Word: hamlets
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Adults, watching a production of Hamlet, realize that the action is limited to the stage. They know, in reality, that Sir Laurence Olivier won't poison Michael Redgrave. They accept a dramatic illusion of reality in order to become involved with the plot and enjoy the play. In all art forms, an audience enters the fantasy world of the artist through this aesthetic illusion...
...reporter's scorn for danger as he tracked down his story. No Marine rifleman was more exposed to enemy fire than Safer and his crew as they lugged their bulky equipment to the outskirts of the hamlet called Cam Ne. The very sound of Safer's voice, excited yet sure, carried a message of urgency. "This is what the war in Viet Nam is all about," he intoned, as the camera panned over crying women and old men. In his careful solemnity there was an echo of CBS Hero Edward R. Mur row reporting World...
...dealing with objects? After human beings have deserted the frame his camera hangs on chairs, clock parts, a fire. These gratuitous images are less irritating then his heavy-handed roping-in of the elements, the ocean he begins and ends with, the hills that his pan zigzags across after Hamlet talks to the ghost of his father...
This is not a silent film, but most crises are followed by melodramatic reaction shots. Count the seconds whenever an interlocutor throws hands in air. One of Hamlet's reactions, after he's thrown down his mother in her chamber, lasts even after a cut. When Hamlet asks Ophelia, "Shall I lie in your lap?" we cut to a bevy of damsels cowering in unison like chorines...
...more simple errors: when Hamlet says, "But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue," the image shows his hairline, and drops to his face only as an after-thought; then, when horsemen are galloping through the Pampas, one of those frame-corners Kozintzev has been ignoring (the lower left one) picks up the highway the camera's trucking along...