ABSTRACT
The present chapter turns to the intermedial process of framing plays in cinema. We should start by recognising that both film and theatre media literally frame their representations, whether on a rectangular screen with its finite border, or a stage – either a proscenium arch, a more open thrust stage, an open-air performance space, or a combination of stage and film framing as in mixedmedia productions. André Bazin, in his 1951 essay ‘Theater and Cinema’, originally published in Esprit, identified and explored the zeitgeist for this merging of film with theatre that had marked the immediate postwar period in European (and ‘Hollywood European’) cinema, and attributed it largely to increased technical and artistic sophistication in the seventh art:
The evidence of a return [after the experiments of the 1920s] to filmed theatre that we have had during the last ten years belongs essentially to the history of decor and editing . . . The grafting of the theatrical text onto the decor of cinema is an operation which today we know can be successful.1
