The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood

The title of my post comes from folklore scholar Jack Zipes's study of the "Red Riding Hood" tale. His book along with the more recent work of Catherine Orenstein, Little Red Hiding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality and the Evolution of a Fairytale, present a fascinating look at the narrative's historical development and demonstrate the way that what originated as a coming-of-age folk tale celebrating young women's wisdom and survival skills was transformed into a blame-the-victim patriarchal morality tale.

That this "innocent" children's story is a coded lesson on sexuality is made obvious by looking at the illustrations that have accompanied the myriad re-tellings and versions of the story. For every realistic (yet talking!) wolf, there are an equal number of pictures like those in the gallery above which not only pose Mr. Wolf on two legs, but dress him in, often suave and stylish, human clothes. The big bad wolf is clearly a man, baby!

As Zipes writes, the "little red" narrative had its beginning in the oral folk traditions of Europe. Folklorists note its links to several common forms of folk tales: warning tales, problem-solving tales, and coming-of-age stories. The first two featured child protagonists who negotiate or overcome some difficulty. These taught children specific lessons about safety as well as demonstrating that children could successfully look after themselves. The third kind, the coming-of-age story celebrated the adult male and female roles children would eventually assume. They allude symbolically to adult occupations and employ narratives structured around the replacement of an old person by a younger one.

Folklorists have recreated the oral tale that gave rise to "Little Red Riding Hood." "The Story of the Grandmother" retains a recognizable outline, but with some significant differences. In the ur-version the girl is not disobedient but merely curious. She's not been given any instructions other than to deliver food to her grandmother, so there's nothing "wrong" with stopping to chat with a talking wolf. While the wolf tricks her, she also tricks him. She uses her wits and saves herself with a humorous ruse: she tells the wolf she won't taste good, he should wait until she's relieved herself before he eats her. When he lets her go to the outhouse with a string tied around her ankle, she slips it off, ties it around a tree stump, and leaves the wolf to keep calling out, "Hey, are you done yet?"

Grandma dies, but granddaughter lives on. And there is no red hood.

The first written version, and the one which created the story's moralistic template is Charles Perrault's 1697, "Little Red Riding Hood." A tale about a capable young woman here becomes the story of a vain, spoiled, disobedient brat who gets what she deserves. It is Perrault who adds the iconic red hood, a gift from a doting grandmother to a "pretty child." The red hood has a double symbolism: the colour of scandal and blood, it suggests her sin and foreshadows her fate. And hood, or chaperon, already had the meaning in French, as it does in English today, of one who guards a girls' virtue.

Perrault's mother explicitly lectures her daughter to not stray from the path, not stop and look at flowers, not talk to strangers. Instead, she disobeys on all counts. She idles, gossips and is seduced by the sensuous delights of the forest, both flowers and wolf. For her transgressions she is punished with death. As if the plot were not explicit enough, Perrault adds a postscript spelling out that his is a story about what happens to girls who let young men take liberties:

"One sees here that pretty, well brought-up young girls should never listen to anyone who happens by, and if this occurs it is not so strange that a wolf should eat them. I say "wolf," but all wolves are not of the same kind. There are some who are pleasant and follow young ladies right into their homes, right into their beds." Orenstein points out that Perrault is playing on French slang for a girl's loss of virginity: elle avoit vû le loup---she’d seen the wolf.

Later, the Brothers Grimm publish a variation, "Little Red Cap," in 1812 with one important change. While Grandma still perishes, a fatherly woodsman both rescues Red and delivers a stern lecture: "a little maid should be afraid to do other than her mother told her." As Zipes writes, "Its quite evident the Riding Hood can be 'daddy's darling' only if she learns to toe the line."

With Perrault and the Brothers Grimm the "classic" plot is in place. Little Red Riding hood is vain, silly and helpless, to blame for her own "rape" and dependent on male authority for rescue.

