Sammendrag
Hamlet (1604), the longest of Shakespeare’s plays, was the subject of at least thirteen silent films that could make little use of its bounty of words. Among these, Svend Gade’s 1921 Hamlet, starring Asta Nielsen, was unique on several levels, but none more so than its unusual premise that Prince Hamlet was born a woman who secretly lived as a man to protect the throne of Denmark. The film includes almost none of the play’s familiar language in intertitles, nor even the visual icon of Hamlet holding a skull, two elements one would expect a silent Hamlet required. Yet perhaps no other film adaptation captures the play’s thematic ambition as masterfully by visualizing it through the same interrogation of light and dark that the original play realizes through words. In this paper, I explore the film’s chiaroscuro in scenes that illustrate Gade’s strategic balance of light and shadow, the silent film’s greatest tool. I will demonstrate that Hamlet’s regendering allowed Gade to gender ambition through a shift of that ambition from Claudius to Gertrude and the new woman in the play, Hamlet. Her troublesome presence produces a visual contrast that illustrates the film’s perceptive interrogation of gender and ambition by locating the play’s two original women, Gertrude and Ophelia at two ends of a visual spectrum.
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