Kurosawa, Kozintsev, Kaurismäki, and Almereyda: Hamlet and Transnational Dialogism

Abstract

This chapter traces a mostly other-languaged conversation that ideologically counterpoints Laurence Olivier’s Freudian Hamlet (1948). Taking Marx as a defining shared referent, this Japanese-Russian-Finnish chain of polyglot dialogism spirals back to the anglophone world in Almereyda’s millennial Hamlet (2000). The American director, through his anti-hero, diffidently voices the time-tinted words of Shakespeare within the corporate chronotope of Manhattan. By giving socio-economic dimension to this re-utterance of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the filmmaker fractures traditional approaches, rendering the lines of Hamlet both contemporary and foreign.