Freeway

The film we look at this week, Matthew Bright's Freeway, is a film which like Cat People both plays with and against multiple genre conventions. Like Cat People, Freeway is part horror film (it could even be said to essentially share the same monster---the werewolf). It also has, as several critics have pointed out, "one foot in the grind house and one in the art house." Director Bright himself labeled the film an "artsploitation" movie: marrying the over-the-top action, sex and violence of exploitation films with an astutely feminist re-telling of the fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood."

For our purposes, we should look for the ways the film uses/subverts genre convention. Some things to think about while watching are the conventional relationship between the horror film monster and "his" victim, the usual "'punishment" of sexuality in horror/slasher films, the violence for violence's sake code of exploitation films, the handling of female characters in exploitation/splatter films, realistic vs. cartoon violence, and the many ways this film changes and even defies these "rules."

As even this cursory list implies, horror and exploitation films have a specific way of treating gender and sexuality---maybe one could go so far as to say that's what they're always really about at their red, bloody core. And more than just the iconic use of the colour red links these genres to the venerable fairytale/children's story, "Little Red Riding Hood." To examine Freeway's rewriting of that narrative, we first need to review the story as it develops from folk tale to children's story.

Small footnote on set design...

I've always been struck by the almost funny use of the painting in this scene from Cat People. This picture is only one of several cat-themed objects in her apartment, but it is a very expressive one since the crafty kitties eyeing the bird visually "rhymes" with Irena's own bird troubles. The look on their faces is priceless.

The painting is a reproduction of a famous portrait by Francisco Goya, Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuniga. I'd never actually looked it up, so I decided to when previewing the film for class.
The painting is a child's portrait and it features several birds besides the pet magpie the subject is playing with (by the way, the magpie is holding Goya's calling card in his beak). There is also a cage full of finches which provides an even stronger link to a piece of action in the film: Irena's accidental killing of her own pet, a caged canary.

But look at the group of cats in the corner. These are the ones featured in the framing of Irena in the shot. It looks to me like these cat's eyes have been reworked to brightly stand out from the dark canvas, and reshaped into more sinister expressions!

Cat People

Cat People is one of a trio of remarkable collaborations between director, Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton. Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, and The Leopard Man, were all low budget “horror” films made in the early 40’s at RKO. What distinguishes them from other films of that genre and budget is Tourneur’s ability to create highly atmospheric, noir-ish visuals that suggest more than they actually show. The scripts and plots Tourneur worked with were also extremely intelligent and creative. Cat People uses the trappings of a horror film to construct a metaphor for female sexual fears and repression. I Walked With A Zombie is an ambitious recasting of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre as a voo-doo inflected monster movie.

In his essay on Jacques Tourneur’s horror films, Ed Gonzalez points to another complex aspect of the Lewton/Tourneur thrillers that raises them above the usual ilk: “There's a certain multi-cultural conflict that distinguishes the Lewton-Tourneurs. In 1942's Cat People, the director's most famous film, the exotic Irena Dubrova (Simone Simon) embraces her cultural past as her sexual urges begin to overwhelm her. In 1943's superior I Walked With a Zombie, Betsey Connell (Frances Dee) similarly acknowledges the power of tradition inherent in Caribbean voodoo lore. In Leopard Man, resistance to tradition and authority and the desire for privilege kills the film's three Mexican women. These anti-racist conflicts seemingly pit a foreign culture against an American one, challenging cultural expectations.”

Tourneur later moved on to direct some of the most seminal of Hollywood film noirs such as Out of the Past and Berlin Express. I think as we look at Cat People this week, we might want to go back and review the previous blog post on film noir so we can talk about how the film both makes use of and subverts elements of the genre (I’m thinking in particular about how Cat People handles the status of the “bad” “dark” woman in a manner that runs explicitly counter to genre expectations).

Another genre concern is the horror film, and again we’ll want to pay attention to how Cat People both conforms to and breaks these conventions. The wikipedia discussion of the history of horror films covers the central elements of the genre: “In horror film plots, evil forces, events, or characters, sometimes of supernatural origin, intrude into the everyday world. Horror film characters include vampires, zombies, monsters, serial killers, and a range of other fear-inspiring characters.” In Cat People, the specific monster “pathology” is lycanthropy: the werewolf. Although Irena fears transforming into some kind of predatory big cat (like a leopard or a jaguar), the basic situation is the same---a human becoming something nonhuman, wild and deadly.

