Hamlet · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start on the knife and the glass. Hamlet stands in the white-and-gold hall and speaks "To be or not to be" — not to us, not to the air, but to his own face in a mirrored door. And behind that door, invisible to him, Claudius and Polonius are watching. He is alone and surveilled at once. He addresses a reflection that is also a window. Branagh found, in this one piece of staging, the image that governs his whole four-hour film, and it happens to be the image Gilles Deleuze called the crystal.

The crystal-image (Deleuze's word: hyalosign) is what happens when a present moment and its mirror-double stop being tellable apart — when the actual thing and its reflection swap places so fast you can no longer say which is real. A mirror is the simplest case. Branagh built a whole palace out of it: a state hall lined with two-way mirrored doors, where every figure is multiplied, doubled, spied on, thrown back. This is a crystal in its most saturated form — an enclosed world of nothing but reflections, with no plain outside to step into. Seeming versus being, the play's oldest obsession, stops being a theme the characters discuss and becomes the architecture they have to walk through.

And here is the gift this film doesn't quite know it's giving. Deleuze took his very formula for the modern image of time from this play. "The time is out of joint" — Hamlet's line — is the sentence he returns to again and again to name the moment time comes unhinged from action: when it stops being the tidy measure of a hero's deeds and starts being felt directly, as weight, as derangement. Hamlet is the man who perceives everything and can act on none of it. He sees the crime, knows the criminal, holds the knife — and waits, watches, talks. He is, four centuries early, the seer (the voyant) Deleuze finds at the birth of modern cinema: a watcher where the older art demanded an agent.

So something strange is going on in Branagh's Hamlet, and it's worth naming, because it is the source of both the film's grandeur and its unease. The story at its core is the purest case of what Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image — a protagonist who can no longer convert what he sees into what he does. But Branagh shoots it as maximal action-cinema. 65mm, the format of roadshow epics. A Steadicam that prowls the mirrored corridors in long unbroken takes, the moving camera standing in for the cut, every line of verse carried on a current of motion — the shot itself (Deleuze's mobile section) made to express change rather than register stillness. He pictorializes what the stage leaves to imagination: we see Hamlet and Ophelia, we see Priam slain, we see Yorick's face. He fills the out-of-field Shakespeare left empty. And in the back half he cross-cuts the court intrigue with Fortinbras's army crunching across the snow toward Elsinore — the machinery of a last-minute convergence, organic American montage, pressed onto a play whose hero's whole problem is that nothing converges in him.

That is the productive contradiction of the film. Branagh takes the ur-text of inaction and gives it the body of pure movement. The verse keeps telling us time is out of joint; the camera keeps insisting the world is a smooth, legible, traversable whole.

Where the crystal does its deepest work is in the rot. Deleuze had a name for an aristocratic order decaying inside its own perfection: crystal-decomposition. Branagh's Elsinore is exactly that — a glittering nineteenth-century imperial court, all marble and gilt and military full dress, magnificent and already brittle, snowbound, eating itself through poison and incest and surveillance. The mirrors that flatter it are the same mirrors it dies in. And the crack in the crystal — the line of flight Deleuze says runs through every sealed world — is Fortinbras: the outside, the army, the future, breaking the gleaming order apart in the final movement. The doors smashed, the hall invaded, the reflections shattered for good.

Place it in its line. Olivier's 1948 Hamlet was a brooding, deep-focus, monochrome abridgement, a Freudian interior carved down by cutting; Branagh inverts every term of it — complete text, high-key color, the widest format he could find. From Kozintsev's 1964 Hamlet he inherits the play as architectural spectacle scored like a symphony (Shostakovich there, Patrick Doyle's funereal sweep here). From his own Henry V and Much Ado he carries the populist bet: famous faces, surging music, Shakespeare as event picture, the RSC voice beside the Hollywood cameo.

What did it do to the art? It proved, once, that the complete text could be cinema and not a filmed reading — that totality was a viable cinematic ambition and not just a scholar's dream. No one has matched it since. It stands as both benchmark and warning.

Watch it again for the glass. Every time Hamlet looks at himself, find the second pair of eyes behind the mirror — then wait for the moment the mirrors break.