Shakespeare in Citation on the Screen: Shakespearean Fragments in Żóƚty szalik (Yellow Scarf, 2000) and The Pianist (2002)
This paper examines two postmillennial films with a fragmentary Shakespearean presence that also share a strong connection with East-Central Europe: the Polish television film Żóƚty szalik (Yellow Scarf, 2000) referencing Hamlet and the international biopic of a Polish-Jewish musician, The Pianist (2002), alluding to The Merchant of Venice. The latter is a big-budget film for global consumption – the work of a “cultural traveller” auteur (Mazierska 2007) –, the former is the product of a ‘small cinema’ (Giukin et al. 2014) – or rather small television culture – with relatively limited presence in global circulation. A “resistance and defiance film” (Kerner 2011: 9; 59-78) within the broader Holocaust genre, the latter demonstrates that Shakespeare “has a knack of showing up at fateful historical moments” (Gross xii), whereas the former may be seen to construct that very missing Christmas tale of Shakespeare that Max Beerbohm’s “Shakespeare and Christmas” published in A Christmas Garland (1912) playfully laments not having.
Rather than being merely scattered examples of the near-omnipresence of Shakespeare in East-Central Europe and some contemporizing tendencies in the practice of Shakespearean appropriation, viewed together these screen productions re-emphasise not only the significance of but the breadth of East-Central European recourse to Shakespeare.
Márta Minier is Associate Professor of Theatre and Media Drama at the University of South Wales in Cardiff. Her research interests include Shakespeare (Shakespeare reception in particular), adaptation, translation, dramaturgy, the culture of East-Central Europe, and the biopic and biographical drama. Her most recent publication is the co-edited volume Hamlet Tanslations: Prisms of Cultural Encounters Across the Globe (2021, Legenda). Earlier publications include the co-edited Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic (2014, Ashgate) and Shakespeare and Tourism: Place, Memory, Participation (2019, E.S.I.) as well as Shakespearean special issues for New Readings (2012) and Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance (2017). Márta has also served as guest co-editor for a special issue of Textus: English Studies in Italy on ‘Performing Narrative across Media’ (2018). She is joint editor of the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance.
For Zoom link, please email: pikli.natalia@btk.elte.hu
Vélemény, hozzászólás?