1This paper examines the screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s play by Peter Greenaway entitled Prospero’s Books with a special interest in the screen-image of Caliban which is created by the dancer and choreographer Michael Clark. I will argue that, in this film, Greenaway actually uses references to adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in Early Cinema, as one of the many art forms which construct the film’s aesthetics. As to Caliban, who owes as much to the Bard’s inventiveness as to descriptions of the New World in texts available in his time, the character has inspired a variety of interpretations which range from the monster to the 'good savage' (Vaughan). These connotations inform the character of Caliban in the film, but it will be argued that Michael Clark gives him a special energy of his own, which might be said to counterbalance Prospero’s magic by the anachronistic independence of the modern anti-hero.

King John, The Tempest and Greenaway’s "Silent Film"

• 3 A ditty making fun of Beerbohm Tree’s interest in Shakespeare on film published in the British Bios (...)

To film or not to film, that is the question / Whether ‘tis nobler for a man to suffer / The shrieks and rantings of outrageous actors, / Than freeze their voices in a moving picture/And, by congealing, end them?3

3The screening of plays without the spoken words seemed weird from the start, since "a Shakespeare play or poem is indeed 'a thing of words'" (Bevington 50), but the great success abroad of the first French Film d’Art, L’Assassinat, with Griffith in particular (Gauthier 184), showed that violence and romance could come across without words. As to magic, it is the very essence of Cinema (Moure 47-57), and Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, combining tragedy and romance with magic, was ideally suited. A remarkable example is the English 1908 adaptation of The Tempest (McKernan 3, 4). Here, screen magic blends with Prospero’s own in a series of visual tricks typical of Méliès (Forsyth), as shown by his Le Royaume des Fées (1903) or La Fée Carabosse (1906) (Malthête 78). This early screening of The Tempest rests on the illusionist’s 'special effects,' while also relying on the unmediated filming of a performance. Similarly, in Prospero's Books, the many possibilities of the special effects of the Graphic Paintbox (Greenaway 28-33) offer images that make us travel in time from the Cretan Minotaur to the Renaissance (Costantini-Cornède), with an Elizabethan 'Machiavel' planning revenge on his enemies, down to the present 1990s crisis of knowledge in the West (Louguet). On the other hand, Greenaway’s screening of the play, as Lanier writes, "relentlessly draws our attention to performers’ bodies; it converts Shakespeare’s narrative into non-narrative non-verbal bodily forms, into mime, acrobatics, static live tableaux masque-like processionals" (Lanier186).

4In fact, the borrowings from silent films in Prospero’s Books answer Guneratne’s definition of the sources of interest in screening a Shakespeare play (Guneratne 2006, 32)—i.e. the global scope of the texts, topicality of political situations as well as a wealth of attractions which offers the filmmaker possibilities of re-appropriation (Maheu). However, as far as topicality is concerned, the character of Caliban has been the vehicle for the expression of post-colonialist issues in the productions of the play. By casting star dancer and choreographer Michael Clark in the role of Caliban, Greenaway actually invited into his film an artist with enough authority to re-appropriate the role to suit his own purpose, as I will argue below, while the art of dancing in itself has a special relation to language which is not inappropriate in a silent film. Moreover, the film also addresses topical concerns of 1990s audiences such as feminists’ claims, and the development of techno-culture with an interest in Artificial Intelligence (Donaldson 106-108).

Polyphony in the film: Sir John Gielgud/alias Prospero/’s multiple voices

6The filmmaker insists on a deliberate "cross-identification between Prospero, Shakespeare and Gielgud" (Greenaway 9). In order to do this, the lines of all the characters are spoken by Gielgud, and the first shots warn us that the actor will experiment with various intonations (Greenaway 43). The soundtrack plays on such variations throughout the film. The 'cross-identification' thanks to the 'hybridization' of the main voice between the three voices, Prospero's, Shakespeare's and Gielgud's, develops against a sound-track of off-screen 'voices,' suggesting a crowd of sounds ranging from the mechanical, animal, or the human. Moreover, the sound of Prospero’s magic is heard in the "distant flying machines… a noise reminiscent of implacable, massive stage machinery in a masque or pageant that is several streets away" (Greenaway 43). The ostinato rhythm, dominant from the opening sequence—the mechanical 'plop' of a drop ricocheting upon the still waters of the Roman 'bath-house'–soon becomes a scansion to dances performed by Prospero’s creatures, i.e. naked men and women who cross from left to right and back in the background of scenes from the play.

