Professor Greg M. Colón Semenza
CLAS Building 213
Department of English--Unit 4025
215 Glenbrook Road
University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT 06269
860-486-4762 / semenza@uconn.edu
Note: the following is a preliminary sketch of a new section of my current book-in-progress, The
History of British Literature on Film. It appears in the book’s third chapter, on the high silent
era, following the previous chapter’s discussion of the emergence of the “classical Hollywood
style” and the lit-film’s eventual, belated embrace of it in the late 1910’s. The paper begins with
discussion of the two fundamental defining characteristics of the Hollywood Brit-lit film:
stylistically speaking, the films were indebted to the “classical Hollywood style” discussed by
Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger; methodologically speaking, in terms of adaptation, the films
were increasingly expected to be “faithful” to their sources. I spend time outlining the
emergency of the fidelity discourse in order to emphasize how radical Hamlet’s creativity is in
historical context. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the Sven Gade/Heinz Schall
Hamlet as a deliberate and systematic challenge to the Hollyworld Brit-lit film.
The Gade/Schall Hamlet (Germany,1920) and Counter-Hollywood Style
By the end of the Great War, the Brit-lit film had overcome the stylistic and technical retardation
which had hampered its growth relative to other thriving, mainstream film genres. Adaptations
such as Tourneur’s Victory (1919) and Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) adhered
closely to the newly established “rules” of continuity editing influenced by Griffith’s great onereel films and cemented by his monumental The Birth of a Nation (1915). In the years 19101914 cinematic developments in editing, camera movement, use of inter- and dialogue titles, and
an industry investment in longer, more complex narrative films, greatly impacted the ability of
filmmakers to emulate, even build upon, the complex types of narrative storytelling long
practiced by dramatists, novelists, and poets. These developments have been analyzed
brilliantly by Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger as the backbone of the “classical Hollywood
cinema,” a style of filmmaking that, by 1920, already had migrated far beyond the hills of
Hollywood and into the major filmmaking countries of the world.
2
Whereas the ascendancy of the classical Hollywood cinema established stylistic
expectations for the 1920s Brit-lit film, the emergence of the “fidelity” discourse in
contemporary film criticism established clear rules for how processes of adaptation would ideally
operate. As we have seen, “fidelity” was essentially an irrelevant concept prior to the 1910’s but
by 1920, expectations for basic fidelity to original texts were quite high. I would note five key
types of fidelity practiced by these early films and demanded by their critics. The first and most
basic one pertained to a film’s inclusion of essential plot details and characters—to the
ingredients of the “story.” The Reverend Elias Boudinet Stockton captured the prevailing view
of the Milano Film Company’s L’Inferno, the smash-hit of 1911: “The distinguishing mark of
this film, from an educational point of view, is not the beauty of the photography, nor the
excellence of the acting, nor the magnificence and delicacy of treatment, great and worthy of all
praise as these are, but the absolute fidelity to the poem in all its details.”1 Stockton goes on to
discuss two instances where fidelity is impaired, such as when “the angel who opened the gates
to the city of Dis (Canto 9:73-105) is a woman instead of a man,” but he insists that “the first
impression is that literally the whole poem has been reproduced; and although a detailed
comparison of the pictures and the film reveals that there are omissions, these have been so
carefully selected and are of so unimportant a nature that the impression grows on one.”2
The link between a film’s “completeness” and its success became firmly entrenched, a
commonplace in the reviews of literary films well beyond the transitional period. A filmmaker’s
decision to exclude too much or veer too freely away from the source text could be devastating.
The New York Times reviewer of Maurice Tourneur’s 1920 Treasure Island, for example,
claimed that “Those least familiar with Stevenson’s story will enjoy it most because, while it has
many excellent scenes and some good acting, it falls so far short of its original than any
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comparison of the two must emphasize its defects.” He admits that “Some recasting of the story
was, of course, necessary for purposes of condensation and adaptation to the screen, but Mr. Fox
seems to have been inspired with a desire to write his own movie rather than translate ‘Treasure
Island’ into moving pictures.”3 The review expresses the regressive notion that the purpose of
the literary film is to pay deference to the adapted text. On the other hand, in spite of the dream
of completeness, the reviewer evinces a clear belief that condensing plots is absolutely necessary
for film adaptations. Several reviews from the period go further than tolerating cuts, even
suggesting that the original stories can be improved through a film’s condensation and omission
of unnecessary material. The 1910 Vitagraph Twelfth Night, which eliminates whole sections of
the play, is said “In some degree, perhaps, [to be] an improvement, since it eliminates many of
those portions which illuminate the main story, though they are not essential to its development,
nor to an understanding of it.”4 While fidelity to the plot is commonly argued to be a sign of a
particular film’s merits, balanced reviews from the period recognize the difference between
essential plot details and inessential ones; thus, no Kenneth Branagh-like filmmaker—with a
dream of filming every single detail—emerges until about 1927 when Erich Von Stroheim
adapts McTeague for his ten-hour-plus film Greed.
