A free adaptation of Shakespeare′s drama. The Danish queen masquerades her daughter as a boy, and thus, the girl lives her life as 'Prince' Hamlet. Her father poisoned by a venomous snake placed by the treacherous Claudius, Hamlet fakes madness to investigate without suspicion.
17 Jun Hamlet (1921)
Citizen Asta
Hamlet has long been attractive to vain actors, despite its opposing energy. Mel Gibson! Olivier! So many… And such committed variety.
There are four notable things.
The first is that the play may be the richest long form narrative in history, essentially inventing poetic metaphor. It is language art in the form of a play. Some of us niggle about this and that, but it is always in the world of the words. Now here, we have that very play but with no words! What words we have in the cards are simple dialog that someone in 1920 would say. This is amazingly daft. We have a few silent versions of Alice in Wonderland as well (by others). But at least in those we have the scenes from the book. Here, the play is only an inspiration for what we see — drawn it seems from some notion of what he would have written.
The second oddity is that the character, played by a woman, is a woman playing a man. That’s fine with me. Prospero as a witch made some sense. This supposedly was based on a prevailing theory that was Shakespeare’s indent, based on a then popular revisionist analysis. This intrigued me enough to get the book. It actually makes no such claim, instead stops at proving that in the several revisions of the play, the author made the character ‘more feminine’ mostly because Hamlet was vacillating and unsure. I think a very cool version of the play could have made something like this work, but with no language, few original scenes, and this change the distance is rather far.
The third interesting thing is the intent. Asta was famous, influential in the art, and powerful enough to get the resources to make this the way she wanted. She was the most famous actress in the world. This was every bit as ambitious as any other great film, and I believe with a few differences could have mattered.
Finally, the Criterion disk has the American version and a bit of commentary on the differences. This is truly puzzling because the easiest thing in the world is to take a German silent film and use English cards. Instead what they did was use two simultaneous cameras from slightly different angles — and edited the result quite differently, as if each version was developed without knowledge of the other.
Posted in 2025
Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
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