Thursday, September 11, 2008

Looking for Whom? Richard or Shakespeare? Or Al Pacino?

Looking for Richard. Dir. Al Pacino. Perf. Al Pacino, Penelope Allen, Alec Baldwin, and Kevin Conway. 1996. Videocassette. Fox Video, 1997.
It's probably looking for all three.

Al Pacino's Looking for Richard falls either into Rothwell's "Revues" category or into his "Documentaries" category of his "Seven Kinds of Shakespearean Derivatives" analysis (though, with this film, there's considerable overlap into other categories as well). As Al Pacino thinks about how to make a film of Richard III, he interviews people on the street (very casually), scholars, actors, and, perhaps primarily, himself as he tries to make sense of it.

The opening of the clip below exhibits how I often feel when reading or teaching Shakespeare. Take a look—you may have felt this way, too:

Links: A Site with Lesson Plans.

Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

    
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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

 —The Tempest