Two "King Lears": Uncovering the Filmtext

Author(s): Barbara Hodgdon

Source: Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 3 (1983), pp. 143-151
Published by: Salisbury University
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43797313
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Literature/Film Quarterly

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Talking about a film based on a Shakespearean playscript invites a kind of
plural auteur criticism that locates textual authority first in that playtext
and, secondarily, in whatever identifying flourishes (perhaps felicitious,
perhaps obtrusive) that constitute the filmmaker's so-called directorial signa-
ture. The problem would be less complex than it is if Shakespeare's play and
the filmmaker's "stylistics" were the only texts mediating my responses. But
they are not. Another textual authority operating here- what I call the ex-
pectational text- contains my private notions about the play and about per-
formed Shakespeare, notions that I may not even recognize until I find them
denied. Thus, Pauline Kael, who titles her review of Brook's King Lear
"Peter Brook's 'Night of the Living Dead' "His theatrical conception kills
not only the drama but most of the poetry; ...only in a few remaining long
speeches can one still be swept up by the rhythm of Shakespeare's lan-
guage."! In stating what "one" misses, Kael echoes the responses of many
to a film of a Shakespearean play as a text of loss-a text that has been
written, like a love letter or a particularly vituperative editorial, to another
text (Shakespeare's) that is- and is not- there.
Filming Shakespeare involves shifting textual authority from the playscript
to the filmtext. For both Peter Brook and Grigori Kozintsev, that process
arose from remarkably similar backgrounds, notions, emphases, and pro-
duction circumstances. Both had directed stage productions (Brook more
recently than Kozintsev), and each director's stage practice was informed by
a generous eclecticism devoted to like goals: how to stage particular texts in
particular historical situations with absolute clarity and force.2 Since both
saw Lear's story as timeless, both were determined to avoid historical authen-
ticity. As Kozintsev put it, " Who said the author was reflecting history? He
is interfering with the present."3 Both were also filming at approximately
the same time (1967-1970) and in similar locations- Brook in Jutland,
Kozintsev on the Kazantip promontory on the Azov Sea. Sharing their
thinking, Brook and Kozintsev corresponded before, during, and after making
their films; an early exchange finds both questioning techniques, means of
expression, and finding no ready answers. Brook was fascinated by Carl
Dreyer's use of the derealization of space in La Passion de Jeanne D'Arc:
he wished to avoid background, as Dreyer had done, and to ground his film
on the close-up; and he was preoccupied by questions about shot content

