Epilogue: Futures of Shakespeare

Abstract

As Walter Benjamin remarks, a degree of fervour often seized the early theorists of the cinema. By way of example he cites Abel Gance, who in 1927 proclaimed that ‘Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make movies […] All legends, all mythologies, and all myths […] await their celluloid resurrection’ (Benjamin 2008, 22). It is the case that Shakespeare’s futures intertwine in multiple ways with the cinema, and that the cinema has often positioned its luminous projections of the beautiful dead as paralleling Shakespeare’s exhumations. However, Gance’s use of the future tense (‘will make movies’) — at least with regard to Shakespeare — is surprising. As we have seen, at least 41 cinematic Hamlets, and in total perhaps 500 Shakespeare films, were produced in the period 1899–1927, prior to Gance’s prediction. Despite the large body of extant Shakespeare films, for Gance Shakespeare’s relation with the cinema was one of futurity. Benjamin explains that Gance was ‘inviting the reader, no doubt unawares, to witness a complete liquidation’ (2008, 22). With ‘liquidation’ Benjamin names the total erosion of all traditional and sacred structures that he perceived as the modus operandi of modernity. Technological reproduction strips artworks of the cultic value of their singular presence, which Benjamin terms their aura.

[The poet] not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers the laws according to which the present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley¹

For what we have in the discovery of psycho-analysis is an encounter, an essential encounter — an appointment to which we are always called with a real that eludes us.

—Jacques Lacan²

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

—Franz Kafka³