7As to the assumption that Shakespeare’s voice is heard in the source text (Orgel, Intr., 1), it characterizes Prospero’s character, but is further expanded in the film as it encompasses not only the playwright, the actor and the character-magician, but also the filmmaker himself (Guneratne 2008, 238-240). Moreover, due to this 'polyphony' but contrary to the play, Caliban is remarkably voiceless in the film. It sounds as if the whole dimension of post-colonial discourse were dismissed by its relegation to the Gielgud-Prospero-Greenaway world of imagination.

Michael Nyman

8In addition to Sir John Gielgud’s spoken words, two other 'voices' who address the audience’s attention and empathy by other means than words make themselves heard in the film, i.e. those of composer Michael Nyman (Walker) and dancer-choreographer Michael Clark (Cotter). The music of the off-screen orchestra score (The Michael Nyman Band) and the on-screen music sung by Sarah Leonard—the four Ariels, and Ceres, Juno and Iris—contribute to the ostinato on the soundtrack by Nyman’s characteristically repetitive and beautifully minimal music. "In Prospero’s Books, the music engages us emotionally, working against the distancing self-consciousness of numerous artistic allusions" (Walker 166), though the use of dissonance, in particular for the singing of Ceres and Iris, echoes the coldness and aesthetic distancing of Greenaway’s style. When Prospero creates his first storm, the film’s introductory music follows the action:

Based in B flat minor, emphasized by tonic pedal notes. The music ends suddenly on a falling minor seventh and this unsettling end is overtaken by the sound of machinery, synthesised crashes, birds cowling, wind and rain, indistinguishable voices […] distorted echoes "we split, we split." (Walker 166).

9As this example shows, Nyman’s music often appears inaudible under a deluge of sounds from the action under way. It is heard in the songs, but strains to be heard over the constant cacophony of sounds which are used to provide a background to Gielgud’s own voice, signifying his magic at work. "The soprano lines written for Ariel […] are so high that the music sounds close to breaking point" comments Elsie Walker who continues "the melodic unpredictability creates unremitting tension […]. It is not until the masque, towards the end of the film, that the music comes into its own" (Walker 167). Otherwise, when it is heard, as in the deceptive banquet (III, iii; 1:11:53), it "bursts out magically often from no visible source" (Walker, 166). Thus the beauty and emotion which Michael Nyman’s music brings to the film is more like the sounds heard by Caliban on the island, i.e. foreign to Prospero’s magic; the songs do not proceed from his magic either, though he acts as if they were. This tension between Prospero’s power over the elements in the island and the sound of music is also characteristic of his ambiguous relations with Caliban, as Michael Clark is careful to make clear. One is tempted to perceive an equal tension between the three artists, Greenaway on the one hand, and Michael Nyman and Michael Clark on the other.

Michael Clark and choreography

10The dancer choreographer plays a unique role in the film, an honour which Clark owes to his international reputation in the 1980s. His performance in the film must be understood within the larger context of theatrical productions of Shakespeare’s play in the same period or earlier, which had created well-established expectations among the public.

• 8 S.Q., vol. 32, n°2, Spring 1981, 188-190.

a narrow, flared leather cape as a tail, a dagger-less scabbard dangling from his waist; leather gloves which, blended in with his blackened skin, gave the illusion of enormous hands, a face mask of light brown…this Caliban was typically on or near the ground—he walked bent over at the waist, torso swaying up and down or shaking vigorously in an animal-like posture…. Emphatic gestures—a vertical clapping or pounding of the fist on his bare chest…convincing groans and growls … imbuing his language with striking visceral impact.8

14In Greenaway’s film, Michael Clark, alias Caliban, does not dance or gesture in relation to the music, though the music sometimes suggests the sounds of the island, a fact which isolates the character within a world of his own. This singularity is introduced first as the camera frames him in a posture which clearly recalls Michelangelo’s Adam, reclining on a rock above water. However instead of a heavenly backdrop of dynamic clouds and pale blue skies, the world in which he appears is a dark ill-lit subterraneous place, "at the confluence of six sewers" (Greenaway 95) suggesting that he belongs to the earth as well as to the waters in which he vanishes, as if Inferno had replaced Heaven. And instead of God’s divine creation by the touch of a finger, Caliban is summoned by Prospero’s distant call and he is filmed coming out of a large sewer. As Sophie Fiennes recalls: "it was a low budget film and the conditions in which Michael was expected to perform were quite miserable. At one point he had to descend down a chute in cold water and then dance; there were repeated takes" (Cotter 117). There is no love lost between the creature and his creator; a close-shot of his head in profile shows him sticking his tongue out at Prospero, giving us a clue for all his further actions in the four following scenes in which he appears.

