Cinema and the Kingdom of Death: Loncraine's

Peter S. Donaldson
SCAENA 2001, Cambridge, UK

Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there -- the earth, the trees, the people, the water, and the air -- is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is no life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.... And all this is in a a strange silence where no rumble of wheels is heard, no sound of footsteps or of speech. Nothing. Not a single note of the intricate symphony that always accompanies the movements of people. ¹

Richard, the third son [...] came into the world feet forward--as men be borne out of it. ²

I. The Kingdom of Shadows

Writing under the pseudonym "I.M. Pacatus" Maxim Gorky began his review of the Lumiere program for the July 4, 1896 edition of the Nizhni Novgorod with the words cited above. The piece is one of the earliest --perhaps the very earliest -- statement of the idea of cinema as a kingdom of death after the introduction of the new medium in 1895. Cinema is "no life, but its shadow." The contrary myth, cinema as "life," (or at least as closer to life in its representations than earlier media) is better known, enshrined even in the names of early production companies and names for cinematic processes: Vitagraph, Bioscope, Biograph. If photographic images were, "drawn by nature's pen," cinematic images added movement to photography's almost unmediated registration of the lineaments of the living world. And yet movement without color and without sound could be thought of as more uncanny than still images, creating spectral stirrings in the pallor of the tomb, or even mortifacient, death producing, not only failing at the simulation of the fullness of life, but actively producing half-life, a kind of death. (The paradox of Gorky's position is that, while he intends his remarks as critical, the experience he describes is a compelling one, for who would not wish, in the safety of the exhibition space, to visit the land of the shadows?)

Though Gorky's words are a classic instance of one kind of dissenting response to cinema once it actually existed, Angela Lant's researches have shown that related discourses of death, spectral life, and mummification can be traced earlier, to the prehistory of cinema, and were a pervasive presence in the discursive world into which film was introduced. Magic lantern "phantasmagoria" date from the late 18th century, and by 1801 were actively advertising the appearance of "Phantasms or Apparitions of the DEAD or ABSENT, in a way more illusive than has ever been offered to the eye in a public theatre." (Lant, 100). In the course of the century such shows acquired a close association with ancient Egypt, its cult of the dead and its practices of entombment and mummification. "Egyptian" elements were introduced into the shows and into the design and architecture of the display spaces, and in time these associations were transferred to cinema. For example, the Egyptian Hall in London, in which the magic lantern show and the craze for things Egyptian had come together most impressively, became a cinema exhibition space as early as 1896. Films about mummies coming to life began very early (Edison's Egyptian Mummy dates from 1909, and there are examples from 1911, 1913, 1914 and of course beyond to the Boris Karloff film of 1931 and further. If cinema was, in Gorky's phrase, a kingdom of shadows, it was so, in part, by design:

Lant's conclusion offers a particularly resonant way of thinking about the early history of several of the sub-genres of horror and Gothic, including the mummy and vampire film, but also provides a point of departure for thinking about the relation of cinema and early modern theatrical tragedy:

"Far from the conquest of death [...] the arrival of cinema seemed to invite an encounter with death" (Lant, 102). ⁴

The idea that cinema itself is the realm of the absent, the departed, the dead seems to be seldom exploited in Shakespeare on film, though our seminar, through its focus on Gothic and horror modes in relation to Shakespeare, may produce examples. One could look again at those flimsy transparent Hamlet ghosts that appear as early as the Forbes-Robertson film (1913), and their successors in Olivier and Zeffirelli (where the kingdom of death beckons more subtly but more powerfully than in many other Hamlets, despite the very human appeal of the ghost), at the "mummified" Desdemona in the Welles Othello, smothered in her wedding/winding sheet, and, perhaps especially, at the complex metacinematic texture of the Brook King Lear, in which Scofield's poignant appeals to the absent audience in his direct address to the camera seem aspects of his madness and grief and lead into his hallucinatory colloquy with the dead Cordelia. This wonderful work, shot in frozen Jutland in anachronistic black and white frequently alludes to silent cinema beginning with the opening sequence, in which an unnaturally mute and still congregation wait outside the royal chamber. Brook keeps us aware of the possibility that the medium itself might fail, lose its soundtrack, stick at a splice and show a still frame, move forward uncertainly, or otherwise revert to the soundless, colorless, fragmentary and almost (but not quite) lifeless isolation and numbness of the king's mind.

In the present essay I suggest that the trope of cinema as necropolis is central to the artistic design of the Loncraine Richard III and to its interpretation of the play. Like the Brook Lear, this Richard III often uses allusions to and techniques characteristic of silent cinema as emblems of death, framing the story of Richard as a media allegory. The media landscape in the film, is, however, broader than that in Brook's Lear . It is itself a widescreen color film, and its use and reframing of other media extend to black and white and silent cinema, 35mm still photography, , photograph-based silk screen graphic art, wireless telegraphy and tickertape, recorded and amplified "live" sound and, in the final moments, digital collage. The film uses this wide range of re-framed communications technologies in part to characterize Richard as a modern, media-reliant dictator, underscoring the other obvious and insistent parallels between Richard and Hitler, English facsism and Nazi terror which the film makes. But it also uses its updated version of Gorky's "kingdom of shadows" to shift attention, subtly but firmly, away from its historical subject, away from Shakespeare, away from Richard -- and even way from its own elaborate evocation of English fascism in the 1930s -- and toward the present moment. In his interpetation of Richard III, Loncraine presents, but also interrogates the myth of media complicity in the creation of contemporary regimes of death. ⁵

II. Richard is at Hand: Telegraphy and Automatic Weapons

Loncraine's media references begin not with cinema but with the older and more immediate medium of the telegraph. ⁶

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Extreme close up of a teletype machine, receiving a message. We see each letter as it is imprinted and moves away from the flywheel: RICHARD GLOUCESTER IS AT HAND. HE HOLDS HIS COURSE TOWARD TEWKESBURY. A hand reaches into the image to tear off the tape, and a longer shot discovers banked rows of machines chugging out a sea of paper ribbons in a busy command headquarters.

