Sunday, August 17, 2008

Back to the Silent Tempest

The Tempest. Silent Shakespeare. Dir. Percy Stow. Perf. Unknown. 1908. DVD. Image Entertainment, 2000.
I managed to take another look at the silent version of The Tempest that I had mentioned earlier.  Spinster Aunt's list of silent movies for people who [think that they] don't like silent movies contained no Shakespeare films—scandalous!—and I wanted to recommend one.

I actually recommended a 1920 silent German version of Hamlet (more on that later), but I've been thinking that I should have mentioned this again.  Thinking back on it, I thought it was about thirty minutes long.  It's actually only twelve or thirteen.  They managed to put so much in in such a short amount of time!

Naturally, as Spinster Aunt remarks, the language of Shakespeare is, for the most part, lost in a silent film . . . but that's part of what makes these films so remarkable as films.

Anyway, more on all that later.  I keep having to remind myself that this is a MicroBlog and that my posts should be shorter.

p.s.  And it also has fabulous title cards.  Look at that color in "The dicsovery of Caliban" above!  Wow!
Click below to purchase the fabulous collection of silent films from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

 —The Tempest