15He seldom stands, and usually curls up and then, balancing his body on his elbow and forearm, stretches his legs horizontally, one of them twitching to the tip of its toes in convolutions suggestive of the coils of a serpent. His naked and clean-shaven body is painted with several brown patches in the Neo-Naturist style of Clark’s earlier performances (Cotter 111), "patterned with black markings like a mottled pig…with mandrill-coloured genitals" (Greenaway 94, 95). Actually the film is not following the script in all its details, rather, Clark performs in keeping with the explicit sexuality of his earlier staged works (Cotter 28). The dancer thus not only deconstructs stereotypes about the character by showing his expressive skills, but also performs in the style which he had already created earlier. The references are thus those of his own earlier performances.

16In the film, however, among the literary sources for the character, a reference to the Minotaur has been added to the current view of Caliban as a creature from the New World of the West. Greenaway seems to have been familiar with the theory that Caliban has a double literary origin, not only the texts from travellers which provided a wealth of information on the New World but also a text which was known to Shakespeare, Apollonius of Tyre (Fiedler 199-253). The reference to Greek Mythology is transcribed in the performers called "Prospero’s Spirits." They are seen in profile, moving in a plane at right angles to the screen, in a smooth tracking shot from left to right; their gestures recall Egyptian or Assyrian dancers on friezes by their angular rhythmic spasms. Obtained by infographic intervention, we find an explicit reference to Cretan art, as for example in Book 18, The Autobiography of Semiramis and Pasiphae: "Greenaway had Eve Ramboz put women wrestlers in motion, similar to Muybridge’s chrono-photographs" (Louguet 150). The prehistory of cinema is thus referred to by the decomposition of movement through photographic snap-shots, which is compared to a cinematic freeze. The image by image animation, one of the founding principles of Early Cinema, together with Meliès’s stop tricks, transpires in Ramboz’s composite image obtained by "the animation of drawings or stencilled out photograms graphically manipulated to give them more depth" (Louguet 150). The Books in the film are over-framed flat surfaces, the source of animation and metamorphoses, the focus being on the 'organicity of matter' as in Francis Bacon’s works.

17It is against such a background that Michael Clark’s performance stands out. Elsie Walker compares Clark’s performance to Ariel’s singing. He "combines balletic leaps with modern dance leaps—his dances are beautiful, poised and full of pain like the music for Ariel." Yet, continues Walker: "Caliban does not dance in painful curls and twists to music. The film does not tie the freedom of music with him." (Walker 169). In the scene where Caliban meets Trinculo and Stephano on the beach (II, ii, 1:06:00) "Caliban dances to the sound of wind and strange, bestial, synthesized, 'automated' noises." (Walker 169). Caliban’s movements have emotional import suggesting a kind of freedom, yet they also suggest containment, since even when he shivers, his bodily movement is rhythmical and choreographed (Walker 170). The key idea that he is suffering from Prospero’s oppression is thus present in the dance. This is made clear to the audience thanks to Michael Clark’s 'signature,' so to speak, since here he is actually transposing within a dramatic context a specific quality of his own style. As Suzanne Cotter writes: "in the 1980s, he affected something of a seismic shift in the culturally elite world of classical ballet in which he trained, transposing onto it the underground culture of music and fashion that has come to define the period" (Cotter 21). Clark’s productions of "movement, sound, lighting and design in multiplemedia, form striking and richly textured visual and spatial compositions" (Cotter 21). This echoes Greenaway’s own carefully designed visual texture in the film, but Clark added a special technique of variations on a choreographic theme, by which he re-appropriates the theme of the master’s violence and the slave’s delicacy in the film. Clark also expresses the loneliness of Caliban by his joy when meeting Trinculo and Stephano, while the tension between his naïve childishness and his perversion by culture, be it language or drink, is made clear as well. The part of Caliban in the film seems to have allowed the artist to return to his earlier experiments with the "no to spectacle, to comedy, to narrative, no to virtuosity" of his work at London’s Riverside Studios in the 1970s (Cotter 25), inasmuch as Caliban’s persona fits this conception of performance.

