On Screen

...What makes The Trojan Women a great play is that here in 415 B C someone managed to encapsulate in one short play every possible argument against war, which had previously been exalted, except in cases of civil war The arguments are cogent, pregnant, poetic and complete, focusing on the defeated but showing, by implication, the toll on the victors as well Given the originality, depth of insight and poetic splendor, the essentially schematic, pat and undra-matic form of the presentation becomes relatively unimportant But here, of course, the very unreality of theater proves handy, indeed necessary We are psychologically primed for stagmess, unreality on the stage, whereas the camera, as every child knows, does not, or is not presumed to, he The problem for the film adapter and director then becomes how to make this highly stylized play even moderately realistic for his much more realistic medium, or, conversely, how to derealize the film medium, or, perhaps, how to work out a fusion of both modes But Cacoyanms??no more than anyone else, possibly??is unequal to the task His setting (ably designed by Nicholas Georgiadis), for example, is real enough, though it shows a ravaged and smouldering Troy from the beginning To have built an undamaged one and then destroyed it would have exceeded the budget Yet when at the end of the film the "city" goes up in colossal flames, the sequence is a ludicrous anticlimax Why would the Greeks burn those burnt-out rums, and how, for that matter, can those remnants of stone walls catch fire...

...Even if slide projections change the backdrop, pieces of scenery float or glide on and off, the lighting shifts drastically from al giorno to chiaroscuro, at a play we are still face to face with faces of relatively fixed size within the unelast'c frame of the stage The pores or blemishes of a countenance do not suddenly hit us, the intricate work of fingers is not spelled out for us, and we cannot take in exactly the sliding of a coffee cup from a table and its symbolic splintering into irredeemable fragments We depend on large gestures, generous verbiage, carefully measured silences and, above all, on simultaneity our ability to see protagonist and antagonist, or a whole group of interacting people, at once and without interruption??without the camera's selectivity and never quite impersonal mediation...

...But it is not just a matter of money, rather, of indecision and wavering When Astyanax is thrown off the battlements, the camera becomes, most naturahstically, the falling child, whirling and crashing fearsomely Yet when the corpse is carried on to become the human pulpit from which Hecuba hurls her imprecations, the boy is all in one piece and undented except for a modest bruise on one cheek Again, the recitations of the chorus are broken up in various pho-togiaphic as well as choreographic ways to make them less formalized But for all the distribution of choric speeches among individuals, for all the close-ups on one face or part of it, we never gain a sense of these being particular women with personal tragedies, while we lose the massive sculptural and terpsichorean image of stylized, ritual drama...

...The toughest conundrum, of course, is what to do with the long speeches, the solo anas in which these noble women lament their falls Cacoyanms lacks the nerve, the talent, or the actresses of an Ingmar Bergman, who can keep his camera more or less immobile on Ullmann, Thulm or Andersson against a blank background and make a vast soliloquy incandesce...

...For Genevieve Bujold's appealing but histrionically insufficient Cassandra, Cacoyanms devises an elaborate balletic chase, with the Greek soldiers as supporting male dancers and the Trojan women as corps de ballet Religious fervor and human pathos fizzle equally among studied compositions and calculated movements, combined with disconcerting jump cuts between medium shots and close-ups and extreme close-ups For Vanessa Redgrave's intelligent and interesting Andromache??infortunately lacking the ultimate warmth and depth??there is much soft-focus hovering over handsome blue-eyed blondness, and picturesque posing of the actress in front of the mounted armor of her slam husband, flapping abjectly in the wind like a martial scarecrow Only for Helen, shrewdly and forcefully if not very seductively incarnated by Irene Papas, has the director come up with some good business, and here his additions are effective Helen's eyes, m extreme close-up peering out from between the logs of her private stockade, other Trojan women parched with thirst while Helen gets a basm of water for mere ablutions But I am somewhat disturbed by Miss Papas' thick accent, Greek though it be, and her great confrontation scene is weakened by her antagonist being Katharine Hepburn Hecuba is the most important character, the only one who remains present throughout, and she who plays the queen must dominate the action and hold its disparate set pieces together But what is Hepburn to Hecuba9 She offers no stronger stuff than brittle querulousness, head-wagglmg and lip-trembling, so that the Trojan mdomitability shining through the uneasy Argive victory is as missing as Poseidon and Athena...

