Grigori Kozintsev's Hamlet
by Grigori Kozintsev
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Anastasiya Vertinskaya, Elze Radzinya, Innokenti Smoktunovsky, Mikhail Nazvanov, Yuri TolubeyevDirector: Grigori Kozintsev
Brand: FACETS HOME VIDEO
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: Russian (Original Language), Unknown; English (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 140 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-10-31
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Facets
Product features:
- Stunning locations and music highlight Grigori Kozintsev's spare, haunting adaptation of the Bard'sic, based on a translation by novelist Boris Pasternak. Stars Innokenti Smoktunovsky as Hamlet. In Russian with English subtitles. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre:?FOREIGN Rating:?NR Age:?736899090425 UPC:?736899090425 Manufacturer No:?DV86928
Movie Reviews of Grigori Kozintsev's Hamlet
Movie Review: Visually, the best Hamlet on film
Summary: 5 Stars
I agree with the gist of the other five-star reviews here, so I'll point out two criticisms.
First, after having watched Shakespeare in a foreign language, it has become apparent to me that one of Shakespeare's greatest qualities is his language, which inevitably becomes lost in translation. Yes, the superb characterization, the masterly wrought plot, the emotional cadences--all that and more are still there. But some (perhaps most) of the poetry fails to comes through. When listening to some of Shakespeare's beautiful lines, I sometimes find my eyes welling up. But that does not happen when I watch him in a foreign language.
Second, as for this particular film, the subtitles were poor. I can't quite figure out what happened, but it seems to me that there must have been more than one translator working on this project, because the quality vacillated during the film. As one example, most of the film had subtitles using the standard English "he" for the third person pronoun. But at some later point the subtitles switched to "a", Shakespeare's usual usage. Why the switch? But worse than that, whole lines of dialogue were regularly dropped. I found myself trying to fill in missing lines from memory and then losing the thread of the continuing dialogue. The screen play was written by Boris Pasternak. Sometimes, the translators seemed to be using Shakespeare's original text for the subtitles, but at other times, the translators seemed to doing a straight translation of Pasternak's screenplay. I wish they had stuck with just using Shakespeare's original text. Often lines of dialogue had a noticeably different form from Shakespeare's original, and the differences were jarring at times (at least for someone intimately familiar with the play.) I hate to harp on something that should be trivial like subtitles. But this otherwise superb film would be vastly improved with better subtitles.
Summary of Grigori Kozintsev's Hamlet
Considered by many the finest screen adaptation of Shakespeare's greatest work, Grigori Kozintsev's HAMLET is a spare, haunting interpretation based on a translation by novelist Boris Pasternak. The malevolence afoot in the state of Denmark is magnificently captured by the foreboding black and white cinematography and the dark, dramatic score by composer Dmitri Shostakovich. In addition, acclaimed Russian actors Innokenti Smoktunovsky and Anastasia Vertinskaya offer stellar, award-winning performances. Kozintsev, a peer of Eisenstein's who worked well into the 1960s, was a master of cinematic technique who finally achieved recognition at the end of his career for his stunning interpretations of Shakespeare. Leading film historian Richard Dyer wrote in the Boston Globe: "Paradoxically, the two most powerful films of Shakespeare plays [HAMLET and KING LEAR] were made not in Great Britain but in the Soviet Union."Art House & International DVD Video
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