“The beached verge” : on filming the unfilmable in Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet

Abstract

While much critical commentary on the filming of Hamlet is explicitly apprehensive of the play’s cinematic unsuitability, none is perhaps as categorically adamant about its daunting difficulties as J. Blumenthal’s belief that the tragic protagonist is unfit for film narrative: “Hamlet would be untranslatable because of the verbality of his experience.” Indeed, even a less drastic critic like Barbara Hodgdon who readily admits that Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet (1964) “does achieve some of Shakespeare’s effects,” likewise emphasises its literary source’s non-visual qualities: “Hamlet is a ‘head play’, in that much of the action (or, rather, the questioning about whether to act and when) takes place in the imagination and is expressed primarily in language. Because of this, Hamlet’s physical role has a commanding stasis.” The echo of G. Wilson Knight’s remark is unmistakable especially in the final epithet: “Instead of being dynamic, the force of Hamlet is, paradoxically, static.” Given this unequivocal consensus on Hamlet having what Robert A. Duffy calls “un-filmic tendencies,” one can easily presume that Kozintsev’s version shares with other filmed Hamlets the inevitable shortcomings of any such doomed attempt to film Shakespeare’s unfilmable text.