I found this film listed in a bibliography somewhere, and I managed to convince my library to purchase it.
George Haggerty's avant-garde film is something of a visualization of Jorge Luis Borges' short story "Everything and Nothing" (for which, q.v.). The narration of the film is from Borges' brief, poetical, biographical sketch of Shakespeare's life. It ends with a suddenly-disenchanted Shakespeare giving up acting and writing and retiring—yet, even in retirement, he is unable not to play a part.
Haggerty's envisioning of Borges' idea can be found in its title: "Hamburger" stands for pop culture, commercial enterprise (the literal marketing campaigns of the 1970s), and low-brow entertainment; "Hamlet" stands for high art, pretentious culture, and even (I imagine) avant-garde films like Hamburger Hamlet.
The plot seems to take us through a day in the life of a modern Shakespeare. We follow an actor (who is made to look roughly like various portraits of Shakespeare) as he watched TV, goes grocery shopping, and puts on a production of Hamlet in which he plays Hamlet. But we only see him in the dressing room between scenes.
I've extracted a bit from the film to give you an idea of how Haggerty works with his source material:
I'm very fond of how, Tom Stoppard–like, we see the part of a production of Hamlet we don't ordinarily see. I also like the wind-up skull and how that image of the departed Yorick becomes replicated and duplicated in the cars on an LA freeway—especially the VW Beetles of that era, which look remarkably like wind-up Yorick skulls. And I appreciate the way Borges' words are overwritten by 1970s advertisements.
Links: The Film at IMDB.
Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).
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