Kaurismaki & Shakespeare: A Dialogue with a Classic

Abstract

In the direction of post-modernist aesthetics a film version of shakesperian “Hamlet” is analyzed, performed by a Finnish producer Aki Kaurismaki, which manifests itself not only in montaging of the plot structure, the use of play which reveals as a structural base of characters’ actions and can be found on all levels of the film-text (everybody only plays a certain role but not a personality restoring the technique of the del arte comedy). A typical method is used “play in the play” and “screen in the screen”. A contrasting or even paradoxical building of separate fragments is achieved by an active use of stylization method. The film was created in 1987 but inheriting cinema tradition of the previous period (by the middle of XX century), the producer uses actively black and white format, a division of episodes with subtitles, darkening of shot, also implements a theatrical decoration of space, minimalism in details, close-up, a small number of cues, plot pauses. In such a way the producer uses a peculiar play with a spectator– identification of well-known techniques, cinema methods. However this stylization does not hinder the producer to picture the reality of the epoch in a true way.

The dialogue of a Finnish classic Aki Kaurismaki with a classical text of a playwright Shakespeare becomes a bright example of original post-modernist genre-creation of the film-text due to the tangling of a surrealist spectacle with “a boring reality”, tragedy with a sarcastic pathos and also a radical re-comprehension of motivating intentions of the main character that influenced a root deformation of the shakespearean plot