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Less than a minute later, Gloucester is at "at hand" indeed, as his tank breaches the walls. Seen first as dark figure in a gas mask, he is suddenly beside the overcomfortable Prince of Wales, who just before was enjoying a luxurious supper and a glass of wine. Seconds prior to Richard's entrance, the approach of the tank is registered in tiny domestic details: the barking of a an aged family dog, the rattle of a single wine glass. A single shot dispatches Edward, but Richard keeps firing gratuitously, the pistol shots becoming sound track to the opening credits, with RICHARD III typed letter by letter on screen in a staccato rhythm as the gun fires, associating teletype and automatic weapons as emblems of the film's intention to connect the character and the play to modernity.

Walter Benjamin's famous essay on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" characterizes mass media in a way that resonates with this moment in the film. ⁸ The masses, Benjamin posits, want things brought "very near, very fast." The tickertape does not, of course, literally bring modern warfare into the comfort of an upper class supper, but the echoing mechanical regularity that connects automated typing and gunfire suggests analogies as well as causal connections between modern communications and modern warfare, alike in their implacable replication, immediacy, and "impact". In Benjamin's essay the imagery is more gentle: media (photography, telegraphy) are harmful mostly to "aura" -- to the uniqueness, distance, numinousness upon which previous artforms and social formations had depended (as, here, the divinity that hedges royalty is no match for a tank; and rapid gunfire is harmful to aura and other living things). Elsewhere in Benjamin (as, for example, in the devastation beheld by the "angel of history" in his next-best known image), the sense of violence, speed and devastation is more palpable, and the association of mass media with the laying waste of nature and humanity more direct, and it is this side of Benjamin's critique that has been most fully developed in recent media theory, as, for example, by Paul Virilio. ⁹

The "masses" want things brought "very near, very fast," but what is brought near by media is the withering of aura (a kind of death) or death itself.

III. Clarence's Leica Captures the Moment

Richard's introduction as a tank commander is followed by a more pastoral scene at court, a modern version of the festivities that mark the "glorious summer" of the Yorkist victory. It is literally pastoral because Richard's gunshots are replaced on the soundtrack by a swing-age setting of Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd," its refrain, "come live with me" framed by Richard's murder of the Prince of Wales before it and images of the coughing (dying) King Edward after. Its harmonies are brief, and, if the vocalist herself is intended to be understood as Jewish, allegorically portentous. The scene is lush, luxurious, insincere, decadent. Lord Rivers is a heedless American roue, grabbing a feel from a stewardess as he disembarks from his plane, chain smoking throughout the ball, even as he dances with his sister Queen Elizabeth. The queen also dances with the invalid king briefly, to show they can do it (but her brother seems a more appropriate romantic match) and then seductively, with her tiny son, in a shot modelled on Doris Day in The Man Who Knew Too Much.

The Duke of Clarence records the moment. He has a Leica (or Leica copy), an elaborate darkroom set up that is beautifully integrated into his apartments in the palace; a folding flash gun, tripod, time delay shutter. He poses the royal family at a balustrade on a higher floor, rushes down the formal staircase to click the shutter, rejoins them and is included in the shot -- which then instantly appears as a black and white still in the sequence, holds for a moment and stops the action, and then procedes to fade "up" to full color and movement as filmic time resumes.

The sequence embodies, through Clarence, the fantasy that the ongoing movement of events and its photographic representation could be seamlessly and instantly integrated, that life and its grey scale shadow could be one, and that the complex processes of photography could be blended elegantly into the lifeways they record. In contrast to cinematic "apparatus theory," Clarence's set up and his "back room" preparations are shown in detail, yet his idealization of the moment and of the small royal society to which he belongs survives the "revelation of the apparatus." This is an ambitiously inclusive world, in which the royal family provides its own spectacle, and its own representations of that spectacle. However both on the level of narrative (Clarence) and of allegory (if I read the singer's ethnic signification correctly), those who do most to create the pastoral image of the court and its Yorkist "summer" will presently become its victims.

As Clarence memorializes the moment (he is the official guide, the modern equivalent of the few Yorkist sources), he is in turn recorded by the cinematographer, and by Richard. The camera movements that traverse the distances between Clarence and his tripod also mirror Richard's glance, ,making connections, watching Clarence, spotting him in the crowd. There's a track from king to Clarence, then men move in to arrest him. Then a shot of Richard and another tracking shot to Clarence, showing that Richard sees the moment of apprehension and may stand in some "insider" or causal relation to it.

Next the camera follows Richard as he makes his way to the microphone. He taps it and a dissonant screech fills the auditorium, contrasting his choice and use of media with Clarence's. As he addresses the mock celebratory soliloquy of discontent not to himself, but to the court, the camera moves in to frame the movements of his brutal, willful jaw and show his teeth. The shot alludes, perhaps, to the famous long tracking shot in Young and Innocent, in which a slow movement from the upper balcony of an immense dancehall to a close up of the drummer in the band, a close-up tight enough to reveal the flaws in his blackface makeup and discover the murderer's disguise, as well as the many references to Richard's bite in the Shakespeare ("O Jesus bless us, he is born with teeth;" "beware my bite, etc.) Hitler is evoked; not only his signature use of the microphone but his suppression of and unintended contribution to the visual record of history.