That Irena’s putative transformation is tied to her sexuality is one way the film’s subject links to film noir and its fear of female desire. Of course, Cat People gives us something much more complex than the male hysteria over vagina dentata that is a trademark of both noir and its literary companion, the hard-boiled detective story. Here, none of the men fear Irena, it is Irena herself that is afraid of sex.

Advance Screening

I think the majority of students in this class have been doing very well. The jump in the level of engagement and ability between papers one and two, plus the continuing accumulation of interesting points of view in the logs has been extremely enjoyable and satisfying---to me, and I hope to you, too. That said, there are students who are still woefully behind, in terms of handing work in and in terms of even understanding what we’ve been doing in class. So this final paper offers something different to each group of students. For those who have truly been students, this paper should be seen as a challenging opportunity to present a polished example of what you’ve gained over the semester. For those who have been occupying seats in the classroom, this paper is a last chance to try to turn something in.

Choosing either Storytelling, Hamlet, Cat People, or Freeway, discuss how the film addresses the status of Truth. Pay particular attention to the relation between specific narrative elements and the film’s subject matter. In other words, how does the film uses the devices of film making (including genre) to raise questions about the nature of Truth?

Some things to consider. Both Storytelling and Hamlet focus on the narrative mediation of reality. Both of these films spend time examining, among other things, the crucial role that communication media play in our apprehension of the world and it’s “truth.” Storytelling juxtaposes the conceptual categories of “fiction” and “nonfiction,” as well as two different media: written and filmed narratives. And nearly every one of the characters represent conflicting and contradictory views or “truths.” Hamlet draws our eye, over and over again, to the dominance of the visual image in contemporary culture, and the privileged status of film as medium for understanding and expressing ourselves.

Cat People and Freeway both use what could be considered trivial or debased art forms (the horror film, melodrama, comic books and the exploitation film) for serious ends: a feminist critique of traditional notions of female sexuality. Cat People can be read as a study of female sexual repression and Freeway rewrites a fear-engendering blame-the-victim children’s tale (Little Red Riding Hood) into an over-the-top ode to female empowerment. In Cat People, Irena’s “truth” (her fears and desires) is dismissed by the other characters, especially the authority figure of the (male) psychoanalyst. In Freeway, Vanessa not only wards off an attack by a serial killer, but also repeated attacks on her honesty and truth telling.

We can talk a bit about this next class since Cat People only runs 71 minutes. We’ll see Freeway the week after that, with an all discussion class the following week to hash out anything else necessary for this paper. All papers must be turned in on the last day of class, when we’ll also be screening one final film yet to be announced.

Length: 6-7 pages, typed, double-spaced, titled and stapled
Due: May 15 (Final day of class)

Bardcore

Almereyda's remark about the existence of a Hamlet porno made me want to track down some evidence of it. Turns out there's not just one, but at least two Hamlet skin flicks as well as a whole slew of Shakespearian themed porn videos. Which makes sense, I guess, given the penchant for puns in porn titles. Who could resist Romeo In Juliet? The Taming of the Screw? Much Ado About Nuttin'?

Here's a humorous run-down of some of the titles in this sub-genre, including a synopsis of X Hamlet: "Something is pervy in the state of Denmark..."

A slightly more academic appraisal of the Bardcore genre can be found here.

Bits (mostly Hamlet) for this week's discussion...

I want to spend our discussion time this week not only on Hamlet and Storytelling, but also other narrative issues we've observed in the films and stories we've looked at thus far. I think this will help focus your thoughts for the final paper. However, at this point I'm not sure I will have the assignment for the final paper fully drafted---so our discussion may be more open ended than I would like. Either way, here are some things to read and think about:

To think more about Storytelling, I suggest you go through all the Student Logs which address this film. Some interesting points have been made in the comment threads---for example, just this morning one of Brittany's logs sparked some new ideas for me that I want to discuss further tomorrow night.

