This book explores how Bakhtins ideas can illuminate the compelling but uneasy fusion of Shakespeare and cinema. With a wide variety of tones, languages, cultural orientations, and thematic concerns, film directors have updated, translated, transposed, fragmented, parodied, and geographically re-situated Shakespeare. Keith Harrison illustrates how Bakhtins interlinked writings in various fields can fruitfully be applied to an understanding of how the ongoing responsiveness of filmmakers to Shakespeares historically remote words can shape self-expressive acts of co-authoring in another medium. Through the use of such Bakhtinian concepts as the chronotope, heteroglossia, the carnivalesque, and polyphony, Harrison details how filmmakersfaithful to their specific cultures, genders, geographies, and historical momentsdialogically locate their particularity through Shakespeares presence.
1. William Shakespeare and Mikhail Bakhtin: Filming Dialogically
2. Chronotopes and Categories of Shakespeare-inflected Films
3. Chronotopic Images and Cinematic Dialogism with Shakespeare
4. Kurosawa, Kozintsev, Kaurism?ki, and Almereyda: Hamlet and Transnational Dialogism
5. Withnail and I: The Ghost of Shakespeare
6. Bakhtinian Polyphony in Godards King Lear
7. Shakespeare Shaping in Dogme95 Films, and Bakhtins Theory of Tragedy
8. Scotland, PA: Parody, Nostalgia, Irony, and Menippean Satire
9. Romeo and Juliet, Polyglossia, and the Romantic Politics of Deepa Mehtas Water
10. Unfinalizability and Cinematic Shakespeare
Keith Harrison is Academic Emeritus of English and Creative Writing & Journalism at Vancouver Island Univlóè