Still in Movement: Shakespeare on Screen

In Still in Movement, Buchman explores the ways in which Shakespeare's plays function as products of cinematic technique and the ways in which the films organize the material of the drama to activate a particular imaginative response. To that end, he focuses on key moments in the films of Laurence Olivier (Henry V, Hamlet, and Richard III), Orson Welles (Macbeth, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight), Grigory Kozintav (Hamlet and King Lear), Roman Polanski (Macbeth) and Peter Brook (King Lear). He examines how these films clarify the process according to spatial and temporal structures of the medium. Buchman's approach is unique in the area of Shakespeare on film; he covers specific topics and addresses questions pertinent to those topics not through individual essays on any one film, play, or filmmaker, but through a comparative treatment of key sequences from a number of different films.