Since we didn't have much time to talk about Almereyda's Hamlet last class, I expect we will spend a lot of time with it. I'm bringing it to class again (also Storytelling) so we can look over some of the scenes and talk about the use of Shakespearian language in the film. The "problems" that students might have with this is soemthing I want to address:not to browbeat you all, but as a jumping off point for questions about language in general. Still, I do have to sneak one criticism in here: you need to read the play first, or at the very least read over the synopsis I provided you with. Although I've asked students to prepare for each of the film's we've screened (and provided much of the material for that preparation), this is one film where such preparation is crucial.

Here are some interesting essays and reviews of Almereyda's film. First, Elvis Mitchell's review in The New York Times, which begins: "It is curious; one never thinks of attaching Hamlet to any special locale," the critic Kenneth Tynan once wrote of Shakespeare's tragedy, and the director Michael Almereyda has brilliantly seized upon that by rooting his voluptuous and rewarding new adaptation of the play in today's Manhattan. The city's contradictions of beauty and squalor give the movie a sense of place -- it makes the best use of the Guggenheim Museum you'll ever see in a film -- and New York becomes a complex character in this vital and sharply intelligent film."

Mitchell highlights one of the things I want to talk more about: the overwhelming presence of New York City in the film. This is integral to the way Almereyda highlights the mediation of the visual image. As Alexandra Marshall points out, "Typical of their generation, Hamlet and Ophelia try to escape into the technologies of image making." And Marshall also links the emphasis on visual technology to the presentation of character in the film: "The characters in this Hamlet are conveyed--with the multiplicity of perspective that also marks our era--as an ensemble of complex personalities with layered and sometimes discomforting histories together."

The dominance of visual media and communication technology is also discussed in Cynthia Fuchs's article on the film: "Poor Hamlet is living in 21st-century Manhattan, where video and electronic surveillance is the norm: cameras find you on sidewalks, stores, offices, elevators. There's no place where you're not on screen, performing consciously or unconsciously for someone's leering and likely profit-minded benefit. "Reality TV" rules: The Real World, Making the Band, Letterman's hijacky street-interviews, Cops, and Big Brother. There are cameras everywhere."

As Fuchs points out, the camera is an instrument of domination, as well as representation---a point also made in Alan A. Stone's review, "...[Hamlet] enters the king’s court, now a corporate press conference, with a video device in each hand; facing down the world with his camera instead of his mordant wit. "

Fuchs also provides a detailed explication of Almereyda's staging of the infamous "to be or not to be" soliloquy in Blockbuster: "He's contemplating his limited options — suicide or homicide? — just as the shot cuts to the store's TV screen, where Eric Draven (Vincent Perez) contemplates one of his own vengeful murders in The Crow Part 2. This reference could not be more astute, not only because the movie features a pissed off dead guy assassinating his own killers, but because this sequel in particular — following Brandon Lee's terrible on-set death in the original Crow — is all about burdens, of history, consumption, and youthful angst, you know, exactly the issues troubling our boy Hamlet."

You can find Almereyda's own thoughts on the film here. A few excerpts: "I was hovering over various possibilities, relatively obscure plays -- and I was resisting Hamlet. It seemed too familiar, too obvious, and it's been filmed at least 43 times. Better to leave it to high school productions, spoofs and skits and The Lion King. As T. S. Eliot noted years back, Hamlet is like the Mona Lisa, something so overexposed you can hardly stand to look at it.

But masterpieces are definably masterpieces because they have a way of manifesting themselves in our everyday lives. The play, and the character, seemed to be chasing me around New York. I passed high school kids quoting Hamlet on the street. I was informed of the existence of a Hamlet porno film. And I found myself thinking back to my first impressions of the play, remembering its adolescence-primed impact and meaning for me -- the rampant parallels between the melancholy Dane and my many doomed and damaged heroes and imaginary friends: James Agee, Holden Caulfield, James Dean, Egon Schiele, Robert Johnson, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Jean Vigo.

...Through all this I was watching every version of Hamlet available in New York, scheduling systematic visits to the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Television and Radio and the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. (This is a curiously claustrophobic activity. You plug yourself into headphones and a monitor mounted within a tight Formica cubicle, surrounded almost exclusively by middle-aged men studying old Broadway musicals.)"

