Ghosts and mirrors: the gaze in film Hamlets

Summary

In this article I use the sense of rupture implicit in Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze to explore film adaptations of Hamlet. My discussion focuses on three well-known adaptations of the play: Olivier, Branagh and Almereyda. I particularly employ Slavoj Žižek’s conception of Lacan’s ‘anamorphic stain’, and Henry Krips’s reading of the points of rupture of the gaze to investigate the symbiotic relationship between the demands Shakespeare’s text makes on film-production, and filmmakers’ manipulation of libidinal-looking in conceiving diegetic space. My contention, that negotiation of concretized film space is the central issue to be confronted in the adaptation of Shakespeare to the genre codes of film, directs my attention to instances of what I term ‘liminal space’, sites of apparent filmic resistance to the concrete (visually defined, realistic, photographic, naturalistic) space of the film diegesis. Though psychoanalytic theory is central to my paper, I attempt to address the recent ‘post-Theory’ theses proposed by Bordwell et al., by grounding theory always in discussion of filmic style, directorial technique and the various signifiers that compose the screen image.

MIRROR TRICKS AND SPECTRAL PRESENCES

To hold, as, ’twere, the mirror up to nature . . .

(3.2.21–2)

At the very opening of the era of cinema, theatrical productions begin to incorporate a series of special effects that uncannily seem to anticipate the future of new form – partially due to technological advances, and partly in order to maintain interest in customers wooed by forerunners to the silver screen. ‘Pepper’s Ghost’, the use of two reflective screens of glass to make a ghost appear on stage, was developed by Henry Dircks in 1862 and perfected for theatrical use by Henry Pepper towards the end of the nineteenth century. The technique required that a second stage be constructed beneath the actual stage, and two reflective screens of glass put into place, the first set at a ninety-degree angle above the lower stage, the second in front of it.