The second category is fidelity to an author’s intentions. As Stephen Bush claimed in
reference to the Milano Inferno, “I know of no higher commendation of the work than mention
of the fact that the film-makers have been exceedingly faithful to the words of the poet.”5 Of all
the categories of fidelity evoked in the period, this one may be the most vague and is usually the
most reactionary, suggesting constantly the inappropriateness of a director striking too far out on
his own or trying to rework a classic author’s presumed original vision. The New York Times
complained in 1915 that
4
The ‘Don Quixote’ revealed yesterday in the Knickerbocker Theatre . . . proved to
be about 95 per cent. movie and five per cent. Cervantes. If [Cervantes] could but
know what the moderns were doing to his greatest work he would probably break
out of the Spanish ossuary in which his bones were interred just 300 years ago
and demand some such justice.6
Although the reviewer may very well be offering a legitimate critique of the film (it seems easy
to imagine the satire being lost in transmission), the final image of Cervantes rolling in his grave
establishes authorial intentions behind the original work as a key criterion for judging
adaptations. The same magazine also breathed a sigh of relief that “Mr. Taylor [in his 1920
version of Huckleberry Finn] did not seek to use Mark Twain’s book as material for a
conventional movie of his own, and so escaped being shot. He did seek, with care and
intelligence, to translate as much as possible of the book into moving pictures.” 7 As such
reviews make clear, attempts at translation were more often than not preferred to creative
adaptation, though more intrepid reviewers occasionally resisted this notion: the reviewer of
Fox’s 1916 Romeo and Juliet, for example, felt that “It is a pity William Shakespeare did not live
to see the movies, for he might have learned about play writing from them. If he had witnessed
the first showing of a motion picture called ‘Romeo and Juliet’ at the Academy of Music
yesterday, for instance, he might have liked the ending better than the one he wrote for the play.”
The reviewer goes on to marvel at the director’s handling of the double-suicide scene:
It will be recalled that Mr. Shakespeare’s Romeo came to the tomb and when he
saw his Juliet on her bier, dead as he thought, he drank the deadly poison the
apothecary had given him and died instantly. . . . Look on this picture from the
studio William Shakespeare Fox. Upon awaking from her coma Juliet discovers
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Romeo and is overjoyed when he tells her he has come to take her away to
Mantua. But her joy is shortlived, for she learns in a moment that he has taken
the poison and death is upon him. . . . The result is the same, of course, but the
brief colloquy between the lovers shrouds the play in still deeper gloom when the
happy ending that seemed imminent fades away.8
One recognizes in this remarkable description a plot alteration successfully used—perhaps even
borrowed from this very film—in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet.
The third emergent category is fidelity to the setting of the adapted text, or scenic fidelity.
As filmmakers broke with increasing regularity out of their cramped studios to on-location sites,
the expectations for faithfulness to place also increased. The point is well corroborated by two
Italian productions of Shakespeare’s Othello. The first, FAI’s 1909 version, was praised
primarily for this very feature: “Many have seen Othello but never in such a setting. The stage
has been noted for wonders of scenic fidelity but to enact this marvelous tragedy along the very
waters and in the very gardens and palaces as the immortal Shakespeare pictures them with his
versatile pen is to add an interest which could not be obtained in any other way.”9 In 1914
Ambrosio advertised in capital letters that its own version was “MADE AT VENICE, ITALY!
