Julie Taymor, 1999.
Prior to
studying The Tempest in Year
Twelve, my English teacher showed us the first ten minutes of Titus. I was captivated by the child
playing at the kitchen table with his toy soldiers; the bold choral, almost
fanfare-like music, that heralded the arrival of the army; the soldiers, like
full-sized copies of the child’s figurines, clothed in armour and leather,
accompanied by motorbikes; the prisoners and spoils of war contained in
chariots and carts pulled by horses and tanks; the heightened dance-like
movement of the foot soldiers, and the authoritarian address by Titus
Andronicus to his people; the way time periods and styles collided against one
another with such force that their anachronistic existences were totally
justified within the deserted coliseum, the original theatre of cruelty. The
rest of the film is nothing short of engrossing, yet also harrowing and
exhaustingly exhilarating in a heightened poetic way. Filmed on location in Italy and Croatia ,
and at Cinecittà Studios in Rome ,
it mixes time periods like smells in a market place, and concocts the giddiest
of pies from its ingredients. Her locations, when coupled with Shakespeare’s
text, become metaphors for the psychological worlds of the characters,
encapsulating emotional throughlines of scenes, sequences and acts. There is
also a frequent and often subtle use of the hand as a visual device – it is
both a blackly ironic statement as well as an examination of the nature and
politics of power, revenge and violence. Taymor’s ideograph of the hand can be
traced in almost every scene – a boy plays at his kitchen table, ripping limbs
from his toy soldiers and dousing them in tomato sauce, all in frenetic
close-up; senators acknowledge crowds and ask for silence; Basianus holds
Lavinia close, out of Saturninus’s reach; Titus fatally stabs his own son; a
large stone hand lies crumbling in a public square, its extended finger seeming
to grope at the square’s occupants; Titus’ hand is chopped off in a twisted act
of salvation; his daughter, Lavinia, is raped and has her hands cut off and
replaced by useless twigs; Aaron the Moor protects his infant son from
soldiers, cradling him in his arms; Titus breaks Lavinia’s neck with his bare
hands in a desperate albeit merciful act towards the film’s conclusion. In its
final shot, there is the rarest of rays of hope, as Young Lucius carries
Aaron’s infant son from the coliseum, as Elliot Goldenthal’s luscious (and
frequently anachronistic) score offers a way out, a way to break the circle of
violence and revenge. Granted, it’s not to everyone’s tastes, and many people
will disagree with it, but I think it is a tremendously bold, audacious and
quite successful rendering of one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays.
