https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=571 L’Oeil du Spectateur N°4 — Saison 2011-2012 fr jeu., 02 févr. 2012 16:20:11 +0100 lun., 06 févr. 2012 10:09:19 +0100 https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=571 0 https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=574 Cet article explore divers modes de représentation de la violence dans le film de Michael Radford William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (2004), violence des temps ou violences politiques, et, à travers la rhétorique en œuvre (style, effets et figures), la mise en évidence d’enjeux idéologiques et esthétiques spécifiques. Si le film propose une interprétation et une reconstitution du contexte fondamentalement réaliste, selon un parti-pris historiciste clairement annoncé, il se double d’un sous-texte métaphorique qui permet de proposer une version modernisée, faisant de Shylock non pas tant un monstre caricatural digne d’une comédie de la cruauté, tourné en ridicule, qu’une victime persécutée dans une Venise atypique et dystopique, rongée par l’intolérance et le matérialisme. Le personnage central apparaît comme vulnérable dans son désir de revanche même (hubris). Les choix idéologiques du réalisateur, comme les choix esthétiques, monstration explicite (scènes de torture), effets spectaculaires ou effets d’effacement ou de brouillage, font tendre l’œuvre modèle vers la veine tragi-comédie, et proposent une vision à l’interface entre une vision Renaissance ancrée sur des images Moyenâgeuses et une vision post-holocauste, plus « politiquement correcte ». This paper explores how cinematic rhetoric illustrates the theme of violence in Michael Radford’s William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Cinematic rhetoric may be defined by means of modes of representation, effects and figures. If the film provides us with a lively realistic version of the Renaissance context, following the tenets of historical authenticity and according to the classical realistic mode of representation, it is also streaked with a darker, metaphorical vein. The main character Shylock, wonderfully enacted by Al Pacino, is featured here not so much as a caricature, the monster of the critical comedy only fit to be ridiculed as as a vulnerable character, gnawed by doubt and desire for revenge. He also becomes the emblematic victim epitomizing the whole Jewish community persecuted by Christians in a particularly dystopian, “de-romanticized” Venetian world torn by hypocritical fanaticism and materialism. The director’s ideological as well as aesthetic and rhetoric choices, from direct demonstration or elocutio to more suggestive techniques, create a personal world that interrelates Middle-ages visions and present ‘post-holocaust’ ones. This makes the original play definitely depart from comedy and verge on the “comedic” or tragi-comic. ven., 03 févr. 2012 10:29:22 +0100 https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=574 https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=590 In this play and film review I have intentionally avoided nearly any textual or literary analysis of the play in order to concentrate on its performance. In other words, my starting point is that of an actor/director’s premise, according to which Shakespeare should be spoken and not read. In a paper designed to explore the demonstration of verbal violence, the major part of the discussion is concerned with the first three acts of the play, as this is where language is most destructive. Any article on verbal abuse in The Winter’s Tale, however would not be complete without examining its comic resurgence in Act IV as well as the silent struggle of Act V, Scene 3. To conclude my analysis the issue of filming theatre will be looked at, especially the question of whether the two media are antagonistic or not. mer., 04 juil. 2012 14:27:33 +0200 https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=590