Date: 2009
Posted by: lavamatic
Cast: not visible
Credits: Made by Jeffrey Weeter
Duration: 5.14

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this, but it’s different and quite hypnotic. The filmmaker (Chicago-based intermedia artist and audio engineer Jeffrey Weeter) has taken sequences from the 1910 Italian silent film Re Lear (King Lear), and then zoomed in on action from the edges of the frame only, so that all you see are feet and the hems of cloaks. The mysterious action is interspersed with titles that read ’something selfish’, ’something similar’, ’something scandalous’ etc., while fitful pieces of music play over the top. It is something rich and strange. Weeter tells us:

“Lear” is a different look. It focuses the information analyzed in the periphery. A narrative unfolds as threads of content are connected and pattern is established. Where there is compression there is also expansion. It is looking at you, vast-expanse-of-art-and-technology-across-history.

Well, I’m not sure that any narrative unfolds at all, still less that compression means expansion. But the sheer elusive of the exercise exerts a real fascination, and it shows how interesting Shakespeare can become in a filmmaker’s hands when they do not feel compelled to tell a story.

Links:
Vimeo page
Lavamatic.com
Jeffrey Weeter

Date: 2007
Posted by: pulsetv.ir
Credits: Created by Alireza Alborzi
Cast: The Simpsons
Duration: 1.46

One doesn’t expect to find Shakespeare parodies on an Iranian web TV channel, but that’s where this video resides (specifically on Pulsetv.ir, which is a channel on Blip.tv). It’s a mash-up of scenes from assorted episodes of The Simpsons to produce the world’s favourite American family’s interpretation of Othello. Homer is Othello, Marge is Desdemona, Sideshow Bob is Iago – it all just falls into place. The humour is doubled by the portentous trailer commentary, cheekily lifted from the trailer for Oliver Parker’s feature film Othello (as are the closing titles). Silly stuff, but done well.

Links:
Blip.tv page

Date: 2007
Posted by: Alex Itin
Credits: Created by Alex Itin
Cast: none
Duration: 2.02

American painter and experimental filmmaker Alex Itin is a member of The Future of the Book, “a small think-and-do tank investigating the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens”. With his starting point the celebrated Wallace Shawn play (and Louis Malle film) My Dinner with André (1981), in which two men debate a wide range of cultural themes over a meal, Itin creates a sampled video by associations. He describes his film thus:

The video is my play on Wallace Shawn and Shakespeare along the way to Orson Welles doing Lear and Mobydick… The drawing of what seems to be Italy with Chinese is from Imagination in The Library. I think he hails from China. The kicked by Sexy Italian Boot Sicily is from my brush wiping page next to the moby ink pot. It’s random, but I thought sort of pretty. It is from the pages of an old book on chess strategy. The Chinese say, “Life is Chess (war); Living is strategy and tactics”.

Also buried within lies the witch from Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (based on Macbeth), alongside Brando in Apocalypse Now, The Third Man, The Kinks, and who knows what else besides (the background pages come from Moby Dick via an earlier Itin video – he recycles his own material as well as that of others). It’s an absurdist delight, with a magnificent title (André the Giant was a wrestler and actor popular in America) and a sublime closing dissolve from camera in the hand to skull in the hand. Sometimes movies should only be like this.

Links:
Another Green World (‘remix’ of some of the same footage)
IT IN place
Vimeo page

Date: 2006
Posted by: BuddhaRhubarb
Credits: Created by Joe Boyce Burgess, for Blind Hill Pictures
Cast: Emil Jannings (Othello), Ica von Lenkeffy (Desdemona)
Duration: 1.26

A strange, borderline disturbing, mashup of the smothering scene Dimitri Buchowetzki’s 1922 silent film Othello with loops of music from an unnamed ‘garage band’ and sounds from the horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. What is it meant to signify? Perhaps it is best not to think about that too deeply. Its creator, Joe Boyce Burgess, has created other such bizarre juxtapositions of film and alien sound, though only this one with a Shakespearean touch.

Links
YouTube page

Date: 2008
Posted by: cebergman324
Credits: Created by cebergman324
Cast: prongs2u/Eric Idle (Mercutio/Mr Smoke-Too-Much), Michael Palin (Mr Bounder of Adventure)
Duration: 3.11

A stage production of Romeo and Juliet in which Mercutio’s ‘Queen Mab’ speech (Act 1 Scene 4) is cheekily replaced on the soundtrack by Eric Idle’s obnoxious tourist in the ‘Travel agent/Watney’s Red Barrel’ sketch from Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl, a sketch originally performed on the television series Monty Python’s Flying Circus (episode 31, tx. 16 November 1972).

