A Film Canon

Olivier's Hamlet makes several, half-hearted attempts to subsume theatre into cinema, the most successful of which is his alternation of spoken and thought language; or, rather, a nexus between dramatic and internal monologues that perfectly captures Shakespeare's taste for depicting characters in a state of sustained self-interrogation, and produces a genuinely original vision of "To be or not to be...", in which the camera is just as interested in Olivier's head as his mouth, and his unspoken thoughts as his eloquent delivery. Similarly, the semi-abstracted Elsinore nicely captures the perspective of this "mind's eye", suffusing every scene with its brooding introspection, and elegantly ensuring that none of the other characters - even Ophelia, who retreats entirely to her mind - achieve the same depth. That said, its staginess is rendered uncomfortably palpable by those scenes that takes place in and around nature - especially the adjoining sea and graveyard - while Olivier's tendency to pull back from the action doesn't so much three-dimensionalise the space in which it is occurring as identify the viewer with the theatrical audience, explaining the peculiar prominence of this technique during the play-within-the-play. In the same way, the abstracted, impressionistic transitions between scenes ultimately feel like so many ciphers for the hurried rearrangement of sets, while Olivier's brilliant Shakespearean sensibility nevertheless remains too stagebound for a piece so devoid of cinematic flourish.