Search

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.

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

Citation only. For access to this book, view the book at USF LIBRARY-St. Petersburg Circulating Collection -- PR3093.R44 2002, check it out through your local library, request it on interlibrary loan, or order it through a book dealer.