143

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144/Two King Lears

(especially when both image and language are carriers of meaning) and shot
duration and the relation of close-up to full shot. Kozintsev disagreed with
Brook about the power of the close-up, seeing it as essential only as a way
to "look deep into a character's eyes, into the man's spiritual world"; he saw
Shakespeare's text "not only as a dialogue but as a landscape, notes from the
author's diary, lines of verse, quotations." Like Brook, he questions how the
cinema, where the visual outweighs the audible, can help the expressiveness
of verbal rhythms, patterns of sound. "I am trying," he said, "to find a visual
Lear. Finally, each director conceptualized his thinking further in writing.
Brook, after asking British poet Ted Hughes to write a "translation" of the
story as he saw it, sought the essential nature of the play by writing a nar-
rative treatment without dialogue; using this as a basis, the text was then
chosen and cut.5 Kozintsev, working from Pasternak's translation, wrote an
excursive, meditative exegesis of the play, making metaphoric and imagic
connections between Lear and his own understanding of the imaginative and
historical registers of human experience. (Interestingly, much of what Kozint-
sev says glosses Brook's filmtext more succinctly than his own. 6) Although
Brook appears to focus his thinking more precisely on issues of cinematic
technique than Kozintsev,7 each film-maker was committed to exploring
how, given the acknowledged differences between the rhythmic laws of the
stage and those of the film, he could create a new text, a filmtext called King
Lear. 8
Rather than juggling with whatever correspondences I find amông these
processes, in what follows I should like to locate textual authority within
the discourse and the diegesis of the films themselves and to talk about
the fundamental operations of each filmtext, focusing primarily on begin-
nings and endings.9
The initial moments of each film construct a space that signals the mode
of discourse to follow. Kozintsev's opening shots, which track a procession of
ragged beggars across a barren landscape strewn with massive prehistoric
boulders, begin with a close-up of cloth-bound feet and gradually give way
to full shots and long shots of entire figures and then to a soaring high-angle
full shot that shows those figures in relation to a full landscape dominated
by a massive fort-like structure. Natural sounds- footsteps, the creaking of
cart wheels- and the sound of a peasant's horn, followed by a flute melody,
accompany these shots, the music swelling into a low chant that stops to
create an expectational pause just before speech begins. The editing pattern
articulates a continuous, unified, connected, and completely plausible,
though strikingly evocative, natural world. In contrast, Brook's opening-
a tight, slow, right and then left pan, in total silence, over a densely packed
group of faces- immediately and succinctly privileges the close-up and stresses
the flat, two-dimensional quality of the image: these faces, with eyes that
look but do not see us, mask the existence of any other space. The moments
invite us to share these expectational waiting attitudes, but because Brook
denies us a surrounding or framing context, even though we look, our know-
ledge is incomplete.
Clearly, the idea behind each of these introductions is similar: to heighten
our spectatorly expectation by showing us- and asking us to place ourselves
among- a group of waiters and to anticipate Lear's presence by showing his
absence. But whereas Kozintsev's discourse clearly and deliberately locates us
within a real-world landscape, allowing us to understand the images fully even
though we may not comprehend their further registers of meaning, Brook's
"landscape," the human face, is here unreadable: these faces may or may not
be seeing something we do not see.
In terms of representational procedures, it would be tempting as well as

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 Two King Lears/145

convenient to characterize Kozintsev's film as a text predicated on sharing a

full vision (and hence, full knowledge) with the spectator and to call Brook's
film a deprived and fragmented (deconstructed?) text which frustrates our
ability to see- and thus, to know. Such labeling sets up a useful, if potentially
reductive, opposition between the two filmtexts in terms of the spectator's
ability to see, to understand, and to know. The epistemology of Kozintsev's
film rests on the diegesis- on showing relationships between characters, and
between characters and the spaces they inhabit; in order to clarify those rela-
tionships and make it possible for us to read them, the film's discourse
becomes invisible. In contrast, Brook's film explores and exploits the rela-
tionship between the spectator and a highly visible discourse, so that our
knowledge is predicated as much on the manner of the discourse as on its
matter.
Let me clarify this by looking further at the operations of both texts. As
Kozintsev's film continues, the shots establish, again within conventional and
extremely fluid editing, the space of the court, placing each person absolutely
within that space, showing the relationships of each family group in a linked
series of near-tableaux that effectively freeze the people within this full,
social mise-en-scene. Clear distinctions- in casting and costuming- separate
these aristocratic figures and those of the beggars; the images make social and
political myths public and readable. But Lear himself appears displaced: he
looks more like one of the peasants come in to warm his hands before the fire
than a king. Fool also seems to belong to that other world, and the similarity
between the two figures- the playful jingle of Fool's bells in response to
Lear's laugh, the mask they briefly share, their "old child-ness"- undermines
the discrepancy between them. Throughout the love trial, which is produced
by Lear, the discourse focuses on balancing and linking action, reaction, and
shifting points of view so tightly and securely that, although the narrative is
clearly disruptive, what we see is Lear's control, a notion that is further
reinforced as the tensed visual rhythm of the exchange between Lear and
Cordelia explodes into a series of tracking shots, reversing right and then left,
as Lear, moving toward the camera and then with it, points to men, horses,
dogs, falcons (they are, for him, equatable objects)- "I'll take that, that,
that." The images derive increased authority and climax from the music that
underscores Lear's exit from the court and his ascent, intercut with high-angle
shots of the peasants seen in the opening, to the top of a tower where, in a
low-angle long shot, he curses and banishes Cordelia.
The crowded images describing the apparent solidity of both the previous
natural landscape and this social milieu and the connectedness of the editing
patterns produce an illusion that we see everything, that nothing has been
elided. Kozintsev posits several centers of attention: the relationships be-
tween peasant and aristocrat and between the spaces each occupies, and the
individual and familial relationships described in the love test. Two questions
are being raised: how will each of these relationships- one social and the
other private- be resolved? Our first view of Lear is in relation to a carefully
created social world; the final shots in the sequence show him in relation to
the opening landscape, dominant over it, not seeing it but being seen by
those in it; and the intercutting between his figure and the watching peasants
articulates a latent equation between them and Lear. In these moments, as
Lear's figure seems to mediate the two milieux of the film, we have a com-
fortable, anticipatory understanding of what is to follow, for we have seen
what Lear does not see: Cordelia's love and his possible relationship to the
beggars. And this understanding derives, I would argue, in large part from the
familiar rhythms of conventional film narrative.
Brook's opening sequence denies us that comfort by dislocating the dieges-