Interesting Work with Film

Above, two images from Nicolas Provost's Papillon d'amour, and a photo of Douglas Gordon's Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake).

Last night in class I briefly mentioned the work of artists who use existing films as the material of their work. I brought this up because I was talking about one of the ideas at play in Michael Almereyda's Hamlet: the absolute dominance of film (or more broadly, visual representation/communication media) in contemporary culture. While I want to write more about this in preparation for our discussion session next week, I thought I'd first give you a look at some innovative video art as food for thought.

You can see Nicholas Provost's beautiful Papillon d'amour on YouTube (low res, unfortunately) and read a bit about his work at the Video Data Bank. Papillon d'amour is made from footage of Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon and I should probably say a bit about it here, too. I've mentioned Rashomon in class because of it's important status in film history and also its interesting handling of narrative structure: its nonlinearity and lack of closure. If you've never seen it, you can actually view the film online via the Internet Archive, a marvelous database of film/video/television images, most of them available in their entirety. Rashomon would fit quite well with the other films we've been looking at in this class, too, since as Stephen Prince points out in his essay for the Criterion Collection's release, "...the film has had a huge impact on modern culture. Rashomon is that rare film which has transcended its own status as film. Rashomon has entered the common parlance of everyday culture to symbolize general notions about the relativity of truth and the unreliability, the inevitable subjectivity, of memory [my emphasis]. In the legal realm, for example, lawyers and judges commonly speak of “the Rashomon effect” when first-hand witnesses of crime confront them with contradictory testimony."

I don't have any clips to show of you of Douglas Gordon's much bigger body of work, but here is a blog which has some interesting commentary on his recent show at MOMA, including 24 Hour Psycho, Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake), and Left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right is right, which splits Otto Preminger's Whirlpool into two panels which both mirror each other and consist of every other film frame.

The Guardian has an interesting discussion of Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake), as well as some photos and commentary on other of his work. From the article:

"[In] Darkness and Light (After William Blake)...two films run continuously, on either side of a translucent screen. On one side, Henry King's 1943 historical biopic Song of Bernadette, about Saint Bernadette, whose visions of the Virgin at Lourdes led to her sanctification and the founding of the pilgrimage site. On the other side of the screen runs The Exorcist, William Friedkin's 1973 horror movie of demonic possession. The images and sound from both movies meld and glide apart...There are inadvertent synchronicities between the two films: one is about virtue and goodness (and shot in black and white), the other unadulterated evil (shot in particularly seamy, grubby colour), but both are concerned with faith and doubt. The resulting "third image" is peculiar. The two films seem to haunt one another. Not only that, but the moments that collide so mysteriously are also always different, as the films are of different length and run continuously...heavenly visions juxtapose with evil infestations; the heavenly and the horrible keep crossing over, literally as well as figuratively."

Lost All My Mirth: Michael Almereyda's Hamlet

Above, some scenes from the film and director Almereyda on the set.

Michael Almereyda's Hamlet is the only film of a Shakespeare play that I like--that I think is not only good as an interpretation, but also good as a film. One reason for this is that this is a very self-reflexive piece of filmmaking. Besides being about the story of Hamlet, its also a film about the dominance of media, of visual culture, of communications technology in contemporary life. Almereyda manages to work in references to nearly every form of currently existing media. Video abounds; television screens and computer monitors, surveillance cameras and Times Square telescreens are included in nearly every shot. Some of the dialog is delivered via email, fax, teleprompter and answering machine; eavesdropping becomes wiretapping. And Hamlet wields a Pixelvision camera in the film's first extended sequence. As one critic remarked, "this is a Hamlet for the information age."

Almereyda has set his Hamlet in NYC year 2000 and slightly modified a few plot elements: Claudius is CEO of Denmark Corporation, fighting off a hostile corporate takeover by competitor Fortinbras. Elsinore is no longer a castle, but a swank hotel. Claudius and Gertrude make public appearances at press conferences and social benefits, not court.

