E - “Eyes and Ears”

When Hamlet stalks off alone to a more removéd ground to encounter the Ghost, the scene morphs into a series of extreme close-ups intercut with flashbacks and trembling earth. There are unnervingly long shots of the Ghost’s mouth, his piercing eyes, and even his ear, overflowing with blood after being filled with a “leperous distilment.” Branagh adopts the tropes of a horror film for several minutes, presenting the audience with body parts “chopped up” by the sharp blade of a film editing razor. 

The only other time the film uses such close-ups is when Claudius is in the confessional, with Hamlet nearby, contemplating a chance at assassination. This time, there are tight close-ups of Hamlet’s eyes and Claudius’ face as Hamlet imagines a swift stab into his uncle’s ear, complete with a violent spurt of blood. This imagery matches Gertrude’s plea to Hamlet in the next scene: “These words like daggers enter in my ears.”

Horror and paranoia infuse the play with numerous references to eyes and ears, invoking the theme of constant surveillance in the apparently authoritarian court of Denmark that Claudius has produced. Being written in the final years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, Hamlet perfectly reflects the atmosphere of the Virgin Queen’s own court, which was famously sustained by a network of spies and informants, since she could not defend her throne with an heir apparent. Claudius openly claims to the public that his nephew is “immediate to our throne” and the presumed heir, but his actions and plots with Polonius clearly indicate otherwise. Instead, Hamlet becomes the “observed of all observers.”

Grigori Kosintsev, in his 1964 film, cleverly invokes the court’s disquieting watchfulness by showing Hamlet deliver his first soliloquy entirely in voice-over while he wanders amongst a crowd of courtiers, seen but not heard. In Gregory Doran’s production of Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2009, Claudius’ court is riddled with security cameras, stripping away even the few private moments the audience has with the prince. At one point, David Tennant, as Hamlet, reclaims his privacy by ripping the power cord from one camera, immediately quipping “Now I am alone.” 

Michael Almereyda’s 2000 film reflects society’s growing concern over digital surveillance at the turn of the century, intercutting hidden camera footage of the Ghost and Hamlet going about his business.  The Robert Ike-directed 2018 Hamlet starring Andrew Scott opens with Francisco, Barnardo, and Horatio gathering in a security control room, watching multiple camera monitors for the appearance of the Ghost. 

The directorial decision to exhibit the Ghost on those cameras renders moot the question of the apparition’s reality, since, as Siegfried Kracauer points out, film’s duty is to establish physical existence. He clarifies that it’s not specifically the camera’s duty, since still photography does not record reality as it evolves through time. Film’s power is to reveal the transient—a whiff of cloud, or perhaps a ghost?—and compensate for “blind spots of the mind” because film is an uninhibited medium that records all within its frame (of space and time). 

Film stock can be manipulated. Film is the medium. Cinema is the art. Luis Buñuel asks “that a film [as cinema] discover something for me.” The camera feeds through which Hamlet and his companions witness the Ghost may be real, but will it help them discover something, since they cannot believe their own eyes and ears?

Sources:

Neil, Michael. “Hamlet: A Modern Perspective.” The Folger Shakespeare Library: Hamlet, edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, Simon & Schuster, 2012. 

Kracauer, Siegfried. “Theory of Film: Basic Concepts.” Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 171-182.

Kracauer, Siegfried. “Theory of Film: The Establishment of Physical Existence.” Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 293-303.

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