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.