This chapter considers how, in six successful Shakespeare films, exclusively cinematic formal methods of depicting battle serve to interpret and transform the plays’ perspectives on warfare. Special emphasis is placed on the concept (and deployment) of dialectical montage first developed by Sergei Eisenstein in his seminal 1929 essay, “The Dramaturgy of Film Form.” Though Eisenstein’s relatively rigid theory of montage has been endlessly appropriated, expanded and, at times, openly rejected by filmmakers and scholars alike, it remains ground zero for realist cinematic treatments of warfare and a key of sorts for deciphering individual filmmakers’ ideological orientations to their subject matter. The chapter argues that even the least overtly political film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays tend to reveal a certain preoccupation with the ethical, ideological, and, of course, hermeneutic implications of representing battle scenes in a medium that all but demands their representation.

This chapter addresses aspects of the trans-cultural or merging process at play in Kurosawa’s three Shakespeare adaptations Kumonosu-j / Macbeth (1957), The Bad Sleep Well / Hamlet (1960) and Ran / King Lear (1985) in terms of narrative and thematic parallels, correspondences from local models to Shakespearean ones and symbolic collusions. For each film, the mode of representation is suggestive rather than literal. The play-film dialectical effects never produce the same pessimistic discourse as in the model text, but one essentially of the same nature and depth. Narrative shifts, radical dialogues transformations allow the necessary adjustments and seamless coalescence between Japanese cultural contexts and Shakespeare worlds. Thematic parallels highlight similar circular, tragic patterns. Various techniques and aesthetics (Noh, painterly effects) blend with the sheer cinematic to depict a dark human saga in realistic worlds verging on symbolism.

There are three truly pioneering versions of King Lear on film: Grigori Kozintsev’s Korol Lir (1970), Peter Brook’s King Lear (1971), and Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985).These adaptations not only represent the best versions of King Lear ever made but also rank among the most important Shakespeare films of all time.None of these films are inventive or subtle in their representation of women, nor are they sophisticated in their approach to gender roles in what is arguably Shakespeare’s most misogynistic play.Silent and obedient, Cordelia is in many ways the perfect Renaissance woman, while Goneril and Regan play the demons to her saint.These rigid binariesand the impossible subject positions they impose on women are the inventions of patriarchy, and of misogyny in particular.Of the three films that I will examine here, only one of them begins to challenge this disabling binary and the concomitant spectacle of patriarchy restored over women’s dead bodies.

Akira Kurosawa spent fifty years, from 1943 to 1993, making films that attempt to look at life and its complexity ‘straight on’, in an unflinching, uncompromising way. However, none of his films forces us to stare into the potential for humans to create hell on earth quite as formidably as one of his final masterpieces, Ran (1985). This chapterfocuseson Kurosawa’s troubled humanism, alongside his didacticism. It is no accident that three such Kurosawa films are his adaptations of Shakespeare tragedies: Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well (1960) and Ran, adaptations of Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear, respectively. Kurosawa uses Ran to express his belief in the compelling need for individuals to transcend the unending cycles of violence that plague this world, rather than embrace the dubious otherworldly salvation provided by supernatural powers, such as Amida Buddha, who appears as a helpless symbol in Ran. The film is a majestic pageant full of symbols and abstractions – including many elements of the Buddhist Noh theatre – which ironically signify unity and harmony in a collapsing world where icons have lost their power to cohere. Ran, in all its beauty and horror, tells us that we have the power to face the inevitable hells on earth and choose not to perpetuate them.

The chapter studies three remarkable films of King Lear created in England, Russia and Japan by three directors of international stature: Peter Brook, Grigori Kozintsev and Akira Kurosawa. The films are all set in the past and all are culturally specific. Because the Fool’s role is so central to the substance and structure of Shakespeare’s play, investigating – using a mixture of thick description, cultural appropriation and cinematic formalism – how these three directors reimaged the Fool to speak out from their particular cultures to a global audience provides insight into the ways each reinvents Shakespeare’s bleakest tragedy for the screen.