Available onlineShakespeare on screen
(page 2 of 4)(Part of an online exhibition created by OU Associate Lecturer Brendan Jackson in 2014)
| Clip 11: | AA306 Macbeth 1 |
|---|---|
| Duration: | 00:02:48 |
| Date: | 2000 |
As it happens, Polanski in his later film of Macbeth also exploits the visual power of a tumbling and spinning crown.
But many specifically cinematic strategic decisions have to be made in filming Shakespeare. In the following clip (Clip 11) the same academics consider the effect of Orson Welles’s choice for his Macbeth of black-and-white film rather than colour. This film was produced in the same year as Olivier’s black-and-white Hamlet, but the use of monochrome was in each case a conscious choice. After all, Olivier’s heroic colour film of Henry V was created four years earlier, in 1944.
View Clip 11
(Sue Wiseman’s point in that clip concerning the polarised black/white morality presented in the film finds a parallel later in the Russian Kozintsev’s 1971 filmed version of King Lear, in which on their first entry the two evil sisters are dressed in dark robes, whereas the innocent Cordelia wears white.)
