Tuning Out
Feb. 11th, 2008 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
itsallovernowFor the record, it's 72 degrees in Los Angeles, bright, beautiful and sunny. And the Gas Company is coming out today to fix our heat. Oh yeah, that irony, it is tasty!
Post-modern Hamlet (The Wooster Group's Hamlet, to be specific) was very cool - sort of karaoke Shakespeare meets the meta of reconstruction - a reverse transformation of film to play complete with sound effects and twitchy reels and blips on the film. (The took a filmed version of the John Gielgud/Richard Burton 1962 production of the play, and sort of... faded out the actors and then recreated it exactly - down to the blips on the film, the staggers and flickers and motions with the sets on stage moving around like a camera pan).
It's actually a really interesting time for this sort of reinterpretation of text and textuality, and compares, I think favorably to much of what we do with a text - deconstructing it, reinterpreting it, re-establishing it and then putting it forth as a separate product.
The perk of doing it with Hamlet is that if your audience is familiar with the text (the literal text), they don't need to pay attention to the words ( and in the case of this Hamlet, the words are secondary, they exist because they existed on screen, they aren't directed toward each other). I can't imagine what anyone who DOESN'T know the play thought of this production, cool mulit-media effects notwithstanding, because the highs and lows of the story were totally secondary to the experience until the second half when the story has a momentum of it's own that is completely separate from a basic interpretation. Hamlet's madness, his disolution, his murderous impulses, the wrenching decisions of youth and grief, take on a life of their own outside the characters and it was sort of amazing to see that, no matter what, that ALWAYS happens.
I've been reading a lot, obviously, remembering what it's like to be obsessed with words on the page, how different an experience that is than watching television. It's a more solitary experience in some ways, which is one of the things I loved about it as a kid - I could do it alone, exist happily in the page without needing to share it with anyone. And even though I study literature in college, it was always strange, always odd to discuss it with others, to bring our various interpretations and readings to the table and hash out a collective agreement, each of us returning to the text believing we were right and the others were wrong. Television seems more communal, even done in a vacuum - the intake is individual, but there's a different feeling to knowing how many people are seeing it simultaneously, knowing how it can be a collective experience and how much that collective can change your feelings towards what you're seeing.
Post-modern Hamlet (The Wooster Group's Hamlet, to be specific) was very cool - sort of karaoke Shakespeare meets the meta of reconstruction - a reverse transformation of film to play complete with sound effects and twitchy reels and blips on the film. (The took a filmed version of the John Gielgud/Richard Burton 1962 production of the play, and sort of... faded out the actors and then recreated it exactly - down to the blips on the film, the staggers and flickers and motions with the sets on stage moving around like a camera pan).
It's actually a really interesting time for this sort of reinterpretation of text and textuality, and compares, I think favorably to much of what we do with a text - deconstructing it, reinterpreting it, re-establishing it and then putting it forth as a separate product.
The perk of doing it with Hamlet is that if your audience is familiar with the text (the literal text), they don't need to pay attention to the words ( and in the case of this Hamlet, the words are secondary, they exist because they existed on screen, they aren't directed toward each other). I can't imagine what anyone who DOESN'T know the play thought of this production, cool mulit-media effects notwithstanding, because the highs and lows of the story were totally secondary to the experience until the second half when the story has a momentum of it's own that is completely separate from a basic interpretation. Hamlet's madness, his disolution, his murderous impulses, the wrenching decisions of youth and grief, take on a life of their own outside the characters and it was sort of amazing to see that, no matter what, that ALWAYS happens.
I've been reading a lot, obviously, remembering what it's like to be obsessed with words on the page, how different an experience that is than watching television. It's a more solitary experience in some ways, which is one of the things I loved about it as a kid - I could do it alone, exist happily in the page without needing to share it with anyone. And even though I study literature in college, it was always strange, always odd to discuss it with others, to bring our various interpretations and readings to the table and hash out a collective agreement, each of us returning to the text believing we were right and the others were wrong. Television seems more communal, even done in a vacuum - the intake is individual, but there's a different feeling to knowing how many people are seeing it simultaneously, knowing how it can be a collective experience and how much that collective can change your feelings towards what you're seeing.
