Word: brook
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...faith lost there is now restored. Peter Brook's King Lear is not quite an unconditional success, but it is close enough. With a minimum of gimmickry and self-consciousness, Shakespeare is transcribed to film, not just filmed theatre, and the play's gain far exceeds its loss. There are sequences on the screen that could not begin to be conceived on stage; a few are embarassing, most work...
...Peter Brook is nothing if not decisive. He senses a certain unwieldiness to the text and without hesitation cuts whatever he considers to be excess. Shakespeare's introductory scene between the Earls of Gloucester and Kent is eliminated; the film begins immediately with the parcelling of the kingdom among the three daughters. The first words are Lear's "Know we have divided-in three our kingdom...", Brook thrusting us into crisis at once. Within five minutes Cordelia has already refused to publicly acclaim her love for her father. Lear has disowned her, and the central dramatic movement...
Sage in Motley. What has Brook done with this ravening epic of the thankless daughters and their wild old fool of a father? He has had to cut it to prevent it from being grindingly long. The cuts have weakened the cumulative impact, and in specific instances the weakness can be felt. A diminished interplay between Lear and his Fool (Jack...
...strict filmic terms. Brook and his cameraman, Henning Kristiansen, supply plenty of visual pyrotechnics. One decision was splendid. The dominating color, or noncolor, of the film is white. This creates the proper sensation of wintry old age and bleakness. The film gives off an almost palpable and desolating coldness, as if one were witnessing snow on the craters of the moon. But the defect of that virtue surfaces at the fulcrum of the play, which is the vast raging storm on the heath. The lashing rain seems incongruous in such an icy climate, and no one's thoughts should...
Apart from the matter of color and cold, there are painterly compositions, off-focus shots, bifocal shots and all sorts of imaginative camera stunts. The most ambitious filmic effect does not really come off. Brook tries to combine highly stylized segments, almost like animated Japanese prints, with segments that are strictly naturalistic in a homey medieval vein. In watching these shifts, the viewer can only fail to pay full attention to what Shakespeare is saying. This is the basic problem of film v. theater. The film's priority is always the visual image, to which the word is subordinated...