Clarence is no photographer (or chronicler) in the play, but his long dream bears a kind of witness to moral complexities in the English civil wars which the Tudor histories, and Shakespeare's play itself, in part disavow and misrepresent by making Richard the central character and apparent author of all evil. To the extent that one attends to the events Clarence's dream recalls, rather than to his dramatic position as repentant victim, Richard takes his place as one more perjured, disloyal, and murderous nobleman among many others. It is this "truth," and not only the truth about the construction of the Tower of London, or the truth of the murder of the princes within it, which is in danger of being effaced, and if Richard's murder of Clarence helps to bury the complexity of the record in one way, Shakespeare's play does so in another.

In Shakespeare, the the question of the record -- the record kept, the record not kept or distorted, the record that persists in living memory, is of course stated in terms of oral and written history, framed by theatrical enactment on the public stage. When York, on his way to the Tower, asks about its history, and declares his faith that, even if the written "report" had been destroyed, "the truth would live from age to age," he points to the oral tradition, and perhaps even to the specific handing down of stories from Cardinal Morton (who as Bishop of Ely appears in the Shakespeare's play as eyewitness to many of Richard's misdeeds) to Thomas More, his protege and co-author. The "truth" York invokes is not the self evident truth of the persistence of the ancient monument; it is the truth of its foundation by Julius Caesar, and, proleptically, prophetically, the truth of the death of the princes as well asthe suppression of that truth. Both "truths" require the witness of the dead, ways in which their knowledge can be be brought back to life in successive generations despite suppression or the loss or perversion of the written record. The dead live in the triumph of oral tradition, just as the living live, but in a kind of death, under suppression, under tyranny. Both kinds of truth are wider than the particular instance, for "Julius Caesar's Tower" and "The Princes in the Tower" are both aspects of the history of the foundation and transmission of state power through violence; the violence of conquest or of the force needed to maintain a state gained through usurpation. Machiavelli, much concerned with the role of violence in both situations, held that the truth would not survive; that the victors -- Christians (who supressed the truth of paganism) and Romans (who suppressed the truth of the peoples they conquered) effectively effaced the voices of those who preceded them. Like the comparisons between Alexander and Henry as conquerors in Henry V, the prince's speech may have a wider application than its immediate place in the drama; it is overdetermined,and,specifically, can apply to such partial "truths" as Shakespeare himself receives, and even amplifies because they support the mythmaking of the victors. The "truth," of Richard's tyranny, the play implies, has survived -- shown now on the stage, and later to be enacted, as events would prove, "from age to age." In the film, the interplay of media is different, with the photographic record (accurate, but staged) contrasted with the more immediate intrusion of the loudspeaker, both framed by a camera that shows us not only Richard's bad faith but that of his class.

IV. Clarence's Death: L'univers concentrationnaire

Richard begins the famous soliloquy at the microphone, but he finishes it in the men's room. The location functions in multiple ways; intimating the intrusion of "bodies" among the flickering cinematic shadows through evocations of physical aspects of life that still photography does not convey. First the the haptic or tactile (Richard's good hand on his penis, shaking the drops off below the frame line; after we see him do this, the concealed "bad" hand will always evoke this moment); then the olfactory (cigarette smoke exhaled through the mouth inhaled through the nostrils sensuously, which in this setting includes a hint of uroboric self-pleasuring). Richard's physical narcisssism is here juxtaposed with the pseudo-innocence of the Rivers clan on the dance floor. That the soliloquy bridges these two sets is important for the film's poltiical allegory, but it does not, however, privilege the more "private" space of the men's room with the clarity of unmediated self-disclosure. It is not as if we move from a false public face to a more authentic privy self, for, even though Gloucester addresses the camera directly here and several times elsewhere, he does not warm up to us as audience, does not "play" us as Olivier's Richard always does. His pleasure in discourse, his moments of acknowledgment and communion (such as they are) are reserved in this sequence for his mirror image, which he addresses with real pleasure.

The men's s room set also serves as the first element in the film's creation of a series of underground spaces in which tile floors and walls, large empty expanses, muted colors tending to greys and whites predominate. The "wooing of Ann" takes places in a hospital morgue, Clarence's quarters in the tower are of a kind of bathhouse. These locations develop the visual theme of the city/kingdom of death, and, though shot in color, always tend to a monchrome palette contrasting with the brightly colored scenes of court life.

The connection of the morgue with this theme is obvious, but the design of the Tower environment develops the associations of the morgue/bathroom/hospital world in the direction of the death camps.

Clarence is first seen in the tower in a grey set; harsh light from an overhead grate diffused in a tiled room lined with ductwork. He still wears his black formal coat and white shirt, now without collar ot tie. His face is pale, drained and deathlike, but, in the first shot of the sequence provides the only hint of color in the image. (one may note how insistently the director creates images in which it is hard to tell a color image of a neutral toned scene from a black and white image. Such devices remind us of Clarence's photography, and also prepare for ambiguities in our perception of media later on in the coronation scene and elsewhere, setting us off guard as to whether an image seen first in a limited context is low intensity color or "real" black and white.

