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Looking for Richard. Dir. Al Pacino. Twentieth Century Fox, 1997.
1.
Al Pacino's Looking for Richard opens with the words "King Richard" appearing first on the screen with the other syllables necessary for completing the title being added gradually. This device not only highlights the name "Richard III," the protagonist of the Shakespearean source for Pacino's film, it also enlists and then encourages us to search for Richard within the film. And when we go looking for Richard, we can, if we look hard, find him, but not where we had expected and, more tellingly, not where we seem to be directed to look. While it gives us innumerable glimpses of Richard--the documentary frame of the film allows us to see Richard in America, in the Cloisters, in England, at the Globe, in theatrical rehearsal and performance, in cinematic rehearsal and performance--Pacino's film, like Shakespeare's humpbacked dissembler, harbors a "secret, close intent," making Richard far more difficult to locate than his conspicuousness in the film would suggest. And once he is glimpsed, we should begin to question the film's motives. While Pacino claims that his goal is to make Shakespeare more accessible to his public, what he, in fact, does under this typically American anti-elitist and democratic ruse is to appropriate the cultural commodity that Shakespeare has become and then use it to establish American dominance within the global market in which this commodity is distributed. Pacino does this by first undermining the hold that England has had on Shakespeare's work, in effect repossessing the work, and then reforming it to his taste so that it may be marketed at home and ultimately abroad. In this cautionary tale about coming to America, Pacino not only hijacks the bard, but then he also audaciously offers him for sale back to his original owners. Indeed, it is only within the film's conflict with itself, in the division between what it actually does and what it appears to do, that the character of Shakespeare's smiling villain comes clearly into our view.
2.
One of the things this film purports to do and in fact does is to provide us with an iteration of Shakespeare's Richard III. That Richard III offers a narrative comprised of four phases: 1) an...