Indian and Chinese Film Versions of Hamlet and Macbeth

Filmmakers around the world have brought Shakespeare and Asian aesthetics together in the past decades to create diverse incarnations and bold imaginations of Shakespearean plays. In the global cultural marketplace, the beginning of the new millennium is for Asian Shakespeare films as the 1990s were for English-language Shakespeare on film — when a large number of creative and popular screen interpretations emerged. Shakespeare has been a part of the film and popular cultures of various Asian countries, with Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Hamlet at the center of cinematic imaginations. Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (Macbeth, 1957) and Ran (Lear, 1985) are far from the earliest or the only Shakespeare films from Asia.

Among other locations, Shakespeare films have been produced in India, Malaysia, Tibet, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, and Japan. Since 1927, the Indian cinematic tradition has engaged Shakespearean motifs in diverse genres ranging from silent film and theatrical cinematization to feature films that localize the plays. Films such as Angoor (dir. Gulzar, 1981; based on The Comedy of Errors) and The Last Lear (dir. Rituparno Ghosh, 2007) suggest that the cultural flows no longer travel unilaterally from the West to the "rest."

Anglophone and Asian films are increasingly in dialogue with one another. Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and John Madden's Shakespeare in Love have also inspired creative reinterpretations of these films and of Romeo and Juliet in Anthony Chan's Hong Kong film, One Husband Too Many, and Cheah Chee Kong's Singaporean film, Chicken Rice War. A Tibetan film entitled The Prince of the Himalayas (Ximalaya wangzi, China, 2006) with an all-star cast, reframes Hamlet in terms of ancient Tibet and local customs.

Following the success of Maqbool (Macbeth, India, 2003), the first Indian film adaptation of Shakespeare to gain international recognition, director Vishal Bhardwaj drew on Othello, caste politics, and gang culture to explore specifiable universals in human emotions in Omkara (2006). If the collapse of Shakespeare's status in mid-twentieth-century India in the narrative of the Merchant Ivory film Shakespeare-Wallah (1964) signals the end of cultural colonization," the advent of Bhardwaj's internationally acclaimed films suggests a renewed rivalry between Shakespeare's globally circulating text and local representational practices (Bollywood and beyond) in the post-national cultural marketplace.

The Banquet (Ye Yan, or Legend of the Black Scorpion, dir. Feng Xiaogang, China, 2006), a martial-arts film in Mandarin Chinese, gives Gertrude and Ophelia, traditionally silenced women characters in Hamlet, a strong presence. As a bold period epic, the film is informed by rich intertextual traces of diverse themes from Shakespearean and Chinese sources. Maqbool (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, India, 2004), hailed as a "Macbeth meets The Godfather" film, defies convenient categorization because it combines Bollywood gangster film, Muslim social drama, ethnography, and postmodernist artwork. The set design in one scene in The Banquet evokes Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968) and Hamlet (1990), while the closing scene in Maqbool is connected to Luc Besson's Léon (1994) through its visual strategies.

The Macbeths inhabit both the present-day Mumbai criminal underworld and India's film industry in an environment reminiscent of the world of the Scottish play. As national films with transnational networks of funding and artistic collaboration, The Banquet and Maqbool are self-conscious about their local as well as their international audiences. Both filmmakers engage productively with the inevitable tensions between different narrativized spaces and cinematic strategies. As a result, the films compel us to reconsider assumptions about the kinetic energy of Asian visual media and the textual foundation of English-language Shakespeare films.

The rash of new Shakespeare films from Asia may be the result of increasingly aggressive trans-nationalizing strategies since the 1990s. Asian audio-visual idioms have been appropriated, along with Shakespeare's text, on stage and on screen. Therefore, we need to ask: On what terms do international Shakespeare films reframe the relationships between different geo-cultural or virtual localities? In turn, what is entailed in the cultural practice of screening, in both senses of the verb, Shakespeare in transnational audio-visual idioms in modern times? How does Shakespeare become a necessary signifier against which popular and world cultures define themselves on screen?

These are some of the questions that have inspired a special issue of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, entitled "Asian Shakespeares on Screen," edited by Alexander Huang. It represents a collaborative effort to bring into productive dialogue studies of Shakespeare and both Asian and Western forms of cultural production. The collection of essays focus on The Banquet and Maqbool, two of the most fascinating and controversial recent Asian films of Shakespeare.

Enhanced by film stills and clips, the multimedia essays in this special collection are also designed to be a teaching tool to advance the study of Shakespeare on film — informing, but also initiating, critical debate. Despite these two feature films' popularity, there is a dearth of open-access scholarly resources that do justice to the films as visual and textual feasts. The issue is available

All articles are available as web-based version with full color illustrations and video clips or PDF version. Visit  borrowers.uga.edu/

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Adapted from --

Huang, Alexander C. Y. "Introduction." In Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue, edited by Alexander C. Y. Huang. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).