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After analysing the debates on the move towards digitalisation in the cinema, this article explores how Julie Taymor’s The Tempest frames digital modalities in negative terms by conflating their power to disembody with the will to de-humanise. Based on the subtle but persistent ways in which Taymor’s Shakespeare films deflect gender precarity onto race, the article argues that The Tempest ultimately encodes Taymor’s own precarity as an industry outsider and female director and becomes an elegy for the analogue production of ‘the human’.

In her pioneering 1973 essay “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema,” filmmaker and theorist Claire Johnston argued thatwomen directorsmust dismantle the structures of domination associated with male bourgeois cinema before a women’s “counter-cinema” can emerge. This project is especially challenging for women directors of Shakespeare films—a genre which, historically, hasbeen almost the exclusive preserve of men. Deepa Mehta’s Water, a loose adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, approaches film as a medium for Foucauldian counter-memory, using Shakespeare’s play to critique the obscene paternalism of Hindu nationalism and to bring to light the repressed histories of India’s enormous widow population—a female underclass that has been silenced for more than two thousand years by religious fundamentalism, State-sanctioned gender oppression, and systemicsexual abuse. Featuringa love story between Narayan, a member of the elite Brahman caste and a passionate disciple of Ghandi, andKalyani, the beautiful young widow condemned to live out her days in an ashram, or widows’ home, as a pariah and sex slave, Waterdocuments a global tragedy, seducing the viewer into a dream of India’s nascent independence even as it exposes the extent to which fantasies of nationhood are dependent for their inscription on the female body-in-pain. Indeed, although Kalyani escapes her confines to elope with Narayan, she soon returns to the ashram where she drowns herself in shame. Uncompromising and unapologetic, Water is the work of a feminist auteur—a concept that entails redefining film authorship as direct political engagement; whether the term “auteur” is appropriate or even desirable in the context of a women’s counter-cinema is the subject of my conclusion.

In casting a female Prospero, as Andrew James Hartley observes, the actress herself experiences "an escape from patriarchy" only to engage in "a study of oppression," as she is forced "to sympathize with the oppressed while being powerless (for the bulk of the play) to escape her own tyranny." (134). In Julie Taymor's film adaptation of The Tempest (2010), this dynamic between tyranny and oppression is a reflection of Prospera's status as a montage effect of the two figures from whom she derives her authority: Prospero, her Shakespearean namesake, and Sycorax, the disinherited female ruler who, like Prospera, was banished to the island based on accusations of witchcraft. Radical montage, first theorized by Sergei Eisenstein and the Russian Constructivists, revolves around collision rather than continuity; it is the process whereby the clash of two discrete frames produces a dramatically new concept-not a synthesis so much as a third term that cannot be reduced to its component parts. Whereas continuity montage is always potentially co-optable by totalizing schemes, collision-based montage is intended "to make manifest the contradictions of Being" (Eisenstein 46)—a process that Walter Benjamin would later term "the politicization of the aesthetic." Replacing Benjamin's concept of "the age of mechanical reproduction," W. J. T. Mitchell characterizes the Twenty First century as the age of "biocybernetic reproduction." In Taymor's film, I shall argue, Prospera's unique heritage "reproduces" her as the site of a biocybernetic struggle. White, Western, imperializing, and male, Prospero is the quintessential Shakespearean patriarch and a figure whose magic we might think of as cybernetic—operationalized through C3 I—the military paradigm known as command-control-communication-intelligence. Within this system, Ariel plays a crucial role as the literal interface between Prospero and his enemies. Sycorax, by contrast, is the profoundly "not-Shakespearean" matriarch who bequeaths to Prospera an ability to subdue the natural world, or bios , along with a keen awareness of her own place in the hierarchy as an oppressed female subject. Caliban, Sycorax's son and the island's only native, holds the key to Prospera's delicate navigation of this colonial paradigm. Whereas Caliban functions as Prospera's limbs by hauling firewood and performing other "offices that serve" the maintenance of her authority (1.2.313), Ariel functions as the sinews of her mind, purveying her thoughts to their material execution. Together, they collide to reinvent Prospera as a montage effect that epitomizes a distinctly posthuman and, indeed, biocybernetic "concept of agency . . . where actors fit oddly, at best, into previous taxa of the human, the natural, or the constructed" (Haraway 21). Ultimately, in Taymor's film, Ariel becomes more monstrous while Caliban becomes more human, as Prospera must come to identify, in the end, more with "this thing of darkness" than with her "diligent spirit." In so doing, Taymor's Tempest dramatizes the "contradictions of Being" female in the Twenty-First-Century.

