Looking for Lear in <span class='italic'>The Eye of the Storm</span>

doi:10.1017/9781108589727.012

Chapter 12 - Looking for Lear in The Eye of the Storm

from Part IV - Lear on the Loose: Migrations and Appropriations of Lear

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2019

Victoria Bladen

Edited by

Victoria Bladen ,

Sarah Hatchuel and

Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin

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Victoria Bladen: Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Sarah Hatchuel: Affiliation:
Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier
Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin: Affiliation:
Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier

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Summary

The Australian film The Eye of the Storm (2011), directed by Fred Schepisi, enters into complex intertextual dialogues with both the novel that it adapts, Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm (1973), and Shakespeare’s King Lear. This chapter explores the ‘Learness’ of Schepisi’s film, and the oscillating effect of both parallels and key departures. With a female Lear as the central protagonist, the film is part of an intriguing history of adaptations or appropriations that have explored gender in Lear. The Eye of the Storm also raises questions of postcoloniality and national identity. Furthermore, the film explores ideas of the harsh Australian landscape, the narrative culminating in a tropical storm that relocates the heath of Lear to northern Queensland. The film invites a range of questions on what appropriating Lear can mean in contemporary film, and how it can articulate suffering, complex relationships and the human condition. In this process, the medium of film itself plays a key role and the chapter considers the ways in which the medium itself, and filmic choices such as screen composition, camera angles, point of view and mise-en-scène, facilitate our engagement with the key characters, the concept of ‘Learness’ and the theme of human suffering.

Keywords

The Eye of the Storm film Australia gender postcoloniality Learness suffering

Type: Chapter
Information: Shakespeare on Screen: King Lear , pp. 185 - 201

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108589727.012 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2019

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