What interested me most about this clip is the relation to history/time and what Cody refers to as "gratuitously impertinent moments of humor and frivolity." I would like to further extend this and relate it to the Crane reading and it's etymological exploration of what conceptual understanding of what it is we do on stage.
The first thing that stuck out to me about this film was, as you might suspect, the music. I think the music serves as an important temporal framing device. It let's us know we are watching a jazz-age Richard the III and sets an emotional atmosphere of calm and luxury (if I may be so bold as to ascribe an emotional element in luxury). For me this historical marker changes what is perceived as "frivolous" because, like Crane insists for a much earlier era, the concept of what is frivolous today and what is frivoulous in the social settings of this period are different. Is it humorous to give a tense speech of pathos and resentment while using a urinal, or does it strive to place us in a time period where, without the ultimate power of 15th century nobility and the privacy of a throne room (pun not intended), a man in Richard the III's situation might feel the only time he has for unequivocally self-reflection is that utmost of private moments.
When a play is transposed to a different time it is (is it?) also, intentionally or not, transposed to an entirely different set of social behaviors. The question of who would Richard the III be in the 1930s is not as simple as "He would have been a gangster like Al Capone. So we make it a gangster setting," because settings are more than just a collection of visual cues.
No comments:
Post a Comment