Hamlet

Shakespeare has arrived in the moneyed world of New York, and I think he likes it. What particularly struck me about this film was some of the imagery and devices. Reflections are everywhere, not just in Hamlet's soliloquies: glass windows, mirrors, water, even the video screen. If we exist only in the eyes of others (J-P Sartre), then everything in this film is granted existence, even Hamlet's madness, because we see it through so many media and reflections. Hamlet's "play within a play" becomes a film, not something ephemeral, but a strip of celluloid that will last past his death, just as this play has survived so many centuries after Shakespeare's time.