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146 /Two King Lears

is through disruptive, shorthand handling of space and spatial relationships,

producing a mise-en-scene with a dimensionless quality that often approaches
near-abstraction. The result compresses the narrative, collapsing it inward in
a consistent focus on intimate exchange. Following the panning shots of faces
seen in close-up, the cut is to a long shot of a cave-like chamber dominated by
a huge black coffin-phallus structure; the shot holds in silence until a small
door in the right background slams shut. Although this shot does establish
the dimensions of a space, our understanding of it is at best partial. Then, in
close-up, slightly off center in the frame, Lear's face floats in black space, and
still we do not know, given the previous shots, where to place his presence.
Held in silence, the shot re-enunciates the seeing initiated in the opening pans.
When Scofield's first word- "Know"- sounds, the effect is startling. In just
three shots, seeing and knowing become explicit concerns of the discourse.
In the sequence that follows, Brook reserves the long shot for establshing
or re-establishing the physical context of the space and the locus of Lear's
authority. There are only five long shots: two are of Lear's throne- seen first
from the back and then later, head-on- the third is of Cordelia, sitting alone;
all three are stable, without movement, and vary in length. The last two swell
out from tighter shots to show Lear's, and then Kent's, exits from the cham-
ber. Throughout, the camera remains steady and sure; movement is minimal,
occurring as a tight, slow pan over faces until, as Lear's plan is frustrated,
action erupts within the image. As each daughter rises to speak, mid-close-ups
and close-ups privilege faces and eyes as well as language; at other times, the
frame edge splits a face, cutting off the characters' complete vision as well as
ours. Yet even when we are allowed to examine their faces, the actors'
performances, which suppress the obvious gestures, smiles, and looks that
provide clues to thought and feeling, raise ambiguities suggesting possible
misinterpretation as much as ensuring understanding. This initial shock of the
close-up of Lear's face floating on blackness keys the point of view of the
sequence. From here on, it is Lear who controls the seeing; the fragmented
views of the others capture his vision, the fractured quality of his spiritual
condition. This Lear is an individual presence, not part of a larger social world
but its entire authority. Occasional returns to an objective view of his figure
in long shot or mid-close-up function not so much as an omniscient point of
view but as a way to re-establish that dominance.
The only other point of view within the shots is Cordelia's (her back is
toward the camera some of the time here, thus associating us with her). The
tensions between Lear and his youngest daughter and the consequent cut-
ting apart of the kingdom are specifically- and briefly- articulated in six
abrupt alternations of point of view. In Kent's quarrel with Lear, where
Brook might have chosen to reveal another point of view, the image instead
privileges the space between the two, each man's profile framing darkness.
Strikingly, this is the only fragmentation of Lear's face in the sequence, and
the camera, at first wavering slightly, corrects that broken view by shifting so
that Lear's entire face is included, and Kent is cut out of the shot, as if obey-
ing Lear's will. And here, as elsewhere, the interplay between the steady
camera, the minimal movement, and the compelling quality of the close-ups
privileges our own look with an intensity comparable to Lear's own, paral-
leling our vision to his and forcing us to share the responsibility for his
actions. In this text, Lear is not only at the center of the narrative as its
subject, but that subjectivity controls the spectator's involvement. We see
like Lear, with as partial a view: the operation of the discourse articulates
exactly how one man forms and carries with him his own image of himself,
of others, of the dimensions of his world.
As one might expect, Lear's subjectivity reaches its most extravagant

