Cowboy Junkies. "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." The Trinity Session. Compact Disc. Latent Recordings, 1988.
I'm still fascinated by silent Shakespeares, and I was thrilled when I found that the first feature-length silent Hamlet became available.
"Feature length," for early silent films, means approaching one hour.
Imagine trying to convey the depth and breadth of one of Shakespeare's masterpieces in less than an hour and without any complete speeches! Such a production, which must depend on prior knowledge of the play, could easily become not much more than the CliffsNotes version of the play. I had a Shakespeare professor who was fond of talking about a five-minute silent film version of Hamlet. He used the anecdote to illustrate what Horatio's account of the events of the play must have been like:
So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on my cunning and [forc'd] cause,
And in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on th' inventors' heads: all this can I
Truly deliver. (V.ii.380–86)
A five-minute silent Hamlet, he argued, might not even do as much as that.
The 1913 Hay Plumb Hamlet does significantly more, but, I think, only for those who have more than a passing familiarity with the play. The title cards, for example, mainly start us off with the first line or two of a scene or a soliloquy and leave the audience to run with it.
Still, even with that limitation, it's a powerful adaptation of the play. It opens with brief portrayals of Hamlet and Ophelia, each with what might be considered a representative line, and then it throws us in to the world of the play.
Taking those two brief, almost dumb-showesque scenes as my cue, I've put together a (roughly) five-minute sampling of the film. Note: The film itself is widely available on the internet, but none of the versions I've seen have supplied any soundtrack. I've rectified this with a song by the Cowboy Junkies (I happened to be listening to it while editing the clip, and it happened to be just the right length—and also to fit the melancholy mood of the play.
Links: The Film at IMDB. The Film on the BFI Player (for those in the UK).
That should give you a sense of the film and its approach to the Hamlet / Ophelia relationship.
I'm particularly fond of the most famous speech in Shakespeare boiled down to a one-line title card. But, in this setting at least, that's enough.
And we learn (via title card) that "Hamlet discovers the King behind the curtain"—without any mention of Polonius. That emphasis means that we don't get a "Where's your father?" title card . . . and that we just jump straight to "Get thee to a nunnery."
The film is worth watching in its entirety. Indeed, I'm working on ways to bring it in to my current Shakespeare and Film course!
Links: The Film at IMDB. The Film on the BFI Player (for those in the UK).
Bonus Image: The Best-Known Title Card from the Play:
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