A reflection of the post-secular turn, Jacques Derrida’s late writings assay the relationship between religion and responsibility seeking to explain their mutual accountability while also exploring their irreducible differences. Curiously, he contends, both religion and responsibility are ‘built upon the heritage and patrimony of secrecy’ (2008a, p. 9, emphasis in original). As an example, Derrida poses the archetypal enigma of the Abrahamic covenant: God promises Abraham that a great nation will spring from Isaac’s seed, only to insist that Abraham sacrifice his firstborn son as an exercise of his responsibility toward God. The secrecy surrounding this strange compact recurs, of course, in the mysterium tremendum — the unknowable ethical imperative encrypted in God’s ‘gift’ of his own son. Derrida also engages the patrimony of secrecy as it pertains to the mystery of Christian hospitality. In the foundational stories of Lot and the Levite, for instance, the respective hosts solve the riddle posed by the strangers at their gates by offering their daughters to the rapacious men of the city, rather than allowing sexual ‘outrages’ to be committed against their unexpected male guests. In the end, both fathers, like Abraham, do not have to sacrifice their children, as the ethic of responsibility is superseded by a literal deus ex machina effect whereby that which is sacrificed is, in fact, mysteriously retained — a ‘miracle’ attributed to the inscrutable workings of God’s grace.

Four the Theaters, hundred a years markedly after similar the curious phenomenon skirmish has known taken as hold the War of the of the Th aters, a markedly si ilar phenom non has taken hold of t cinema, emerging in films that purport to represent the Renaissance and, particularly, its bankside beacon, Shakespeare. Revolving around a fundamental division, as Richard Helgerson has persuasively argued, between a "players' theater" and an "authors' theater," the war was really a bid for social preferment and economic survival in a culture making an uneven transition from patronage to market forces.1 On one side, the proponents of the authors' theater strove to distinguish the singularity of their poetry from its debased embodiment on stage, catering to a privileged clientele through learned plays performed by elite children's companies, whose combined objective was to disparage the unsophisticated audiences and common players associated with the public amphitheaters. On the other side, the players' theater remained the "caviar" of "the general."2 Refusing the lure of more privatized venues such as Blackfriars and St. Paul's, as well as the social division of labor between players and "authors" which, for figures like Shakespeare, proved a paradox, advocates of the players' theater continued to rely on collaborative authorship, adult actors, and popular themes for their plays but not without leaving scathing rejoinders in their wake.3 Nevertheless, what distinguished the war as a bizarre interlude in the English theater's ongoing struggle for respectability was the way in which children came to mediate this debate. As the most