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 Two King Lears/lAl

heights in the storm. The discourse consistently destroys narrativity, forcing

us to articulate our own connections between a series of unexpected, multi-
ple, and often contradictory images whose short duration hampers their
ordering. Although a few long shots and full shots do serve to establish a
broad physical context, these spaces are introduced by close-ups of Lear,
which function as substitutes for more conventional establishing shots,
and Lear's words initiate many images. For example, a single musical note
cues Lear's "Blow, winds. . . the voice seems to produce the water, dis-
torted, close-up images that, within the duration of a shot, quickly turn
abstract and disintegrate but return to more precise resolution in the next
shot. In one segment, a close-up of Lear's face is printed alternately on left
and then right screen; extremely rapid cuts coinciding with lightning flashes
produce a stroboscopie effect which seems to arise from the storm itself.
But since Lear's words have cued this effect, his look becomes identified
with the center of the storm: he is both within it and producing it at the same
time.
The central operations of the discourse- spatial disorientation and the
engendering relationship between sound and image- reinforce Edgar/Tom's
relationship to Lear. After a brief shift to Tom's point of view as he is intro-
duced, we return, through a blurred close-up of Lear's eyes, to his apparent
control over a regular alternation (28 shots) between a repeated mid-shot
and a variety of close-up views of Tom as he explains what he has been.
Although the mid-shot image of Tom against a wall of the hovel, bubbling
with falling rain, remains stable, the close-ups change constantly, becoming
less and less recognizable as images of a human face. Paradoxically, the
sound of his monologue is diegetic in the close-ups but non-diegetic in the
mid-shots (where his lips do not move and his body has a catatonic stance).
Thus, Tom's elaborate, distorted self-description- 4 A servingman! proud in
heart and mind; that curl'd my hair..."- suggests one kind of image, a trans-
formation, which we might expect this discourse, especially in this hallucina-
tory sequence, to show us. But his words keep producing the same image;
and both the close-ups and the repeated mid-shot are included within Lear's
fixed and framing vision of a disintegrating self. The climax of the segment,
again keyed by a close-up of Lear's eyes and mouth, now blurred to darkened
blotches, is a sliding pan, in close-up, down Tom's shivering body, accom-
panied by Lear's "Is man no more than this..." and ending on Tom's feet,
whitened stumps that seem to be growing down into the mud. Cut to a
high-angle mid-shot as Lear tears off his clothes. In comparison to the com-
plexity of the discourse here, the flash-lit appearances of Goneril and Cordelia
a bit later seem almost inevitable "real"- certainly more easily readable-
images.
It is difficult to say how much Lear comprehends here. The fragmentation
of the discourse so limits and denies interpretation by wresting all vision to
Lear's perspective that seeing, understanding, and knowing remain
problematic. Not so with Kozintsev's fllmtext, in which seeing and knowing
are distributed easily among characters, on various levels, and from multiple
points of view. Tom and Fool are privileged almost equally with Lear, whose
central relationship, as in the opening, is to a group of others. Full and mid-
shot views ensure stress on Lear as part of the group here, thus resolving the
earlier suggestions of his similarity to the peasants who listened to his
proclamation. Seen far above them in the opening, Lear now joins them. No
ruptures in the discourse articulate this change; rather, the continuity
describes an almost imperceptible, natural shift from king to unaccommo-
dated man. The central exchange, that between Tom and Lear, focuses
attention on Yarveťs performance: his searching scrutiny of Tom, seen in

