Word: lear
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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GRIGORY KOZINTSEV'S 1971 screen version of King Lear is living, breathing evidence of the schoolroom adage that Shakespeare's plays were meant to be seen and not read. With the familiar sounds of Cordelia's solemn "nothing, my lord," and Lear's famous tirade "Blow, winds, blow," translated into Russian, much of the play's impact depends on the actors' ability to reinforce their foreign words with physical gestures, tones of voice, facial expressions and other universally understood signs. And it is greatly to director Kotzintsev's credit that the play's primordial, elemental power is strengthened--not diluted...
...covered feet, crippled feet--in short, feet in their most humble form. It then expands to show a procession of peasants trudging across a barren, almost lunar landscape of huge rocks and cracked terrain. Immediately we see that we have entered the surreal, prehistoric kingdom of Shakespeare's Lear. The next shot shows Lear's huge, imposing castle which rises suddenly and rather unnaturally out of the ground, dwarfing the peasants who in comparison look like a bunch of ants swarming on an anthill. Heightened by the effective use of Dmitry Shostakovich's operatic score, the feeling of impending doom...
...basic elements of nature and his soul. The play has been cut down, leaving only those scenes which further the plot's course of destruction. For example, the fool's part is shorn of its lighter scenes, leaving only the bitter social commentary. Thus the movie presents a Lear of pure and seemingly inevitable tragedy...
...finally there is Lear, a white, tousle-haired man whose crinkled face and impish carriage remind one more of an elf than a king. But this is not unintentional, for Kozintsev's Lear emphasizes correctly the humanness of its central character. Lear's fall is not of the same grandeur as Oedipus in Sophocles's tragedy, Oedipus-Tyrannus. Rather it is the fall of a vain, petty man whose self-centered need for flattery destroys his only loving daughter and ruins his sacred kingdom...
...only does the character of Lear himself emphasize the lower, more humble forms of humanity, but so does the entire movie. The film begins with a procession of peasants going to hear the awful proclamation of their king and ends with these same beggars stoically picking up remnants of their ravished land. In between there are numerous scenes of peasants and cripples, the most disturbing and effective of which is the scene on the heath when Lear comes upon Edgar and a crowd of other beggars who have taken refuge from the storm in a miserable, leaky hovel. Looking upon...