Comrade Shakespeare – Archeology of the Theater

Not much less often than you meet him on the theater stages of the world, you can see the comrade Shakespeare rustling over any canvas, flickering in any television. That is not always good for his work. Too often you are harassed to Shakespeare by costume films, you have to get through hollow pathos, depoliticized kitsch as well as flattening and neglect.

If you hear the name Jean-Luc Godard, you certainly don’t think of the Elisabethan theater first. Godard, whose day of death is for the third time this month, is rather closely linked to the dialectical theater of a Bertolt Brecht. He translated his artistic access for the film and for a new time.

And yet in the difficult to be manageable filmography of Godard, there is a strip with the title “King Lear” from the 80s, a time that is not the most glamorous in the work of the film icon. On the occupation list, the writer (and casual filmmaker) Norman Mailer, the director of the American theater Peter Sellars, Hollywood’s flagship maker Woody Allen and Godard himself.

Genosse Shakespeare

As you like it: Every two weeks, Erik Zielke writes about great tragedies, political lubricating theater and the fools from the past and present. He finds inspiration from his comrade from Stratford-Upon-Avon.

You can find all columns here.

In his work biography of Jean-Luc Godard, the film critic Bert Rebhandl describes how this and his early contemporaries were inspired by the Soviet cinema Eisenstein. It was intended to continue the Eisenstein legacy – and yet you did not know the films themselves, but only the written arguments with it. So you continued something practically that you only had an idea of ​​the theory.

We find a very similar situation in Godards »King Lear«. After an atomic catastrophe – the world was still under direct impression of the events in Chernobyl – the cultural roots seem to be cut from the past. William Shakespeare Junior The fifth, a descendant of our comrade, digs out the dead for us, as Heiner Müller once demanded.

Godard also reads his Shakespeare with Brecht. The intermediate titles, the narrative voice (which he himself speaks in the engaging bumpy English) and the rejection of any blunt psychologism testify. After deconstructivism, a vain hobby of left -wing intellectuals in the second half of the 20th century, a phase of reconstruction must follow.

Who is this Lear? So the canvas heroes ask. They laboriously try to restore references, to open up an action, to have a drama developed. Godard makes it clear what the Hollywood Biedermeier is coming and why it has to fail on Shakespeare so often. You also have to see that the Shakespeare Theater is more than nicely said verses. After Stratford, only a difficult way leads. And today we may find the globe more in the cinema (the clairvoyant Godard would probably say today: on Tikkok): not a matter of course, but as a folk art, for and – above all – against the people.

In his early days, Godard had to invent his iron stone as a film theorist and film practitioner. And Shakespeare will also have to be resurrected in apocalyptic times (to which we can feel close again today) as it never existed. Together with his dramatic staff: the fools and failed heroes, little clever royal children and cruel loving daughters and fathers.

The downfall of culture may be so criminal, yet the robustness of their lighting shapes is comforting: Shakespeare and Brecht and Godard are continued, detached from narrow periods and overly limited horizons. The theater will also survive, perhaps in other rooms.

“Nothing won’t work out of nothing,” says Shakespeare his Lear. Godard knew how to assess: “I’m a legend.”