Film Versions of King Lear

The television production of King Lear adapted by and starring Laurence Olivier is accurately described as straightforward in its style of treatment of the text. The production as a whole is set in pre-Christian Britain, which is consistent with the fact that, according to Rowse, the Lear story was familiar to Elizabethans from Holinshed's account of ancient British history and legend (Rowse 338). The use of Stonehenge like pillars and rustic wood as structural elements, together with wilderness exterior settings, is consistent not only with the period of the play but also with a sense of legend and the vastness and bleak purity of nature. In turn, all these features contribute to the sense that the play concerns questions and themes that have universal significance, consistent with Aristotle's idea that tragedy requires "some amplitude" (39).

The focus of the British production is very much on the transformation of Shakespeare's protagonist, Lear. The critical reception of Olivier's performance indicates the verisimilitude of the change in the character's fortune and his attainment of tragic stature commensurate with the pattern of ideas in the play. One review cites Olivier's performance

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y integrate himself. Yet his is a special case, since what interest him most is creating a complex melange of styles: at the moment one of his films approaches the fictional, he quickly makes an about-face toward the documentary, once arrived there only to rush off again in still another direction. Nevertheless there is great logic in his career. Just look at his criticism in cahiers: from the start one senses a disdain for complete fiction, coupled with an admiration for those films in which the plot is destroyed in the making. However his own personality is so strong that he never need question what he does: he does it, and it becomes right (Truffaut 372) King Lear cannot be classified as a New Wave film, but it does illustrate Godard's unconventionality, complex melange of styles, and disdain for fictional narrative. To say that the style of production is cinematic is in one sense to imply that Godard presents King Lear with certain kinds of camera angles and (perhaps) a post-modern, idiosyncratic vision of the play's meaning. But, Truffaut to the contrary notwithstanding, idiosyncrasy is not its own justification, and the weight of evidence in Godard's King Lear is on the side of the view that the film not only has not
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3367
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

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