of one sort of movie as defi ing cinema in general. Thus he misses the ontologically primitive commonalities of superficially different artifacts. Or so I argue below. Carroll realizes that choice of definitive causal conditions might say more about normative presuppositions regarding the nature of cinema than about the nature of cinema itself. His solution to this problem is anti-essentialist, ingenious, and big hearted. But I doubt it is successful. Stated roughly, Carroll identifies as cinematic any two-dimensional presented in a detached display, generated by a template technology, and produced by cinematic means.7 He takes pains, though, to dissociate imagery from depiction. Indeed, he prefers moving image for its wider application to pictorial works (made photographically or otherwise) as well as purely abstract ones (including those made by such heteroclite methods as editing together strips of clear and opaque leader).8 Display detachment concerns the way cinematic and other images perforce involve spatial dislocation.9 Just by looking at a movie of it, I cannot orient my body in the Grand Canyon's direction. Unlike windows, mirrors, and magnifying lenses, photographically-produced movie pictures do not connect us spatially with their depicta. Say I am watching a movie at a spatialtemporal location Li. Following Carroll, when a display, D, at L1 is a photographically (or nonphotographically) generated picture of some extra-cinematic referent, S, D is detached from S's own space-time location L such that I cannot orient myself bodily and in time relative to S merely by looking D-wards at Li. But what if I were watching closed-circuit, live images of happenings in the room next door? As Carroll notes, background knowledge of the imagery's connection to that room, not visual experience of the image, allows one to orient one's self spatially-temporally to those happenings.o A template is a physical storage, recording, exhibition, or transmission format by means of which a cinematic work is disseminated. When I watch The Player (Robert Altman, 1992), I could be viewing imagery produced from a DVD, videocassette, broadcast television signal, or 35mm film print. None of these items is identical to the work, The Player, though. The work consists of story, characterization, irony, This content downloaded from 157.55.39.105 on Fri, 07 Oct 2016 04:28:50 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Ponech The Substance of Cinema 189 actors' performances, directorial decisions, and so forth-properties and events no traces of which are found within the template's molecules and electrons. Similarly, were my copy of The Player destroyed or the TV signal degraded, the work itself would not thereby be destroyed-only one particular token of its template. Moreover, screening the show requires I view a mechanical performance executed from this template. At a stage play, visiting a movie set, or attending a hockey game, I watch people as they perform their artistic or professional actions right before my eyes. When I view a play, film, or game on television or in a movie theater my proximal perceptual object, the detached display, results from something a machine is arationally doing in front of me. This mechanical performance facilitates my access to peoples' artistic and sporting actions, but it is not itself an artistic or sporting perform-

Hamlet's "Globe" and the Self as Performer in England and Japan

In his paper, "Hamlet's 'Globe' and the Self as Performer in England and Japan," Yu Shibuya argues that Hamlet sees his life as a performance. Shibuya presents examples from Tsuneari Fukuda's Japanese translation to suggest that Fukuda makes choices that emphasize the theatrical side of Hamlet's character. If Hamlet perceives himself as an actor, then his definition of theater or an actor is ultimately a definition of himself. Shibuya uses the theme of self-definition to examine Kenneth Branagh's film version, especially the Mousetrap and the "O what a rogue and peasant slave" scenes. By analyzing Branagh's staging and directorial decisions and his recognition that Hamlet is a performer, Shibuya shows how Branagh's directorial decisions complement his abilities as an actor that make this aspect of his Hamlet one of the finest moments in Shakespeare on film.