Hamlet · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A face burning out of a black the production never had to build. The Delacorte sits in the middle of Central Park, and in 1964 the image orthicon tube inside a television camera was hungry enough for light that anything outside the reach of a stage lantern simply stopped existing. Faces come up hot. A lamp at the edge of frame wears a ring of halation. And behind those faces, unseen, two thousand people are sitting on the grass having paid nothing to be there.

Hold on to the black. Almost everything worth saying about this three-hour tape is in it.

Start with what the black forbids. There is no reverse angle in this Hamlet, and there could never have been one, because behind the actors is the audience. Deleuze splits offscreen space into two kinds. The relative out-of-field is the room next door, the street below — space you could walk into and shoot, space the frame keeps quietly promising you. The absolute out-of-field is a beyond the frame cannot contain at all. Papp's telecast has the second kind, and there is nothing mystical about it: it is a free public in a city park, the thing that makes the event an event, structurally excluded from every shot. Bruce Minnix's cameras sit in the house and stay there. Long-lens compression from out front. A wide that makes the actors small and the staging readable. Closer singles that seize a face and throw away the composition Papp actually built. Every shot is a trade, and both halves of the trade lose something.

Bazin argued that what separates theater from cinema is presence — actor and audience propping each other up in one room — and that a camera pretending the audience isn't there kills the thing it came to preserve. Olivier's Henry V (1944) answered by opening at the Globe with the camera seated as a spectator, groundling noise included. Papp's broadcast inherits that convention whole, not as a flourish but as a condition it cannot escape.

Now the play. The premise is a man who suspects his uncle of murder and cannot decide whether to act. Deleuze's entire break between cinema's two regimes turns on that exact failure: in the movement-image a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the act resolves the situation; in the time-image the act stops resolving, and the character is left watching and enduring inside a time that no longer measures anything. Hamlet is the prototype three and a half centuries early, which is why Deleuze borrowed the prince's own line — the time is out of joint — as his formula for time coming loose from movement. Put that man on an open thrust stage, in front of a live crowd, running in real time with no way to hurry him, and the crisis stops being a matter of interpretation. It becomes a physical property of the recording.

Which brings us to the thing on the tape that nobody intended. Alfred Ryder was forty-eight, a character actor who had waited most of a working life for the part, and he opened on 16 June 1964 with laryngitis. He was replaced the next day by Robert Burr, and when the voice came back Papp would not have him. He never appeared on or off Broadway again. The paperwork around this broadcast is thin, and the dossier says so plainly. The technical situation is not in doubt. Two-inch quadruplex videotape in 1964 was barely editable — splicing was physical and destructive, electronic editing had only just arrived — so a performance like this was taken in long unbroken passes with the assembly decided live at the vision mixer. A film editor can protect an actor: trim the line, cut to a listener, borrow Tuesday's take. A vision mixer can only choose which camera watches it happen.

Deleuze calls that a pure optical and sound situation: a moment where no action is available and looking is the only thing left. He found it in Italian rubble and Antonioni's dead hours. Here it arrives by way of engineering. The apparatus has no mechanism for mercy, so everyone in the chain becomes what he calls a seer rather than an agent — the cameras, the man at the mixer, us.

There is a further turn. Live recording splits time at the instant it happens, one half passing and one half already preserved, and Deleuze's crystal-image is his name for an image where you can watch that split occur. This tape is about as literal a crystal as the medium produces. The same three hours are the performance and the archive of the performance, made at once, indistinguishable. A career ends and is filed in the same motion.

The casting carries something the tape never mentions. Howard Da Silva plays Claudius; he was blacklisted after his 1951 HUAC appearance and spent most of the decade out of Hollywood. John Randolph plays the Gravedigger and would not get significant film work again until Seconds in 1966. The broadcaster is CBS, which fired Papp on 19 June 1958, the same day he declined to answer HUAC, and took him back that November only because an arbitrator ruled his contract required it — not the Constitution. So the usurper king and the man who jokes with skulls are played by two people that machinery had put out of work, on the network that ran it. Deleuze's word for this is the gest: an arrangement of bodies and postures that exposes a social relation without anyone stating it. Nothing on the tape comments. It is completely legible anyway.

The bodies carry the duration too. Ming Cho Lee designed the production, in the season his work turned American scenic design away from painted illusion toward scaffolds and raw texture, and the staging is built for a thrust: actors placed in depth and on levels, movement wide and continuous, gesture scaled to be read from the twentieth row. All of that reads beautifully in the park and poorly through an orthicon tube, which flattens texture and turns architectural voids into undifferentiated black. A picture made for two thousand people outdoors arrives on a twenty-one-inch screen. The image loses its self-evidence and becomes something you have to decipher — Deleuze's lectosign — and that reading is what the telecast is actually good for.

Papp's invention was not a shot. It was an argument, won against Robert Moses in 1959, that classical theater is a municipal utility rather than a commodity, and the broadcast is that argument carried into another medium: television as amplification of a free thing rather than as a product. The lineage around it is precise. Welles shot Macbeth in twenty-three days with his Utah stage company, the camera fitted to an existing staging; Papp's three-week Delacorte schedule repeats that repertory speed. Brando and Calhern speaking the verse in American rhythms in Julius Caesar (1953) is the direct precedent for Papp's principle that the pentameter belongs in American speech. Maurice Evans's live Hamlet on Hallmark Hall of Fame in 1953, cut in the control room off image-orthicon cameras, proved a network would carry a classical text at all. Olivier's Richard III on NBC in 1955 turned a classical performance into a scheduled television occasion. And Olivier's 1948 Hamlet is the one Papp answers back: where Olivier cut Fortinbras and built a chiaroscuro Elsinore, Papp keeps Fortinbras and takes the flat outdoor greys he is given.

The sharpest comparison is from the same month. Burton's Broadway Hamlet was recorded at the Lunt-Fontanne in June 1964 by the Electronovision system, transferred to film, shown in roughly a thousand cinemas for two days that September, and the prints were meant to be destroyed afterward. Identical problem, opposite answer: one side manufactured scarcity, the other gave it away over the air. Papp kept giving it away, and Festival work on public television became routine.

So the case for this recording is not that it is a good film. It isn't one and doesn't try to be. The case is that it settles what a camera pointed at a stage can be for — witness rather than author, keeping an event's ontology instead of dissolving it into film space. Watch it once for the play and once for the black behind the faces. Then watch the moment a man's voice goes, and somebody has to decide which camera looks at him.