Hamlet (1964 film)
| Hamlet | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Directed by |
Grigori Kozintsev Iosif Shapiro (co-director) |
| Written by |
William Shakespeare Boris Pasternak Grigori Kozintsev |
| Starring |
Innokenty Smoktunovsky Mikhail Nazvanov Elze Radzinya Anastasiya Vertinskaya |
| Music by | Dmitri Shostakovich |
| Cinematography | Jonas Gritsius |
| Distributed by | Lenfilm |
|
Release date
|
June 24, 1964 |
|
Running time
|
140 minutes |
| Country | Soviet Union |
| Language | Russian |
Hamlet (Russian: Гамлет, tr. Gamlet) is a 1964 film adaptation in Russian of William Shakespeare's play of the same title, based on a translation by Boris Pasternak. It was directed by Grigori Kozintsev and Iosif Shapiro, and stars Innokenty Smoktunovsky as Prince Hamlet.
Grigori Kozintsev had been a founder member of the Russian avant-garde artist group The Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS), whose ideas were closely related to Dadaism and Futurism. In 1923 he had been planning to perform Hamlet as a pantomime in the experimental manner of FEKS, but the plan was not put into effect, and Kozintsev's energies shifted into the cinema. However, he returned to the theatre in 1941 with a Leningrad production of King Lear. Then, in 1954 Kozintsev directed a stage production of Hamlet at the Pushkin Theatre in Leningrad, using Boris Pasternak's translation; this was one of the first Soviet productions of the play in the post-Joseph Stalin era.
Kozintsev also wrote extensively about Shakespeare and a major chapter in his book Shakespeare: Time and Conscience is devoted to his thoughts on Hamlet together with a historical survey of earlier interpretations. In an appendix entitled "Ten Years with Hamlet", he includes extracts from his diaries dealing with his experiences of the 1954 stage production and his 1964 film.
Kozintsev's film is faithful to the architecture of the play, but the text (based on Pasternak's translation) is heavily truncated, achieving a total running time of 2 hours 20 minutes (from a play which can last as long as four hours in full performance). The opening scene of the play is cut entirely, along with scenes 1 and 6 of Act IV, but other scenes are represented in sequence, even though some are drastically shortened. (Hamlet's final speech is reduced simply to "The rest is silence.") There is some resequencing of material in Act IV to illustrate the outwitting of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the voyage to England. Kozintsev seeks constantly to represent the content of the play in visual terms, and there are notable sequences which are constructed without the use of dialogue (e.g. the opening scene in which Hamlet arrives at Elsinore to join the court's mourning, and the vigil awaiting the appearance of the ghost).
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