Anjos da Lama

Em 1966, Florença foi invadida por 80 a 250 milhões de metros cúbicos de água, que arrastaram 30 mil carros e arrasaram casas, lojas, monumentos, chegando em alguns locais a sete metros de altura. A catástrofe destruiu mais de 1.500 obras de arte e um milhão de manuscritos preciosos e livros raros. O cineasta florentino Franco Zeffirelli, que trabalhava na TV RAI, conseguiu chegar à cidade ilhada e ali rodou o impressionante documentário Per Firenze (1966), que, graças ao senador americano Edward Kennedy, rodou o mundo, mobilizando a juventude de vários países a acorrer para Florença para salvar o patrimônio da humanidade. Os assim chamados “Anjos da Lama” anteciparam os jovens que, dois anos depois, se rebelariam em todo o mundo.

Citizen Ken: Branagh, Shakespeare, and the movies

As Kenneth Branagh turns sixty, he finds himself honoured by the English theatrical world as the restored heir to its tradition of the actor-manager, having created a theatre and film career unlike any other. He is an actor-manager-film director who builds on the tradition he inherits from Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, and Franco Zeffirelli even as he revises it. This overview of his career reveals that he can do small and tidy, but his cinematic imagination first feasts on Hollywood movie genres – noir thrillers, murder mysteries, Disney classics, Superhero fantasies, spy films, musicals, and bio-pics – then feeds his lasting legacy to Shakespeare on film.

Picturing Charlotte Brontë’s Artistic Rebellion? Myths of the Woman Artist in Postfeminist Jane Eyre Screen Adaptations

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847) has been regularly adapted for the screen since the silent era. During the 1990s, a trend emerged in which cinematic and television versions of Brontë’s novel paid increased attention to the protagonists’ identities as amateur artists. To explain this phenomenon, this article examines Jane Eyre (Franco Zeffirelli, 1996), Jane Eyre (ITV/A&E, 1997), Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006), and Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga, 2011). It proposes that these productions contribute to the evolution of Brontë’s authorial mythology by heightening their heroines’ similarities with the writer, another amateur artist. In so doing, these adaptations benefit from the reputations of Brontë and her work as rebelliously feminist. Nevertheless, these women artists’ rebellions are distinctly postfeminist. To demonstrate its argument, the article contextualizes contemporary Jane Eyre adaptations within their postfeminist cultural landscape. Postfeminism, however, is a contested term. Hence, this analysis participates in broader debates that interrogate postfeminism as a concept and its persistent fascination with nineteenth-century creative women. Through comparisons of the adaptations, this article will delineate the development of the woman artist trope to reveal how postfeminist conceptualizations of women’s creativity have shifted since the 1990s. In particular, the woman artist displays an increased desire to ‘return home’. Such retreatist narratives exploit but also obscure the fact that Brontë has long signified the perceived tension between traditional, highly domestic female gender roles and women’s creativity. As such, these postfeminist adaptations have a shaping effect on the myths that continue to circulate about Brontë’s feminism and authorship.

A New Opera House

The commission that was one of the greatest tributes to Barber’s career turned out to be his nemesis. Antony and Cleopatra, written for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York, was handicapped by the inflated Franco Zeffirelli production, with its problematic paraphernalia, including camels and goats and a malfunctioning pyramid, which eclipsed serious evaluation of the music. This chapter narrates how the opera based on Barber’s favorite Shakespeare play came to life, how he handpicked the major characters ̶—Leontyne Price for Cleopatra and Justino Díaz for Antony ̶—and how these artists devoted themselves to the literature and history of their roles. Although Barber’s work here was no less brilliant, the critics felt that the failure of the opera was due to overproduction, with an infusion of mechanical and technical failures. After the premiere, Barber boarded the SS Constitution for Europe. Over the next decade, he devoted his energies intermittently toward a revision of the opera in collaboration with Menotti. In 1975, four performances of the more intimate version with increased lyric meditation were presented at the Juilliard School. Critical reviews of a production at the Spoleto Festival in Italy after Barber died gave much attention to the musical strengths of the opera, with uniform appreciation of Barber as a master of orchestra and choral writing. Performances followed in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia.

tragedy tailored to the spirit of the times – Romeo and Juliet as interpreted by Franco Zeffirelli and Baz Luhrmann

This article discusses two film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, i.e. one directed by Franco Zeffirelli and the other by Baz Luhrmann. It covers the following aspects: the structure of both the drama and its two film adaptations, the characters’ creation, the choice of setting and screen time, and the function of tragedy. Shakespeare’s language is characterised by unparalleled wit and powers of observation, and the final form of his plays is a clear indication of his ambivalent attitude towards tradition and the rigid structure of the drama. By breaking with convention, favouring an episodic structure, and blending tragedy with comedy, Shakespeare always takes risks, in a similar vain to the two directors who decided to make film adaptations based on his plays. Each technical device the adaptors selected could have turned out to be a wonderful novelty or a total disaster. The strength of both Zeffirelli’s and Luhrman’s adaptations is their emphasis on love and youth, which thanks to their directorial skill is perfectly in tune with the spirit of their respective times.

Duch Hamleta na szklanym ekranie

Każda ekranizacja, adaptacja filmowa lub wystawienie na scenie zawiera w sobie elementy interpretacji dzieła literackiego i determinuje określony sposób jego odczytania. Artykuł prezentuje to na przykładzie ekranizacji i adaptacji Hamleta Szekspira. W tekście przywołano dzieła filmowe takich twórców jak Laurence Olivier, Alan Dent, Akira Kurosawa, John Gielgud, Bill Colleran, Grigori Kozincew i Franco Zeffirelli. Ze szczególną uwagą omówiona została postać ojca Hamleta, różnorodnie przedstawiania w kolejnych ekranizacjach szekspirowskiego dramatu.

Ontological Shivers

This essay explores major movements in film history through the lens of Romeo and Juliet adaptations, including films by Irving Thalberg and George Cukor, Renato Castellani, Franco Zeffirelli, Baz Luhrmann, and Deepa Mehta. More specifically, the essay offers a critical examination of theoretical developments in the notion of realism—including classical realism, neorealism, realismo rosa, and post-realism.

Hamlet

Film adaptations of Hamlet have tended to fall into two broad categories, psychological character studies of Hamlet that emphasize Oedipal dynamics, and political readings that portray the prince as a rebellious crusader against various forms of systemic sociopolitical corruption. Of the former group, Laurence Olivier’s 1947 Hamlet has been particularly influential, casting a long shadow across film versions by John Gielgud (1964), Tony Richardson (1969), and Franco Zeffirelli (1990). Notable examples of political screen adaptations include the versions by Akira Kurosawa (The Bad Sleep Well, 1960), Gyorgi Kozintsev (1964), Kenneth Branagh (1996), and Michael Almereyda (2000). This article surveys the history and characteristics of these two styles of adapting Hamlet to the screen, focusing on how specific films have reshaped Shakespeare’s play to respond to specific historical and cultural contexts, to the demands of film as a medium, and to previous film adaptations of the tragedy.

Hamlet e a hermenêutica: Das muitas interpretações da triste estória do príncipe da Dinamarca

Analisa-se aqui quatro adaptações de Hamlet, de William Shakespeare, para o cinema: Laurence Olivier (1948); Franco Zeffirelli (1990); Kenneth Branagh (1996) e Michael Almereyda (2000). E se discutem as relações da narrativa com a psicanálise e com a hermenêutica.