For low illumination, of course, drains the world of color even though a scene may be recorded on a color emulsion. Through the film, Loncraine momentarily deceives us by framing one medium by another, yet keeps us conscious that we might be tricked, keeps us looking not only for Richard, but for evidence as to how he is being filmed. If, in the now classic formulations of the "apparatus" critics, the foregrounding of the camera (as in Dziga Vertov's "Man with a Movie Camera" or Godard's "Vivre sa Vie") creates possibilities of political significance in its implicit critique of the constructedness of the image (and therefore, so this argument goes) of the ideological structures that effacement of process is implicated in, so Loncraine foregrounds not the apparatus itself, but the emulsion and the format (black and white or color, 35mm still, 16mm home movie, 35mm color cinema).

In the second sequence in the Tower, shots through the bars of Clarence's prison (a bluer light, still monochrome, shows rows of windows, the murderers seeking entrance from the keeper in high angle long shot) are intercut with shots of the brightly colored palace dining hall, decorated with fresh flowers, where Gloucester confronts and insults the Queen and Rivers.

The third sequence, in which the murderers enter to Clarence, return to brown tinted monochrome, again with Clarence's very slightly pink flesh the only hint of a wider palette. The shot is a diagonal, wide angle view of a room containins six large bathtubs over a grated floor with steam rising up through the floor in several places. Clarence is in the second tub, his face obscured by the newspaper he is reading as the murderers enter through barred gates at the back of the image.

The first gas chamber at Auschwitz was a converted morgue, chosen because the pre-exsting ventillation system could be adapted for the rapid clearing of lethal gas. The prisoners, as all know, were told they were entering a delousing shower, and were packed into the chamber so that their body heat would create the temperature necessary to volatilize the Zyglon B insecticide that was shaken down, in solid form, into the chamber through grates above. Loncraine replicates elements of this scenario -- grates above, the naked body in the bath, the visual linking of this location to the morgue in which Richard woos Lady Ann, the steam rising from the floor.

V. Royal Snuff: Filming the Moment of death

Richard Loncraine is not primarily a "horror film" director but there are a number of films in which he concentrates attention on the visual evidences of death, and plays upon the way in which cinema does not provide enough information, cannot render sensory aspects of the death moment which the characters can perceive, but also brings us at least visually closer to the dying face than those present in the scene. In addition he plays upon the possibilities of cinematic manipulation to unsettle the attention his death scenes demand. A freeze frame, for example, can look very much like the cessation of movement in death; the appearance of the pallor of death might be due to a change in lighting.

The death of Edward IV is brief, but raises these issues; the king's facial movements are tiny, microscopic, his rasping breath very quiet, at last he is still, but we are not sure if the cessation of movement is final until we are cued by a cut to the queen's horrified reaction:

From the earliest years of his career, Loncraine has favored such moments. In The Haunting of Julia (1976) the final sequence ends with a similar shot in which Julia (Mia Farrow) dies on screen, but a tight close-up keeps our attention on her face and withholds the contextual clues that next inform us that we hav been looking at a dead face. It is interesting that this film centers on a kind of reversal of post-war mythology, for the "haunting" in the film takes its origin from the torture and death of an inncent German child in the wake of the post-war hatred of Germans. Loncraine keeps us guessing as to whether Mia Farrow's character is victim or vampire until the very end, when the ambiguity is played as audience difficulty in determining whether cinemtic faces are alive or dead.

In Wide Eyed and Legless [US title The Wedding Gift] (1994), a telelvision drama starring Julie Walters and Jim Broadbent, the life-death boundary is treated in a related way, and brings horror elements into a strange and affecting domestic story, in which a middle aged wife suffering from extreme chronic fatigue and wishing to die arranges an affair for her husband as a kind of gift, and attempts, finally successfully, to arrange her own death as well. In a number of sequences, the husband looks into his wife's face (several of these are in the bath), trying to see if she has had a momentary lapse of consciousness or has drowned or died by poisoning herself. In the climax, the lights in the house dim ominously, registering the current that rushes through her body in the bath when she commits suicide by electrocution. We don't know, however, whether this has really happened until he rushes upstairs and we examine, with him, once again, her lifeless face, this time intended to be read as actually dead. As in the Haunting of Julia, the perusal of the image, examining it for signs of life is also thematic; if in Julia the motif captures and hold our attention on the moral issue of the victimization of Germans, here we are asked to consider the complex moral issues surrounding the wife's wish to die rather than suffer the torments of an incurable disease and the sadness of watching her marriage, based so much on activity and vital engagment, drift into long term care burdens for her husband. The moments of ambiguity are torment for the husband; for the audience they provide an invitation to take the unconventional moral stance of the film seriously.

Dwelling on the moment of death and on the ways in which that moment is made ambiguous yet "very near" by reproduction in contemporary media is a constant preoccupation of Loncraine's Richard III, where such moments are, as might be expected, very closely associated with Richard as well as with the audience's perception and non-perception of his murders. There were explicit necrophiliac scenes in the National Theater production from which the film derives: after Hasting's death, his head is brought (in a fire bucket) to Richard. Alone on the huge stage, he savors the moment, glances about (no one there; only us), and reaches lovingly into the bucket in a kind of erotic ecstasy.

