ABSTRACT
From April 1994 to April 1995 the National Film Theatre in London ran an extended season devoted to Shakespearean performances on film and television under the inspired title Walking Shadows-a title which occasionally transmuted in inter-office memos and e-mail to “Shadow and Substance”, “Idiot’s Tale” or even, on a bad day, “Signifying Nothing”. Walking Shadows was also the title of an annotated catalogue of Shakespeare holdings in the National Film and Television Archive edited by Luke McKernan and Olwen Terris which was published by the British Film Institute to coincide with the beginning of the season (McKernan and Terris 1994). The month of June 1994 saw the screening of twelve different versions of Hamlet; as McKernan and Terris put it in their programme note:
Hamlet is the world’s most filmed story after Cinderella. The figure of Hamlet, his agonised choices, his revenge and his fate (not to mention the literary kudos) have attracted filmmakers and actors from 1900 onwards, when Sarah Bernhardt became the first person to play the Dane on film. Since then he has been played by a woman three more times (Asta Nielsen, Joy Caroline Johnson and Fatma Girik), and the men have included Georges Melies, Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, John Barrymore, Jack Benny, Laurence Olivier, Maurice Evans, Hardy Kruger, Maximilian Schell, Christopher Plummer, Richard Burton, Innokenti Smoktunowsky, Nicol Williamson, Richard Chamberlain, Derek Jacobi, Mel Brooks, Mel Gibson and Arnold Schwarzenegger. He has been animated at least twice, portrayed as twins (Anthony and David Meyer) and turned into a cowboy (Johnny Hamlet and Lust in the Sun). India, Ghana, Japan, the USSR, Brazil, Turkey, Greece and Denmark have all produced their versions of the story.
