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Godard and Lear: Trashing the Can(n)on1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

Susan Bennett
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In the late 1990s, the endlessly reinvented Shakespeare has apparently become a popular and successful screenwriter. The recent release of Richard III, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Twelfth Night and Hamlet have brought an enthusiastic movie-going public to see, among other things, the Capulets and the Montagues on the beach and Hamlet striding through a cast of thousands at Elsinore. But this is not to suggest that this particular genre success is either new or inappropriate; the collection of artifacts known as Shakespeare (including but not limited to the plays themselves) has long signified as high art dedicated to the education of not just a theatre-going elite nor the mass audiences of popular media, but everyone. On a global scale, Shakespeare means culture or, as Michael Bristol would more wittily have it, Shakespeare is “big time.” This history of the cultural capital that is Shakespeare continues to have a fascination for, and a usefulness to the producers and distributors of films. Thus, to turn Shakespeare from playwright to screenwriter is, culturally speaking, both a pragmatic and predictable strategy. And it is a strategy that has more or less existed as long as film itself.

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Theatre Survey , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , May 1998, pp. 7 - 19
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Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1998

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References

2. Certeau, Michel de, The Writing of History, trans. Conley, Tom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 14Google Scholar.

3. Shakespeare, William, King Lear, ed. Muir, Kenneth (London: Methuen, 1972), Act 1, scene 1Google Scholar.

4. As well as Bristol's, Big Time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar, an important study is Hawkes's, TerenceMeaning by Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Taylor's, GaryReinventing Shakespeare (London: Hogarth Press, 1990Google Scholar) is also germane. To understand the global impact of meaning by Shakespeare, Viswanathan's, GauriMasks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989Google Scholar) is an important text.

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6. Ibid., 247. In this connection, it was even claimed that the actors in the Vitagraph Julius Caesar were wearing costumes previously worn in theatrical productions. More generally, the tradition of Shakespearean production in the United States of America was considered a legitimate source of credibility for the emergent film product. (Rather ironically, early Shakespeare-on-film relied heavily on the theatrical product from which film in general was to steal much of its audience.)

7. Ibid., 248.

8. Ibid., 249.

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11. Ibid., 90.

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24. Window Shopping, 179. I have also borrowed the term “subjective timelessness” from Friedberg While she invokes the phrase as part of a more abstract discussion (ibid., 177), it conveys perfectly what Cannon must have seen in the pairing of Godard with Shakespeare—the Shakespeare/modernist quality of timelessness wrought by the subjective avant-garde auteur director.

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29. Image, Music, Text, trans. Heath, Stephen (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1977), 65Google Scholar. The emphases are in the original.

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31. Robinson continues: “As though impatient with the easy talk of those who profess concern for cultural health, Godard does the manual labor any act of restoration entails. He transforms his film into a vessel for storage—one anxiously positioned between property and loss” (20). While I think Robinson is absolutely right in naming the anxiety cathected on to the film as object, it would seem more accurate to see the film as invested in the costs involved in the manual labor rather than the labor itself.

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38. “Text, Eyes, and Videotape,” 244.

39. This last section abbreviates my argument outlined in Performing Nostalgia, 67 ff.

40. “In Search of Nothing,” 143.

41. “Preface” to The Geopolitical Aesthetic, xii.

42. The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 163.

43. Ibid., 163.

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45. The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 163.

46. Big Time Shakespeare, 90.

47. Ibid., 90–91. I agree with Bristol's reason for Shakespeare retaining currency; the same, I would suggest, is true for Godard. Once again, this demonstrates the extraordinary appeal of this project for Cannon.