V Hollywood:' asserted Time magazine in its 1998 cover story about the future of the feminist movement.1 Less controversial is that in the past ten years Shakespeare, too, has "gone Hollywood," garnering an unprecedented amount of airtime as a screen sensation. What I wish to explore here is the extent to which Shakespeare's rise in Hollywood and feminism's alleged retreat to Hollywood are related, focusing on the distinctly cinematic backlash against women in recent Renaissance-period films and Shakespeare adaptations featuring transgressive female characters. Period films such as Elizabeth (dir. Shekar Kapur, 1998) and Dangerous Beauty (dir. Michael Herskovitz, 1998) and Shakespeare adaptations and spinoffs such as William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (dir. Michael Hoffman, 1999) and Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998) purport to dramatize striking exceptions to Renaissance rules of gender decorum, presenting us with heroines who succeed as politicians, poets, and even players. However, the kaleidoscopic view of female subjectivity purveyed by these films is eclipsed by their more powerful fetishization of sex-the power to deny or to enjoy it-as the heroine's only legitimate means of career advancement. Thus, while seeming to offer an array of politically-enabling identifications for the spectator, these films reduce their female characters to so many layers of easily removed clothing and invest their costume dramas with the imprimatur of History or, worse, Shakespeare. By contrast, Artemisia (dir. Agnes Merlet, 1997) and Titus (dir. Julie Taymor, 2000), two tragedies directed by women, resonate as inspiring if ironic exceptions to these antifeminist appropriations of the life, times, or works of William Shakespeare, subscribing to a politics of representation that explores the possible futures envisioned by cyborg feminism.

Somewhere I had made a wrong turn, and I was no longer headed to Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in La Grange, Kentucky. Instead, I found myself lost in the middle of a Louisville ghetto, its unremarkable geography interrupted only by a Liquor Depot and a funeral home with a giant “Going out of business” sign. I remember thinking about the irony of the funeral home’s bankruptcy in a place that reeked of death. Marred by extreme poverty, obesity, truancy and, most of all, violent crime, this side of Louisville—the proverbial “wrong side”—was the childhood home of many of the prisoners I would interview later that day.

V Vfilm version of Romeo and Juliet, which claims to be not merely an adaptation of this legendary story of star-crossed lovers but rather the thing itself-an authorial gambit announced in the film's title: William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet.2 Not surprisingly, given the seemingly un-Shakespearean appearance of the film, most reviewers have labeled Luhrmann's Shakespearean aspirations audacious."William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet is deceptively titled,"' writes one reviewer, "because it is really Baz Luhrmann's Romeo & Juliet."3 Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers observes

This article considers whether film adaptations of Middleton's plays are really that much different from their Shakespearian counterparts. Is there something genuinely new occurring in these adaptations? The answer is an unqualified ‘yes’. It is shown that while Middleton adaptations tend to reinforce the reductive equation of the Jacobean period with ‘decadence’, brought about by ‘material comfort, political stability and undue deference to the monarch’, the adaptations examined do not misread the present. These films venture into critiques of the neo-noir universe of late capitalism where Shakespeare films fear to tread. Generating provocative, if not highly disturbing, variations on the noir themes of the obscene father and the femme fatale, film adaptations of Middleton linger on the cusp – or, indeed, in the middle – of an uncertain heritage, caught somewhere between the historical reflex of misogyny and a more radical critique of the collective, totemic paternalism of our own ‘contemporary Jacobean’ culture.

Shekhar Kapur’s sequel to his highly acclaimed film Elizabeth: The Virgin Queen (1998), aptly titled Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), is, from its opening credit sequence, visibly scarred by the nine years separating it from its predecessor. Though the former is a classic period film, based on inquiry into and intrigue over Elizabeth’s personal life and political ambitions, The Golden Age is irrevocably steeped in the ontological crises that characterize the post-9/11 world: specifically, the rise of religious fundamentalism, the place of unlawful detainment and torture in an ostensibly enlightened society, and the imperative to restrain leaders who claim to have “God” on their side. But at least at first glance, Kapur’s film is not a straightforward allegory of “us” versus “them,” freedom versus fundamentalism, Christian (Protestant) versus Muslim (Catholic) “other.” Quite the contrary, Elizabeth: The Golden Age represents the “bad guy"—Philip II—as a megalomaniac whose Armada plot clearly invokes the Powell Doctrine of “Overwhelming Force,” whereas the “good guys”—the moderate, English Protestants—maintain suspected “enemy combatants” in obscene, Camp X-Ray-style conditions while reveling in truly medieval forms of torture. Indeed, the singular irony of this period film is the fact that no matter how far back Kapur’s lens stretches in search of the glory of the “Golden Age,” the camera consistently represents only competing cadres of evildoers who patently reject Renaissance humanism’s insistence on the dignity of man.