Links
YouTube page

Date: 2008
Posted by: kjnwcedu
Credits: Created by Keith Jones
Cast: Frederick Warde (Richard III)
Duration: 1.22

Another mashing up of silent Shakespeare with unlikely music by Professor Keith Jones, the man who gave us Julius Caesar with a wassailing song. Here extracts from the 1912 feature film Richard III, starring Frederick Warde, is introduced to Gnarls Barkley’s ‘Feng Shui’. Anything to save it from being done straight with Ennio Morricone…

Links
YouTube page
Keith Jones’ Shakespeare on Film: A Microblog
Richard III on DVD from Kino

Date: 2008
Posted by: kjnwcedu
Credits: Created by Keith Jones
Cast: Amleto Novelli, Giovanna Terribili Gonzalès, Pina Menichelli, Ruffo Geri, Ignazio Lupi, Irene Mattadra, Bruto Castellani, Augusto Mastripietri, Sigira Geri, Orlando Ricci, Carlo Duse, Lea Orlandi
Duration: 0.58

Keith Jones is an American professor of English and Literature who maintains the Shakespeare and Film Microblog. As well as gathering together information and thoughts on Shakespeare and film, Jones adds his own mashups, of which this is an uplifting example. Strictly speaking the Italian 1914 epic Cajus Julius Caesar has nothing to do with Shakespeare play, but the joyous coming together of ancient Romans milling about with an (unnamed) group singing the Gower Wassail demands its inclusion here.

Links
YouTube page
Keith Jones’ Shakespeare on Film: A Microblog

Date: 2007
Posted by: clanxmac
Credits: Created by clanxmac (Liz), music ‘Nineveh’ by E.S. Posthumous. A Low Flying Kiwi Production
Cast: Christian Bale (Othello), Emily Watson (Desdemona), Sean Bean (Iago), Angus MacFayden (Brabanzio), Tyne Diggs (Cassio), Sean Pertwee (The Duke of Venice)
Duration: 5.29

This is really quite inspired. Its creator has taken footage from the 2002 film Equilibrium, starring Christian Bale, Emily Watson and Sean Bean, and recut it as though it were a trailer for an Othello. The original film is a science fiction drama, set in a future world controlled by a Fascistic regime which suppresses the emotions and the arts. Equilibrium has no connection with Othello (it owes rather more to Orwell), but by concentrating on the three characters, with some clever choice of shots, and with a good deal of the power of suggestion making our minds doing the rest of the work for her, the filmmaker does indeed create something like Othello (even if Othello himself is not black). It goes on a bit long, and the mispelling of ‘despair’ is unfortunate, but as a kind of mashup in reverse, this is a creative piece of work.

(The video opens with lines from W.B. Yeats’ “He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven” – Yeats’ poetry is a feature of the film Equilibrium).

Links
YouTube page

Date: 2007
Posted by: Scartol
Credits: Created by Scartol
Cast: Jon Finch (Macbeth), Francesca Annis (Lady Macbeth)
Duration: 5.13

A logical fusion of Macbeth with Gangsta rap, in this neatly-edited mashup of shots from Roman Polanski’s 1971 Macbeth (in widescreen), with Jon Finch as Macbeth and Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth, to the music of the Geto Boys’ ‘Mind Playin’ Tricks On Me’. There are numerous adroit matches between lyrics and action; note, for example, the timing of the lines (from the song) of ‘my hands are all bloody’.

Links
YouTube page

Date: 2007
Posted by: Garrywat
Credits: Created by Gary and Lisa Watkinson
Cast: David Tennant
Duration: 0.25

A compilation by Gary and Lisa Watkinson, reacting to the news in 2007 that David Tennant was to play Hamlet on stage, which takes word-clips from the BBC television series Dr Who (in which Tennant plays the title role) to construct lines from Shakespeare’s play. The lines selected are ‘What a peice [sic] of work is Man/How noble in reason’ and ‘There is nothing either good or bad/But thinking makes it so’.

David Tennant Does Shakespeare

Date: 2007
Posted by: Garrywat
Credits: Created by Gary and Lisa Watkinson
Cast: David Tennant
Duration: 0.25

A second compilation by Gary and Lisa Watkinson. The lines selected are ‘To be or not to be, that is the question, ‘That it should come to this’ and ‘The play’s the thing’ (complete phrase from the Dr Who episode The Shakespeare Code).

Links
The Doctor does Shakespeare YouTube page
David Tennant Does Shakespeare YouTube page