Commentary on Grigori Kozintsev’s Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Grigori Kozintsev’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet has landed critical acclaim due to its faithfulness to the architecture of the play that helped to engross the eye despite the lack of aural stimulation, as well as its added political and personal lens. One of the most iconic scenes in Kozintsev’s production of Hamlet is the renowned graveyard scene in which the Gravedigger and Hamlet engage in battle of wits, and Laertes dramatizes his love for Ophelia. It is during this scene that Kozintsev strategically utilizes differing camera angles and abridgments of the original script to yield a much more conservative and idealized Hamlet that makes the situation in act 5 scene 1 much less ambiguous, while adding a political flair to the atmosphere via background details and props.

The theatrical elements that Shakespeare employs in act 5, scene 1 are outstanding, and serve to crease an ambiguous atmosphere surround the Ophelia’s death. This ambiguity is partially formulated by the Gravedigger’s play on words, in which he reopens death of Ophelia that the Queen portrayed as a “drowning,” as she fell into the water “mermaid-like… chanting snatches of old lauds As one incapable of her own distress” (4.7, 175-177), and turns it into an appalling transgression, marking her death as a suicide, contending that she “willfully seek[ed] her own salvation” (5.1, 274). The controversy that the Gravedigger brings up creates this problematic situation that gives Hamlet one of its unique characteristics; after all, Ophelia-the-suicide is much more complicated than an Ophelia of accidental death, especially because the corpse would be thrown into unhallowed ground with a steak through her heart. Furthermore, giving Ophelia’s death a suicidal natur...

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...f scenes form his production, as well as his use of camera angles removes this sense of ambiguity and confusion, and opts for a more conservative approach towards the scene. In addition to this, we see that Ophelia’s screen time is dramatically reduced from her already minimal role in the graveyard scene to focus on Hamlet (32 seconds out of 9 minutes to be exact), and because Ophelia’s lifeless body spawns this controversy, the film presents a “recuperation of Hamlet.” Kozintsev’s Hamlet is pushed away form “buffoonery and travesty” to create a character who is “always a hero” (Rutter), and thus he creates a much more idealized version of Hamlet than Shakespeare himself. Thus Kozintsev cultivates a production of Hamlet that not only reduces ambiguity, but creates a idealize Hamlet, and gives it a slight political touch to represent past and current Soviet trouble.