Tuesday, October 29, 2013

New Silent King John Film

King John. Dir. Michael Merriam. Perf. John Glosser, Carolyn Bishop, Hugo Martin, Gabriel Kalomas, Tyler Heathman, and James Younis. 2013. Vimeo.
Shakespeare and Film aficionados often nerdily quiz people on what the very first Shakespeare film was. The answer is King John (for which, q.v.). And the qualifiers are (1) that it's just the deathbed scene, and (2) that it's about seventy-six seconds long.

That's one reason I was really fascinated to hear from Michael Merriam, the director of a new silent film version of King John—or, to be more specific, of its first scene. Aesthetically, it's enormously pleasing. And as a nostalgic connection to the first King John film ever made, it's peerless. Observe and enjoy:

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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.

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 —The Tempest