That’s a Tremendous Advertising Feature in itself! . . . The waterways of Historic Venice with
its tales ten centuries old, of Passionate Lovers and Fierce Vendettas . . . In Othello, we offer a
real masterpiece. It is the first of Shakespeare’s stories filmed in its proper environment, as the
Master would have wished.”10 Of course, approximating a particular story’s setting could be just
as praiseworthy as filming at the actual location in which the actions occur; The Moving Picture
World praised in 1910 a Danish (Great Northern) Robinson Crusoe for this very reason: “There
must be wonderfully enterprising and conscientious producers out in Denmark, for as we sat and
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watched this film, we were amazed at its verisimilitude. Denmark is not a tropical country, and
yet when Robinson Crusoe arrived on his desert isle, there were all the indications and
appearances of tropicals, vegetation and the like.”11
While scenic fidelity is important for all filmed literary and historical subjects, it seems to
have been a special concern of filmmakers producing works based on British literature, perhaps
because of the great scenic details associated with the Victorian novel. We view this quality as
one of the early distinguishing features of the Brit-lit film, as opposed to the American- or the
Italian-literature one. In the transitional period, many of the larger international companies
opened branches in Great Britain, which allowed them to film their subjects with greater
attention to setting and location, and non-British companies were no less obsessed than native
ones. Rachel Low has argued that “both American and French companies filming in England
were anxious to make them as obviously British in character as possible, and in their search for
typically English scenery, and their use of English history and classics, were even more acutely
sensitive to English atmosphere than many of the native companies” (131). Indeed, in many of
the Brit-lit films of the decade, one sees the type of meticulousness that will become a basic
staple of the literary costume drama which is so closely associated today with British literature
on film. Films violating the high expectations for scenic fidelity could be severely ridiculed for
their lapses, as in the case of Selig’s 1909 The Moonstone: “the details seem to have been
worked out with quite as close fidelity to facts as has been shown in other dramas,” however,
“one is disposed to think that the details of the London scene are less faithfully rendered. There
is no such place as Hampton Heath in London, Mr. Selig. There is a Hampton, . . . and there is a
Hampton Court, but no Hampton Heath as you would have us believe in your splendid film.”12
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The most important British producer in regard to scenic fidelity was Cecil Hepworth,
whose literary films are marked by a respect for detail almost unprecedented in previous
productions.13 The Hepworth studio’s 1913 David Copperfield, directed by Thomas Bentley, for
example, is a wonderful example of how setting, costuming, and camera positioning could
contribute to a mise-en-scene capable alone of holding an audience’s attention. Rachel Low,
who has written extensively on the film, admitted the temptation to “regard the film as
retrograde,” but she rightly viewed Bentley’s handling of both “settings and players” as an
advance in British filmmaking.14 In their extensive attention to detail, the Hepworth studio’s
films are in some ways the most obvious root of the Brit-lit costume drama tradition epitomized
by the Merchant-Ivory films of the 1980s. Their power lies in a compositional richness
describing both the warm interior midshots of the actors and the deeper and more expansive
exterior spaces they move through. The film’s intra-scene editing also showed Bentley’s
skillfulness in breaking up the static shot through impressive pans and camera re-positionings.
While somewhat retrograde in terms of temporal and inter-scene continuity editing, therefore, the
Hepworth films tended to feature extraordinarily impressive compositions, intelligent interior
lighting techniques (especially for communicating the time of day), and an attention to
architectural spaces and scenic locations, all of which lent them what contemporaries might have
called a sense of “authenticity.”
Hepworth’s American counterpart at this time was the independent Thanhouser
Company. A New Jersey based company which filmed most of its exteriors in-state and
therefore could not easily reproduce London street scenes, say, Thanhouser invested most of its
energy in the creation of stunningly ornate interior settings, its costuming being almost
unparalleled in terms of detail. Most Thanhouser films, like the Hepworth ones, were
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stylistically limited, especially after 1915, when they began to fall out of favor with their early,
adoring critics.15 . .. [Section cut]
The fourth category we wish to discuss here—closely related to and sometimes
indistinguishable from scenic fidelity—is fidelity to the historical period in which the adapted
story is set. This is not to say that all transitional period filmmakers were slavishly insistent on
periodization. In fact, the decade sees dozens of modernizations and clever offshoots of classic
works, as is revealed by such titles as Romeo and Juliet in Town, A Modern Portia, and Sherlock
Holmes Jr., among others. The crucial issue had to do with whether particular adaptations were
openly announcing themselves as modernizations of the adapted text and, unless they were doing
so, period authenticity was increasingly viewed as mandatory. Certainly, the demand for
accuracy resulted in some of the most persnickety reviews to be found in the trade journals, even
when the films were praised for their general excellence or service to the cinema. The 1911
Vitagraph Vanity Fair was said to come
nearer to being a flawless adaptation than anything that has appeared in moving
pictures. Aside from one slight incongruity there is nothing to criticise and
everything to praise. We were not aware that well-shaped cigars were much in
use one hundred years ago, nor were gentlemen accustomed to lighting their
cigars with the present-day parlor match, as did Lord Steyne in the scene with
Becky Sharpe.”16
Reviewers more commonly limited their comments on period details to a kind of staple
validation of the film so long as the basic rules were upheld. The reviewer of a 1912 two-reel
Lady Audley’s Secret, for example, congratulates “the Imp Company on having produced a
period play that is practically perfect in the matter of detail.”17
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The final category we wish to discuss is thematic fidelity, a less commonly noted type in
the period’s production notes and reviews, but an increasingly central concern of the filmmakers,
as evidenced by the films themselves. Like Thomas Leitch, we would locate the ideal model for
effective thematic fidelity to an adapted text in Griffith’s one- and two-reel literary films, which
effectively “reduce those originals to their thematic essence or create a thematic nexus that
implies something of the scale or prestige of a literary original.”18 Again, Enoch Arden seems an
ideal example, especially in its use of parallel montage to capture the tragic “too-lateness” of
Enoch’s rescue. Though the later, multi-reel adaptations would indeed make their priority the
attempt to “follow the narrative curve of their literary originals,”19 the classic Hollywood
narrative style pioneered by Griffith would remain at the center of their attempts.
