Play On! Shakespeare in Silent Film (2016) Pulls off the Impossible (Review)

Silent Shakespeare?  It might seem to invalidate the very reason why Shakespeare has been a cultural constant for centuries now, but it was popular in its time.  When cinema was invented it was widely considered a novelty rather than a serious art form, so it was necessary to prove it could tackle the highest of high culture.  And it worked: IMDb lists one hundred and thirty-one screen credits for the Bard before The Jazz Singer brought in the sound era.  Doubtless, there are more that have been lost to history.

The films collected in the BFI’s new Blu-Ray compilation of silent Shakespeare shorts demonstrate the central problem of a Shakespeare adaptation in extremis: how do you take something written for the late-Tudor stage and make it feel like cinema?  The title feature on the disc, Play On! Shakespeare in Silent Film, arranges scenes from around two dozen silent shorts into five acts, each of them dealing with a different aspect of film Shakespeare.  The most obvious advantage cinema has is in the realm of special effects, and early film-makers were quick to understand this.  So we see a Midsummer Night’s Dream where Puck literally flies around the world, a Tempest where Prospero watches a fantastic, Méliès-style shipwreck, and Hamlet and Macbeth both get to see misty, superimposed ghosts.

When this approach works, it works terrifically.  I’d go so far as to say Percy Stow’s 1908 adaptation of The Tempest is my favourite version of the play, in part because Stow’s woodlands exteriors feel as rich and strange as any of the supernatural effects-based material, but also because the play is well-suited to being boiled down to visual set-pieces.  It’s a typically ambitious product of Shakespeare’s late blockbuster stage, also represented here by versions of The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII.  Most theatres simply don’t have the budget to stage a faithful version of those plays, so cinema certainly holds the advantage there.  That doesn’t answer the question of how to film a Shakespeare play with an introverted hero, little on-stage action and “words, words, words”, though.  How do you solve a problem like Hamlet?

The limitation of Play On! as a feature is that it can’t address that question; it can show us great silent actors as Hamlet, and it can show them re-enacting all the big set-pieces (a lot of skull-holding, naturally), but it can’t show us how these played out as whole films.  This is where the hefty extras come in.  As well as the entirety of 2004’s BFI Silent Shakespeare collection remastered from the original prints, there’s also three incredibly obscure shorts remastered and presented with a commentary from Dr. Judith Buchanan.  There’s a version of King Lear that radically differs from the more familiar Italian version included as part of Silent Shakespeare, a Winter’s Tale (of which more later), and a little clip of the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene featuring – a real find, this – John Gielgud in his first screen role.

Gielgud was disappointed with his first filmed performance, feeling he’d failed to capture the essence of Romeo.  Which is hilarious, in light of what’s actually on screen; a minute-long film so visual it’s presented in a picture frame rather than a traditional aspect ratio, where the actors are reduced to silhouettes.  Perhaps Gielgud does fail to offer a well-rounded portrayal of the tragic teenager, but given these restrictions, who could have?  There are silent performances that offer great intensity of feeling, of course – Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc, Veidt in The Man Who Laughs, Jannings in anything – but there’s also another tendency around at the same time, which is the Lumière brothers ethos of using cinema as a way to simply show the audience something they’d never see elsewhere.  Gielgud’s Romeo is recorded in this manner, as is Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in the earliest film in the collection, an adaptation of King John from 1899.  “Adaptation” might be the wrong word; the film, co-directed by Edison Company whiz William K.L. Dickson of Monkeyshines fame, simply shows the great actor-manager writhing around in the King’s death throes.  There’s no narrative, simply the spectacle of a theatre legend acting, the purest kind of star vehicle.  It’s no substitute for a full-text RSC production, but it retains its fascination 117 years later.

There are great performances here, though.  The American company Vitagraph made Shakespeare a speciality and they snaffled some top-drawer talent to do it.  Silent Shakespeare includes two films directed by Charles Kent; his Midsummer Night’s Dream isn’t as visually inventive as the other version excerpted in Play On!, but his Twelfth Night is significantly lifted by his own hilariously pompous, carefully-judged performance as the Puritan Malvolio.  That film also features “the Vitagraph girl” Florence Turner as Viola; even in drag she’s about as masculine as Jessica Rabbit, but she gives the role all of the impish energy and mischief that made her perhaps the greatest female silent comedian.  Speaking of gender-bending, Play On! also includes clips of Asta Nielsen’s legendary turn as a female Hamlet.  Gaunt, hollow-eyed and genuinely eerie, her performance has a haunting intensity evident in even the briefest excerpts.

And sometimes it all comes together in one film.  The set’s major discovery is Baldassare Negroni’s 1913 adaptation of The Winter’s Tale; the longest film here at 43 minutes, it’s also the best and probably the most expensive.  With a throng of extras to rival the similarly-impressive scenes from Julius Caesar and Macbeth in Play On!, it strips out a lot of Shakespeare’s key set-pieces in favour of its own innovations based on real locations and elaborate props.  At a time when even adventurous directors like Percy Stow were mostly just trying to transpose the play, this is a surprisingly creative – dare we say auteurist? – approach.

Any disappointment at the lack of moving statues and bears for people to exit pursued by will fade away when confronted by Negroni’s astonishing visuals, including a smouldering volcano and a burning longboat.  It’s the sort of physical, dangerous silent spectacle Guy Maddin dreams of, and its rediscovery is a huge deal.  The whole set has a sense of rediscovery, actually – and if you find yourself wanting to see some of the films that are excerpted in Play On! but not included in full in the extras, several of them are available to watch for free on BFI Player.  Special mention has to go to the score, whose musicians are celebrated in a special feature.  They have the unenviable task of soundtracking not just a Shakespeare play, but seventeen of them, and they pull it off magnificently.

Thanks for reading our review of Play On! Shakespeare in Silent Film

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