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148/Two King Lears

mid-close-up and from Tom's point of view, anatomizes him both as an object
and as a mirror. But several backward dollies to full shots and mid-shots
include Fool's point of view as well: as Lear offers Tom a place, Fool screams,
perhaps fearful of losing his own identity, which is linked to Lear's. Briefly,
Kent urges Lear to rest, and the discourse focuses on Tom's avoidance of
Gloucester, privileging his story at the expense of Lear's.
Like these moments, Kozintsev's ending also describes a move toward
Lear's absence. And here, as elsewhere, it is the diegetic effect of the images
rather than their articulation that seems significant. The last moments arise
"organically" out of the final battle sequence. From a high -angle mid -shot of
Albany bending over Edmund's body, the camera tracks out and cranes up to
Lear's tiny figure atop the castle walls; his "Howl" binds the shots together.
Throughout, the camera remains mobile; yet compared to the formality of
earlier sequences, the ending is almost sketchily handled- a shorthand de-
emphasis of individual presences giving way to a lyrically omniscient,
perspective-engendering view of an entire action. Haunting echoes of the
opening show Lear at the center of and surrounded by others, Lear in relation
to his daughters and to Fool. The image chain contains suggestive impressions
anticipating the formal circularity of the narrative: the castle itself is familiar,
as is the sense of presences gradually filling its spaces. We see Lear and
Cordelia together, only this time her body is in his arms. Each family group
is firmly placed, as the bodies of Lear and Cordelia and, separately, those of
Regan and then Goneril are carried on litters in procession through the
burned town. Fool's bells jingle once again as a soldier kicks him out of the
way- but the prevailing full shots and mid -shots keep us at a distance,
denying us a privileged, close-up view of Lear's last moments with Cordelia.
The discourse diminishes and then erases the expected resolution- the final
union between father and daughter.
That expectation arises from two earlier sequences- Lear's awakening to
recognize Cordelia, and Cordelia and Lear together, flanked by Edmund's
soldiers. In the first, seeing is enunciated by Fool- the "sad, human voice of
art," according to Kozintsev's diary 10- • who lies down as Lear wakes and, in
mid-close-up, lifts Cordelia's tears to his lips. The second, seen in omniscient
point of view, functions in part as an echo of Lear's first exit from his court:
he and Cordelia push toward the camera through groups of fleeing refugees,
lost in the crowd until they are recognized and surrounded. Framing locates
them centrally within a line of soldiers spread across the full screen. In a high-
angle mid-shot, Cordelia kisses Lear's hand, returning his own gestures before
Edmund orders them led away. By recovering what the opening sequence
denies, both moments reconstitute Lear in his daughter's eyes, suggesting
their shared vision and permitting us to see their understanding triumph.
Kozintsevis ending draws on these suggestions in a single, extraordinary
image. In full shot, Lear, in center frame, with Cordelia's prone body in right
frame, speaks, "Never, never, never. . . We expect to cut to a close-up as he
bends over her, particularly since there has been only one previous close-up in
the sequence- of Lear and Cordelia as he pulls her body toward him to listen
for her speech. But, although Lear's voice binds over and echoes in the next
shot, the cut is to a full shot of the gap in the wall where, earlier, Cordelia's
body had been cut down: the camera dollies in to a whirlpooling eddy
beyond, and a gull flies right and then left out of the shot. As a substitute for
a close-up of Cordelia, this unexpected image interrupts the otherwise
conventional diegesis, endowing the shot with strong metaphoric and
connotative pressures. But a cut quickly returns us to the previous full shot:
Lear collapses as the others crowd in, again obstructing our view. A close-up
of Cordelia's face follows; a hand- Lear's?- rests on her shoulder. The

