Prospero’s Books ***** (1991, John Gielgud) – Classic Movie Review 1313

Cult writer-director Peter Greenaway’s joyful 1991 film of Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a dazzling delight, both visually and aurally, respecting and adorning the play big time. A pioneering work with delight as much in technical innovation as in artistic imagination, it combines Shakespeare with mime, dance, opera and animation. Edited in Japan, the film makes extensive use of then new digital image manipulation, using inserts, video images and computer graphics, overlaying multiple moving and still pictures with animations.

It’s a total banquet of a feast but ultimately it stands and falls on its main treat – the great Shakespearean actor John Gielgud at the aged of 87 holding centre stage magnificently as the exiled magician Prospero. In Greenaway’s vision, Prospero stands in for Shakespeare, and he shows him writing and speaking the story’s action as it unfolds. Gielgud also beautifully voices all the parts, providing the off-screen narration and voices to the other characters.

Greenaway is true to his star and Shakespeare, while making it wonderfully cinematic, simultaneously experimental and formally beautiful, both magical and accessible. The eye is assaulted by a continual array of gorgeous visuals, the superimposed Hi-Vision video images, the ‘Paintbox’ computer graphics, the sumptuous costumes and sets, and an extraordinary gallery of varied naked men and women, supposedly reminiscent of Renaissance paintings of mythological characters. It’s rated R in the US and 15 in the UK for ‘pervasive nudity’.

The dancer Michael Clark is an inspired choice as Caliban. Ariel is played by four actors — three acrobats – a boy, an adolescent and a youth – as well as a boy singer. The pre-eminent Prospero of our age finally achieves his ambition to film the role – he turned down Derek Jarman’s wish to film him as Prospero in his 1979 The Tempest – and he’s in unexpected but safe hands. Greenaway got Gielgud to record the entire play, including dialogue that was never intended to be in  the film, so there would be a permanent record of his marvellous Shakespearean voice.

As Prospero, Gielgud was in four stage productions of The Tempest, in 1931, 1940, 1957, and 1974 and said a film of it was his life’s ambition. He had approached Alain Resnais, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and Orson Welles about directing him in it, and a Welles-directed version nearly came about in 1967 till finance collapsed.

Michael Nyman composes the score in the last of his collaborations with Greenaway and Karine Saporta choreographs the dance.

(C) Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1313

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