ABSTRACT
Though most critics of Shakespearean film are familiar with the muchpraised work of Kosintzev, Shakespeare first appears on the Russian film scene well before Kosintzev turns from stage to film in the 1960s. Between 1954 and 1956, the Soviet Union plunged headlong into representing Shakespeare’s plays on film with the unusual production of four Shakespearean films.1 Late in 1954, Romeo and Juliet, a film of the Bolshoi Ballet production, was released. During 1955, two major Russian film studios produced full-length feature films of Shakespearean plays: the Lenfilm Studios produced and released Twelfth Night, entitled Dvenadtsataia noch’, and the Moscow Film Studio was completing Yutkevich’s Otello. In 1956, yet another production, a film of a theatrical performance of Much Ado About Nothing was released. The four films together reproduce and rework Shakespeare’s texts in response to an important period in the Soviet Union’s cultural and political development, the time just after Stalin’s death in 1953.