It’s the desert at sunrise, and the only narrative is the howling wind. White cars come and go; white soldiers and white MPs dot the landscape of Twentynine Palms Military Base. The whiteness of this Mojave Desert outpost and its pale, tattoo-dappled occupants is ruptured only by shots of a bloody female body stuffed into the back of a car. These shots are, in turn, interspersed with glimpses of another woman; naked, her white skin is made all the whiter by an unidentifiable powdery substance that covers her body as she sits in the middle of a thick jungle, writing on her arm with a stick. The film is Nina Menkes’s The Bloody Child: An Interior of Violence, the title of which obliquely invokes Macbeth, a play that is referenced directly in the film’s intermittent repetitions of the witches’film—like Macbeth lines, which are intoned from an offscreen space in a distinctly non-narrative fashion. But for all its stunning, stark white imagery and its masculinist military setting, Menkes’s film—like Macbeth’s own fearful summons of the dark, desperately disavowed “woman-within” every man of woman born—is very much about the intersection of blackness and femininity. Rather than externalizing this conjunction of blackness and femininity into the “weird” or “weyward” sisters (aptly described as Shakespeare’s “black and midnight hags”), Menkes’s spin-off pushes the viewer toward this connection through a series of mind-bending montage effects that force the spectator into an encounter with the “interior of violence,” a phrase that, in addition to providing Menkes with her subtitle, also refers to the post-traumatic stress that is acted out by the Gulf War veterans featured in the film.

Self-help’s popularization by late capitalism acknowledges the extent to which our relationships can be mediated through commodities, yet overstates its potential to mediate satisfactorily our sense of our “inner” selves. But to what extent were the mechanisms of self-help already in place within the emergent capitalism of early modern culture?1 According to the entertaining speculations of the 1998 Academy Award winning film, Shakespeare in Love, even Will Shakespeare sought the help of an apothecary-therapist to help him access the “poet of true love” that lay dormant within his emasculated body.2 Nevertheless, the character most in need of therapy in this film is not Shakespeare but one of his fellow playwrights, John Webster, the vagrant boy who hangs around the playhouse, tortures mice, witnesses forbidden sexual trysts, and revels in bloody endings, as he explains in response to the Queen’s inquiry as to whether or not he enjoyed Will’s production of Romeo and Juliet: “I liked it when she stabbed herself, your majesty.” What we know of the real John Webster does little to mitigate this image of the disturbed pre-teen projected by Shakespeare in Love, for Webster’s dedicatory prefaces to readers and patrons are rife with images of self-deprecatory language and negativity. In his preface to The White Devil, for instance, Webster offers the following caveat: “If it be objected this is no true dramatic poem, I shall easily confess it; non potes in nugas dicere plura meas: ipse ego quam dixi” (In. 15–16), which translates as, “you cannot say more against these trifles of mine than I have said myself.” Elsewhere, the brooding, melancholy tragedian envisions as grim a scenario as his own death, likening the pages of his book to “winding sheets,” or shrouds (Duchess In. 19), in a gesture of literal self-abnegation.

Disrupting the cinematic narrative of Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, is a nightmare sequence in which the newly crowned empress, Tamora, stands face-to-face with her enemy, Titus. Images of dismembered limbs engulfed in flames appear in the background, sailing forward, until they inundate the screen behind the characters’ silhouetted profiles.1 Invoking the murders of Tamora’s eldest son Alarbus and Titus’s youngest son Mutius, the flying, burning body parts symbolize the powerfulness, unpleasantness, and mysteriousness of the creative process, harkening back, via homage to the horror of Seneca, to the ritualistic, religious roots of theater in the Greek festival of Dionysus. In Titus, especially in such magnificent scenes as this, Taymor combines a slew of culturally rich metaphors, in effect demonstrating what transversal theory calls “investigative-expansive wherewithal” and the “principle of translucency.” (See photo 9.1.)

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