All five categories of fidelity are crucial to the development of the literary film because
they come to constitute the basic criteria for early qualitative analysis of adaptations. Fidelity
analysis paradoxically complicates older assumptions that literary films are important solely as a
result of extrinsic prestige. Though all types of fidelity analysis obviously will measure an
adaptation’s success according to the effectiveness of its engagement with a particular aspect of
the source text, a nearly limitless number of evaluative options are available to a viewer, and his
judgments will necessarily be highly subjective. Whereas one reviewer may scoff, for example,
at a director’s decision to awaken Juliet before Romeo’s death, another may view such a
departure from the text as a clarifying gesture or, paradoxically, a faithful one, in that her early
awakening better advances the intended pathos of the double suicide. Colin MacCabe has
recently lamented the manner in which adaptation critics condemn too simplistically the typical
evaluative criteria used to discuss films and books in the non-academic realm: “These colloquial
forms,” he argues, “are highly evaluative not least because they are often directed at immediate
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questions of choice: ‘Do you recommend that I go and see this movie or that?’ ‘In your opinion
is this book worth buying?’”20 Certainly, fidelity analysis is the most popular colloquial form of
analysis, one whose usefulness in certain contexts has been reconsidered in MacCabe’s recently
published collection of essays True to the Spirit. In the book, Dudley Andrew himself is quoted
as saying that popular discussions of fidelity amount to “a vernacular version of comparative
media semiotics.”21 Such important qualifications of the academic anti-fidelity discourse add up
to the idea that whereas judging an adaptation according to how faithful it is to its source would
be exceedingly reductivist, a viewer’s ability to assess the myriad ways in which adaptations are
faithful or unfaithful to their sources actually may enhance the pleasure and/or intellectual
experience of encountering an adaptation.22 In the transitional period, the development of the
fidelity discourse can be said to be vital since it puts forward a series of complex evaluative
terms for describing and analyzing early film adaptations of literature.
The Gade/Schall Hamlet
Sven Gade and Heinz Schall’s Hamlet (also known as the Asta Nielsen Hamlet) is a
much discussed film among scholars—at least in comparison to other silent Shakespeare films.
The attention is well deserved. Robert Hamilton Ball called this “least Shakespearean Hamlet . .
. the best Hamlet film of the silent era,” and I would quibble with his claim only because it’s too
understated: Hamlet is the best Shakespeare film of the silent era, period.
Readings of the film, however, have focused almost exclusively on Asta Nielsen’s
remarkable cross-dressed performance of the prince. Discussion of the film’s style has
unfortunately been limited to a few paragraphs here and there,23 and little attempt has been made
to contextualize the iconoclastic film in relation to specific developments impacting world
cinema around 1920. Such contextualization would consider, among other factors, both
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Germany’s complex relationship to the former Allied-powers and the rise of national cinemas in
the immediate post-war period. In light of such factors, I wish to argue that Hamlet did more
than merely reflect German post-war production values; instead, it wielded like weapons both a
systematically deployed German expressionist style and a disdain for textual fidelity bordering
on irreverence. Hamlet rejected both the dominant style associated with the Hollywood film
factory and basic period standards governing the more or less “faithful” adaptation of culturally
significant texts, especially those at the center of the British Empire’s great literary tradition.
