Watching Lear: Resituating the Gaze at the Intersection of Film and Drama in Kristian Levring's The King Is Alive

Just imagine if you could put on King Lear out here in this godforsaken place with all these lost souls.

-Henry, The King Is Alive

Socrates, in Plato's Book X of The Republic, declares the now oft-cited notion, "'that [the] process of representation deals with something at third remove from the truth'" (370). Whether writer, filmmaker, or simply consumer, the creation and appreciation of such arts as poetry, drama, and film follow the same interpretive path described by Plato centuries ago: '"The quickest way is to take a mirror and turn it round in all directions; before long you will create sun and stars and earth'" (361). Though somewhat facile, Plato's explanation of the representative process is the foregrounding element in what Wolfgang Iser describes over two thousand years later in "Interaction between Text and Reader" as "the phenomenological theory of art" (1673). If the interpretive process, according to Iser, "is to be successful," the reader is "drawn into the events [of the text] and made to supply what is meant from what is not said (1676). In effect, "this is what stimulates the reader into filling the blanks with projections. [...] Whenever the reader bridges the gaps, communication begins" (1676). What the rapport between artist and subject or subject and viewer share is representation and interpretation as difference. Neither representation for Plato nor interpretation for Iser is exactly analogous to the object from which either act arises. Thus, what is so intriguing about Kristian Levring's Dogme film The King is Alive (2000), which is a very loose adaptation of William Shakespeare's King Lear, is that questions of veracity and faithfulness to an original text or source are of little consequence. The film makes implicit the idea of adaptation as interpretation and not necessarily veneration of an original. King Lear is treated from a number of perspectives, including that of Levring-the filmmaker-as well as all of his characters. Since the act of interpretation is itself at least one remove from the text being analyzed, Plato's poet is not the last in the line of "representative artists" (Plato 363). Rather, what follows are the numerous "readers," who are themselves producers.

Whether ridiculed or imitated, those films created under the rules of the Dogme 95 manifesto challenge the artifice of Hollywood's composed shots, three-point lighting system, and axis of action. But what is particularly interesting about the Dogme 95 movement with its insistence that the "camera must be handheld" is the effect of such a shooting style-the appearance that much of what we see is the consequence of chance. Albeit, a prescient kind of chance. The documentary look and editing style of films such as Kristian Levring's The King Is Alive (2000) lend them a sense of the unplanned or unexpected. As a footnote, I should mention that the now defunct Dogme 95 rules-the secretariat was closed in 2001 because its members argued that Dogme "has almost grown into a genre formula"-are best known for the fact that they continually are broken. And Levring is no exception. The beginning of the film is marked by crane and aerial shots that defy the rule that "shooting must take place where the film takes place, ruling out cranes, helicopter shots, and other techniques used to convey distant point-of-views" (qtd. in Stevenson 23). And yet, the film and its inclusion of William Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear reciprocally point to the fact that both drama and film are not finished texts in the sense of seamless creations, but works that reveal their own process of construction.

The King Is Alive is the story of a group of American and British tourists who are trapped in an abandoned village in the North African Kalahari Desert after their bus goes off course and eventually runs out of gas. In order to distract themselves from their situation, the tourists decide to stage Shakespeare's King Lear. The village's only occupant Kanana, an aged aboriginal man who speaks only Swahili, is a passive observer of the chaotic events that take place as the westerners await rescue. The tourists' decision to stage the Shakespeare play as a way of coping with their situation infuses the film with a degree of reflexivity; the uncertainty of their fate is mirrored in a sense by the unfinished and, at times, chaotic treatment of the tragedy. Thus, neither the events of the film nor the play and its outcome leave the viewer with a sense of certainty.

Filmic adaptations of Shakespeare do not often focus primarily on the play at the level of rehearsal. In other words, whether the film's treatment of the play is a literal or loose adaptation, Shakespeare's text resides more or less in its finished form. Aside from The King Is Alive, Al Pacino's Looking For Richard (1996) is perhaps the only other film that focuses attention on Shakespeare at the level of rehearsal. By combining rehearsals, scenes from the finished play, and commentary from actors and viewers, Pacino's documentary is successful in making its tagline evident: "A Four Hundred Year Old Work-in-Progress." As a commentary on how Shakespeare is acted and produced, Looking For Richard exposes the process behind the production while remaining faithful to the originality of the text. Levring's adaptation of King Lear, however, works against the master narrative of Shakespeare. The bard's work is deconstructed and then reconstructed as a frenzied commentary on filial and spousal rivalry, race, and spectatorship.