The film weaves a subtle web of sensory details into its portayal of comparable moments. The first death is that of Clarence -- Richard is seen in medium close-up, his withered arm being massaged; the masseur is out of view and we see the pain of the process and a hint of excstacy in the relief it brings on Richard's face. A package is brought (evidence of Clarence's death within, we think) and the attendant withdraws. Richard draws the brown paper past his nostrils as if savoring a fine cigar, extracts the duke's spectacles (twins of the ones Richard himself is wearing) and begins to sniff them hungrily when he becomes aware of his wife at the staircase in a lovely lowcut satin nightgown. Interrupted and annoyed, he goes to her and dismisses her by rudely reaching past her to shut off the light. The sense of smell, of course, is not, or not delivered as a part of the cinematic experience, but its simulacrum has been used earlier in Richard's savoring and inhalation of his own second-hand smoke, and, grotesquely, in his smelling of his own saliva-coated ring (he's taken it off his finger with his teeth) before he places it on Ann's finger in the morgue. Here, then, Clarence's glasses, the "brothers" to Richard's, evoke the earlier scenes of narcissism, twinning, replication, mirroring, as one pair of spectacles is brought so close to the other as to appear its image, as the odor of the living body of one brother is savored by the other.

Whether or not the necrophiliac stories that are attached to Adolf Hitler are true or not, they are certainly a part of the legend and its cinematic representation. As early as The Great Dictator (1940), Chaplain's Hitler, when alone, slides into a megalomania and narcissism tinged with erotic intensity (like McKellen) and is obsessed with death. When a visitor admires the dictator's great fishtank and wants to see the fish actually swim, Chaplin replies with delight, "You can't -- they're all dead."

Photographs of the dead Hastings, a noose around his neck offer Richard the next opportunity to savorings the death moment of a victim, and he makes sure he is alone, and puts a record on the Victrola and stretches out on the love seat to enjoy it.

Queen Anne's death, later, is also filmed so that the audience scans her face, eyes open, still and pale on her pillow for signs of life or death, and attends to the image for the "still frame" effect we have seen before as an indicator of the moment of death. We have heard Richard's ominous prediction that she is "grievous sick and like to die." When a tiny spider walks across her face she doesn't move. Whether or not its venom caused her death, the shot recalls the "spider" epithets for Richard used by Queen Elizabeth, and the moment links us, as watchers, to his morbid preoccupations.

In each case, the death moment is associated with a still photograph, a still frame, a moving image sequence so motionless that it is hard to distinguish from a still, a change to black and white emulsion, a shift to monchrome palette and pale tones -- or a combination of several of these devices that reverse the history of the medium, moving from full color sound cinema to its silent and motionless media ancestors.

VI. The Coronation

The English coronation ritual derives, through many changes, from Carolingian practices which themselves are based, ultimately, on Biblical texts concerning the annointing of kings in the Davidic line. The annointing itself is a ritual analogue and subtitute for the more wayward and unpredictable descent of divine spirit upon the leaders of Israel in the preceding age of the judges, when personal and literal evidences of charisma or numen determined the succession. Saul, in some sense both judge and king, is a transitional figure, for charisma descends upon him (and leaves him, too) and he is also annointed, as David and all his successors were to be.

Because the annointing of a king at the time of coronation was a ritual of such sanctity, its portrayal in secular media was, and continued to be, into the mid twentieth century, an extremely sensitive matter -- Shakespeare and his immediate predecessors, the authors of the True Tragedie and of the Latin RicardusTertius do not present the coronation of Richard on stage. Historically, the coronation of Richard III was itself an exceptional event in several ways. Preparations were somewhat rushed, but plans in place for the coronation of Edward V provided a head start. It was the first "double" coronation since 1308, for Lady Ann was crowned as well as Richard. The ceremony was extended by the addition of a vigil on the night before. A version of the oath was translated into English, printed and circulated. The sacred oil of Thomas a Becket, and the bejewelled eagle containing the ampulla that held it was transferred permanently to Westminster Abbey, in order to bring the ritual closer to the way in which the oil of Clovis was treated in France. The event was simultaneously more elaborately sacral and more "accessible" than most of its predecesors. ¹⁰

In the film, the event is magnificent, but its charismatic status is undermined not only by our knowledge of Richard's crimes, but by his absolutely rigid, grimly unresponsive demeanor, and, especially, by the manner of its presentation on screen. The coronation sequence begins with a shot of Queen Anne, her face impassive, being driven to Westminster in a limousine. The camera lowers to show her thighs, discolored by drug abuse, the tops of her stockings and garter, a dark triangle of shadow between her legs which the hypodermic traverses. ¹¹

As her head nods off to the left in the moving car, a dissolve to a "matched" sequence associates her head, borne off into dreams, with the crown on its cushion, carried in the coronation ritual.

The dissolve elides the travel to the procession, for as Richard is crowned, it is Anne, in close-up, whose motionless face provides the "reaction shot" for the scene, who is the chief watcher. As we cut back to the procession, it is black and white, and has dropped back, looped back in time to the beginning of the march we have just seen, identical but for medium, for this is a black and white shot -- Richard is crowned again (he will always be crowned again -- he is "at hand"), and there is a cut back to Anne, in color, in a shot that is similar to her first appearance. Is the shift in medium an index of her loss of vitality to the drug and to the abusive and soon to be fatal marriage to Richard?

As she nods off to the right in the moving car, a dissolve to a "matched" sequence associates her head, borne off into dreams, with the crown on its cushion, carried forward in the procession. As Richard is crowned, it is Anne, in close-up, whose motionless face provides the "reaction shot" for the scene. She is the chief watcher, a member of the audience, rather than, as in history, crowned consort.