This iconoclastic and highly “cinematic” film was a box office hit in Europe in 1921 but,
in spite of the praise of the critics, a popular failure in America. The New York Times rated the
film among the “Ten Best” of the year, and the National Board of Review placed it in the top
forty. The Board’s publication Exceptional Photoplays (January-February 1922) suggests that
the film’s strength—and perhaps the sense of foreignness it conveyed to American audiences—
had to do specifically with its particular style rather than irreverence or infidelity: “one is led to
wonder if the picture’s grim, tragic atmosphere could have been achieved by the soft effect that
seems to be the present ideal of the best camera work.”24 It’s hard to know exactly what the
reviewer is describing here, but the “present ideal” can only refer to the essential traits of the
Hollywood style, and the adjectives “grim” and “soft” clarify that Hamlet’s relatively gritty and
bleak mise-en-scene was entirely noticeable to contemporary viewers. A distinction emerges,
then, in the reviewer’s mind between a particularly American style—soft, perhaps more inclined
towards the comedic—and the considerably darker style of this German film. While we don’t
have to accept entirely the reviewer’s reductive generalizations about the Hollywood style, basic
familiarity with the German film and the most popular American ones around 1920 provides
much clarity.
12
The famously distinctive German style often associated with expressionism grew,
interestingly enough, out of political hostilities in the middle 1910s. Concerned by the perceived
or real anti-German content of foreign films during the early war years, the state banned film
imports in 1916, and the result was greater investment in the domestic film industry.25 The ban
would last until 1920, the year of Hamlet’s filming and production and, of course, the year of Dr.
Caligari. Isolationism during and just after the war meant that Germany could form its own
style during precisely the same years that the Hollywood style began dominating international
film production, and the French impressionist style was coming into prominence closer to home
and—for a brief moment—represented an alternative path mainstream film might have taken.
French impressionism was markedly different from Hollywood cinema in at least one major
regard: whereas Hollywood films belonged increasingly to the cinema of realism, the French
films experimented with cinematic abstraction. However, both the Hollywood and French
impressionist styles were distinguished and characterized largely by their experimental
camerawork; the German style, on the other hand, was notable primarily for its use of mise-enscene—specifically the stylized or exaggerated sets and surfaces associated with the emergent
expressionist style.
What I find most interesting about Hamlet, stylistically speaking, is that its
expressionistic qualities are strategically deployed throughout the film, depending on plot turns
and character alterations, rather than defining it in toto. Simply put, the film is not unified
stylistically; instead, its style shifts dramatically from one mode to another, even announcing the
transformations, as if it wishes to highlight the greater appropriateness of the German style for
answering the baffling questions Shakespeare’s play puts forward. In the reading of the film that
follows, I hope to show the ways in which Gade and Schall seek to claim Hamlet for Germany
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by simultaneously 1) celebrating the advantages of the German style for cinematic adaptations of
the play, and 2) rejecting dominant, even imperializing Anglophone modes of adaptation and
cinematic storytelling.
Upon a first viewing of Hamlet years ago, I almost pressed the stop button on my DVD
remote less than five minutes into the film, thinking I’d come back to it some other time. The
reason? The camerawork in the opening few shots of the film are so retrograde that I assumed an
utterly tedious two hours would follow. Essentially static long shots of a hill upon which the
armies of Old Hamlet and Old Fortinbras battle, the middle of the frame is gradually filled by
Danish soldiers carrying their wounded king towards the camera from right top to bottom left
(see Image 1). This technique of maximizing the amount of action that can be captured by a
single shot in an unedited sequence was a staple of most pre-1915 films, but advances in camera
work and editing had rendered it old-fashioned by 1920. Even as early as 1916, a Wid’s Film
Daily reviewer of Thanhouser’s King Lear complained that “Time after time, we found
characters walking or running down to the foreground, to stop and then go ahead in the approved
‘movie’ manner of many years ago. This should be very funny to those of your fans who know
something of Shakespeare and realize what can be done in the films by intelligent handling. . . .
The director evidently had little knowledge of the value of different camera angles, and the
photography was all straight, hard, old-school camera work.”26 By 1916, then, let alone 1920,
the immobile camera, the static long shot—basically all the elements of the pre-Hollywood
style—were openly described as passé, old-school.
