Content area
Full Text
This study analyzes the way Peter Greenaway in his film Prospéra 's Books reinterprets Shakespeare's The Tempest by underlining the way he organizes the material from the Shakespearean play to bring about a specific imaginative response. My analysis will be limited to the exploration of the spatial field (Buchman 12-32) created by Greenaway in the first sequences of the shipwreck, particularly interesting and characteristic of the film, since, according to Greenaway himself, "the start of a film is like a gateway, a formal entrancepoint" (Watching Water 14).
In his film, Greenaway develops and focuses on the aesthetic and mannerist aspects of the Shakespearean text, while he does not seem to care too much about the other very important Shakespearean themes, such as power or history. 1As far as it is possible to generalize about the relation between Prospéra 's Books and The Tempest, I am suggesting that the filmmaker reinterprets the Shakespearean text as a mannerist text and creates a new, artificial, and mannerist world by making use of devices and techniques which constitute a cinematic equivalent to Shakespeare's theatrical illusionism. He exasperates and amplifies those aspects, which were already there in Shakespeare, where the sense of the crisis makes itself felt most fully and explicitly (Hoy 49-67),2 namely the metadramatic reflection upon the concept of art and the work of art-artist-spectator relationship and the mannerist tendency to disrupt the spatial unity and to combine things from different spheres of reality (Hauser).
In spite of his cinematic translation and exasperation of certain Shakespearean "tricks," the filmmaker imposes his meaning on the original text and, by reducing it to a formal mechanism and to a huge stock of images and languages, he creates his own cerebral world which, in turn, offers him the opportunity for a discourse upon the cinema. The film is directed by a filmmaker who is also a painter, who tries to redefine the properties of the filmic frame. Greenaway's magic, like Prospero's, is a strange mixture of science and art. If Shakespeare, like Prospère, is a playwright who exploits all his "charms" (Tempest I)3namely, the technical tricks of his days, to stage "the direful spectacle of the wrack" (I.ii.26)Greenaway uses both conventional film techniques and the resources of high-definition television to layer...