As we cut back to the procession, the image has shifted from color to black and white, and has looped back in time to the beginning of the march.. The sequence is identical to what we have just seen but for the change in emulsion -- Richard is crowned again (he will always be crowned again -- he is perpetually "at hand"), and there is a cut back to Anne, in color as before, apparently in the same spot, watching the procession. But now a wider shot reveals that she is sitting in a chair watching a replay of the moment, with Richard, as a silent black and white "home movie" is shown over and over on a portable screen in the palace. These complex shifts among and analogies between points of view connect our doubled view of the ritual with that of the drugged and dying queen, with the draining of life from her vision, as well as with the king's need for replay and "postmortem" through photographic replication.

The sequence foreshadows the queen's death, and suggests that she is already in a state of living death or zombification, and associates Richard's media addiction with that state. The sequence also provides a motivational link from the coronation to the decision to murder the princes, for we see that no amount of replay will allow Richard to draw contentment or reassurance from the coronation; his recording of the moment has made it less, not more available to him, and he must turn to more psychopathic measures in order to move from "thus" to "safely thus."

This anachronistic, fictional filming of the coronation may be read in relation to the central role which investitures, royal marriages and funerals, and coronations have had in the debates concerning the aura or sanctity of kingship in 20th century Britain. The investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1911, the marraige of the future George VI to the future Queen Elizabeth, the funeral of Princess Diana and especially the coronations of 1936 and 1953 were all major events in media history, and in each case there were extended debates about the relation of media coverage and royal mystery. Would the coronation itself be covered or just the procession? What would the role of loudspeaker, audio broadcast, television coverage (as early as 1936) and film coverage be? How might the dignity of kingship be affected by the more than theoretical possibility that someone might hear or watch the proceedings while doing something unseemly if not literally coram rege, then at least in the mediated presence of the august event? In 1936, the "Mass Observation Movement" made a virtue of these fears, choosing Coronation Day as the first of a series of nation-wide autoethnographical surveys, precisely targetting description of the settings and reactions of ordinary people, in some cases randomly observed, to the procession and coronation, its coverage by loudspeaker in London and its radio broadcast throughout Britain and in Europe. Offcial fears of lese majeste were echoed (and enacted, sometimes self-consciously) in all these settings. ¹²

The Loncraine film embodies and affirms the myth of the degradation of kingship by media reresentation, but locates the source of that degradation not in the masses' wish to have the event brought "very near, very fast," but in the narcissistic needs of the ruler. It is not public broadcast that transforms the transmission of the living spirit into a pallid and deathly compulsion, but a private exhibition for the royal family.

VII. "Suddenly, a King"

The New York Times Magazine cover for Feb. 6, 2000 is illustrated with a striking Joyce Tenneson photographic portrait of Abdullah II of Jordan. His face, hands and just one corner of the arm of a worn red velvet and mahogany chair are fully lit, while the rest of his body is very nearly invisible, his ribbed black sweater merging with the black background of the cover. The king's face is framed by the red, familar antique lettering of the magazine section title, which in this context picks up both the color and the traditional associations of the king's chair. The caption, in large block letters across Abdullah's chest, provides a contrast, the starker, more modern typocgraphy declaring: "Suddenly (in grey)," "A King" (in white). Then two lines of smaller white characters below explain "Abdullah II of Jordan was trained to be a modern guy, not a Middle East potentate. Is it possible to be both?"

At the upper right corner of the page, again in white, there is a teaser for another story: "Joseph Stalin's Cure for Strep -- by Lawrence Osborn"

The portrait itself shows a man relaxed and pleasant but not entirely comfortable in the role of Times cover personality. He is a new and not quite assimilated media presence, his home remedies not yet household words like those of a more famous ruler who did manage to combine elements of modernity with absolutism. Abdullah's image is new and vivid, and yet (almost microscopically, but tellingly) unkempt, other, and uncertain. This is a debut. As his reign proceeds, his success as media will personality will be watched, will have an influence on what he will be able to accomplish as king and even on how long he will rule.

The Times Magazine cover reminds me of the traditional division of English history into medieval and modern in 1485; of the role of a new medium (printing) in what used to be called "The Tudor Myth," of how central the transition from Richard III, a kind of despot and successor to Tamburlaine on the English stage, to Henry VII was for for More, for Polydore Vergil, for Shakespeare and for all the chronicles and editions of chronicles between. I think of the various (modernist) revisions of the idea of Tudor modernity, as for example G.R. Elton's slight shift from Shakespeare's periodization, his locating of the "Tudor revolution in government" in the beaureaucratic innovations of Thomas Cromwell under Henry VIII. The "modern" continues to be at least in part defined by a new relation between ruler and ruled made possible by the mechanically replicated verbal and visual images we now call "the media."

Richard III's place in the intertwining of Tudor apologetics in print and in the medium of public theater in the sixteenth century is a central, even defining one -- he is perhaps the most vivid character in the English prose histories, and his place in the emergence of the English history play is crucial, for the Richard plays not only make the king an intimate, soliloquizing presence, but also import the Marlovian tragedy of one-man tyrrany into a recent and English historical setting. The part of Richard was a star role, then as now. Yet, at the same time, his definitive, overdone, histrionic evil marks a period shift, his call for a horse in Shakespeare and earlier suggesting the dead end of medieval modes of single combat and the exhaustion of a chivalric code continually corrupted by nealry all the parrticipants on every side of the complex struggles of the fifteenth century. Henry VII is not a star, but a pious soldier of God in Shakespeare, and it is not until Henry V that the term "star" in something like its modern sense will be applied to an English king by Shakespeare or by anyone else.