What kept me watching were the opening titles just preceding these shots—which were
anything but old-school. Emphasizing the shock of the new, the titles read:
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For ages, scholars have been arguing about the meaning of the Hamlet saga.
Many eminent writers have hotly debated the life of Hamlet. Voltaire, the French
philosopher, called Shakespeare’s play a tasteless mix of whim and nonsense.
Herder stated that Hamlet was an affected fop. Even Goethe was damning in his
criticism of Hamlet: Hamlet is an ass! Recently, the American literary researcher,
Professor Vining, produced a new interpretation of the Hamlet saga. Until now,
the character of Hamlet has harboured an astonishing secret: in reality, Hamlet
was a woman!
Although the editorial exclamation point follows the epiphany that Hamlet was a woman (!), that
point is perhaps only slightly more shocking than the film’s initial presentation of Shakespeare’s
play and most famous character as part of an incomprehensible muddle. For a moment, we are
led to believe that an American will be responsible for solving the problem of Hamlet’s meaning,
but the final caption is quite sly. 1881, the date Edward P. Vining’s The Mystery of Hamlet was
published, is hardly “recently,” and the “until now” of the following sentence suggests an
improvement upon Vining’s helpful theory. Whereas Vining had argued that Hamlet’s
personality was essentially feminine—“when it became evident that Hamlet was born lacking in
many of the elements of virility, there grew up in him, as compensation, many of the perfections
of character more properly the crown of the better half of the human race”—the Gade/Schall film
will show that Hamlet was literally a woman. And so the plot unfolds: afraid her wounded
husband will die in battle, Gertrude announces that her newborn infant girl is a boy. When Old
Hamlet returns from the war, he agrees that the people must never know about Gertrude’s lie,
and so poor Hamlet is forced her entire life to pretend she is a boy.
15
The film begins, then, not with any sort of faithfulness to an original text but, rather, with
criticism of Shakespeare’s play, quotation of its sharpest critics, appropriation of a modern
intertext in Vining, and the advancement of a “new” interpretation or, better, a complete
rewriting. In one bold stroke, Hamlet jabs at the heart of British cultural-imperialism, offering
(what may be a tongue-in-cheek) presentation of the “real” Hamlet story (it is perhaps no
mistake that Gade, Nielsen, and other insiders were Danish), and rejects outright the popular
fidelity mode of adaptation.
Considering the boldness of the enterprise, why, are the opening shots so flat and oldfashioned? Why so seemingly un-German? Little changes through the first part of the film.
Starting with the war and proceeding through the first fifteen-minutes plus, the camerawork and
compositions are uninspired. Consisting mainly of static long and medium shots of exteriors and
airy castle interiors, none of which highlight a particularly expressive mise-en-scene, and
relatively slow inter-scenic editing, this initial stylistic mode jars heavily with the boldness and
the inventiveness of the imposed plot elements the film puts forward. Only in retrospect can we
really see how deliberate the “soft” style of the opening appears to have been. The first few
scenes present almost exclusively additions to the play, intended as explanatory background for
the Hamlet-as-woman plot. However, the film’s opening also establishes a possible comedic
trajectory for the story—and in two senses. While Hamlet is in Wittenberg, she meets the
dashing Horatio. She is immediately charmed but can’t act on her desires, and several funny
scenes present the lover’s predicament. Second and more important, a later scene introduces
young Fortinbras, one of Hamlet’s college classmates and, after a few tense moments, the two
young “men” decide to shake hands and bury their parents’ strife. Light pours through the
window as they toast one another (see Image 2).27 Appropriate to the time and the politics of
16
expressionism, the scenes at Wittenberg emphasize the potential of a younger generation to
overcome the past, to cast off the sins of their fathers, to form bonds crossing political, personal,
and national boundaries; in the majority of shots at Wittenberg, all is light and open, and tragedy
seems far away.