Hybridity and screen image: Clark’s Caliban as a post-modernist anti-hero

18While the hybridization of the screen image remains a characteristic of Greenaway’s film, as has been seen above, this quality affects Michael Clark’s screen image of Caliban in a specific way. Hybridity, a concept from Bakhtine’s writings which has been widely explored in the 1990s and may have influenced Greenaway’s art, since it is linked with his concept of polyphony (Plana 222-229), is actually inbred as far as the character is concerned, being caused by the 'monstrous union' of a witch and a devil, and it informs his own body and gestures in the play (Shakespeare is well-known for his familiarity with Rabelais’s works). More appropriate to this discussion is the fact that Michael Clark himself has a reputation of combining "the paradoxical elements of beauty and brutality, order and anarchy, vulgarity and serenity" (Jann Parry, quoted in Cotter 26), which accounts for his decision to act the part of Caliban and explore the possibilities of his screen image. But Greenaway himself adds to his source text by making the four elements also contribute to hybridization in the film, since Caliban symbolises the mingling of water and earth, with icons such as 'mud,' and he is paired off with Ariel who symbolises air and fire. Skin pigmentation matches this dichotomy, the four Ariels’ fair skin and blond hair contrasting with Caliban’s dark skin and implicit dark hair. Here Michael Clark interferes with the racial clichés by shaving his head and even his whole body, which makes his smooth skin glitter in the chiaroscuro lighting of the subterraneous places where he is held a prisoner, while reflections on his wet skin also add an effect of sparkling light, thus contradicting Prospero’s insulting assumption that Caliban is his creation, and, I would like to suggest, also questioning Greenaway’s demiurgic claim.

19Hybridity in the play is generic as discussed above; it is also a major trait of the Mannerist aesthetics of the late Renaissance. In Clark’s dance, one finds echoes of this feature of the source text, in particular the search for elegance, dainty subtlety and fluidity, qualities which are the opposite of the two dimensional aesthetics of the frieze dances performed by Prospero’s spirits in the film. While the latter are relegated to the continuous movement of the background, Clark’s choreography explores the three dimensions of sculpture, which for the Renaissance was epitomized in the Laocoon—i.e. serpents and 'serpentine' contortions of the human figures. These aesthetic references address the educated audience, allowing us to recognize the source-text in the midst of avant-garde technology. As Patricia Falguières argues, mannerist artists are both virtuoso and modern, and Pina Bausch is but another example of this link between mannerist and avant-garde aesthetics (Avanzani). They draw oblique motifs which compel us to adopt a side glance upon reality, using anamorphosis instead of metamorphosis. In the play, Caliban’s apparent metamorphosis into an animal when hiding under his "cloak" is only due to Trinculo's special angle of vision: "legged like a man, and his fins like arms!" (II, ii, 33). The ethics of this 'awry' glance relies on the conception of truth as elusive, a mere appearance, entailing self-derision, since the observer always remains in doubt. Interestingly, the 'avant-garde' aesthetics developed by Michael Clark in his interpretation of the character of Caliban are seen as 'mannerist' in the "exquisite poise as each movement is threatened by physical collapse, in which the staged precision of classical form is subject to loss of control and spectacular flaunting of convention" (Cotter 26).

20Moreover, Caliban’s dancing is continuous in the film since movement is his sole mode of expression, and this enables Michael Clark to make Caliban’s 'voice' heard in a unique manner. This presence is inscribed in the 'mannerist' dimension of time, since Clark is a master of live performance and the ephemeral event. In an interview by Sophie Fiennes, the artist compares dance to music in this respect:

You can’t deny that the body has a brain behind it or there’s a mind at work, and to deny that would be kind of foolish, but I don’t think music or movement are necessarily the best ways to communicate very literal things. I mean, I love words […] but I guess I’m more interested in what I consider a more complex place, which is where things can’t be made specific through language. (Cotter 118)

21The difficulty of screening Shakespeare’s text, which Greenaway attempts to solve by giving Prospero a hybrid identity, is also addressed by Michael Clark. The dancer’s 'perpetuum mobile' interpretation of Caliban becomes a metaphor of life itself, and makes him an authentic inhabitant of the island. He reacts to its 'voices' in a manner that utterly denies any claim by Prospero that Caliban would be a figment from his imagination. Michael Clark’s Caliban meets this challenge by the "spectrum of anti-positions" in which "dissonance" and "harmony," aesthetic categories of avant-garde and mannerist ethics, alternately inform his performance (Cotter 26). By his forever changing postures woven in and out of uncannily repetitive rhythms, which make his screen image so elusive and mysterious, Michael Clark gives life to a hybrid creature who embodies the insecure relation of post-modern man with the world.

22Hybridization in the film is a post-modern language which qualifies Greenaway’s creative genius; yet, it is also fully explored by the dancer and choreographer Michael Clark on his own terms, as he transforms the Shakespearean character into a post-modern anti-hero.