Citizen Ken: Branagh, Shakespeare, and the movies

As Kenneth Branagh turns sixty, he finds himself honoured by the English theatrical world as the restored heir to its tradition of the actor-manager, having created a theatre and film career unlike any other. He is an actor-manager-film director who builds on the tradition he inherits from Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, and Franco Zeffirelli even as he revises it. This overview of his career reveals that he can do small and tidy, but his cinematic imagination first feasts on Hollywood movie genres – noir thrillers, murder mysteries, Disney classics, Superhero fantasies, spy films, musicals, and bio-pics – then feeds his lasting legacy to Shakespeare on film.

Uma década de transmissões de apresentações teatrais: questões e tendências

Resumo: Este artigo acompanha o período de desenvolvimento da transmissão teatral no Reino Unido dentre 2009, quando a NT Live lançou sua operação de transmissão, e 2019. Defende a necessidade de considerar o impacto que as tecnologias de transmissão teatral têm na produção e na recepção de Shakespeare tanto na Grã-Bretanha como ao redor do mundo, considerando-se que as transmissões estão cada vez mais aptas a se tornarem substitutas da experiência de teatro que promovem. A primeira parte do artigo considera o alcance diferencial deste fenômeno supostamente "global" em continentes diversos e explora o risco de que grandes companhias como a National Theatre, a RSC e a Shakespeare's Globe construam monopólios culturais que possam restringir a participação de companhias menores. A segunda parte considera as técnicas de câmera utilizadas pelas transmissões e dá uma atenção especial à relação entre a montagem de proscênio no teatro e a bidimensionalidade da tela de cinema em Romeu e Julieta de Rob Ashford e Kenneth Branagh, que foi transmitida ao vivo pela Kenneth Branagh Company no Garrick Live em 2016.

Telluride and After

FQ editor-in-chief B. Ruby Rich reports from the 48th edition of the Telluride Film Festival. Unlike most of its peer festivals, Telluride opted not to hold a virtual edition in 2020, a decision entirely in keeping with its emphasis on the tactile and experiential aspects of cinema, and which made its return in 2021 all the more giddy for first-time attendees and long-term devotees alike. Rich reviews the many festival highlights, from Jane Campion’s reinvention of the Western in The Power of the Dog to Todd Haynes’ archival documentary The Velvet Underground. Childhood takes center stage in new films from Céline Sciamma and Kenneth Branagh while misunderstood masculinity emerges as a theme in Michael Pearce’s Encounter, Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero, and Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon. Including a coda on the New York Film Festival, Rich concludes that the masterful riches of the two festivals augur well for the fall 2021 season.

Made to Connive: Revisioning Cinderella in a Music Video. From Disney to Arthur Pirozkhov: A Case Study

The article focuses on the way in which music videos can subvert and refigure the message of literature and film. The author sets out to demonstrate how a music video entitled “Зацепила” by Arthur Pirozkhov (Aleksandr Revva) enters a dialogue with the recent Disney version of Cinderella by Kenneth Branagh (2015), which, in turn, is an attempt to do justice to Perrault’s famous fairy tale. Starting out with Michèle Le Dœuff’s comment on the limitations imposed upon women’s intellectual freedom throughout the centuries, Filipczak applies the French philosopher’s concept of “regulatory myth” to illustrate the impact of fairy tales and their Disney versions on the contemporary construction of femininity. In her analysis of Branagh’s film Filipczak contends that its female protagonist is haunted by the spectre of the Victorian angel in the house which has come back with a vengeance in contemporary times despite Virginia Woolf’s and her followers’ attempts to annihilate it. Paradoxically, the music video, which is still marginalized in academia on account of its popular status, often offers a liberating deconstruction of regulatory myths. In the case in question, it allows the viewers to realize how their intellectual horizon is limited by the very stereotypes that inform the structure of Perrault’s Cinderella. This makes viewers see popular culture in a different light and appreciate the explosive power of music videos which can combine an artistic message with a perceptive commentary on stereotypes masked by seductive glamour.

Frankenstein: a narrativa de Mary Shelley no cinema

O presente artigo traça um breve panorama das adaptações fílmicas da obra Frankenstein or, the modern Prometheus, de Mary Shelley. Publicado pela primeira vez em 1818, a narrativa completa duzentos anos de existência e continua a exercer influência nas diversas mídias, especialmente no cinema. Victor Frankenstein, personagem protagonista, estuda como gerar vida e desenvolve experimentos para provar sua descoberta. No processo, o cientista produz uma criatura e obtém êxito ao torná-lo vivo. Contudo, a criação escapa do controle de Frankenstein, que é acometido por uma série de crimes trágicos. A partir de algumas discussões sobre adaptação fílmica como tradução (LEFEVERE, 2007; HUTCHEON, 2013), investigamos de que modo o romance de Mary Shelley continua sendo reescrito nas telas e quais traços podem ser observados nas seguintes adaptações: Frankenstein (1931), com direção de James Whale; e Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), dirigido por Kenneth Branagh. Partimos do pressuposto que os filmes ressignificam a obra literária a partir dos seus diferentes contextos, contribuindo para criar novas imagens da história centenária de Mary Shelley.

A Mennydörgés Istenének amerikanizálása: hogyan lesz a fiúuralkodóból Asgard jogos királya a Thorban

A tanulmány Terence McSweeney Avengers Assemble! Critical Perspectives on the Marvel Cinematic Universe című könyvének két szövegéből áll, amelyek könnyedén illeszkednek egymáshoz. A Thorral (Kenneth Branagh, 2011) foglalkozó első részben a filmet az amerikai monomítoszokkal és az amerikai politikával, valamint az Egyesült Államokon kívüli amerikai beavatkozással veti össze a szerző, látványos párhuzamokat vonva. A tanulmány második fele a Thor: Sötét világon (Thor: Dark World. Alan Foster, 2014) keresztül a Marvel-filmek problémás nőábrázolását mutatja be, kiemelt helyen kezelve Thor szerelmét, Jane Fostert.

Intimate and Epic Macbeths in Contemporary Performance

The recent performance history of Macbeth illustrates two tendencies discernible in contemporary Shakespeare performance more widely: the strong, empathic engagement characteristic of theatrical intimacy in the Aristotelian vein and the vast, distancing sweep of epic as theorized by Bertolt Brecht and, later, Walter Benjamin. By considering productions by Punchdrunk, Rift, John Tiffany and Andrew Goldberg, Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford, and Grzegorz Jarzyna, this chapter argues that epic theatre as proposed by Brecht and Benjamin is a marked feature of immersive productions, which combine the impression of intimacy with the distancing effect of the epic. Using Elinor Fuchs’s notion of landscape theatre, it concludes that in contemporary apolitical epic theatre, intimacy can be achieved outside Aristotelian catharsis or character and even beyond the notion of humanity.