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ONE of the obvious challenges of filmmakers who adapt Shakespeare for the screen is to try to translate in visual terms as much of the richly evocative imagery of the dramatist's speeches as possible and to invent filmic ways of conveying powerfully to the viewer the intricate web of symbolic and thematic interconnections that reside poetically in the playwright's text - a text whose complexities Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences were better trained to receive aurally than we are. Such modifications are far from easy and require much imaginative energy. Film by its very nature is more naturalistic than Renaissance theater with its necessarily stylized conventions and artificialities.1 In his famous 1971 adaptation of Macbeth Polanski was fully aware of such problems and, collaborating with Kenneth Tynan, a distinguished critic of Shakespearean stage productions, was able to innovate creatively in the presentation of visual ideas, thereby producing a movie version of the Scottish tragedy that has become something of a classic in its own right despite its having been a commercial failure and at the time of its release negatively received.
Thanks to Lome Buchman, we have become acutely aware of the importance of close-ups and the technique of voice-over in Polanski's Macbeth. As Buchman reminds us, "the very first sequence of the film . . . creates a sense of covert and mysterious action through the pictorial isolation" of a crooked stick that bisects the screen diagonally and intrudes upon our previous view of a "barren and austere tidal flat at sunrise."2 The image of irregularly divided space on a rectangular screen in close-up offers us a more jarring version of the jagged line that divides earth from sky in the long shot of the Scottish landscape that immediately precedes it. Working in tandem, the extended reddish vista turning slowly to gray-blue and the obtrusive black stick alert us at the outset to the repeated encroachments upon each other of dark and light, night and day, sleeping and waking, that are to figure so prominently in the narrative to be unfolded. Polanski will provide us with several images of dawn or twilight to evoke the liminal spaces between consciousness and unconsciousness, clarity and obscurity, openness and hiddenness, innocence and guilt, future hopes and doom....