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 Two KingLearsl 149

discourse erases Lear, leaving us only Cordelia's face and the ambiguous
resonance of a gull's flight over water.
The last view of father and daughter shows them together, borne on a
litter in a deadened, near-parodic, marred repetition of the opening
processions into the court, the soldiers and litter moving forward toward the
camera into a space we don't see. Attention focuses on what Lear has left
behind- Fool, once his constant appendage and double, and the melody of his
flute, which, cued by a soldier's kick, functions as a further reminder of
Lear's reconciliation with Cordelia. But even Fool is erased in a final violation
of the discourse (a brief acknowledging of the theatrical text?) as Edgar gazes
straight out, his look acting as a funnel, directing all that has happened at us.
He seems about to speak but does not; and the next, and final image, a full
shot of peasants moving among burned timbers, results as much from our
look as from his. That look functions as the final means of eliding Lear, of
deflecting attention from a private reconciliation toward a last view of a
destroyed social landscape. The familial, private relationship put into
question in the opening has been resolved, possibly in transcendence, but the
social hierarchy that was once so firmly set in place no longer exists. The two
milieux- castle interior and rock-hard landscape- mediated earlier by Lear's
figure, have fused into a single space: charred ruins peopled with unseeing
survivors.
Whereas the ending of Kozintsev's film, with its residue of metaphorically
charged images, is unexpectedly disruptive, denying a "healing" resolution in
the narrative as well as in the discourse, the formal symmetry of Brook's
filmtext resolves, with extraordinary economy, all the questions of seeing,
understanding, and knowing posed by the opening. Here, the technical
virtuosity which may seem obtrusive in the storm earns its effects: these
moments constitute the climax of all disruptions in the film's discourse- in
mise-en-scene, framing, editing, sound- as well as firmly locating Lear at the
narrative center of that discourse.
The shots that key the sequence jump-cut through time and space, juxta-
posing, in images of varying duration, the deaths of Regan, Goneril, and
Cordelia. The last, a mid-shot of Cordelia's body dropping from a noose, cues
Lear's "Howl," but the next image unexpectedly shows Kent, not Lear. Then
the following image, an extreme long shot of Lear with Cordelia's body in his
arms against a bleached background of beach, low dunes, and sky, establishes
a recognizable space and places Lear within it. Both he and Kent are seers
here as well as survivors, and the abrupt shift from the "snapshot" images of
the dead to this bleak "living" world suggests the marginal nature of that
survival. As in the opening, however, Lear is clearly the narrative subject. But
from this point on the diegesis fractures. The space around Lear keeps chang-
ing: we see him, first from the back and then from the front, as he sets
Cordelia's body on the ground; and recurrent low-angle shots privilege a
background emptiness in relation to his figure.
Further disorientation results from seeing Cordelia both dead and alive.
The shots make no distinction between "reality" and "fantasy," and the con-
sistent spatial shifts reinforce this ambiguity, not only for her figure but for
the figures of Lear and the others as well. In one shot, for example, Cordelia
replaces Kent, taking his screen-right position, thus briefly but surely paral-
leling the two persons Lear had banished in the opening. Even though Lear's
interrupted monologue provides verbal continuity, what he sees remains
problematic. Thus, too, our seeing and knowing fragment, lose a center.
Clearly, Lear does see Kent. Momentarily, Lear seems also to see Cordelia,
but the next image denies this. In a low-angle mid-close-up, Lear, in right
screen, says, "No, no, no life," and sound travels over the cut to a long shot

