Admirável Shakespeare novo: literatura, cinema e vídeo em Prospero’s Books de Peter Greenaway

Abstract

The relationship between cinema and literature is well-known through time and through the theoretical comparative studies. In 1991, Peter Greenaway, an English film director, said in an interview for an important American magazine that “cinema is not an excuse to illustrate literature”. Besides that, we know literature is becoming, more and more, an object of inspiration to the cinema and television. Among these literary texts, we have many written by William Shakespeare, renowned as the England's greatest playwright and poet. According Leão (2008), there are more than seven hundred Shakespeareans translations to the cinema and TV since the nineteenth century. Peter Greenaway is one of the most important researches of the cinematographic language and its interface with different means, mainly the digital ones. According to Barros (2007), the new technologies made him rethink about his conceptions of cinema and they also helped to produce a kind of cinema based on research. Philippe Dubois (2004) and Arlindo Machado (2004) proposed a conception of video centered in an idea of a stage, which the kinetic movement is definer. The dialogue between cinema and digital video provokes many interesting discussions related to the cinematographic narrative structure and the visual conceptions of cinema. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (2005), in his studies about cinema, organizes two different kinds of image: movement-image and time-image. According Roberto Machado (2010), what differs these two kinds of image is their relation, directly and indirectly, with time. Based on this, Deleuze observers these images considering them important parts of the separation that we do between a narrative and a non-narrative cinema. Believing in the idea of a productive dialogue among literature, cinema and video, our research has as an objective to investigate, through intersemiotic theories and based on the studies of Peirce (2008), Gilles Deleuze (1993 e 2005), Bentes (2004) and Gérard Genette (1980) among others, how the inserts of videos in the movie Prospero’s Books (1991), written and directed by Peter Greenaway and translation of the Shakespearian play The Tempest, present themselves overlapped to the cinematographic film. Based on these overlays, we are going to observe how they contribute to new readings of the cinematographic theories. To do this, we divided our work in three different parts. In the first part, we are going to discuss about how the theories of video started and its relation with cinema; in the second part, we focus in the discussion about cinematic narration and the differences between a narrative film and non-narrative one; in the third part, we are going to analyze some images of Prospero’s Books and observe how these images build a non-narrative film.