Kings began to be media personalities as soon as there were media to personalize them, and Richard III, even Loncraine's Richard III is among them. There are star turns in McKellen's portrayal (but fewer than in the stage production). His command of the microphone, his wonderful act as reluctant conscript king, forced to assume the role against his withdrawn and meditative nature, and his manifest skill as dissimulation all continue the process by which, from More to Shakespeare, Richard becomes, rather steadily, ever more central to the story of his reign, ever more distinct, almost ontologically, from the other historical actors, some of whom shared a comparable list of crimes, betrayals and deceptions. Several aspects of this "stardom" receive special attention in McKellen's performance and in Loncraine's framing of that performance: there is astonishing physical work in McKellen's ability to take gloves on and off, light cigarettes with one hand, work a ring off his finger with his teeth. These favored, signature aspects of McKellen's style are much in evidence in the film (though they were perhaps more central to the stage production, in which he changes jackets before the audience with one hand, from Wehrmacht to SS as the fascist allegory came to its climax). In the scene before Richard appears, reluctant, before the citizens of London, he prepares in a space that is literally a star dressing room, with dozens of light bulbs, twin make up women, and an appropriately pouting fussiness on the part of the star himself.

However, these elements are relatively muted: we see Richard's success, and indeed, it is a tour de force of role shifting and role playing, but as I read the film, Richard is not a star for us in the same way that, for example, Olivier was. Establishing this point securely would require a longer argument, but several points can be noted briefly. McKellen does not use the soliloquy to create special relationship with us audience, charming or impressing us; he does address the camera directly, but not with much of a sense of contact. This can be seen by contrasting the joy with which he responds to himself in the mirror in the opening soliloquy, as opposed to the flat tone in which he addresses the camera. And, in any case, the soliloquy does not open the film -- first we see him as a cruel, methodical executioner during the credits, then as a public speaker, beginning the soliloquy as an address to the court. If his direct address style isn't charming or winning, neither is it chilling, it is matter of fact. If his performance as reluctant king is framed as a star turn, it succeeds by a rather lower key performance than we are led to expect, and then, as in the text, there is a gap between what Richard can achieve as performer and what Buckingham must extract from the citizens by more direct pressure. Richard does what is required, brings considerable theatrical powers to bear in doing it, but does not waste more energy than is needed to achieve his aims.

What I see as a certain reserve in Richard, his indifference to theatrical or media stardom may have many determinants -- Loncraine and McKellen's interest in the social dynamics that Richard's actions reveal as the true causes for violence is surely among them; this is a film as much about class privilege, class indifference and scapegoating as it is about a single wicked personality. In any case, this reserve makes possible a transition from Richard to Richmond that is startling, and which, in the final moment or two of the film, reshapes ones perception of the McKellen interpretation of the play.

The film ends with a confrontation between Richard and Richmond after a slow pursuit on the upper floors of a ruined building, on the precarious footing of its exposed steel girders. Richard thinks he is alone, turns to see Richmond in a position of advantage, weapon drawn, and falls backward, apparently intentionally, and smiles as he falls, beckoning Richmond to join him as his image becomes posterized, cartoon-like and infernal, engulfing flames rising about him. Richmond, secure in his footing above, fires coldly into the falling body, and then catches the camera's watching eye, looks up and breaks into a shy smile of recognition, as in those 70s television shows in which the performers acknowledge their performance, step out of role and, as it were, take their televisual bows for the camera. Here, the gesture accompanies the very moment at which power passes decisively from Richard to Richmond, that is, at the pivotal moment at which the medieval becomes the modern, in which a hellish, demonic rule yields to a new dynasty, one perhaps equally cold, more casual and banal in its evil.

Richmond's gratuitous firing into Richard's body echoes the ticker-tape regularity of the gunshots in the opening sequence, when Richard fired into the dead body of Edward Prince of Wales. With these shots, the film comes full circle and Richard triumphs, because his project has been to turn his self-hatred into a deconstruction of the bland, morally vacant and violent society around him. Richard sees Richmond fire and smiles as he falls, reaching his hand out to invite the new king "if not to heaven then hand in hand to Hell" as "Sittin' on top of the world" plays on the soundtrack. That is, as the style of the film suddenly turns very contemporary, toward digital collage and postmodern pastiche, its frame of reference broadens, just as quickly, from the period of time between the wars, or even the greater span between Shakespeare and the present, to allow allusions to the Medieval figures that were Richard's dramatic predecessors, and to the Biblical and post-Biblical passages that speak of a fallen angel and of the flames of Hell. ¹³

Richard misses what would have been an even greater triumph, the sight of the ready grin with which the new king turns from this gratuitous act of cruelty to morally bankrupt acceptance of his place in the spotlight. For as Richard falls backward in space and moves into the realm of ancient legend (narrowly missing grabbing hold of his rival's hand), Richmond, caught in a pivotal moment of bad faith, moves closer to our world of media conscious political leaders, mugging for the camera with a smoking gun in his hand. Though he is present in the production far more than other Richmonds on stage and in film adaptations, he was unnamed and unremarked in the early scenes, and hard to read, even neutral in the latter sequences, bland even (or especially) in the "added" sex scene with his new wife. Now he takes the stage, or, more precisely, makes his media debut.