The stylistic shift occurs almost twenty minutes into the film as the focus switches back
to the older generation: “In the meantime,” the intertitles read, “Claudius’s greed for the Royal
Throne has driven him to decide on a terrible course of action.” He and Gertrude meet in one of
the castle’s many secret underground chambers. The cold stone chamber is moonlit by two
lancet windows, the sharpness of their arches evocative of a knife- or sword-point; the windows
dominate the background as the lovers emerge into the foreground (see Image 3). As the pair
embraces wildly in the safety of the chamber’s dark shadows, Claudius “claims” Gertrude,
declaring that he will “destroy anything” in order to keep her. The wonderful lighting and
shadows, the position of the couple beneath ground level, the architectural structure itself—all
these combine to express an interior darkness the film had not yet explored to this point. The
secret chamber of the castle becomes synonymous with the secret chambers of the human heart,
and with few exceptions, once that potential darkness is unleashed all is dark in Hamlet the
whole way through the finale. The scene changes to follow the diabolical pair trekking through
tangled grass and brush, their way lit only by torch light, as they sneak into yet another of the
castle dungeons. Claudius descends the stairwell alone and approaches a covered well, which he
opens to reveal a writhing tangle of poisonous snakes. The snakes are revealed in a stunning
close-up that can be called the first abstract image in the film—the abstractness being captured
by an iris effect that centers the pulsating circle of death within a larger frame of blackness (see
Image 4).
17
For the final time, the film returns to the light of youth and innocence, a lecture room in
Wittenberg, where Hamlet and her friends play before three wide (and decidedly less sharp)
lancets which allow the warm sunlight to pour in upon them (see Image 5). Hamlet learns from a
messenger that her father has been killed by a venomous snake. Act I ends, and Hamlet returns
to Elsinore at night with Horatio, is shocked to discover her mother carousing with the new king
at her father’s funeral, and retreats into the solitude of a private chamber—which may be a
chapel. The film style shifts again notably at this point, announcing, I would argue, that
Hamlet—the melancholy Dane, for whom the world is but an “unweeded garden”—has at last
been born. The back story having been presented, the familiar Hamlet story now begins. Gade
and Schall convey this alteration through a considerably more expressive mise-en-scene, more
rapid intra-scenic cutting, and more complex crosscutting—especially in cases where the film
wishes to show the audience what Hamlet is imagining. For example, when we first see
Hamlet’s dark chamber, we are struck by the imposing quality of the mise-en-scene. The room
is moonlit by a large semicircular window whose ornate metal grating seems evocative of
serpents and perhaps even of the human brain (see Image 6). To the far left of the room,
rectangular windows allow in a counter light, the two sources of light clashing and painting the
entire room in a complex web of shadow. Columns jut up from floor to ceiling, partitioning the
space and caging Hamlet in. She is often barely visible, buried behind the architecture—
overwhelmed by the “tyranny of objects”—hiding behind them, shaping her body to conform to
them.28 John D. Barlowe has usefully explained the different preoccupations of national silent
cinemas with inanimate objects: “While the malicious power of objects and things created comic
situations in American films, they were used in the German films the 1920s to express the tragic
hopelessness of the human predicament. Individuals fight with the objects that challenge them in
18
the American movies, and we laugh; they are overcome by them in the German movies, and we
shudder.”29 In this scene, Hamlet’s body blends in with the shadows and the shapes so that at
times she becomes mere background, a part of the architecture. At the center of the room is a
cabinet, an altar perhaps, whose shape mirrors exactly the lancets in the previous scenes,
measuring the extremes between Claudius’s violence and guiltiness and the innocence of Hamlet
in Wittenberg. She drapes herself over the object, becomes inseparable from it. The camera
affords the viewer a clearer sense of the room through a slow pan left, and then Hamlet’s
tormented face is shown in close-up, before the scene cuts back to Gertrude and Claudius and the
drunken revelers Hamlet cannot cast out of her mind. Innocence is forever shattered. The
chamber scene certainly is one of the film’s high points, but from this moment forward the
camera work continues to be more expressive and more complex, the acting is more
expressionistic, and the mise-en-scene continues to dominate the audience’s attention.
While the entire remainder of the film is worthy of scene-by-scene analysis, I will
(mercifully) focus on just two more scenes. When Hamlet learns from the gravedigger that her
father was stung by one of the snakes from the castle dungeon, she jumps, though her “prophetic
soul” seems soothed. A wonderful fish-eye close-up captures precisely her mental turn to
Claudius (See Image 7). When she meets Claudius a few moments later, already having
announced to Horatio that she will put on an antic disposition, she startles him by revealing that
she holds in her hands his dagger. He steps backwards, horrified that she knows of his foul deed.
