Promethean Apparatus: Michael Almereyda's Hamlet as Cinematic Allegory, The

Shakespeare's cinematic renaissance ended on a high note in the twentieth century with John Madden's Shakespeare in Love ( 1998) achieving seven Academy Awards at the 1999 Oscars. What Hollywood seemed at last to acknowledge at this event is the approach toward Shakespearean appropriation by filmmakers across the globe that has become marked by, in Kenneth Branagh's words, "a clearer cinematic logic" (Burnett and Wray 173). Emergent cinematic technology-from CGI to DVD-promoted exciting developments in the film industry. Baz Luhrmann's MTV-saturated William Shakespeare's Romeo + ju liet ( 1996) kick-started a trend in Shakespearean cinema that is expressed most recently by the digitally composed The King is Alive (dir. Kristian Levring, 2002) and Rave Macbeth (dir. Klaus Knoesel, 2001). Both these films in particular serve as examples of what cinema has to offer Shakespearean appropriation throughout the following century. As the first film of the new millennium to adapt a Bardic text, Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000) signals this discursive and technological abundance as cinematically as possible. Denmark here is a New York corporation, ostensibly involved in film production. Hamlet, played by Ethan Hawke, is constructed as a filmmaker obsessed with observing his environs and forefathers through a camera lens. The production's preoccupation with an entirely fragmented and appositely filmic milieu underscores an emphatically postmodern approach to Shakespeare's most filmed of plays in the same moment as constructing cinema as what I would call a "Promethean apparatus."1 Translating as "he-who-sees-before," Prometheus is the mythic figure of innovation who stole fire from Zeus to enable mankind to see for the first time.2 In deploying fire and suggestibly Promethean themes of foresight and cinematic innovation, Almereyda's film appears to rework cinema as a Promethean apparatus in terms of a visually organized dichotomy of presence and absence. Shakespeare's "presence" in this aesthetic reconfiguration is a vital index in reassembling concepts of temporality at the current moment.

I read Almereyda's production as allegorically enlivening cinema in these contexts in a number of ways. First, the tools and techniques of film production that are showcased here display those elements of cinematic apparatus that are available to the consumer for individual use. second, I would argue that Almereyda takes as his point of departure the cultural debate toward the end of the twentieth century that both queried and welcomed a "purely cinematic" Shakespeare. Third, as cinema enters its second century, the production vocalizes the anxieties attendant to cinematic potential. Indeed, the relative boom of film technologies leading up to our current historical juncture emphasizes the importance of cinema as a regenerator of ideologies, artistic developments, and global mindscapes. Fourth, I contend that Hamlet alludes to cinema's inception at the end of the nineteenth century, and queries whether this inception was simply the manifestation of cinematic realizations already prevalent in premodern society, that is, the preoccupations with perception, presence, and absence in such discourses as Plato's cave simile in his fourth century B.C. text The Republic, that underline modern technologies as the culmination of explicitly Promethean concerns (Plato 255-65). Gaby Wood, in her cogent study of artificiality in Edison's Eve of 2002, made a similar connection when she described the birth of cinema as a "Promethean, or Pygmalionesque, event" (Wood 168). In the application of recent film theories to this production, moreover, Shakespeare's play unfolds before a cinematic audience in illuminating, highly relative ways. For example, Christian Metz's theory of cinema as a signifier of the Lacanian Imaginary finds a parallel here with the ghost of Hamlet's father. In Metz's words, "the imaginary, by definition, combines within it a certain presence and a certain absence" (Metz 248-49). The ghost is constituted in Almereyda's film as a present absence. Like a director appearing at the margins of the frame, Sam Shepard's character appears to deliver both motivation and direction to Hamlet. Similarly, the search for Hamlet's "grand original," his father, may be interpreted as the search for cinema's own origins. Stephen Herbert's interesting study of "Pre-Cinema" delineates such premodern innovations as the Zoetrope, the Magic Lantern, the Camera Obscura, among others, which demonstrate a move toward the apparatus we now know as cinema before its "birth" at the hands of the Lumiere brothers in 1895.

In (his light, il would seem that cinema is Shakespeare's ideological precursor. Almereyda's production crystallizes the play's engagement with a specifically cinematic dogma while also displaying pre-cinematic inventions, such as the photograph. The film's first presentation of Old Hamlet is not as a ghost, but as a photograph, decorating the wall of the opening scene's press conference that is attended by the main cast and "a phalanx of cameras" (Almereyda 40). As Marjorie Garber points out, "the photo negative is in fact very like a ghost; it reifies the concept of an absent presence, existing positively as a negative image. In a negative we see light as dark and dark as light; we see, in effect, what is not there" (Garber 17).3 Extending Garber's point, we could argue that a photograph permits us to see, in effect, what is no longer there. The ghost admits that it is not Old Hamlet himself, but Hamlet's "father's spirit" (1.5.9). The video footage of Hamlet's father before his death juxtaposes presence with absence, and also past with present, recalling Barthes's comment: "by shifting the reality to the past [...] the photograph suggests that [the subject] is already dead" (Barthes, Camera 79). Hamlet's footage shows Old Hamlet shyly covering the camera lens with his hand, as if not wanting to be seen, conveying his desire to remain in the present. Representing an instrument of memory in its recording of events of the immediate and distant past for replay in the future, the camera is rejected by Old Hamlet in life. He later requests it in death, as he exhorts Hamlet to "Remember me!" Significantly, it is Hamlet's remembrance of his father that leads to his own demise, an event that enables his video-diary to become his, and perhaps the film's, sequel.