The Loncraine Richard III uses the trope of the cinematic kingdom of death as a central feature of its approach to the play, extending the metaphor of cinematic representation as death-in-life to a wide range of media including telegraphy and photography, all framed by the practices of contemporary digitally enhanced moviemaking. If the film's "allegorical" narrative moves Richard from the late middle ages to fascist-leaning England in the 1930s, its media allegory in turn frames that placement in even more contemporary terms, those of the age of media convergence, cross media repurposing and repackaging, and government by celebrity media stars. As the film's final moments transfer power from Richard to Richmond, and he recognizes us at the moment he becomes an insincere politician/star, the film asks us to recognize him, and his world, as ours.

¹ "I.M. Pacatus" (pseud. of Maxim Gorky), rev. of Lumiere exhibition, Nizhni Novgorod, (July 5, 1896), trans and repr Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), p. 407. back

² Thomas More, Historie of King Richard III back

³ Angela Lant, "The Curse of the Pharaoh, or How Cinema Contracted Egyptomania," October 59 (1992) 87-112. back

⁴ In a sense, the early cinema made a virtue of necessity, for it had, as William Uricchio has recently argued, failed to live up to expectations, common at the century's end, that some new form of art, some new medium would bring life -- distant life, past life-- before an audience in all its vitality and ongoingness. Like the"telescopic philanthropy" imagined in Bleak House, the hope was that the lives of faraway people would be present to us in real time, as they unfolded. As early as 1877, a year after the invention of the telephone, Punch published a cartoon of a young woman in Africa, talking to her parents in England on a wide screen picture phone, with an ease that current technologies have not yet achieved in the year 2000. The medium, Uricchio argues, for which the time was ripe was not film, with its repetition of the recorded past in grey and silent pictures, but what we would now call television -- and perhaps color television at that. We would have to wait for it, and the rhetoric of cinema discourse and marketing only continued, according to this view, to stimulate appetites for living representations that were only approached in the late 1930s, and then only for a few, when television systems were launched in England and Germany. But television was not widespread in America and Western Europe until after the Second War, and color came later still. William Uricchio, "Technologies of Time," MS. back

⁵ Questions about whether a new medium, or a new representational practice imitates life, creates a new kind of life, reanimates the dead or, in contrast, renders life into a lifeless shadow of itself were sometimes raised in relation to the the public threater in early modern England as well, and the Richard III story offered special opportunities for raising them. The True Tragedy of Richard III begins with a ghost crying for revenge. In this, the play was following a precedent set by The Spanish Tragedy, and followed by Locrine and several others -- but the True Tragedy is the first to weave the revenge-ghost and the matter of English history together. The play begins with a ghost, crying for revenge. At his exit, Truth and Poetry confer: Poetrie :Truth, well met. Truth: Thankes, poetrie, what makes thou vpon a stage? Poetrie: Shadowes. Truth: Then will I adde bodies to the shadowes Therefore depart and give Truth leave to show her pageant. The function of "Truth" on the stage, then, is to move from shadows to bodies; from fictions to realities, from ghosts, perhaps, to the living. But also, in a more troubling but perhaps equally compelling reading, one can hear in Truth's claim to deliver a different kind of image of death from the spectral, a physicalized, enacted form of death peculiar to the stage, the littering of the stage with corpses. Such a reading would link the play to Tamburlaine, who shows the virgins 'death" on thepoint of his sword, and whose depradations, by the end of part I, show a stage littered with bodies, where "as in a mirror" may be seen "his honor that conists in shedding blood." back

⁷ References in pointed brackets are to the MGM "letterbox" issue of Richard III (d. Richard Loncraine, 1995) on video laserdisc (1996). Side number, time code for start of citation and time code for end point separated by commas. E.g.: r3McK1,21027,22625» indicates side 1, citation begins at 2 minutes, 10 seconds, frame 27 and ends at 2 minutes, 26 seconds, frame 25. back

⁸ In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969) 217-251. back

⁹ Paul Virilio, The Virilio Reader, ed. James Der Derian (London and Malden, MA.:Blackwell, 1998), esp. chap. 4 "The State of Emergency" and refs. in index s.v."speed." back

¹⁰ Anne F. Sutton and P.W. Hammond, eds., The Coronation of Richard III: The Extant Documents (New York: St. Martin's, 1984); P.E. Schramm, A History of the English Coronation ( Oxford: Clarendon, 1937). back

¹¹ The sequence is in some ways typical of Loncraine's handling of the voyeuristic conventions of filmic sexuality, as the camera both seeks and covers the view of the female, and displaces phallus into symbol. Loncraine's use these well known tropes is always complicated by our being able to read in them the signs of Richard's particular obsession with death. Here, the queen is killing herself slowly with drugs because of the horror (including sexual emptiness) of living with Richard. The scene of the murder of Rivers at the moment of ejaculation during fellatio, followed by a cut to a child's train and then to a steam engine entering a tunnel also enacts such a double displacement, whereby screen voyeurism is reframed as necrophilia. back

¹² Kenneth M. Wolfe, The Churches and the British Broadcasting Corporation (London: SCM Press, 1984); Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge, et. al., eds. May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys (London: Faber, 1937); Paddy Scannell, Radio, Television and Modern Life: A Phenomenological Approach (London: Blackwell, 1996). back

¹³ E.g. Isaiah 14:12, Revelations 12:7-9 and eso. Luke 10:18; see also English Mystery Plays , ed. David Bevington (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), "The Creation and Fall of the Angels" (Wakefield Cycle), pp. 259-266 and English Mystery Plays, ed. Peter Happe (London: Penguin, 1975), "Fall of Lucifer" (Chester Cycle) 49-61. back