What follows is an acting tour de force by Nielsen, who contorts her slim, angular body into a
shape suggestive of a serpent, her head raised, her eyes glued to Claudius retreating body. The
downward slope of her legs mirrors exactly the downward slope of the stone staircase behind
her, and above her head, as if connected to her torso, is a lancet whose sharpness is similar to the
19
windows in the earlier scene with Gertrude and Claudius. Claudius is terrified, and the viewer
understands why. Hamlet has become for Claudius a poisonous snake (see Image 8). The acting
and the mise-en-scene bear out what Barlow describes as perhaps the essential characteristic of
German expressionism, for “the scenery, the other characters, the lighting, the music, even the
audience . . . is a projection of the central protagonist’s single-minded consciousness” (24).
Indeed, after Hamlet’s death in the film’s final scene, the third-person perspective is fully
restored. The audience now once again witnesses the action through relatively plain medium and
long shots of the airy castle interiors. Only her unmoving body seizes our attention—linear, jet
black, pointed—like a dead snake draped over the stairs leading to the throne of Denmark (see
image 9).
With a certain degree of irony, Asta Nielsen and her directors approached Hamlet as a
vehicle for German film, a way to bring Germany back onto the international scene after a long
period of isolationism. The Gade/Schall Hamlet is not merely representative of the German
expressionist style (as well as a much earlier German cinematic obsession on filming interiority
through light and shadows30); it flaunts its Germanic qualities. The film is gritty as hell; when
Hamlet returns from her banishment to Norway (not England), she sets fire to part of the castle,
burning Claudius and his fellow revelers alive. Most obviously, the film is extraordinarily
playful and creative, irreverent even, an emblematic case of expressionism’s general rejection of
all things traditional. Another 1920 German film, Dr. Caligari, would ultimately become more
responsible for introducing German expressionism to the rest of the world; nonetheless, Hamlet
emerges as a paragon of Shakespearean adaptation in the first thirty years of cinema, one whose
power derives specifically, I would argue, from its snubbing of British (cultural) and American
(cinematic) hegemony.
20
1
Stockton, “Impressions of ‘Dante’s Inferno,’” The Moving Picture World 16 September 1911,
p. 780.
2
Ibid.
3
The New York Times 12 April 1920, p. 13:1.
4
The Moving Picture World 19 February 1910, p. 257.
5
The Moving Picture World 29 July 1911, p. 188.
6
The New York Times 20 December 1915, part 11, p. 1.
7
The New York Times 23 February 1920, part 11, p. 2.
8
The New York Times 23 October 1916, part 10, p. 3.
9
The Moving Picture World 19 March 1910, p. 90.
10
The Moving Picture World 4 July 1914, p. 21.
11
The Moving Picture World 10 September 1910, p. 576.
12
13
The Moving Picture World 19 June 1909, p. 834.
One exception would be the William G. B. Barker 6-reel production of East Lynne (1913),
directed by Bert Haldane.
14
Low, History of the British Film, 238, 239.
15
One exceptional late Thanhouser film is the studio’s 1916 production of Silas Marner starring
Frederick Warde in his first movie appearance (dir. Earnest Warde). Though somewhat marred
by sentimentality, this beautiful film also is characterized by stunning contrasts between airy
open exteriors and masterfully lit, meticulously adorned interiors; effective dialogue titles which
render an unusually comprehensible story; beautiful close-ups which effectively communicate
21
Silas’s internal struggles; fairly rapid pacing; and occasionally strong interscene continuity
editing.
16
The Moving Picture World 16 December 1911, pp. 886-87.
17
The Moving Picture World 18 May 1912, p. 613.
18
Leitch, Film Adaptation and its Discontents: From “Gone with the Wind” to “The Passion of
the Christ” (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007), 46.
19
Ibid.
20
See MacCabe, Murray, and Warner, True to the Spirit, 9.
21
Andrew, “The Economies of Adaptation,” in MacCabe, Murray, and Warner, True to the
Spirit, 27.
22
Or, as Gunning puts it, “I take for granted the value, uniqueness, and the power of cinema, but
adaptation might best be approached as an area in which cinema foregoes this preoccupation
with its autonomy (without actually losing its identity) and becomes sincerely interested in how
it can interact with literature” (“Literary Appropriation and Translation, 42).
23
including Judith Buchanan, Lawrence Guntner and Peter Drexler, and Ball, BUT DEAL WITH
ISSUE OF post-1995 European version vs. MOMA version.
24
See (see Ball 277).
25
See Bordwell and Thompson, History, 58.
26
Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film, 98.
27
Insert section on Expressionist rejection of authority and older generation, etc.
28
Barlow, German Expressionist Film, 135.
29
Ibid
30
See barlow 66 and others.