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In my view Shakespeare on the screen must become more a tragic poem than a play, more of a relationship between characters and landscape, a historical and geographical representation. But simple historical naturalism has no connection with Shakespeare. Historical materialism can destroy the poetic unity of Shakespearean plays. It's not merely a question of speaking verse in front of the camera and moving from a long-shot to close-up. It's necessary to create a pictorial imagery, a visual poetry with the same quality as that of the Shakespearean verse.1
In this brief statement explaining his approach to the adaptation of Shakespeare's plays for the screen, the Russian director Grigori Kozintsev sums up the nature of the artistic transformation that must take place. He agrees with Boris Pasternak, who wrote Russian screenplays of Hamlet and King Lear, that in the cinema the script is not sacrosanct. Pasternak states that as soon as one has "penetrated his [Shakespeare's] artistic intention, and mastered it, one can and should sacrifice the most vivid and profound lines (not to mention the pale and indifferent ones) provided that the actors have achieved an equally talented performance of an acted, mimed, silent, or laconic equivalent to these lines of the drama and in this part of its development.'^ Kozintsev replies that although this doesn't hold true for the theatre, in film "with its power of visual imagery, it would be possible to risk achieving equal forcefulness (Time and Conscience, p. 215)."
Kozintsev, therefore, believes that unlike the theatre director who interprets a script which was conceived for the stage, the film director must function as a kind of translator, rendering discursive language into nondiscursive image without diminishing the effect of Shakespeare's original play. Like a musician, sculptor, or dancer working with the same material, the film director then becomes a creative collaborator, the final product being a fusion of his vision with what he takes Shakespeare's vision to be.
In this paper I will investigate the "pictorial imagery" Kozintsev fashions in his 1971 film of King Lear and which acts as a cinematic equivalent to Shakespeare's poetry. I hope to show the way in which images anticipate and echo various parts of the action; how they come together or work in opposition...