This all happened in FEKS about forty years ago.” Concluding his anecdote, Kozintsev wryly notes that, “Luckily for me, no materials concerning this experiment have been preserved.” 3 Throughout his two books, Kozintsev, while conceding the enormous influence that his 1920s experiments had for his later work, consistently maintains the gulf separating that period from the time of his Shakespeare adaptations. As he relates: “The director Sergei Gerasimov recently recalled the distant past: it seems that I suggested to him (then a student at our workshop) that he rework the famous tragedy, using a modern tempo, and perform it in pantomime. In the opening of the appendix to Time and Conscience, Kozintsev confesses that his production of Hamlet has a longer provenance than he has usually cared to admit. His book Shakespeare: Time and Conscience, which appeared in English translation in 1966, combines a general study of Shakespeare’s work and its repercussions in the centuries following the artist’s own lifetime with extracts from Kozintsev’s journal entries from the time of Hamlet’s filming, a pairing of film and theoretical text that was followed in 1973 when the release of his second Shakespeare film was accompanied by the publication of a further volume, King Lear: The Space of Tragedy. With this work, Kozintsev also renewed the tradition in Soviet cinema of combining artistic practice with film theory.

Shot on black and white 70mm film in the 2.35:1 “Sovscope” format, the spectacular scenery, striking score and inimitable acting performances of Kozintsev’s Hamlet have led to its reputation as one of the best filmed adaptations of Shakespeare, and attest to the director’s stated intention that the goal of the film was “not to adapt Shakespeare to the cinema, but to adapt the cinema to Shakespeare.” 1 Making use of Boris Pasternak’s translation of the original text into contemporary Russian and the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, Hamlet is the site for an encounter between three of the Soviet Union’s foremost artists. Grigori Kozintsev’s Gamlet ( Hamlet, 1964) forms a diptych with his later film Korol Lir ( King Lear, 1973), but many of its formal techniques also hark back to the director’s earlier collaborations with Leonid Trauberg, such as Shinel ( The Overcoat, 1926) Novyy Vavilon ( The New Babylon, 1929) and the Maxim trilogy (1934-38). It is perhaps a measure of the state of Soviet film culture in the Khrushchev era that the country’s highest grossing film of 1964 was a 140-minute Shakespeare adaptation directed by a filmmaker who had cut his teeth in the experimental workshops of the silent era.

Issue 85 Adapting the Cinema to Shakespeare: Hamlet (Grigori Kozintsev, 1964)

Hamlet movie