Thomas Pendleton introduced our featured speaker, Professor Bernice Kliman, whose topic was "The Unkindest Cuts: Flashcut Excess in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet." Professor Kliman began by recalling a moment in December 1996, when news of the impending release of a two-hour version Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet promised to reveal substantially more of his interpretation of the text. The disappointment of that cut version, its failure offer a distinct vision of the play or to remedy the faults of the four-hour version previously released, impelled Kliman to begin a two-part project about Branagh's film. The first part of that project, represented by this paper, consists of an effort to imagine another way of cutting the film to two hours, by removing its defects but retaining both its clear interpretive decisions and the essential project of producing a Hamlet film without cutting any scenes. In the second, future part of this project, Kliman promised to analyze what remains of Branagh' s film after her proposed cuts
Kliman then turned to her proposals for cutting the film, suggesting first of all the elimination of what the published script calls the "flashcuts," that is, brief inset shots or scenes spliced into the major scenes. She also proposed cutting the longer inset scenes and anything in the film that distracts attention from the speakers and from the words spoken This alone, Kliman speculated, would bring the film to just over three hours' length. To further reduce it, she then proposed removing all the lines added to Branagh’s text from the second quarto, since the control text was generally the folio version.
Branagh, Kliman noted, had set himself the daunting task of producing a film with a full text; whereas most Shakespeare movies substitute visual for verbal pictures, Branagh tried to have both. The result, Kliman argued, suggests that this is an impossible goal. Certainly in the versions of Branagh' s film we now have, the result is, in a sense, unwatchable: that is, a film that is too long, and a film that at crucial moments leaves the viewer uncertain about what she or he is seeing. The flashcuts not only extend the actual length of the film but also the sense of its length, as well as sabotaging its tempo. Furthermore, the flashcuts are inconsistent in the points of view they present: some of them are flashbacks, some are glimpses into the thoughts of a particular character in the present moment, and others are of unclear origin. Many of them either are or feel like "omniscient" images, images offered by the filmmaker to help the audience through a long speech. But none of these categories are clearly or regularly distinguished from the others.
To illustrate the problems with Branagh's flashcuts, Kliman discussed three scenes, drawn from the beginning, middle, and end of the film. First she turned to 1.5, in which Branagh alternates flashcuts of a bloody ear with images of the ghost's face at various angles. These shots precede the story of the poisoning in the garden, so the images are clearly not Hamlet's; and the ghost equally clearly could not have seen any of these images. The scenes are presumably omniscient narration, redundantly conveying material better conveyed by the text, and as such they have a presumptive truth-value: Branagh reduces to clear fact what in the text is only a narrative, susceptible to doubt. Omniscient narration eviscerates the problems of perception. At another point in the same scene, Branagh shows scenes of Gertrude and Claudius interacting which culminate in the image of a hand loosening a woman’s corset, while the ghost in voiceover speaks of preying upon garbage. These shots may be illustrations of the ghost's words, Hamlet's own recollections or fantasies, or more omniscient narrative. Whichever they are, the scenes, Kliman argued, are expendable.
She then turned to the scenes with Ophelia, arguing again that inset shots and flash cuts mar the scenes. When Polonius wams Ophelia away from Hamlet, we see scenes of lovemaking that may be flashcuts or may be her wish-fulfillment. Hamlet never "sees" such things; and yet the flashcuts during Polonius’s speech include a shot of Hamlet writing the very letter Polonius now has in his hand, which suggests an objective reality conveyed by omniscient narration. Branagh’s professed desire to present a diminished and problematic Hamlet, Kliman argued, could better have been achieved by attending to and using the text, rather than by inserting material that confuses the text.
Finally, Kliman turned her attention to the inserted scenes showing the arrival of Fortinbras and his army, again arguing that these insertions suggest a mistrust of the audience or of the text, a suspicion that the text could not communicate its meanings effectively, or that the audience could only believe what it sees and not what it hears. Once again, the inset scenes turn narrative and report into objective event. And once again, the emphasis on Fortinbras's invasion of Elsinore confuses the text, too quickly and too heavy-handedly showing how paltry and insufficient are this court’s obsessions, in the face of political disaster. Without all of this added material, Kliman concluded, we would be left with a stronger and more compact film, which would still function as a paratextual commentary on Shakespeare's play, but would do so by developing the clues already in the Folio text itself.
DISCUSSION
Anthony Burton opened the discussion by referring to the scene of Fortinbras's arrival at Elsinore, which he found reminiscent of a scene in a Monty Python film, and asking whether it was possible that Branagh was trying to reassure his audience, so that they wouldn't be afraid of , "stuffy old Shakespeare." This, Burton remarked, suggested that Branagh had in some sense given up on Shakespeare. Kliman responded by suggesting that we wait and see what Branagh does with his Love's Labor's Lost, and then remarked that she believes that Branagh genuinely loves the plays. She had hoped that the cut version would clarify his central vision of Hamlet; but she heard from his assistant that he had nothing to do with the cut version, and that it was something his producers had insisted on, to play on the airwaves. Harry Keyishian then brought the conversation around the "to be or not to be" soliloquy, and remarked that he had shown the film versions of that speech by Zeffirelli, Gibson, and Branagh to a class recently, and had noticed that Branagh had presented a totally static speech. What he had really admired was how Zeffirelli and Gibson broke down the speech and made the emotional shifts clear to the audience. Kliman said she couldn't agree more, and that she thought Zeffirelli was a very underrated director. Martha Nochimson came to the defense of the flash cuts, praising Kliman' s analysis of them, but suggesting that it was possible to acknowledge that the cuts present a kind of modernist aesthetic indeterminacy. Kliman acknowledged that point, and noted that the stage production had aimed at a kind of alienation effect; but she felt that many of the meanings produced by Branagh's cuts were uncontrolled and accidental. Irene Dash praised the way Kliman distinguished between flash cuts, omniscient cuts, etc., and further observed that she found many scenes in the film to be destructive of the meaning of the play. Corrine Abate returned the discussion to Tony Burton's initial point, suggesting that perhaps Branagh had not lost confidence in Shakespeare, but in himself, and that his films seemed to be more and more Hollywood, and less and less Renaissance drama. Chris Stroffolino countered that this Hamlet was closer to Shakespeare's play text than Branagh's Much Ado was to Shakespeare's Much Ado, and suggested that the confusions within the film represented an effort to achieve the play' s ambivalence. Kliman agreed and said that she would still like to see a Hamlet in which all the defects of the person are registered, and yet we still like him.
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