Ophelia is a trust fund princess slumming on the LES, dressed in couture and sneakers and carting her cameras and photography equipment around in a Manhattan Portage messenger bag. Hamlet is a slacker film school student, a would be video artist obsessively reviewing footage of his life with the smudged door stamp from last night’s club still on the back of his hand. That we live in a world irrevocably mediated by the image is eloquently, wittily, and forcefully brought home by Almereyda's staging of that most iconic of all theatrical moments, Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy, in a Blockbuster video store.

The film also continually juxtaposes high and low culture elements on every level: the Shakespearian language we hear confronts the contemporary images we see, the soundtrack combines music referencing Hamlet by both classic composers (Tchaikovsky's "Hamlet") and rock musicians (Nick Cave and The Birthday Party's "Hamlet Pow, Pow, Pow"), even the casting carries this theme through by combining figures with pop culture resonance (Ethan Hawke, Julia Stiles and Bill Murray) with those more associated with theatre and Shakespeare (Sam Shepard, Diane Venora, Liev Schreiber).

The film is visually and aurally dense: there's much to look at and much to listen to. The score, by film composer Carter Burwell, is evocative and haunting. I uploaded it all to the Voxblog, Extra Things, if you want to listen to it.

So where can we most profitably place our eyes and ears?

While I think there is much to be said about how Almereyda treats Shakespeare's text, I don't know if that's the best place to begin for a class devoted to narrative. True, Almereyda cuts much, but frankly the last stage production I saw (Andrei Serban's referenced in my post below) ran about the same length of time. I like placing the famous speech from Act II at the beginning ("I have of late, where for I know not, lost all my mirth...") because it both cuts out the backstory blabla of the watchmen and it is my favorite bit in the play (though for me the best rendition of that speech in film remains Richard E. Grant's declamation in the final scene of Withnail & I).

Instead, I think we could begin with looking at the issue of mediation: the way our perception of the world, of how things are, is mediated by narrative and the various media in which it is encoded.

Above all, Almereyda's Hamlet argues for the primacy and power given film in contemporary society. That is why his film references so many forms of the reproduced image, and why he specifically locates the central elements of Shakespeare's play within an explicitly filmic context: Hamlet as aspiring filmmaker and avid film fan, the replacement of the play-within-a-play with a film-within-a-film, the Blockbuster location of "...to be or not to be...," and finally, Hamlet's questions about the reality of feelings emoted on the stage are now asked of a Movie Star, a pop culture icon of passion and action. "What would he do had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have?" asks this Hamlet, not of one of the court players, but of James Dean.

Quintessence of Dust: Hamlet Hell

I wanted to post some links to clips from different versions of Hamlet so students would have some points of comparison with Almereyda's film. I figured we were all familiar with various "classic" renditions, films like Kenneth Branagh's or the Franco Zefirelli/Mel Gibson version which attempt to mount a "faithful" recreation of what they seem to consider a sacred text. There are much more interesting routes to go when confronting the play T.S. Eliot referred to as, "the Mona Lisa of literature."

East German playwright Heiner Miller's, Hamletmachine, for example, is a kind of meta-theatrical commentary that uses the supposed "universality" of the play as an entry point for a far reaching critique of literature and politics. And Andrei Serban's 1999 staging was an attempt to capture not the just the play, but all the versions of it that have become dominant in collective memory.

So I took a brief look through YouTube and found a couple of things of possible interest. Here's a section from a typically "classic" staging, one which features Derek "I, Claudius" Jacobi as Hamlet and Patric "Jean-Luc Picard" Stewart as Claudius. And then there's The Simpson's version, which should be better, but does achieve a certain pathos in the casting of Chief Wiggam as Polonius and Ralph Wiggam as Laertes ("Look! Daddy's stomach is crying!!"). I also came across a clip from Tom Stoppard's film of his play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which is kind of nice to look at against the way the same scene is handled in Almereyda's film.

