Zbornik Radova Akademije Umetnosti (Jan 2017)
Olivier's 'Essay on Hamlet'
Abstract
Laurence Olivier's Hamlet is more a renaissance character, a melancholic and a daydreamer, than a man of action, unlike his Henry V and Richard III film adaptations. However, it seems that Olivier showed outstanding courage not in his extremely liberal approach to interpreting this Shakespeare's tragedy, but in literal application of Freud's model on his inner problems, seen through the prism of the professor Ernest Johnson. Transposing Shakespeare's original text, starting with its global features, he abstracts numerous and diversified eventful and associative moments which might burden the polyphonic structure of his own - film story. Moreover, Olivier wants to avoid its dramatic deconstruction and focuses the viewer's attention to the climactic moments. However, dramatically the strongest and most effective scenes in his film adaptation of Hamlet are the ones related to the use of camera, that is to say, its movement and analyticity. The intention was to point not only to the ostentatious difference between cinematographic and theatrical stylisation, but, to a certain extent, he defines the viewer's standpoint. In his 'essay on Hamlet', Olivier does not consider chronology, that is to say, the problem of temporal relations. The visual structure of the film and its dynamics are determined a priori by the rhythmic parameters of the Elsinore's labyrinthic space.