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150/Two King Lears

of Lear, from the back, kneeling on "Never, never, never. . . Cut to an

extreme close-up of the lower part of Lear's face and his breast: we can
discern only the direction of his look, which seems fixed first on us and then
on an invisible point off frame right; his hand stretches out, pointing off
screen- "Look, look there"- and the camera tilts up to include his face. His
eyes close, his mouth opens, and he slowly begins to fall out of the frame.
Progressively, the discourse has prepared us for the loss of its subject, but at
the moment when Lear's words and gesture recuperate both seeing and
knowing, centering both on the spectator- at that moment when we may
recognize our own seeing, we see nothing.
The final images bring together all the concerns of the discourse- delocal-
ized space, disorientations of vision, foregrounding of the close-up as an
establishing shot, fragmentation of a face accomplished by framing, dis-
continuity editing, the use of sound to produce images, the intercutting of
silent images, Lear's privileged centrality. The moments intercut two image
chains: one, which is silent, shows a series of close-ups of Lear, in profile,
falling out of the frame in slow motion; the other, in which we hear voices,
describes first Edgar, next Albany, then Kent, and, once again, Edgar, speak-
ing the last words to us and then turning in profile to face left screen. On the
one hand, the alternation between these two image chains articulates the
discontinuity of Lear's world; on the other, that sense of disjuncture is
balanced by the illusion of continuity created by the repeated serial images
of Lear's slowly falling face. The reverse pans on the three survivors combine
with the repetition of the gradually whitening, coarsely textured images
tracing Lear's increasing fragmentation and his disappearance from the frame
to generate a musical impression that sustains and extends our expectations,
linking them to Lear's dying fall and suggesting a vague presentiment of
harmonic closure that fades away into the silent, gravity-free, dimensionless
void of the white screen. All along, we have been tricked into thinking that
we can share Lear's vision without being seen ourselves; as he turns that sight
toward us and then deprives us of knowing, the discourse substitutes for that
knowledge only a steadily brightening light which, although suggesting an
increased ability to see, finally cuts off all seeing, all knowing. We are trans-
formed through the operation of the discourse, to a position similar to that
described in the opening shots of silent, staring eyes. Seeing better, under-
standing and knowing more, may not be possible.
Earlier in this essay, I said that Brook and Kozintsev had each committed
his energies to exploring how to create a new text, a filmtext called King
Lear . As critics, we need to commit ourselves to studying those texts, as well
as others, on their own terms. This means working, not with a single au-
thoritative text and its signed and unsigned derivatives but with a multipli-
city of texts- a playscript, a theatrical performance, a filmtext- and finding
more precise modes of description and analysis for the ways they engage us.

Barbara Hodgdon
Drake University

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 Two King Learsl 151

NOTES

1 Pauline Kael, Deeper Into Movies (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), pp

2 See Grigori Kozintsev, Shakespeare: Time and Conscience , trans. J

(London: Dennis Dobson, 1966) and King Lear: The Space of Tragedy , trans. Mary
Mackintosh (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977); Peter Brook, The Empty Space
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1972).

3 Kozintsev, King Lear , p. 124.

4 Kozintsev, King Lear^ pp. 25-26.

5 Roger Manvell, Shakespeare and the Film (New York: Praeger, 1971), pp. 135-38.

6 See especially Kozintsev, King Lear , passim.

7 Brook's interest in cinematic technique in this film continues. See Macha Makeieff
et Philippe Carcassonne, "Quelques réflexions à la confluence de deux arts,"
Cinématographe , No. 54 (Feb. 1980), 31-34.

8 For two prior, and especially useful readings, see, on both films, Jack J. Jorgens,
Shakespeare on Film (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 235-51; and, on
Brook's film, Lillian Wilds, "One King Lear for Our Time." Literature/ Film Quarterly 4,
No. 2 (Spring 1976), 159-64. On Kozintsev's film, see my "Kozintsev's King Lear:
Filming a Tragic Poem," Literature /Film Quarterly , 5, No. 4 (Fall 1977), 291-98; this
reading, though descriptively accurate about parts of the film, seems to me now more
"impressionistic" - that is, grounded on my expectations of Shakespeare's text - than it is
precisely centered on the operations of the film text.

9 I distinguish discourse - the articulating/enunciation process of the text - from the

diegesis - the part which is articulated /enunciated, the "world" or space-time continuum
which the spectator is invited to enter and/or observe. In the following analysis, I am
indebted to my colleague, Richard Abel, who has generously shared both his shot notes
and his perceptions.

Kozintsev, King Lear< p. 238.

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