But mostly I found that YouTube is a bottomless pit of everybody's crappy video version of scenes from Hamlet staged for their high school English class. Each one of these imagines itself to be "hilarious" and "original," and yet I found 8 different "lego-mation" versions, at least 16 machinima (drawing from The Sims, Halo, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, and Second Life, among others), 22 Star Wars/Hamlet fusions and "gangsta" and rap Hamlets beyond count ("Homeboy Hamlet," "Hamlet in Da Hood," etc.). Apparently, if you give white suburban American teenagers a video camera the first thing they do is recreate some "jackass" stunts and then they move on to pretending they're both black and Shakesperian actors. I'll let you mine YouTube for "gems" yourselves.

You can also find some of the videos linked to here over on my VoxBlog, Extra Things, along with the one actually interesting thing I found on YouTube: Andrew Bellware's Hamlet short. I don't know anything about him or his production company, PandoraMachine, but the film was shot in Pixelvision, a "method" pioneered by Michael Almereyda in his first film, Another Girl, Another Planet, and something which has become almost a signature for him---you'll see bits shot on Pixelvision in Hamlet and I think all his other films as well.

Man delights not me: Shakespeare's Hamlet

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is probably the most famous play in the English language. One reason for its continued popularity is its seemingly “modern” rendering of individual psychology and motivation. Although there is plenty of onstage action, the play’s emphasis is really on internal battles: Hamlet’s struggle with himself, his indecisiveness and inability to act in ethically complicated situations make it an ideal text for multiple interpretations.

The following is a quick n’ dirty synopsis of the play’s plot. It should help with any major trouble you may have in reading the play. If you want a more detailed, act-by-act and scene-by-scene description you can look here, but I don’t think that will be necessary as Almereyda makes extensive cuts and revisions in the play.

Hamlet, the son of the King of Denmark, has come home to Castle Elsinore for his father’s funeral. Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, has married the former King’s brother, Claudius--who is now himself King. Hamlet is still mourning his father’s death and visibly disturbed and depressed over his mother’s remarriage. He doesn’t like Claudius and he’s acting weird around his girlfriend, Ophelia. Ophelia’s brother, Laertes, and father, the Lord Chamberlain Polonius, warn her that Hamlet might be only playing with her affections.

The neighboring kingdom of Norway (specifically Prince Fortinbras) is threatening to invade. One night, some watchmen see a ghost resembling King Hamlet. Hamlet and his closest friend Horatio talk to it and learn that his father was murdered by Claudius---by having poison poured in his ear. The ghost wants Hamlet to avenge him but he’s not entirely sure how best to get this revenge.

Claudius and Gertrude notice Hamlet’s increasing anti-social behavior (or madness) and they appoint two of his school mates, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on him. Claudius is worried that Hamlet suspects something. Polonius on the other hand, bumblingly thinks Hamlet is just moody and lovesick for Ophelia. He, too, spies on Hamlet and Ophelia to report back to Claudius. Hamlet breaks with Ophelia.

Hamlet decides to trick Claudius into betraying himself by staging a play which recreates the murder of King Hamlet. The play upsets Claudius, clinching Hamlet’s resolve, but when he goes to kill him, Claudius is in prayer and Hamlet cannot follow through. He then confronts his mother and hearing a noise behind her bedroom curtain, stabs at it, thinking it Claudius. He has, however, killed Polonius. Claudius sends him back to England, ostensibly for his own safety, but in reality he’s also sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with orders for his death.

Ophelia, already upset by Hamlet’s rebuff, now goes mad in grief at her father’s murder. She drowns, perhaps a suicide. Laertes, her brother and Polonius’s son, returns in a rage from France, demanding that Claudius punish Hamlet. Hamlet sends word that he’s returning, and realizing his plot didn’t work, Claudius hatches a new one with Laertes: to challenge Hamlet to a fencing match. Laertes will bring a poisoned blade; Claudius will provide a poisoned cup. During the match, Gertrude drinks from the poisoned cup instead and Laertes fatally wounds Hamlet, but is himself wounded with his own sword. As he dies, he tells Hamlet about Claudius’s plot and Hamlet kills Claudius. Hamlet dies begging his dear friend Horatio to tell the story. Fortinbras and his army enter the castle to begin a new regime.