Hamlet

Hamlet is a 1964 film adaptation in Russian of William Shakespeare's play of the same title, based on a translation by Boris Pasternak. It was directed by Grigori Kozintsev and Iosif Shapiro, and stars Innokenty Smoktunovsky as Prince Hamlet. Grigori Kozintsev had been a founder member of the Russian avant-garde artist group The Factory of the Eccentric Actor , whose ideas were closely related to Dadaism and Futurism. In 1923 he had been planning to perform Hamlet as a pantomime in the experimental manner of FEKS, but the plan was not put into effect, and Kozintsev's energies shifted into... the cinema. However, he returned to the theatre in 1941 with a Leningrad production of King Lear. Then, in 1954 Kozintsev directed a stage production of Hamlet at the Pushkin Theatre in Leningrad, using Boris Pasternak's translation; this was one the first Soviet productions of the play in the post-Joseph Stalin era. Kozintsev also wrote extensively about Shakespeare and a major chapter in his book Shakespeare: Time and Conscience is devoted to his thoughts on Hamlet together with a historical survey of earlier interpretations.
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