European Shakespeare on Film: Jovan Živanović, "How Romeo and Julia Loved"
European Shakespeare on Film: Jovan Živanović, "How Romeo and Julia Loved"

Summary/Abstract: "Anything can be projected into Shakespeare," wrote Ted Hughes in the Foreword to his Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, insisting, at the same time, that his own discovery of a basic structural pattern (or plot schemata, fundamental, galvanic, nuclear dramatic idea) in Shakespeare's works was not a 'projection', but "had objective life, and in fact evolved from play to play with riveting consistency". He called the pattern in question Shakespeare's 'myth', and claimed to have been guided towards its discovery by two fortuitous circumstances in his life: his sustained interest in the mythologies and folklores of the world, which preceded his interest in poetry, and his work with Peter Brook, both in London's Old Vick, and the Centre for Theatre Research in Paris. In 1971 these experiences amalgamated with his work on the Faber edition of Shakespeare's poetry, and evolved, through the next twenty years, into the study he completed and published in 1992. The final impetus for the writing of the book, according to Hughes, came from the stimulating exchange of letters with the Swedish actress Donya Feur, who was inspired by Hughes' observations about Shakespeare to put together, in 1978, "a full length performance of interlocked verse extracts in which a solo actress relived her Shakespearean earlier incarnations, following the evolution of one of the myth's figures from play to play." Like Feur, I too found Hughes' basic insight into Shakespeare stimulating, and, testing it against the works of film directors who have produced 'Shakespearean films', discovered that it threw a unique new light on the evolution of their oeuvre. For the past ten years I have been exploring this vastly interesting area in a course on Shakespeare and Film set up at the Women's Study Centre in Belgrade, and in the undergraduate and graduate courses I teach at the FDA. The course looks into the evolution of such artists as Bresson, Bergman, Bertolucci, Tarkovsky, Godard, Kurosawa, Welles, Altman, Polansky, Lepage, Heneke, and many others (Maya Deren, Kusturica, etc.). This contribution to the ESSE 2002 conference is based on my current work on two Yugoslav directors, Jovan Živanović and Krsto Papić whose opus contains films derived from Shakespeare.

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