...Lear Brook's 1963 production of the play was a considerable mutilation ot it, never content with a job half done, Brook's 1969 film version murders it altogether Brook shot the film in northernmost Denmark (Ultima Thule9) and imposed fancy trickery on his able black-and-white cinematographer, Henning Knstian-sen The icy landscape now looks like a telecast of moon landings, an electronic blizzard piled on a natural one The play has been cut to shreds, rearranged, directed down to the point of emotional and verbal catatonia, with anything heroic, chivalnc or just humane in it either edited out or curbed beyond recognition It also becomes almost impossible to follow the plot, and the occasional mter-titles, in the style of an inept silent film, only make this inept sound film look more unsound What Brook has contrived, in fact, is a pogrom on poetry No actor is allowed to sound touched in the least by divine afflatus, and Lear and Cordelia, above all, must be as grey and listless as fatigued ghosts that have haunted themselves out Paul Sco-field, an often prodigious actor, has never been comfortable with verse, and falls in happily with the prosai-cizmg conception His Lear antagonizes us from the beginning??not properly, because of overbearing pomp, but because of his flat, slow-motion, soporific line readings I have no stomach for listing all the orgies of minimalism that were inflicted on this work of supreme genius, but I must stress that every cheap cinematographic trick was trotted out pan passu, so that while Shakespeare's content becomes etiolated, Peter Brook's overlay may dazzle us with every frame The dazzlement, like all the other blizzards, merely adds to our visual revulsion...

...D ubious an enterprise as The Trojan Women is, it is masterly compared to Peter Brook's King...

...On Screen THE SCREEN BESTRIDES THE STAGE BY JOHN SIMON Plays resist screen adaptation much more doggedly than novels The former require additions, and these have a way of being easily deadlier than subtractions, the latter often lose much in their transfer to the screen, but the openness of the form??its ability to burrow into psyches and expand into landscapes ??can be matched by the camera A play, ensconced in limited stage space no matter what the stage directions call for and the set designer dreams up, contradicts the tree-roaming tendencies of the camera The lens magnifies everything, even a small room it may find itself locked into That chamber promptly becomes a microcosm full of details spots on the ceiling, irregularities in the wall paper, shadows on the floor, not to mention a universe of furniture and bric-a-brac??and all of this constantly changing shape and size as the camera shifts its position...

...Cutting the gods' opening scene is understandable m 1971, but a strategic error all the same For it is from the conversation of the deities that we learn of their weakness and fickleness, and of their intention to make the arrogant Greeks, on their journey home, pay dearly for their triumph This rounds out the tragic image of war, in which even the victor falls victim to a fundamentally untrustworthy, unmanageable cosmos Moreover, Helen's argument that Aphrodite is to blame for what happened, though meant to be in part sophistic, emerges, m the absence of visible gods, as sheer nonsense Alfio Contrm's color cinematography is appropriately muted and desolate, but black-and-white would have done the job better The music of Mikis Theodorakis is disappointing when not embarrassing, and Edith Hamilton's translation should have been avoided by Cacoyanms, but then it was all English to him...

...Consider Michael Cacoyanms' movie version of Euripides' The Trojan Women, an earnest effort by a man with ample theatrical and cinematic experience who has repeatedly returned to The Tiojan Women in different places, languages, and now media Granted, Euripides' work is not quite a play in the modern sense, rather a sort of tragic cantata Troy has been conquered and its great women??the heroic Hecuba, the pathetic Cassandra, the profoundly human Andromache, the diabolic Helen??come on to speak their piece before they go off the good to slavery and death, the evil to further life and lust All this is framed by a chorus of ordinary women extending the drama downward, and prefaced by a colloquy between the gods Poseidon and Athena, stretching the tragedy upward into cosmic, metaphysical reaches...

...Much of this, to be sure, can be blamed on Jan Kott, that foolish and arrogant Polish pseudoscholar, whose worthless Shakespeare criticism has dazzled a good many of our brighter directors But the ultimate blindness is their very own...