Contemporary and postmodern Shakespeare : film as historical deconstruction of drama

The article is a review of the book: Shakespeare and Cinema. Adaptation Strategies and their Socio-Cultural Contexts (Shakespeare i kino. Strategie adaptacyjne i ich konteksty społeczno-kulturowe) by Olga Katafi asz. In this book the Author analysis 28 chosen fi lm version of Shakespeare dramas adopted by famous directors in 1935–2011. Katafi asz examines especially strategies of adaptations reading in esthetical, political and historical dimensions. The article refers to order of the book which was determined mainly by chronology and begins with Max Reinhardt’s and William Dieterle’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935); then analyses the adaptation strategies prevailing in movies directed by: Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Grigorij Kozincev, Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polański, Kenneth Branagh, Peter Greenaway, Richard Loncraine, Baz Luhrmann, Julie Taymor, Ralph Fiennes and Michael Radford; Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942) and Alan Johnson’s To Be or Not to Be (1983). The review discusses (among others) the methodology of the book based on Harold Bloom’s idea so called: ‘the anxiety of infl uence’, accompanying – as suggests Katafiasz – the creative process of fi lm based on Shakespeare’s plays