A rough mountain: fog, wind and snow. Menacing, oriental-style music. And in the middle a train of armed men, grim, bearded, wild. Are the Kalashnikovs they carry over their shoulders? No, there are swords. We are in Scotland the year 1057, not in today’s Afghanistan, and the warlord who opposes rides the battle here is not Ahmed but Macbeth. But the confusion is close, the analogy must be intention: Look, seems to say director Justin Kurzel:. Shakespeare is nevertheless still and again our contemporary
That may be. But Macbeth
The new film version of the old piece with Michael Fassbender in the title role of the bloody social climber and Marion Cotillard as his accomplice and queen – no question – a feast for the eyes. Anyway, if you mountains and swamps in the rain, roaring warrior, rivers of blood in slow motion and – like well, beautiful people like Fassbender and Cotillard. Anyone who has visited the Isle of Skye, probably some of the picturesque venues recognize But the heart remains cold. No one ever attend feel a current history – neither “House of Cards” nor “Game of Thrones”. Why is that?
Shaggy Scots
As the pieces were premiered, knew all the spectators that Shakespeare even negotiated their presence, if he – because of censorship – in foreign countries or the distant past moved. His Romans, Greeks and Trojans wore on stage contemporary clothes, as well as its medieval English kings.
As the piece on the Scottish warriors and usurper Macbeth written was, probably in 1606, sat a Scot (and Shakespeare fan) on the English throne. James I, son of the executed Mary Stuart held, for a descendant of Banquo, Macbeth had assassinated. Shakespeare celebrates Banquo’s loyalty and tells how his son nearly escaped the captors to establish a dynasty. Jacob believed in witches. Shakespeare built three witches in his play. A planned Catholic terrorist attack on Parliament and King had questions the legitimacy of domination and resistance discussed again: You are at the center of the piece. Macbeth was for Shakespeare’s audience no shaggy clan chief Small Worlds, but a modern coup leader.
The Australian Kurzel but stresses the Shaggy. His Scots are semi-savages. They live in the mud. Cold and wet crawl through the cracks. Pre-Christian superstition and Christian faith fighting for supremacy behind the painted in war paint foreheads; archaic values such as honor and courage to fight man, clan loyalty and hospitality dominate this male chauvinist society. In order to gain influence over her husband to Lady Macbeth has the dark powers arise – it does so at Kurzel, unlikely in a Christian chapel – and calling on the demons, to take their sex, and with him all the soft pitiful, they to “entweiben”. A favor they do. The couple remains childless.
And where the children?
are here is for Kurzel the key to Drama , And how many a Shakespearean commentators before him, especially Sigmund Freud, he sees in Shakespeare’s dramatic world one family formation, and in that which is not shown, the really important thing. In his first film, “Snow Town”, he made the fatherless to the central problem of his negative hero, a serial killer. The serial killer Macbeth, so suggests his second film, suffering from his childlessness – more precisely. The loss of his children
There is this text clues: “He has no children! “cries Macbeth opponents Macduff when he hears about the murder of his wife and children by the despot. But when the film Macbeth at the beginning of his bloody career still reluctant to murder the rightful king and to crown, tells him Lady Macbeth, they’ve also nursed children, but would prefer to tear her own baby from the breast and his skull smash against the wall, listening as such a coward on.
P>The Highlands are not the Hindu Kush
No, Macbeth is not traumatized Taliban, not a criminal from lost fatherhood. Shakespeare used the old story, to describe a new phenomenon for his contemporaries: the Machiavellian ruler for whom the end justifies the means, because he holds nothing sacred. Repeatedly emphasized Macbeth that he believes neither in an afterlife nor a divine judgment; that the murder creates security in the here and now and that afterwards nothing comes.
Although the piece continually revealed his lies: The murdered return again to torment him, the conscience sends his queen to madness and death. But at the end of his life he is still convinced that life is a tale told by an idiot, without meaning the end for good as for evil of dusty death. It speaks volumes about Kurzel conception of the piece that he can express these thoughts as casually Fassbender, while the camera remains in the medium shot. Certainly, they do not declaim as once Orson Welles, but they deserve just yet more attention than the supposed family drama of Macbeth.
Macbeth’s motives are but that the pieces do today problematic, and just Kurzel attempt to settle it somewhere in the Hindu Kush or of nowhere, make this clear. The Machiavellian power man – Putin and Assad despite – not our main problem. We understand these types, also thanks to Shakespeare, we read them like an open book, we know that they will fail, like Macbeth.
Macbeth was Stalin
When the Polish literary scholar Jan Kott wrote in 1965, Shakespeare is our contemporary, it is because the poet laid bare the mechanism of power in totalitarian societies. Macbeth was Stalin or one of the many little Stalin of the Soviet bloc. Around the same time the piece “MacBird” enjoying success, in the power of man Lyndon B. Johnson coming through the murder of John F. Kennedy in the White House.
But that’s history. And that’s why the film does not move, in spite of beautiful pictures, and even though Fassbender and Cotillard playing well and – recite Shakespearean text tidy – arg shortened, but still recognizable. Macbeth is simply a serial killer in the Scottish rain. Religious warriors, steeped in the omnipresence of God and close to the afterlife:. – As William Shakespeare – do not believe in Machiavelli, but on divine orders Wen we still do not really understand people who are People who accuse us of believing in nothing, nothing to hold sacred, to have a purely purposeful relationship to existence. For the Taliban, to make it clear we are Macbeth’s children.
To illustrate this, one would have to write a new play. It could “Homeland” hot.
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