#Kozintsev hamlet full movie professional#
#Kozintsev hamlet full movie series#

He worked alongside the likes of Eisenstein and Shostakovich, but his closest friend and associate at this time was Leonid Trauberg, a fellow Ukrainian with whom Kozintsev made all his early films (indeed, all his films until about 1947).

Having completed his studies at the Academy, Kozintsev found work at the Lenfilm studios in the city, which was part of the newly nationalised state film industry.

#Kozintsev hamlet full movie professional#

It was with Shostakovich that Kozintsev was to have the longest and most fruitful personal and professional relationship, as Shostakovich ultimately scored Kozintsev’s Shakespeare films, in the process writing some of the finest film music, and particularly Shakespearean film music, ever written. Among Kozintsev’s direct contemporaries in Petrograd were several luminaries who would go on to become some of the greatest artists of Soviet Russia, including the theatre director and theorist Vsevolod Meyerhold, the film director Sergei Eisenstein and the composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

Although he formally studied art, he was always fascinated by theatre, particularly Shakespeare, organising experimental performances from an early age, including of Gogol’s play, Marriage, in which a civil servant contemplates the personal and financial difficulties of taking a wife (exhibiting Hamlet-like indecision as he does so). Petersburg, having been Leningrad in between). The young Kozintsev was clearly precocious, studying first at the Kiev School of Art and then at the famous Academy of Arts in Petrograd (now St. Consequently, Kozintsev’s early life and artistic career were lived and acted out against the backdrop of the Communist Party taking control of Russia and instantly implementing sweeping social, economic and even artistic reforms. Kozintsev was born in 1905 in Kiev, which is now part of Ukraine, a country that is obviously still suffering from the convulsions that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Kozintsev died before the end of the Soviet era, when the Communists finally lost control over Russia, but his two great Shakespeare films, Gamlet (1964) and Korol Lir (King Lear) (1971), which were made near the end of his career and life, are among the most profound artistic examinations of Soviet-era totalitarianism. Kozintsev’s life and career spanned almost the entire length of the 20 th century and so coincided with the Soviet era in Russia, when the Communist Party first seized power from the Tsar and then ruled over the country for more than seventy years. Its creator, Grigori Kosintsev, was one of the finest screen directors of Shakespeare and the story behind his cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare’s greatest play, which involves a cast list of famous writers, famous composers and famous dictators, is one of the most fascinating “back stories” of any Shakespeare movie. However, Olivier himself was one of the first to heap praise on a much less well-known screen Hamlet, namely the great Soviet-era adaptation of the play, Gamlet (1964). Shakespeare’s Hamlet is not only (by common, if not universal, consent) the greatest play ever written but the basis for some of the greatest Shakespeare screen adaptations ever made, especially Laurence Olivier’s Oscar-winning version (1948). It continues with an examination of the story behind one of the greatest Shakespeare films ever made, Grigori Kosintsev’s Hamlet.

#Kozintsev hamlet full movie series#

The Story Behind The Screenplay is a series by Martin Keady that examines the origins of some of the greatest screenplays ever written.