Klappentext
Can the son’s eye
behold his father bleed?
There’s meed for meed, death for a deadly deed.
Despite its gruesome catalogue of atrocities, Shakespeare’s violent
revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus has been performed successfully all
over the world. Julie Taymor, the acclaimed director of the film Frida,
adapted it for the screen in 1999. Her film Titus draws on numerous
cultural and iconographic references to create a complex network of
meanings, thus exploring violence from a great variety of perspectives.
Giving its spectators food for thought, it plays with the thin line
between beautifying and denouncing the barbarous deeds in the text. The
purpose of this work is to lay bare the mechanisms by which the film
dissects how we experience, perpetrate and look at violence. Without
losing sight of the ethical implications, I wish to focus on and explore
the aesthetics of the violent spectacle.
The work was awarded the Prize for the Master’s Dissertation of the
French Shakespeare Society.
Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Introduction 9
Chapter One
Ritual and Realism: Exploring Violence? 17
Violence in Titus: contexts 18
Shakespeare and the revenge tragedy 18
Stylisation or realism: Titus on stage in the 20th century 25
Cinema and violence 32
The human body as the object of violence 38
An abstract approach to the body: ritualised violence 38
The reality of bloodshed 46
Comedy as an iconoclastic force 51
Chapter Two
The Rape of Lavinia: a Female Gaze on Violence? 57
Shakespeare’s Lavinia 59
The meaning of ‘rape’: woman as commodity 59
The rape of a woman or the dishonour of a family? 67
The characterisation of Lavinia: text vs performance 75
Family ties: individual vs archetype 75
Lavinia cut out: theatre vs film 81
Representing rape 85
Ancient and modern clichés of femininity 85
Empathy and violation 91
Chapter Three
Creating a Sense of Responsibility: a Way Out of Violence? 99
A journey from innocence to responsibility? 101
Young Lucius as a character within the diegesis 101
Young Lucius as an intellectual construct 104
Spectators within and outside of the fiction 107
Violence as spectacle 107
Teaching us how to look 113
Young Lucius as a director 116
Conjuring up a story of violence 116
Levels of fiction and reality 120
The final shot 123
The politics of renewal 123
A happy end? 126
Conclusion 133
Bibliography 135
Abstract 139
About the Author 141
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